People Who Want Money

I answer the ring of my cellphone, the cellphone for which only my wife has the number and, as usual, I can see that it isn't her on the other end of the line. There's a pause and the voice asks for my mother-in-law.

'You have the wrong number,' I say, delivering the familiar speech. 'This isn't her phone.'

I only have a cellphone for use in emergencies. It's registered to my mother-in-law because she signed up with some kind of esoteric plan whereby she gets her own phone at a cheaper rate if she has more than one.

'Maybe you can help me anyway,' the guy suggests. He asks if I'd like to make a charitable donation to a fund for cops because it's a very risky job. I'm a stranger in this country, by some definition, but I'm fairly sure cops are paid to be cops. For a country in which handouts or financial assistance of any description are seemingly regarded as the gateway drug for raging Communism, it's surprising just how often I am asked to give generously to people who already work for a living.

I hang up.

Next evening, we're at the school again. It's just parents, something which won't take long, but it's mandatory. Our boy has another few months before graduation, so we're here to find out about that and about the impending trip to Washington DC. The whole class will be going and they'll be staying in a hotel for the best part of the week, so there will be a lot of juggling involved. Unfortunately we're ten minutes late for the meeting because we stopped off to eat at the Greek place over by the Quarry. The Quarry is about a minute from the school, so we thought we had it all worked out, but our food took longer than anticipated to arrive.

Anyway, we're here now. We shuffle awkwardly amongst the folding chairs, trying not to be the annoying latecomers. The teacher is telling us about someone who will be acting as a chaperone on the school trip. We each need to give our child ten dollars in an envelope, and this money will constitute tips for the woman, a way of showing we're thankful for her hypothetically vigilant dispensation of justice when one of our precious little ones attempts to let off a fire extinguisher in a hotel corridor.

Personally, I'm confused.

Another woman steps up to speak. She's very excited about something, but I can't understand what she's saying. Her voice is way up in the Minnie Mouse register and her accent peppers whatever she is trying to tell us with additional syllables. I've lived in Texas for nearly six years, but I'm still not used to it. She speaks fast and it sounds like she's playing a Jew's harp. She delivers words resembling formal edicts punctuated with improvised twittering based around um and you know, over and over. I have a horrible feeling she's actually the mathematics teacher we met last time the school called us in for some parental event.

Everybody looks at the forms in their folders, apparently prompted by something our speaker has been explaining.

I guess it's just me then.

Fifteen minutes of this and it's over, and we're done, and we can leave. We shuffle from the room exchanging pleasantries with Duncan's mother, then Mr. and Mrs. Pace. They're the only parents I recognise.

'So who are we tipping again? Who needs our ten dollars?'

Bess tells me it's the woman with the voice of Minnie Mouse.

'The maths teacher? Does she not already get a wage?'

'She isn't a teacher. She's one of the parents. She always volunteers.'

'Oh - okay. That makes more sense, I guess.'

I feel a little guilty for my uncharitable sentiments.

'I still couldn't understand a fucking word she said though.'

'Me neither.'

Maybe this is what it's like to be old.

The Mysteries of Dance

Of all the supposed arts, I've never had much of a relationship with dance. I quite enjoyed all that stuff with the maypole when I was a kid, and I can appreciate the folklore of village ceremonies, or dance as defining the ritual space in which offerings might be made to Huitzilopochtli; but otherwise it generally doesn't engage me, and I don't regard it as either interesting or important. Many years ago I used to buy The Observer every Sunday, more or less for the sake of habit and because it was marginally funnier than the Radio Times, but I gave up when they printed some crappy Millennial list of the hundred people they saw as having most influenced the twentieth century. There were three choreographers in the list, because apparently choreography is important. It was probably the wankiest, most excrutiatingly middle-class thing I had ever seen in a left-leaning newspaper, so I stopped buying, at last understanding that such things weren't for the likes of me, mister.

I never danced as a kid, but I danced as an art student when I realised that the act was part of a process which, if performed correctly, might provide access to the contents of women's knickers; although it never did in my case. This was probably because I attempted to develop my own style - a kind of spastic bodypopping relative of David Byrne in the Once in a Lifetime video. I observed my peers dancing, mostly doing that thing with forearms moving up and down from a stationary elbow whilst looking bored, sort of like a mime of climbing a ladder performed by someone who is tired and doesn't really understand why you would want to know in the first place. I saw this and felt compelled to move rhythmically in a way which at least suggested that I was alive and maybe even enjoying the music. My style was knackering, but had the additional benefit of providing much needed exercise which tended to lessen the subsequent unpleasant effects of being full of beer, but it never led to sexual activity, or at least no sexual activity involving persons other than myself, and was therefore mostly a waste of time.

Nevertheless, here I am thirty years later going to a dance recital. We're going along to watch Jamie, who is seventeen or maybe eighteen and who is my friend's daughter. She's been attending a local dance class for at least a decade, and this is the big show at the end of the educational year.

We take seats and we watch.

There are four or five groups according to age ranging from five or six to Jamie's bunch, and each group performs three or four times to some song or piece of music; and as soon as it starts I realise just how much I'm out of my depth. I don't understand why I'm watching this thing, and these people have no reason to be on the stage moving around in set patterns whilst grinning or else looking confused. There is no reason for this thing to be happening, and yet here it is.

The youngest group aren't really dancing so much as going through a set sequence of vaguely illustrative gestures, more or less at the same time, and all staring intently at an off-stage teacher, aside from the one dancer who spends each performance facing the opposite direction to all the rest. It's puzzling, and yet sort of charming because it's little kids, which at least keeps my wife happy for a couple of minutes. They dance, or at least engage in roughly synchronised gestures to what sound like Shirley Temple numbers; but they really come to life during Blue Suede Shoes. Yes, they're all girls, but there's no reason why they shouldn't look at least a bit like Elvis, and their shoes are certainly blue. Then as one, they point out at the audience, furrow brows into angry-little-girl faces and yell don't step on my blue suede shoes - a startling burst of atonal noise but you can tell they're enjoying themselves.

