A Few Turds from Our Sponsor

Does advertising work? asks the billboard at the side of the highway, then answering its own question with it just did! To break this down, the billboard suggests that advertising works because you've just read the message stating that it works, and might therefore consider paying the owners of the billboard a load of money to slap up a few images promoting your suppository franchise, or whatever it is you do. Of course, although the billboard suggests that advertising works because you've just read the message stating that it works, the only people who will have read the message are those who read the message because anyone who didn't bother to read the message won't have read it, making this the advertising equivalent of the anthropic principle, namely the philosophical consideration that observations of the universe must be compatible with the conscious and sapient life that observes it. The message is additionally weakened by the presumption of its own cognitive impact, resting on the premise that mere awareness of a product or service is the same as paying for it; which it isn't, as the billboard itself demonstrates, because I've seen it fucking hundreds of times and I'm still not absolutely certain of the six words cited here being the right ones.

Likewise, the following television commercials have sent me flying across the room to hit the mute button on the remote probably hundreds of occasions in some cases, and yet I'm still unable to remember what half of the fuckers are advertising, because all I can see in my minds eye is a parade of gormless grinning faces suffused with halos of how much I loathe everyone involved, which if anything only ensures that I'll go out of my way to avoid purchase of whatever shit they're selling in the event of my ever needing it or even being able to remember what it is. Marketing departments might suggest otherwise, but marketing departments are explicitly in the business of just making shit up and so their testimony is worthless. The civilisation of ancient Egypt endured for around three-thousand years, give or take a few periods of unrest. Isn't it fucking funny how you never hear anything about their marketing department?

AARP. I think this stands for the American Association of Retired People, but I can't be bothered to check. I'm sure it's a worthy organisation, dedicated as it is to involving those over a certain age with theatre visits, wine tasting, salsa classes and so on, but publicising the organisation with weird wobbly-headed older people grinning in your face seems ill-advised. So far there have been two major advertising campaigns, both starring Hispanic oldsters, first a woman and then a man. Each has this weirdly over-familiar grin like they're trying to get you involved in something your parents don't need to know about, and they grin and they wobble their heads side to side as though either pissed or ripped to the tits on prescription painkillers, and they slur something like if you don' think real possibilities when you hear the name AARP, then you don' know AARP, which sounds almost as though it should have my frien' at the end as an unwelcome hand finds its way round to your ass. Considering it all happens on a telly screen, there's something weirdly intrusive about Señor and Señora Real Possibilities, as though television has now found a way to invade your personal space with what nevertheless remains a two-dimensional image.

Contemplative Hillbillies Impressed by Impact of Heavy Object. I can't remember if this is Ford, Chevrolet, or General Motors, but it probably doesn't matter. As our tableau commences we see a group of guys in stetsons and jeans stood around looking at massive trucks, the kind of trucks only ever driven by men with enormous penises, so it's a safe bet that all of these hillbillies probably have penises of at least a foot in length, possibly two foot in the case of a couple of the more stoically rugged ones. None of these men are strangers to big heavy tools, not just the kind presently at rest within their own trousers, but also wrenches and items with rubber-grip handles which they squeeze and twist when engaging in their manly labours, grunting and occasionally pausing to quaff a refreshing beer-style beverage. When these men have finished utilising their big heavy tools out in the wilderness at the mercy of lions, bears and probably Injuns, they toss their big heavy tools in the back of their trucks and head home, and of course being just regular guys, they toss their tools roughly rather than daintily, like some homosexual carefully arranging wildflowers upon a gingham cushion; but in tossing their tools, sometimes they damage their trucks. So here the hillbillies stand in contemplation as heavy metal boxes of tools are cast into the back of trucks with a thud thud thud. One brand of truck sustains denting, but the other doesn't because it is rugged like the men. This makes the men happy and so we see them smile and nod with approval.

Grandpa the Asthmatic Wolf. This commercial riffs - probably unintentionally - on a cartoon I once saw in Punch magazine wherein an old man, having just announced how delightful he finds the unalloyed directness of the young, is asked Grandpa, how come you're so fat, grey, bald, and wrinkled? Here he's reading them the story of the Three Little Pigs, and has just reached the point at which the wolf is huffing and puffing when one of his own grandchildren points out that he too does quite a lot of huffing and puffing . 'It's my asthma,' he explains, digressing off into a long and unnecessarily detailed account of his condition, apparently having missed the point that his girls were simply engaging in banter and hadn't actually requested for this droning summary of his medical history. The advert then enters an animated segment wherein a cartoon wolf consults the advice of his doctor regarding asthma, correct usage of inhalers and so on, prior to tackling those three pigs. One sequence shows the wolf, breathing quite easily whilst engaged in rigorous activity, dancing with his wolf granddaughters, here identified by dresses and tiaras, making it quite clear that the wolf is also Grandpa. Personally I think this sends out a slightly dubious message, and - as with all medical adverts - this one spends five inevitable minutes listing all of the potentially deadly side effects of using this particular form of relief for asthma symptoms, whatever it is. I know they probably have to do it for legal reasons, but when two of the potentially deadly side effects are an increase in severity of asthma symptoms and death by asthma, the whole enterprise is rendered seemingly ludicrous; and Grandpa waving a cuddly toy wolf at the girls and making them scream with delight at the end doesn't really help a whole lot.