The older groups are probably better in so much as what they do looks more like dancing, or at least more like those routines which clogged up the British television schedule for most of the seventies - top hats, teeth and high kicks all swirling around the stage to a dubstep version of some Amy Winehouse song. I still can't quite see the point of any of it, and now I have the additional conundrum of why anyone really thought Back to Black worked better as some shitty crunk ringtone with the bass replaced by that wub-wub-wub sound. Is it not enough that the poor woman is pushing up the daisies?

I say the older groups are probably better, but it's all relative. I remain aware of lumps of meat hurling themselves awkwardly across the stage to land with a thump whilst trying to smile, but it's never a convincing smile. It looks like they're mostly on the verge of shitting themselves, and the ones who aren't smiling have a face suggestive of trying to remember what the hell comes next. It's awkward and a long way from anything you could describe as graceful, but it feels somehow like we're all in this together. We all have to get through this thing so we can go home.

The styles are tap, jazz, freestyle, and a few others I've never heard of. I can see there are differences. I know what tap dancing is, and mostly they've all got that one pretty much nailed. Jazz involves sparkly top hats and a whole shitload of grinning.

Inevitably there are a few disquieting anomalies even without the missed beats and screw-ups. One group includes a girl roughly three times the size of everyone else. She's probably just regularly proportioned, but everyone else being so tiny makes her seem enormous, ungainly, and very difficult to miss; but this is some dance class not Broadway, so she's stuck with midgets of equivalent ability and that's just how it is, and now I have to feel bad for even noticing. Also there are two males in the group, and they dance well, which isn't a problem; but from my circumstantially blinkered point of view it jars. It feels forced and awkward. It's all weird and pointless, and I'm aware that my opinions don't really count for shit in this context, which doesn't make it any less weird or pointless.

Jamie herself is on a few times, and whilst I may well be biased, I can't help notice that she dances well compared to her peers. Her moves seem graceful with less huffing and puffing involved, and she looks as though she's enjoying herself rather than grinning like she's at a job interview or communicating something to people with whom she shares no common language. This is great because at least it means I won't have to lie to her mother. She dances with the others to Nights in White Satin, and thankfully it's not the dubstep version. It's not even the Dickies version, although that might have been interesting.

We end with ceremony and applause, speeches and awards, even for just showing up in a few cases. Those who have been in the class for longer than ten years take a bow, and it's most of them. I guess that dancing must be a lot harder than I imagined if some of this bunch have been at this since 2006. I don't know how many of these kids are likely to end up on Broadway, if that's an ambition. I still don't know what any of us were supposed to get out of this.

Afterwards we visit the south side and eat at some place on Military Drive, which is fine during the day but can get a bit shooty in the evenings. Once we've eaten, we drop in on Flipside Records because it's almost next door to the restaurant and I've always wanted to take a look at the place. The incense is so thick I can barely see the bongs and related paraphernalia on sale at the rear of the store, but I browse the racks of used records and find a Stranglers album I've been after, which is nice. Three Mexican girls come in and begin looking for some Moody Blues album. I can't work out quite which record they're looking for, but wonder if it might be the one containing Nights in White Satin.

If there's a pattern to any of this, I don't think I will ever understand it.

Hey! Hey! We're the Benders!

During the warm summer evenings of 1981 my friends and I would  hang around Shipston's sportsfield on the London Road. The sports field comprised tennis courts, football and rugby pitches, and a club house from which we were excluded, being just fifteen, or I suppose sixteen in the case of Pete and Steve. We spent most of our time sat upon the swings of the children's play area, there being no children around to make use of them at that time of evening. This displeased Biddy Crump, an elderly pear-shaped woman and Daily Mail reader who lived opposite the entrance to the sportsfield. Her husband had been Geoff Crump, one time mayor of our small market town; but he'd passed on some years before, leaving her a widow and custodian of his beloved wellington boots, so local legend had it, specifically a fairly implausible local legend which held that the woman presently had her husband's beloved vulcanised footwear mounted in a cabinet and on display in the living room.

'Get off them swings!' She scowled at us from afar as she ambled across the car park towards the clubhouse. 'They're not for big boys like you!'

Had we been slightly younger, we might have taken more notice, but we were teenagers, and the edict had been delivered in a comical rural accent by someone with a funny name who, as widow of a mayor, presented herself as an authority figure and therefore a legitimate target; and an authority figure without any actual authority so far as we could see. Furthermore, we were sat upon the swings talking. None of us smoked, nor had we developed any premature alcoholic tendencies. We weren't in the habit of vandalising anything or terrorising anyone for chuckles. As usual, we were minding our own business, trying hard to squeeze some fun out of living in Shipston-on-Stour.

Sometimes we would answer back - and Pete tended to be the one with the wittiest replies in this capacity - or we would wander off to investigate the corner of the field in which a new quota of recently used condoms would appear each time we went to check. We would stand around and speculate as to who had been doing a deed about which we could only dream. At other times we would simply ignore Biddy and so she would waddle angrily towards the clubhouse, threatening to fetch Ted Hunt, proprietor of the establishment. It was an empty threat given that Ted Hunt didn't care enough to subject himself to our protests, peppered as they would be with insults built upon the unfortunate rhymes to which his surname lent itself with such ease. Eventually, having concluded whatever business she had at the clubhouse, Biddy would have to make the return journey, pretending not to notice that we were still there so as to avoid acknowledging the futility of the earlier exchange. Sometimes Pete would shout her name at astonishing volume as she disappeared from view. She would come back from around the corner and stare for a moment, unable to retaliate. Pete progressed to shouting her name backwards, pronouncing it Yiddib, an ingeniously pointless insult, we all felt, specifically designed to bewilder its victim.

With hindsight, it may seem harsh or unfair to some, but we had become a little territorial with regard to our right to sit on the swings and talk rubbish of an evening. There was Pete, Graham, and myself, our numbers occasionally bolstered by Eggy, Dean, Steve, Sid, Mark, Anders, Cloppo, Dean's little brother, or Janice, who was Dean's girlfriend. We didn't really have anywhere else to go, and it wasn't like we could all pile around someone's house in such numbers. We tended to avoid the square as it was usually full of local bikers and their younger admirers, kids our own age with denim jackets upon which were painted the covers of albums by Whitesnake or Rainbow, kids who always seemed to have something to prove.

These kids regarded at least a few of our own group as essentially homosexual and thus sorely in need of punishment. I myself was quite a scruffy child with my worn anorak and saggy corduroy trousers which I distinctly recall having been held up with baling twine at one point. My hair was not long, but I was very much a stranger to both brush and comb, at least sufficiently so as to have earned the nickname Worzel Gummidge after the popular television scarecrow played by Jon Pertwee. Pete and Graham were both of smarter appearance, and Pete in particular aspired to being a mod in keeping with his sartorial impulses. We were doing okay in school, if not spectacularly so, and couldn't really be considered stuck-up toffee-nosed swots unless your standards were so low as to define the act of wiping one's own bottom following defecation as la-di-da and ostentatious. We didn't generally like team sports. We kept ourselves to ourselves, and we all fancied girls - possibly excepting Sid who never really engaged with that one subject and seemed tellingly keen on musical theatre; but nevertheless, we were the gay boys, or the benders - as was probably the most popular term of the time. We didn't smoke, drink, or get in fights, and we listened to bands like Crass, Joy Division, the Stranglers or even Secret Affair in preference to affirming our heterosexuality with a big denim soundtrack of Queen, Judas Priest and proper music of that kind. We weren't homosexual, but we may as well have been for all the difference it made, and we felt somewhat outnumbered by the bikers, the heavy metal kids, and their legions of little followers.

If the sportsfield was not exactly our territory, we nevertheless felt a little safer there. Within plain sight of the clubhouse, a shitty Ford Cortina might occasionally dispense older kids who would pause to remind us that we were gay bum boys before heading into the clubhouse to discuss the size of each other's choppers over a jocular pint or twenty, but this was better than a shitty Ford Cortina pulling up at the side of the road to dispense the courier of a battering because one of us had looked at him funny. On one occasion a group of much younger children, possibly having been brought there by shitty Ford Cortina and bribed to befuckinghave with a pop and some crisps whilst dad discussed penises with his drinking buddies, decided that we were all bare bummers and ran around shouting this verdict, despite our all being fully clothed. This was difficult to take seriously, so Graham threw himself into the role, protesting that this was, after all, no longer the nineteeth century. These denim-clad offspring of Whitesnake fans were so appalled by the possibility that maybe we really were bare bummers that they went to play elsewhere, on the other side of the tennis courts.

More unnerving was the arrival of Bonnie, Janice's much younger sister, and her friend Joanne. They would have been about thirteen, and seemed keen to score points with the older boys and bikers, and they had apparently decided that we were easy targets.

'I've seen more cock on a dead sparrow,' Bonnie smirked at us from the roundabout, having finally caught our attention. We had been hoping that she and her little friend would get bored and piss off, but it wasn't to be. Bonnie smirked a lot, and her features were well-suited to it - like a sort of fish-faced young offender luxuriating in the knowledge of being a girl and thus traditionally immune to the kind of retaliation her comments might warrant under other circumstances. We told her to fuck off, but it didn't bother her, inviting only the somewhat obvious response of just who was going to make her fuck off, and which army they intended to enlist in furtherance of this objective.

Joanne, her sidekick, would underscore each comment with guttural laughter. Hur hur hur hur.

More cock on a dead sparrow - the accusation was bewildering, as none of us could really care less about this weirdly vicious little creature's estimate of our collective masculinity. Someone probably made a comment about the reproductive organs of the common sparrow being mostly internal, so the comparison seemed poorly made, but Bonnie seemed to take all those long words as proof of her original statement.

'Hur hur hur hur,' Joanne chuckled because we were all big queer benders or whatever.

Why us?, I wondered. These girls went to our school, and now they really seemed to be going for the jugular. Had any of our group even done so much as noticed them before, or were they simply joining in with the town consensus? After a while they seemed to lose interest, but hung around by the slide and the roundabout. At one point, Bonnie somehow fell over and, laughing, registered a loud complaint about having hurt her quim, and she actually used the mediaeval term. I got the impression she wanted us to hear, and I found it surprisingly unpleasant to listen to a thirteen year old girl who had apparently adopted the vocabulary of a seasoned author of down-market pornographic copy.

They started in on us again, this time with Joanne enthusiastically joining in to catalogue our numerous imagined failings as men. This seemed a poor decision on her part given that whole deal about people in glass houses not throwing stones. She was a bullish girl with a head the shape of a huge unshelled peanut and a deep, gruff voice.

'She's more of a man than all you lot put together,' Bonnie smirked.

There was moment of silence as everyone gave serious consideration to the comparison. Graham muttered something along the lines of how he didn't think anyone could argue with that.

Another moment passed before the laughter erupted in force. Pete laughed so hard that he fell off the swing as Joanne's heavy brow lowered to define the frown of a small, female Incredible Hulk.

'Oh dear.' Steve tried to speak through the tears, addressing Bonnie. 'You've really dropped your friend in it there.'

They left, because there was no coming back from that one. They had shot themselves in the collective foot, and from then on, each time one of us passed either girl in the school corridor we would be subjected to some reiteration of the theme of our being gay homosexual benders. Such comments were countered with reference to the ambiguous sexuality of JoManne, as we came to know her, or by singing a few bars of the Song of the Volga Boatmen, or beating our chests and roaring like gorillas, or lowering our voices as far as they would go and simply retorting with the words deep voice, drawing the syllables out as though it were a Gregorian chant. Eventually it worked, and the girls got bored, and hostilities ceased.