Grinning Fool Plays Air Drums. This is a locally made advertisement, possibly filmed on some cunt's phone by the look of it and starring the actual people who own the car dealership and who will probably try to flog you a motor should you find that their advertising has worked for you. My guess would be that neither of them ever took any sort of acting course and are thus banking on the raw, unpolished honesty of their performance, such as it is, to win you over. She is small and Hispanic, and he physically suggests a scenario in which aliens discovered the ruined body of Hoss from NBC's Bonanza on some distant asteroid and attempted to surgically restore him but, lacking any understanding of human physiology, found themselves obliged to use an Alfred E. Neuman heavy issue of Mad magazine for reference. Released back into the wild in the general vicinity of San Antonio, he was cruelly incapacitated by a thorn which became embedded in his mighty paw, but luckily the Latina woman happened to be passing and they've been faithful friends ever since. The part which really gets me is where she prefixes the announcement of some boring special offer by asking for a drum roll, whereupon he hunkers down and does the honours upon an imaginary snare; and whilst it's impressive that he's managed to suspend that stupid grin for a whole two seconds, it's hard not to notice his tongue pop from the corner of his mouth with all the strain of concentration. The guy resembles Gary from the thick kids class at my school, itself not an institution which was ever going to give Oxford or Cambridge much competition. I'm sure Gary was lovely but - Lordy was he stupid! He once gave me the nickname of Funny Eater, inspired by the difficulty I experienced with a particular sandwich. He saw me in trouble, he pointed, he laughed, and his imagination suggested Funny Eater might be a fitting nickname by which to forever associate me with the incident - a nickname which actually leaves the one who came up with it seeming more fucking pitiful than the person to whom it is applied, regardless of how poorly it went for me and that sandwich.

Inexplicable Enthusiasm for Cardboard Chicken. Most of us know Popeye as a Sailor Man with a heavy spinach habit, but here in Americaland he's also a fried chicken franchise which attempts to make a virtue out of taking fucking ages to get your order together by means of the presumably ironic strapline Louisiana fast. I think the implication is that they're not actually a massive corporation, but they're just these guys, you know, and like, they care about nourishing your soul as well as your stomach, so maybe give them a fuckin' chance, yeah? I mean if you got some plane to catch maybe you should've gone to Wendy's instead. To be fair, it may just be my presumably understaffed local branch of Popeye's Louisiana Kitchen which takes forever, although it's not actually the leisurely pace of their service which bothers me. The advertising stars an enthusiastic matronly chef lady delivering a jovial testimony to the superiority of her wares invoking good N'awlins home cookin', fresh spices, and Mardi Gras, mon cher. Conversely, the food, when it eventually arrives, leaves you with the sensation of having consumed an entire loaf of bread in one sitting, albeit a vaguely chicken-flavoured loaf of bread. It's not a good feeling, and contrasts with the promise of the advertising in the same way that the Aryan mythology of white supremacy tends to contrast with the lumpy tattooed mutants who subscribe to that sort of drivel. Also, chef lady smiles so hard that it looks like she's doing it at gunpoint, which is troubling.

Lucky Buffoon Hits Jackpot. This is a commercial for the Lucky Eagle casino of Eagle Pass which is somewhere down near the Mexican border so far as I understand. It's part of the Kickapoo reservation and is probably therefore able to operate outside state laws regarding gambling, whatever they may be. I've never really given much of a shit about gambling and tend to regard those who do as losers and arseholes. Everett's dad was supposedly a professional gambler, and he was a fucking shocker. That said, I'm happy to see First Nations people making a living - taking our money back from white people one quarter at a time, as runs the motto of the Wamapoke Casino. The thing I have a problem with is the hair metal theme song with Grace Slick - or someone of her general type - bellowing out lu-huckee eeyooooooowaaaargh over fifty simultaneous guitar solos whilst a buffoon looks happy in slow motion, drunk with the euphoria of having pumped five bucks into the slots and landed himself a sweet, sweet pay out of four dollars and twenty-five cents, the knob.

The Misery of Dry Skin. This is an advert for either moisturiser or some kind of specifically medicinal moisturiser, in which a robust looking woman explains that the very worst aspect of diabetes is undoubtedly the dry skin. Wikipedia on the other hand lists heart disease, stroke, chronic kidney failure, foot ulcers, and damage to the eyes among those attendant complications one might reasonably regard as undesirable, and yet no mention of dry skin. Maybe the whole dry skin aspect is just too horrible to contemplate.

Pretzelphage Resumes Activity. This is a commercial for Aspen Dental, and I'm not sure why I should remember that detail when I remain in the dark about most of the rest discussed here. Anyway, all Aspen Dental commercials seem to be a variation on a theme in which persons with whom I suppose we are expected to identify realises that their teeth are shit and in need of work, and so they go to Aspen Dental, get those choppers sorted out, and behold their teeth are no longer shit because look - there's our man winning the taco eating competition, munching away like it ain't no thing; and in each case this narrative is delivered in the form of a song, complete with dental staff pulling wry faces to the camera as the patient yodels away in the chair. The thing which annoys me most about the worst of these adverts, the one sung by some woman working in a bakery, is the finale in which, still singing, she grins, snatches a large pretzel from the hand of her associate, and croons 'this pretzel's got nothing on me,' before taking a big old bite by way of demonstration. It's the actual phraseology which bothers me. The statement that something or other has nothing on the person making the statement is one of those things people tend to say because they've heard someone else say it and thought it sounded cool. In the case of our dentally enhanced vocalist, this pretzel's got nothing on me is like saying I am superior to this pretzel, or my victory over this pretzel is assured for I am better equipped to achieve victory than this inanimate baked item; which is a fucking stupid thing to say, because no-one is going to put money on the pretzel winning, and in any case it's a false dichotomy. The entire function of the pretzel is to be consumed and in doing so to provide sustenance. Therefore a victory for the pretzel constitutes its being consumed, which is what happens as a result of what the woman qualifies as her triumph, because she's a fucking idiot who tries too hard.

Purple Turd. Have you ever been bunged up, popped a laxative, and subsequently had yourself a really good shit? If so, did you enjoy it so much that you were barely able to contain yourself afterwards? Did you pull on a t-shirt bearing the slogan I ❤ my Lax? Did you rush down to the shore and write I ❤ my Lax in the sand in letters of a size sufficient as to allow the message to be read by the pilots of any aircraft which might be passing overhead? I've honestly never been that happy to have a shit, and I've spent time in Mexico, so to me it just looks like secret signalling for those who take pleasure in the production of fecal matter towards ends other than the purely alimentary, if you know what I'm saying. If you don't know what I'm saying you should probably consider yourself lucky. The animated segment of the advertisement - assuming it's the same one and I haven't just conflated two different laxative adverts - shows a purple turd set free and at last proceeding along a colon towards a bumhole like we're watching that episode of Barbapapa directed by Joan Miró.  I suppose it's purple so as to allow viewers to get to grips with the general concept of having a shit without directly invoking the act whilst we're trying to eat our fucking tea, thank you very much; either that or someone has been on a diet of nothing but sloes for the past week.

Zipline Bore. 'Now that I'm over fifty,' says our helmeted guy as he's about to slide down a zipline attached to the side of the Matterhorn, 'my friends ask me, aren't you scared?' He pushes away, sliding off into empty Alpine space, just a knot of toughened cord preventing him from plummeting thousands of feet to his death, and as he slips off he yelps the rest of the anecdote, such as it is. The only thing he's really scared of, so it transpires, is leaving himself vulnerable to something or other by failing to either renew his health insurance or get himself inoculated against something or other - I can never remember which it is. I've a feeling this may be one of those adverts in which I asked my doctor and he said blah blah blah followed by four minutes listing all the potentially deadly side effects, so it's probably the latter - the inoculation. Personally, I suspect that our boy is somewhat embellishing his story. I expect he was having a drink with what few friends he has left, or he was hanging out at the sauna or something when he happened to mention that he was planning to slide down a mountain on a bit of rope; and the response was probably 'sure thing, Ken - sounds real scary,' before they carried on with whatever they had been talking about. It seems significant that the guy appears to be having this adventure holiday on his own, apart from whoever is holding the camera allowing him to waffle on and on and on, explaining his wearisome home-brewed philosophy to fucking no-one.