With hindsight, we said some truly horrible things. Joanne may have been entirely happy about her own appearance, or we may each have contributed to some later body dysmorphia, or she may have had a terrible home life which had driven her to take it out on us, or she may simply have been too fucking thick to understand the flaws in her own bullshit small-town mentality; but what has been said has been said, and it was all a long time ago, and in any case, we didn't start it.

The Day I Met ZZ Top

I am familiar with the notion of borderland as sacred space from having read about Mexico before the Spanish conquest. Borderlands for the Mexica were dusk, dawn, and numerous points of the calendar at which one kind of time became another. Such junctures, so it was believed, were weak spots where sacred forces might be in flux, realms of neither one thing nor the other, and this was where the ordinary and readily understood laws of the universe broke down. I found myself in one such space for most of the summer of 1984.

My recall of the exact sequence of events is poor, which is of course understandable given the breakdown of reality, or at least of reality as I had understood it up to that point. School had ended with my fifth year of secondary edumacation in the summer of 1982. Shipston-on-Stour Comprehensive had no sixth form, due either to lack of funds, or it hardly being worth the effort given the quality of students. Those of us who had been coaxed into either taking A levels - or retaking those exams I would have passed at school had I been paying attention - signed on for a catch-up year at the South Warwickshire College of Further Education in Stratford-upon-Avon. A few of my friends were also there, and stranger still, we now found ourselves compressed into a single scholastic stratum with kids who had been in the year above our own at the school; because as I say, it was a borderland wherein the ordinary and readily understood laws of the universe broke down. We were stood at the threshold of our respective futures, in a manner of speaking, although loitering would be a better term; and none of us were under any illusion that those futures would contain yachts, private planes, or expensive Italian sports cars. This state of flux endured for two years, ending as I wandered off towards Maidstone in non-committal pursuit of a fine art degree, so 1984 was arguably the last year of my childhood.

Back at school there had been the four of us in our little gang: myself, Graham, Eggy, and Pete. We had been drawn together by a shared sense of humour, and the fact of our being the only kids in the entire town who preferred Joy Division and The Stranglers to Iron Maiden. Typically we formed a band, having understood that musicianship was no longer necessary for such an undertaking. Two of us could sort of play, and we were somewhat lacking in terms of instrumentation, but these were fairly minor considerations given that the main point was keeping ourselves entertained, which we managed extremely well. The music, such as it was, was recorded on an endless succession of cassette tapes, taking the form of whatever we felt like doing at the time, anything from puerile noise to a sort of sarcastic variation on the Oi! music then regularly championed in Sounds music paper.

Unfortunately, when Pete finished school in 1981, his family moved to Eastbourne on the south coast, leaving the Pre-War Busconductors - as we called ourselves - limping along without our least musical but otherwise most entertaining member, the only one of us who could really sing; and as the borderland years closed in, we all moved on. Pete had been a year older than the rest of us, but had crossed the generational gulf through being Graham's neighbour, and now we found ourselves as one with his former classmates, these strange older kids previously seen only from afar but now sat next to us in class at the South Warwickshire College of Further Education. Suddenly we were hanging out with Anders Longthorne and Mark Lewis, and our entire world was changing, sort of. I'd barely known these older kids had existed when I was at school, or even that there even were other kids who would refuse on principle to allow Electric Light Orchestra records into their homes.

Girls still being some years away, we discovered drink together, mounting expeditions to The Black Horse to ask for bottles of lager in deeper voices than those with which we spoke to our parents. Anders Longthorne, being older and taller was pretty good at this. It probably also helped that he didn't really care whether we got served or not. It was just something to do.

Anders was an enigma, the son of some guy who had worked for NASA in America, who hung large framed prints pertaining to the moon landing around his home, and yet who lived in Shipston-on-Stour, England - the middle of nowhere so far as the rest of us were concerned. Even without the peculiarly Scandinavian Christian name and exotic heritage, Anders was immediately memorable for being one of the most toxically sardonic human beings ever to walk the earth. When I first read Peter Bagge's Neat Stuff comic, Buddy Bradley immediately reminded me of Anders whom I viewed as having originated that same distinctive blend of hard, dry wit and nihilism.

'My life is shit,' he once chortled with casual venom, selecting a Mars Bar from the display in the newsagents. 'I may as well be fat and shit.'

He'd introduced the rest of us to Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver - possibly so as to furnish us with all the required references for when he affected the insane intensity of Travis Bickle for comic effect. 'I'm gonna get myself organisised,' he would tell us. 'I'm gonna clean up this town,' he promised, laughing to himself and playing imaginary ZZ Top guitar riffs. ZZ Top, along with Motohead, Statas Quo and Judas Preist were one of those long hair bands identified in biro on the denim jackets of every other kid at school, so we had shunned them on principle; but Anders liked them, and didn't really care what the rest of us thought; and we realised that he was right.

His best friend was Mark Lewis, generally identified as Louie. No-one could quite work out why they were friends as they seemed to spend most of the time taking the piss out of each other. Possibly they had been brought together through mutual appreciation of ZZ Top.

Somehow inevitably, we formed a band, or at least Mark drafted the rest of us in to provide his backing, in a few cases without actually telling us. The band was called Louie & the Bum Ticklers - a name which held no promise of success, but no-one really cared enough to object.

Eggy, being our one bastion of social responsibility and the sort of wholesome activities of which a parent might approve, was a member of the Sea Scouts, which allowed him - and by association the rest of us - access to the scout hut situated on the London Road, near the Coach and Horses pub. It didn't seem like the scout hut was ever really used for much, at least not so far as we could tell, and so we became regulars, just hanging out because it was something to do. One evening, having returned from The Black Horse with more cider than seemed advisable, we staged a Monopoly tournament at the scout hut, discovering in the process that Monopoly can be a lot of fun when you're seventeen and too drunk to stand. Later that evening I regurgitated the contents of my stomach from my bedroom window, learning all of the usual valuable lessons that come with preliminary forays into alcoholism.

'Somebody had one too many last night, I reckon,' my dad observed over breakfast. 'They lost their guts all over the pavement outside.'

It appeared that he considered this funny, but I was not identified as a suspect which was odd seeing as it hardly required Sherlock Holmes levels of deduction to penetrate this particular veil of mystery. Later I went outside and noted the acidic cider trail etched down the brickwork from my first floor bedroom window to an incriminating and now dried out dusting of diced carrots and tomato skins on the pavement. The stain was such that it remained visible for many years to come, and may still be there now for all I know, a silent memorial to my bankrupting Eggy with all of his fancy hotels neatly lined up along Park Lane.

We also used the scout hut for Louie & the Bum Ticklers rehearsals, sneaking down there with crappy practice amplifiers and the cheap Teisco Decca guitar I'd bought from Andy Scrivener for a tenner. I had the impression that almost everyone involved in the enterprise aside from Mark and myself regarded it as distinctly lame, something we should have outgrown, but nevertheless we all gave it our best, such as it was. Graham, Mark and I chugged out three note riffs on our guitars, Anders kept a rhythm on cardboard boxes and other household objects lazily adapted to percussive functions, and Eggy sang the lyrics from an exercise book whilst trying not to laugh. It wasn't that Mark's songs were necessarily hilarious, although they were intended to be at least amusing, but Eggy was a vocalist distinguished by enthusiasm rather than ability, and he had a well-developed sense of the ridiculous. It was fairly easy to make him laugh so much that he couldn't breath if the circumstances were sufficiently stupid.

I drew a cover for our tape Down in the Pool Hall featuring four cartoon characters bearing no real resemblance to ourselves. The eight songs listed on the inlay, all, so far as I recall, recorded in that echoey scout hut, were Derek Griffiths, Wah, A Kid Called Grez, Heavy Metal Rebellion, Shipston Hero, Meat Head, Stereotype, and Pool Hall Blues. Being as the cassette resides in a cardboard box on a different continental land mass to the one upon which I am presently settled, I can recall only one of these songs.

Wah was about a student who took the same mathematics class as Mark, Graham, and Anders at the South Warwickshire College. He was substantially overweight and excessively spotty, possibly owing to the masses of chips with which he was observed stuffing his face each lunchtime. Additionally he had massive red lips resembling the kind which can be purchased from joke and novelty retailers, and he had an apparently odious personality to match. His nickname was Wah Wah in reference to a sound effect used on Family Fortunes, a popular television game show. The contestant would provide an answer which, if wrong, would be suffixed with a car horn style electronic wah wah and the announcement our survey says, followed by the correct answer. I never found out quite how this related to the target of our song because I wasn't in the same mathematics class, but I remember the chorus well:

Wah me old chip scoffer,
Wah my only mate,
You gotta purse them lips, Wah,
And suck them chips right off that plate.

I suppose it qualifies as bullying of a sort, particularly if you accept the notion that we live in a world in which nobody is a dick. Unfortunately though, this is not the case, and we in fact live in a world in which a great many people are dicks, and as Louie & the Bum Ticklers, we simply chose to acknowledge this with the gift of song. Specifically we chose to acknowledge this with the gift of songs that no-one would ever hear, which is still better than going around thumping people you don't like the look of, I would say.

Hanging around with Mark and Anders was fun, a prelude to the world beyond Shipston-on-Stour. Anders had passed his driving test, and would sometimes borrow his dad's car so we could drive through the town square feeling superior to the local bikers. We would wind down the windows whilst playing electro compilations on the Street Sounds label or the Grandmaster Flash greatest hits tape to underscore the point that we were different, and that although we didn't know what the future held, we presumed it would be better than this.

One small part of that future contained our meeting with ZZ Top. Mark had told us that he personally knew the members of ZZ Top and frequently spoke with them by telephone. Being as ZZ Top had sold millions of records and were a huge, globally popular rock band from Houston, Texas, the idea was so patently ridiculous that only Anders bothered to argue, as ever relishing the opportunity to give his friend a hard time. 'Come on, Louie, you moron. You don't know what you're talking about.'

'You don't have to believe me if you don't want to.'

'Well that's lucky, because I don't, and you're a moron.'

'Billy and Dusty don't think I'm a moron.' These were the names of the bassist and guitarist of ZZ Top, and Mark would underscore his observation with his weird, unique spoken chuckle, sh sh like the word shucks but without the -ucks, twice and in quick succession.

'Oh piss off.'

I could be getting some of these details in the wrong order, but that was roughly how I remember it. It seemed to be some private joke between the two of them, an argument they kept going because it gave them pleasure. It carried on in the background for weeks, culminating in the peculiar proposition that Mark would arrange for ZZ Top to come to Shipston-on-Stour and pay us a visit.

'You're out of your mind, Louie.'

'We'll just have to see what you say when the boys turn up.'

'I'll still say that you're out of your mind because we both know it's never going to happen, you stupid bastard.'

Mark remained nevertheless optimistic.

Sh sh.

The day came, and Graham, Eggy, and myself met at the scout hut as usual. We went inside and set up, which wasn't a big deal as it only really involved plugging in my small practice amplifier and turning it on. None of us commented on the fact that neither Anders nor Mark had yet arrived as it didn't seem significant. Neither did we discuss this being the proposed date of our promised audience with ZZ Top because we were all seventeen or thereabouts, none of us believed in Father Christmas, and it was obviously just some private joke, just the older kids taking the piss out of us.

Two figures entered the scout hut, swaggering like John Wayne. They both wore large black hats, sunglasses, and had long, obviously false beards.