Traditional English Teeth

A popular truism held by Americans regarding the English is that they - or rather we - have terrible teeth. Obviously it's a generalisation at best, approaching not entirely accurate providing you can afford to spend the whole day sat on your arse seeking out online articles to the contrary. I would say the truth is to be found in dividing the popularity of the Osmonds by how many American children end up wearing braces for most of their teenage years, and then adding the English love of sweets, cigarettes, and not getting too hung-up on appearance. I would say this, except I am myself English, and whilst I couldn't claim to have had the absolute worst teeth, I can think of only three individuals with marginally more disgusting oral furniture; and this is across the entire fifty year span of my life and is limited only to people I've actually known, so no Shane MacGowan or whoever. So even if it isn't strictly true that the English have terrible teeth, it feels true, as Spike Milligan acknowledged in his poem:

English Teeth, English Teeth!
Shining in the sun,
A part of British heritage,
Aye, each and every one.
English Teeth, Happy Teeth!
Always having fun,
Clamping down on bits of fish,
And sausages half done.
English Teeth! Heroes' Teeth!
Hear them click! and clack!
Let's sing a song of praise to them -
Three cheers for the Brown, Grey and Black.

My own engagement with this proud legacy began early, possibly through a combination of my grandmother filling me with sweets roughly every fourteen days and a suspicion that brushing didn't make much of a difference given that my teeth always looked exactly the same when I'd finished; so up until as late as my thirties, I was brushing once a day or not, depending on whether I could be bothered. Of my twice yearly childhood visits to the dentist, I can recall maybe two which didn't result in another filling, and yet somehow I never managed to quite make the connection between this and not brushing my teeth. My diary entry for Friday the 29th of April, 1983 accordingly observes:

Today I had five fillings done at the dentist, although to be fair I suppose three of them were minor.

My friend Andrew visited the dentist only twice in his life, once as a child, and then as he approached forty. He told me he'd made an appointment as we sat in the pub in Lewisham. I'd always found his teeth odd, fascinating even. They were small and peg-like - pale yellow, but a uniformly pale yellow like they were supposed to be that way. I said nothing because I had no positive forecast to share.

'They're all fine,' he told me next day, once again in the pub.

'What? Seriously?'

'Yup.'

'You haven't been to the dentist since you were a kid and you don't even need a filling?'

'He told me that I have naturally strong teeth.'

From this conversation I deduced that there might be such a thing as naturally weak teeth, and that this probably applied to me. Teenage periods of what I considered diligent brushing had been rewarded at six-monthly intervals with more fillings regardless, and so I had ceased caring because caring led to thoughts of dentists and injections and drills and pain. Besides, my teeth looked okay from the front and no-one had complained of my having bad breath, so it didn't seem like they could be that terrible. At least I didn't think so when I was a kid. Once at school I'd laughed out loud at some comment made by Juliet Prouse, and I'd laughed with such vigour that I threw my head back, mouth open.

'I don't know why you'd want to kiss him,' observed James Renton who was then busily waging some sort of weird hate campaign against me for reasons known only to himself. 'It would be like kissing a dustbin.'

I wasn't even sat next to him. If my breath had been that toxic there would have been other clues, so I assumed James had been referring to the quota of dental amalgam inside my mouth, the bilateral arcs of metallic grey exposed when I opened wide. More puzzling was the possibility that Juliet Prouse might have wanted to kiss me in the first place. Were it true, this would have been problematic because I found her slightly annoying but didn't feel myself in a position to be choosy. Given that she had exhibited more obvious and undisguised interest in at least three other boys, I assumed the romantic aspect of the jibe was simply what James had chosen as framework from which to launch his critique of my gob.

It probably didn't help that I enthusiastically took up smoking as soon as I left home, and that in leaving home I had removed myself from an environment containing anyone who might occasionally give a shit about my teeth or the wisdom of my going to see the dentist every once in a while. I still brushed at least some of the time, but my technique was closer to voodoo than actual brushing - movements to appease the spirits of the undertaking rather than specifically tailored towards the removal of plaque. It isn't that I was oblivious to the perils of poor dental hygiene so much as that I felt it was already a lost cause. I'd been having nightmares in which my teeth fell out one by one ever since I was a kid. The lore has it that such dreams tend to stem either from the subconscious fear that one may actually be a bit of a munter, or else anxiety regarding the security of one's living arrangements, but my theory is that these dreams were more to do with a fear of my fucking teeth falling out. Accordingly, a diary entry dated to Wednesday the 18th of May, 1988 states:

I've got a very strongly ingrained fear of dentists, but on the scale my fear of dentists has been balanced out by fear of my teeth falling out because the other day I was prodding about and there is a hole in one of them into which you can insert about three millimetres of fingernail and then waggle it about; and when you look at that tooth it looks like it has come out of a packet of Rolos. It's very worrying so I went along and made an appointment, and I have that at 2.30PM tomorrow. It's the first time I've been to a dentist in about five years, so it serves me right I suppose.