Eggy began to squeak with laughter. 'You stupid buggers.'

'Hey guys,' said the taller one in a fairly poor approximation of an American accent. 'You seen Mark and Anders? They told us to meet them down here.'

'Yeah,' said the other helpfully. 'We're ZZ Top.'

'Very funny,' I said, trying not to laugh.

'What do you mean?' The taller of the two regarded the one who was about Mark's height. 'They said they would be here.'

It carried on for a few minutes. When Anders adopted some ludicrous position for the sake of argument, nothing on Earth could induce him to let it go. Short of pulling off the false beard, there was nothing we could do until they got bored, which eventually they did, and so they left.

A minute or so passed and Mark and Anders turned up, apparently in high spirits.

'You'll never guess who was here just now,' said Eggy with immense sarcasm.

'Who?'

'ZZ Top!'

'Oh man, and we missed them!'

Mark chuckled. 'I told you, and you didn't believe me.'

Sh sh.

The thing that had impressed me most was the amount of effort and preparation that had gone into those few minutes, building the story up weeks beforehand, then getting hold of some pretty serious false beards, and all towards ends that were ludicrous at best; and that ludicrous at best had been the whole point.

As previously stated, the two years from the summer of 1982 to that of 1984 were, by some definition, my borderlands, a period of general uncertainty during which I discovered both alcohol and sexual intercourse, and put away at least some childish things - although it was nevertheless annoying when I came back from the first term at Maidstone to find that my dad had given all of my Micronauts to Oxfam. In terms of this metaphysical borderland, ZZ Top might therefore be regarded as loa, expressions of sacred forces which briefly intruded upon my small world, channelled through the agency of Louie and one of his Bum Ticklers. Were I the kind of writer who casually invokes the concept of psychogeography, having picked it up from Alan Moore rather than Guy Debord, I might be inspired to suggest that ZZ Top, heralds of my eventual Texan future, had come to plant the seed by which I would grow myself some flax, weave a pair of comfortable shoes, and walk that fateful path as a sharp dressed man. Even aside from my spending the next decade resembling a twelfth century serf, the suggestion would quite clearly be rubbish, because it wasn't ZZ Top. It was just Anders and Louie up to their usual ridiculous bollocks, and in many ways that was better.

Doctor, Why?

'He into his bikes, is he?' The question was asked by Peter Sweet,  someone my father knew through mutual love of massive, noisy motorcycles. Even though I was not yet ten years old, we lived on a farm and I was male so I suppose it had seemed reasonable to assume that I was probably into Status Quo, Aston Villa and motorbikes.

'Oh no - he's a Doctor Who man,' my father explained as they headed out the door, intent on keeping a date with a lake of beer and lively conversation about gear boxes.

Without even knowing quite why, even then I resented the label, even though it was certainly fitting. I'd been terrified by Doctor Who up until the age of five at which point, having just watched Jon Pertwee menaced by a man pretending to be an animated stone gargoyle without quacking my pants, I informed my mother that I would be okay to watch the programme from that point on; and I was, never missing an episode until Colin Baker took to the screen and I moved away from home and into a house with no television set, which was possibly ironic in so much as I had relocated in order to study film and video production at Maidstone College of Art. Inevitably I drifted away from the programme because I was eighteen and, without wishing to cast doubt on the quality of either the Colin Baker or Sylvester McCoy years, I had other, more interesting things to do.

Roughly a decade went by without my giving so much as a passing thought to this phenomenon which had once been so integral to my childhood, but then the same is true of Enid Blyton's Adventures of the Wishing Chair, so it's really not such a big deal. Then some time in the early 1990s my friend Andrew gave me a VHS tape of an old Jon Pertwee Doctor Who story for my birthday, and like Clark Kent recalling his secret origin, it all came flooding back in one massive bolus of memory sherbert. I bought some more of these tapes and was surprised at how well the stories had endured for what was essentially a children's programme without much in the way of a budget. Those later years during which the show had tried so hard not to fall off the bottom of the screen had completely passed me by, and I was intrigued by the idea that the clown from Vision On had somehow ended up in the lead role; so I bought tapes of episodes from the Sylvester McCoy era and found I even liked those. This in turn led to my reading the novels published by Virgin Books which continued the story on from the show's cancellation in 1989, with efforts made towards being decent science-fiction novels in their own right - which some of them certainly were.

In summary, Doctor Who was never my reason for living, but I had an investment I suppose you would say. I wouldn't go so far as to claim it for my native mythology as does Lawrence Miles, but it meant something and, more importantly, it led me to other, more interesting places. I can trace, for one example, at least half of the music I now listen to back to the soundtrack of jarring electronic farts scored by Malcolm Clarke for 1972's The Sea Devils.

Then in 2005, Doctor Who was once more recognised as being a viable entertainment franchise and returned to our television screens with Christopher Ecclescake in the lead role. I tried with this revived version but ultimately found myself forced to admit that it really wasn't for me. It's difficult to place the blame on any one thing that has remained consistently poor since its return - aside from Murray Lead's unrelenting incidental music which has remained efficiently and intrusively crass from the beginning - so I tend to attribute its failure to a combination of general shoddy workmanship and the stench of corporately regulated spontaneity and leave it at that.

Of course, I strive to keep such views to myself most of the time. Regardless of whether love or loathing are involved, centring each day around one's feelings for a television programme can never be healthy. I've seen what happens on internet forums gripped by the hysteria of such product overinvestment, and it isn't nice; and nor is there anything to be gained from arguing with someone for whom a fictional character is their life. They won't listen, and the more intellectually inert of their brethren will only counter your argument with viewing statistics, because if Fifty Shades of Gray, The X-Factor, Sex and the City, Justin Bieber and Adolf Hitler's rise to power have taught us anything at all, it is that the cultural or historical value of a phenomenon is apparently proportional to the quota of bums on seats. E.V. Rieu's 1946 translation of Homer's Odyssey sold three-million copies; Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code has sold eighty-million copies worldwide and is by this logic the artistically superior title.