Then on Friday the 17th of June I report:

I went to the dentist as I said I would, and it was quite good. In fact I find it difficult to understand what I was so nervous about. I had to go back about four times and like I say there's that tooth which was really rotten - he put a completely new crown on it and it was all right; and this last time that I went he said right, that's your lot, which was good because I thought I would need about six months worth of treatment.

My next visit was in 1990 and I was living in Coventry with my dad. It was two years since the above cluster of appointments, from which I had somehow developed the idea that it will probably be all right might reasonably be adopted as a practical philosophy of dental hygiene. I think this degree of optimism sprang from the fact that he'd said right, that's your lot and that I still had teeth despite that which I had foreseen in my dreams. The Coventry dentist seemed to regard my optimism as premature, warning me, you really need to start looking after your teeth right now. You're going to have serious trouble with them by the time you're fifty if you're not careful. He also told me that I had gum disease, but I'd heard this one before. You have gum disease, without explanation of what it was or how it might be treated, and I was reluctant to ask because when sat in a dentist's chair I usually feel sufficiently well stocked for bad news and am reluctant to seek more. He may as well have said I see that you are wearing shoes for all the difference it made.

After Coventry, I moved to London, failed to make the effort to hook myself up with a new dentist, and then on Friday the 29th of November, 1991 I noted:

I've had a couple of shocks this week. The second was, you know how you probe around your mouth with the tip of your tongue after you've just eaten something? Well I've come across an enormous hole in one of my teeth - big enough to use as an echo chamber. I can only assume it's where a filling has come out because I looked in the mirror and it is a long way back and that tooth already has other fillings in it; and that size of hole, I'm sure I would have noticed before. It can't just have appeared out of nowhere. It looks like a visit to the dentist is in order at some point.

But I wasn't in any pain so I decided a period of adjustment might be okay, a month or so during which I could really dedicate myself towards working up the courage to think about making an appointment. Months inevitably became a year, and then disaster struck. Surprisingly the agony came from a wisdom tooth which had suddenly decided to act the cunt, although the tooth with the echo chamber was still fine - which I felt rather proved my point, whatever it had been. Equally surprising, this was the first time I'd experienced genuine dental pain of the kind which isn't induced by a dental practitioner using either a needle or a drill. Until that moment my understanding of toothache came mostly from the comics I'd read as a kid, Whoopee or Cheeky Weekly in which toothache necessitates a spotted handkerchief tied around one's swollen jaw with a knot the size of a tropical butterfly flapping around on top of your head, with treatment generally involving a door handle and a length of string. The reality of toothache turned out to be at least as agonising as Whoopee and Cheeky Weekly had promised. I dabbed the tooth with oil of cloves, a natural analgesic recommended by Peter Laycock from work, and while it took off the edge, it was obvious that I really did need to get myself to a dentist.

I found one on the Lee High Road, just across from the pub in which Andrew had told me of his own perfect free-range teeth. The dentist asked me whether I was aware of having gum disease, and then out came the needle like an old friend looking very much as I remembered, a huge silver assagai of the kind you would expect to see piercing Kenneth Williams' quivering buttock in a Carry On film.

'Are you numb?,' he asked after a minute or so.

'Not really.'

'Well, if you go and wait in reception, I'll call you back in when you are and we can take a look at that wisdom tooth.'

This was a new, slightly puzzling development, but there didn't seem to be much point in arguing. I shuffled out to the waiting room and sat down. Another patient was called in. Fifteen minutes passed and this second patient came back out, because it was now his turn to wait for the anaesthetic to take full effect.

'If we could have you back now, Mr. Burton...'

I resumed my position in the chair and he poked around. It was still painful. He gave me another injection and told me to return to the waiting room a second time whilst he continued treating the other patient. I suppose if the practice had been able to afford more chairs he could have had a whole line of us, five or six in a row all being worked on simultaneously.

Eventually the anaesthetic kicked in and he was able to yank my errant wisdom tooth using an instrument resembling the sort of pliers with which I might adjust the gears on a bicycle. There was no pain, but it felt as though I was wearing a motorcycle crash helmet and someone was attacking the side of my head with a hammer. Following this he turned his attention to the echo chambered tooth after another spell out in the waiting room as further patients were juggled. He ground the tooth down to a nub, glued a crown in place, and informed me that I had terrible gum disease and should therefore be sore afraid.

My mouth seemed to be back in some sort of working order, and I considered a vow of not bothering to go to see a dentist ever again if I could help it, without actually quite making that vow. An indeterminate count of years later I found myself once again obliged to see a dentist as the crowned molar flared up. I'd moved to East Dulwich and so signed myself on at the Townley Road dental practice, clutching my swollen gob and making muffled noises about how their earliest available appointment would be nice. The dentist to whom I was assigned seemed to take the state of my teeth personally, and may as well have suffixed most of what he told me with you piss-taking fuckface. It transpired that the Lee High Road dentist had done something of a rush job on that back tooth - which didn't come as much of a surprise given the multitasking which had characterised the appointment. The decay had continued beneath my hastily fitted crown and there was some infection involved. This newest practitioner did what he had to do, then asked 'did you know that you have gum disease, you piss-taking fuckface?'

I'm really never going to the dentist ever again, I told myself as I paid up and left, not out of choice, I'm not. I might be hit by a bus whilst crossing the road tomorrow, and then the future state of my gob won't matter one way or the other. Who can say what will happen?

I was back again six months later, same tooth but more agonising than ever. The dentist numbed me up, had a look, and deduced that the nerve within the same naughty molar was now at death's door and had hence begun to make a fuss. This was a detail which the previous dentist - the one who had taken the state of my teeth personally - would have been unable to detect as he capped my molar with the sort of care it should have received first time around.

'We'll need to extract the nerve.'

I didn't even know this was a thing. Unfortunately, once my latest dentist had drilled enough to get at the nerve to perform an extraction, her next action felt like several thousand volts of electricity passed through the tooth, regardless of anaesthetic.

'Oh dear,' she said, 'it seems the nerve is not quite dead.'

She told me she could cover the tooth with a temporary cap then try again in about a month, and at least I wouldn't be in any pain in the mean time. Under other circumstances my response probably would have been fuck off, but for the first time ever my dentist was female and - as I couldn't really fail to notice - gorgeous.

'Yes,' I said, adopting a serious expression to show that I understood, and that I really, really cared about my teeth, and that together, we could crack this thing. So I went back another four or five times at two week intervals, Dr. Patel attempting to extract the nerve on each occasion but having to admit defeat, still finding it was too sensitive. In the end she gave the tooth a semi-permanent cap and suggested I return when I experienced further discomfort. This seemed fair enough. Quite aside from the obvious appeal of my dentist being what might be described as a hottie, she was also a whizz with the anaesthetic. As she worked I had realised with considerable surprise that, aside from that electric jolt of decaying nerve, I'd otherwise felt nothing and that this was a first. There had always been some small degree of pain during the drilling or the chipping away or whatever else they got up to in there. Either anaesthetic practice had come some way since the late eighties, or Dr. Patel was just a better dentist than her predecessors.

Another decade passed, or something like a decade, although  I'm no longer certain quite when this particular divide occurred within the natural history of my teeth. It was almost certainly the frequently capped molar with its seemingly immortal nerve that sent me back, muttering a sheepish apology for having left it so long. The molar was at last dealt with by means of a root canal undertaken by Dr. Shane Curran. I'd initially resisted the notion of seeing a practitioner other than Dr. Patel on the grounds that I could tolerate some discomfort if I fancied the dentist a bit, but being in my forties I had at last begun to grasp that not having shit teeth should be considered sufficient inducement. I began to see the hygienist on a regular basis and agreed to twice yearly check ups from that point on - this more or less coinciding with a significant downward turn in the state of my teeth, even considering that they had never been great at the best of times. The Coventry dentist had warned me, you're going to have serious trouble with them by the time you're fifty if you're not careful, and my dental chickens were coming home to roost.

This was all due to a combination of gum disease, inexpert brushing, and smoking. I still had no idea what gum disease was beyond that I had it, and I was brushing morning and night more or less without fail, but without the sort of technique which would have made a difference. I had the vaguely expressed intention of giving up smoking at some point but found it difficult because life was otherwise just too depressing and miserable. Eventually and inevitably, some of my teeth had begun to feel loose.

Gum disease, as it was finally explained to me, is expressed as the gum receding from the tooth to expose the lower parts of the root which it would ordinarily protect, ultimately resulting in the decay of the bone surrounding which should support the tooth; which was why mine were beginning to rattle.