Where Doctor Who in its heyday was spawned of a BBC populated with cranky eccentrics who tended not to play well with others but were good at imaginative programming, now it is imagineered by committee according to the guidelines of focus groups, and if it isn't, then it feels like it is to me, having more in common with Friends or Sex and the City than with its predecessor. Someone somewhere decided that the eccentric charm of the original could be rebranded and marketed with a 45% increased efficiency per unit of metric quirk to the benefit of shareholders and audience alike, floating the selfsame adventuresome zanyplex on the open market thus allowing it to compete with the likes of Spielberg, Buffy the Vampire Portfolio, and other wilfully culty TV shows about teenagers in warehouses full of stuff that fell off the back of a UFO. Even some of Doctor Who's fans now refer to it as a franchise.

Characters routinely undergo modular emotional journeys - the usual generic tripe about how daddy was never there and so on, standard soap-opera fare - scored without exception to a deafening barrage of boo hoo music just in case we didn't realise that a crying girl with big eyes is supposed to make us have a sad and because no-one trusts the script to deliver anything beyond tiresomely snappy wordplay and plot explanations; and it's no wonder when said scripts amount to a collage of time-tested set pieces already proven to have got the job done on other shows - the Doctor pleading you don't have to do this to the pissed-off alleged Silurian just like a million Nicholas Cages before him all talking the terrorist out of detonating the bomb, and nine times out of ten building up to the worst ever threat to the continued existence of everything ever yet again. It's all piss, wind, and bluster - just meaningless scale presented over and over because the steering committee understand sales targets and viewer ratings better than they understand the basic mechanics of telling a story, or why anyone would even want to tell a story without first consulting the Financial Times. This is why Doctor Who now so closely resembles proven-sellers - Indiana Jones, Star Wars, Harry Potter as the the camera zooms in for a close up, the music swells, Matt Smith looking directly into the camera to deliver one of those lines you only ever hear in the bronchial voiceover of a cinematic trailer: this ends here; the time for something or other is over; there's one thing you don't ever put in a trap; bring it on, numbnuts and so on and so forth. It's a magical funtime ride of wonderment and adventure because Tim Burton didn't win all those awards just for combing his hair. That's commercial, as Borgia Ginz observes in Derek Jarman's Jubilee.

I object to this because I dislike being condescended to by anything more stupid than myself, anything which assumes that like a south-sea island tribesman I will be impressed by bright flashing lights and loud music and so fail to notice the absence of content, or that the dribbling stream of trite jokes and twee observations aren't actually that funny. The sheer insincerity is breathtaking.

I've worked hard over the years to elevate myself above the level of gurgling idiocy to which I was born, and unfortunately this has meant that as I grow older and hopefully a little more discerning, some things just don't cut it any more. I get bored easily, particularly when confronted with the sort of mechanically-reclaimed science-fiction that has recently become so popular, and was actually already somewhat limited in its scope thirty years ago when Star Wars put an untimely end to those pleasantly cerebral science-fiction films of the early 1970s by reintroducing us to the Flash Gordon method of storytelling. I dislike being sold the same idea over and over, particularly when the idea really wasn't that amazing in the first place. Doubtless this may sound elitist, but I prefer to think of it as having standards, the ability to tell the difference between McDonalds and actual food. If that makes anyone feel threatened or somehow inadequate, that's really a shame.

I dislike contemporary Doctor Who because it smothers any story it might be trying to tell with the narrative equivalent of sex aids - something novel to spice up that which lacks the proverbial wood - and because it just isn't anywhere near so clever as it wants us to believe it is. It has been suggested to me that this is simply the way television is made these days, as though I might like to try getting used to it or else piss off back to my penny farthing and wax cylinders. That this is simply the way television is made these days is not strictly accurate, but rather seems to be one of those stock phrases people tend to repeat because they've heard someone else say it and it saves them having to think about whether or not it's true. There's really quite a bit of television employing narrative language entirely unlike that of Doctor Who, mostly television scripted by people who can actually write, who don't require smoke and mirrors to compensate for any lack in the production; and to condense all of the above into a single sentence, I dislike contemporary Doctor Who because it's Nickelback trying to fool us into thinking they're The Sex Pistols.

A few might agree with the above, or at least with some of the above, and there are many, many who would disagree in the strongest possible terms. Being able to cope with the notion that others might hold views different to my own, I don't have a problem with that. If people wish to spend their time watching Doctor Who then fine. Not everything has to be The Deer Hunter, and as for myself it'll be a cold day in hell before I get tired of Godzilla movies, absurd though they may well be. However, I do object to those individuals who seem unable to cope with anyone holding opinions so wildly divergent to their own, and who for some reason seem to take any insult to their beloved yet entirely fictitious Doctor Who Magic Telly Man as an assault upon them, their children, their children's children, and everything that is right and true. If you hate it so much, they bleat because they've seen the question posed before and it seemed to work for the previous guy, then why do you watch it?

Truthfully, I don't. I gave up after struggling through the first ten minutes of Hitler, Go Home or whatever it was called. Matt Smith had just made an amusing remark about wearing either a fez or a bow-tie. The woman who played Dirty Den's second wife in Eastenders had quipped hello, darling to hilarious effect whilst Rory died and Amy McBoggle pulled that feisty popeyed face she does every few minutes, and I knew I just couldn't stand it any longer. I knew it was never going to improve, and that both Steven Moffat and I were wasting each other's time. Later I trawled the internet seeking commentary upon the episode and found I know Hitler was a bit of a bad lad and all, but surely even he deserved better than that..