'What can I do?' I asked, uncomfortably aware of an irony black hole created in the wake of this newest display of concern. There didn't seem to be any single answer, possibly because you're probably fucked has never been considered a helpful expression in the context of medical diagnoses. 'Are you really sure this isn't just moving deck chairs around on the Titanic?' I asked Dr. Patel as she gave me yet another filling. 'I mean if I'm looking at false teeth, maybe it would just be easier to get it over and done with.'

She didn't really have an answer, but she chuckled at the joke about the Titanic which made me feel warm inside.

I was signed on for a course of deep cleaning at King's College Hospital, once a month, six sessions or something like that. The specific problem was that gum disease creates pockets down the side of the tooth wherein bacteria can collect and flourish, gradually destroying both the tooth and the bone in which it is set, and with all of this occurring below the gum line, brushing doesn't make much difference. My dental pockets were measured as being of about 5mm depth on average, but some were deeper and getting worse. The hygienist at King's College Hospital wrote me a prescription for Corsodyl, an antibacterial gel which I was to use in conjunction with interdental brushes referred to as tepes which could be inserted into the gaps between teeth; and I had to floss daily; and to brush properly, angling the bristles down towards the gum line. In addition to this I had an appointment roughly once a month during which the hygienist would manually scrape and chip away the plaque which had calcified around the roots of my teeth. It wasn't a huge amount of fun, but it seemed to be making some difference in that my pockets weren't getting any worse. Some were even beginning to close up and heal, although by now I had a few over one centimetre in depth - the point of no return, so I was told.

In 2009 I left London and returned to Coventry for a spell, living at my mother's house whilst preparing for my move to the States. Unfortunately this meant it became impractical for me to continue treatment at King's College Hospital in London. Simply I couldn't afford the train fare. I reasoned that with America being the land of Osmond brothers and perfect smiles, I would be living there soon enough providing everything worked out. I would worry about my gob once I'd moved because I had other seemingly more pressing concerns for the present; or so it appeared until I lost a filling whilst eating a cheese sandwich. I found a dental surgery in Coventry, but they were unable to continue my course of deep cleaning treatment owing to the convolutions of NHS funding and my no longer having an income, so it became a matter of damage limitation. I kept on with the Corsodyl and the tepes, and the dentist at the Balkrishna clinic pulled a couple of the really rotten ones which now, having lost all support, waggled freely from side to side in the back of my mouth. He never seemed particularly happy to see me, and even pulled one of the worst teeth without charge, having taken pity on me because the extraction had been performed with a simple tug, like removing a pebble from the tread of a bicycle tyre.

'Make sure you are seen as soon as you've moved,' he warned me darkly. 'You no longer have the luxury of sitting around and thinking about it for a while.'

I moved to America.

Prior to our marriage, I had warned my wife about my traditional English teeth and how they would almost certainly require work at some point, and that the work would doubtless be quite expensive; but having moved to the States, I was reluctant to bring the subject up again because I was fairly certain that the work would comprise someone pulling the lot and then measuring me for a pair of dentures. I presumed it had always been on the cards, yet despite everything I was still in part banking on my teeth eventually returning to full health of their own accord. I didn't want to commit myself to the idea that they definitely wouldn't return to full health of their own accord, and I was therefore naturally cautious of making any hasty decisions. I had given up smoking, and I knew at least some of my trouble had stemmed from the necrosis of the gums caused by tobacco smoke. My gums would probably grow back, and my teeth would begin to feel firm once more, I decided.

Typically, within a week of my arriving in America another filling popped out as I chewed on a soft, slightly crappy McDonald's cookie. Oh for fuck's sake, I thought.

I visited a dentist in Alamo Heights. He took an x-ray, then shrugged and delivered a verdict along the lines of how he wouldn't even know where to begin, and that the tooth from which I'd just lost a filling was probably a write off so there wasn't much point in him fixing it; for which he charged me eighty dollars.

Months passed, and then a year, and a second dentist told me the same as the first regarding the lost filling, specifically that he couldn't really commit to the idea that the tooth was worth saving in the first place. He proposed giving me a bridge - pulling a couple of teeth and attaching a sort of armature to those left standing, along which would be arranged a couple of false ones. He also recommended I seek a second opinion from one Dr. Stalker, apparently something of a whizz in this particular field. 'If anyone can help you, it's Stalker,' he told me, a slightly faraway look in his eyes as though he were referring to the last of the fabled Jedi Knights.

The proposed bridge sounded complicated and unpleasant, but my wife had been left sceptical of Dr. Stalker having been treated by him on a previous occasion. Nevertheless, a second opinion couldn't hurt and so I went to see Dr. Yarbrough who, rather conveniently, practiced just a block away from where my wife and myself were living. Dr. Yarbrough's second opinion was pretty much the same as the first had been, right down to the invocation of the mighty Dr. Stalker. He could deal with the lost filling, but it wasn't really even worth considering until Dr. Stalker had taken a look.