Unfortunately Doctor Who, whether you watch it or not, has become difficult to avoid, and it's impossible to entirely disassociate oneself from something you enjoyed for at least a few decades of your life, particularly when you still have some sneaking regard for the previous version. It's also difficult to prevent strong opinions such as those expressed above boiling to the surface when any view you might share is pounced on by ravening hordes driven by the sort of religious bloodlust that Tomás de Torquemada would have regarded as slightly creepy. You are the ones, they scream, who can't let go, the jealous losers who take it all too seriously, who can't stand that it's back and that it's more brilliant than ever before, and so on and so forth to paraphrase a Doctor Who author whose books I will never buy. More than anything it comes across as terrible insecurity: tread softly because you tread on my dreams...

Well, that's how it sounds with the slightly more rabid defenders of the faith, but who knows what they're thinking? I suppose you might argue that in writing this I too am failing to let go, but I really feel the accusation would be rendered somewhat flaccid by the word count of material I've written which has nothing to do with Magic Doctor Who Man Telly Adventure Time. Often it is suggested that my fellow naysayers and I might like to shut the fuck up lest we somehow spoil other's enjoyment, because if history has taught us anything it is that those who made unkind comments about the Bay City Rollers, Kenny, Curiosity Killed the Cat, the Jo-Boxers, Bros, Oasis, Take That, Westlife, Busted, and One Direction must ever live with the shame of knowing how their hurtful remarks have destroyed people's lives and engulfed orphanages in the terrible killing flames of death; which is why wanting something to not be rubbish is frowned upon, I suppose.

Essentially I like people, and try to see the best in everyone. I like to see people making something of themselves and doing whatever it is they do well, generally speaking, developing themselves and learning to appreciate what a great world we live in. Therefore it pisses me off when I see people wilfully wasting their time on that which doesn't matter, or coming out with moronic drivel because they've never made the effort, or even been inspired to make the effort, to expand themselves - like the person who in intellectual terms lives in the same town their entire life, never once expressing an interest in the world beyond the horizon of their television set, who justifies such myopia with reasoning amounting to well I think you'll find Solihull has a lot to offer on the face of it. I don't understand why anyone wouldn't want more, and the sheer lack of curiosity about experiencing that which one might not have previously experienced is terrifying - failing to engage with any form of culture not bearing a specific logo, for example. There is no-one on Earth who eats at McDonalds to the complete exclusion of all other gastronomic options, and yet there do seem to be people who bifurcate the world into Doctor Who and all that other stuff.

Where Doctor Who was once a show that at least aspired to inspire, to open up a wider world to young viewers without giving any attendant adults too much of a headache, now it is concerned principally with the perpetuation of its own mythology. It has become a marketing exercise garnished with tried and tested signifiers of authenticity - generic emotive or humorous sequences as the televisual equivalent of McDonalds deciding to sell fruit or using twee folk music as part of their advertising campaign - and its only purpose seems to be the occupation of as much cultural bandwidth as it can appropriate before everyone wises up and starts spending their money elsewhere. What this boils down to, at least for me, is an issue of fundamental curiosity regarding what's out there, all the books I will never have time to read, films I may never see, or places I may never visit. I try to broaden my horizons as I proceed through life, to experience as much as I can, not least through reading; and I read a great deal of science-fiction because that's what I enjoy, but I try not restrict myself to any one genre. It depresses me that there are people out there who will never pick up a book without it bearing some relation to Doctor Who, who may bang on about science-fiction literature on some stupid forum without actually quite knowing even who Isaac Asimov or Clifford Simak were; or worse, who might not even read at all, just sit there drooling over the same crappy DVD they've seen a million times whilst assuming that a broadened horizon means watching fucking Stargate instead. I don't want to live in a world full of morons. I don't want to live in a culture where you have to drive fifty miles to find a Denny's or a Jim's because no-one understands why you would want anything other than a Big Mac. The great energy harvester of western society feeds us quite enough fake homogenised culture as it is without our encouraging it further.

Of course, in the end it's up to the individual, and I have many valued friends who I actually hope don't read this because I know it will piss them off, and it needn't because it really isn't about them (apart from Steve*). I don't tend to make friends based on mutual appreciation of the same bands because I'm not sixteen years old, and I can make a distinction between the individual and whatever they have printed on their T-shirt; and I can even, under the ordinary circumstances of friendship, respect their holding views differing wildly from my own. By extension, I'm not interested in discourse with any individual unable to extend the same courtesies to others, and so I don't see why anyone should be expected to shut up about something they dislike, particularly if they are able to offer some illuminating reason as to why they dislike it.

Doctor Who has often been sold as an ongoing story with almost limitless possibilities, mainly because that's a neat little phrase and no-one really stops to think about it too hard; but its possibilities are only limitless within the confines of every single variant requiring the involvement of a man in a box having adventures whilst his chums stands around asking questions. You might just as well say Garfield is an ongoing story with almost limitless possibilities, then accordingly revise Crime and Punishment in order to illustrate this, having Raskolnikov debate the morality of his actions with a wisecracking pizza-scoffing cat. If it really is about the story rather than the franchise, then why would anyone settle for an inferior model simply because it carries a familiar logo?

So there you go. It took a lot of squeezing but I think that's most of the pimple in so much as there's nothing much I could add without further repeating myself. That's my view pretty much in full and set to a semblance of order so that I shouldn't need to do it again. Hopefully the reader will have gained something from the above, one way or the other, and may at least appreciate why I hold such views: it's not so much about my opinion of, for example, Moffat as an alleged writer, whether new Doctor Who episodes will ever attain the giddy creative heights of The Twin Dilemma or Timelash, or any of the specific and deeply uninteresting details. It's mostly about possibilities, people bothering to look outside their front door, accepting that views divergent from their own may be equally or even more valid, and maybe even learning to recognise when they're being diddled; and to invert the stock challenge so beloved of a certain type of contemporary Doctor Who fan, if you hate all of that so much, then why did you read this?

*: Relax, dude. I'm joking.