'Well, what do I know?' my wife sighed. 'They all seem to think he's the best. Maybe I was just unlucky.'

Dr. Stalker proved an amiable and knowledgeable practitioner, one of those people who immediately puts his patients at ease, or at least he put me at ease.

'Give it to me straight, doc,' I said, if not in those exact words, 'have you seen anyone with teeth worse than mine?'

'Well, they're not great,' he chuckled, not unkindly, 'but we're not without options.'

He took x-rays, prodded around for a while and then made his proposal. It wasn't going to be cheap, but it seemed worth a try. My wife's medical insurance covered some of the expense, and we borrowed the rest; and so Dr. Stalker went to work. I was unconscious under general anaesthetic for three hours as he pulled those teeth which were beyond repair, then opened up my gums and scraped the rest of the decaying matter from out of the bone support. Then he introduced some newly developed concoction utilising my own blood plasma which would, so he hoped, stimulate fresh bone growth around the roots of my remaining teeth, giving them greater stability; and then he sewed me back up.

I had a mouth full of stitches for a couple of weeks, and I was on a diet of pain killers and soup for about the same length of time, but when the stitches came out, Dr. Stalker seemed optimistic.

'It's looking good so far,' he told me, 'but I guess we'll know for sure in a couple of months. In the meantime you should get that rear molar capped.'

I returned to Dr. Yarbrough's office and was seen by a young Polish dentist. Without quite being able to say why, I found her abrasive, far from the reassuring presence which had been presented by Dr. Stalker, or even Dr. Yarbrough himself on my previous visit. She prodded and poked, drilled and filled some minor cavities I hadn't known about. She told me she had once been to London but couldn't remember much about it - which I presumed was her equivalent of bedside manner. Unfortunately any charm generated was quickly dispelled by her habit of discussing me and my terrible teeth with the dental assistant as though I were either deaf, stupid, or absent.

'Has Dr. Stalker treated him yet?' the assistant asked.

'No, I don't think he has.' The Polish women scowled into my mouth, apparently finding no evidence of several thousand dollars worth of surgery followed by a couple of weeks spent in serious pain.

She spoke directly to me. 'You have terrible gum disease, you know. It really is quite bad.'

'Still?'

'Yes.'

'I thought the surgery was supposed to deal with that.'

'You have already had the surgery with Dr. Stalker?'

'Yes I have, and apparently it hasn't made the slightest bit of difference.' I was almost in tears.

'You are going to have implants?'

This had been an earlier proposal, but a vague one depending on the success of Dr. Stalker's work. The gaps between my teeth left by those pulled might be filled with implants which could be screwed directly into the bone of my jaw, depending on how much bone was there. It sounded painful and expensive, and not entirely necessary given that I was getting on fine with the teeth I had left.

'No. I'm not going to have implants.'

The dentist returned to her conversation with the dental assistant, again discussing me as though I had left the room. 'Make a note, would you? When he comes back for his implants we shall—'

'I'm right here, you know.' This was too much. 'I can actually hear what you're saying; and I'm not having implants as I'm pretty sure I just said.'

She made some noise along the lines of well, just think about it, and then you can decide a bit later, and then ground my rear upper molar down to a nub and glued a temporary crown in place. This was the tooth from which Ronald McDonald had robbed me of a filling now over a year before.

'This is a temporary crown?'

'Yes,' she said. 'We need to order the permanent replacement, and then you will come back in again.' She showed me a catalogue offering a choice of different types of crown. I didn't have a fucking clue what I was looking at or why what seemed to me like a single job should require multiple appointments, and so got my wife on the phone and had her speak to the woman. After further discussion the dentist ordered the most expensive replacement crown, it being the best option, from what any of us could tell. I would need to return in another couple of weeks in order to have it fitted.

'Can you come with me?' I asked my wife. 'That dentist makes me nervous.'

Bess assumed I was probably freaking out over nothing, but nevertheless agreed to accompany me. The dentist fitted my new crown and we left.

'You were right.' Bess told me. 'I don't know what it was, but I didn't like her at all.'

A month or so later I returned to Dr. Stalker's office for the first of my regular deep cleaning appointments. The surgery had not been a success, I knew, so I was dreading it.

Dr. Stalker had a look around in my mouth and seemed quite pleased. I related what had happened at Dr. Yarbrough's office, and he responded with a slight frown. 'Trust me,' he said. 'It's early days, but there's already significant improvement here.' He didn't actually say, the woman doesn't know what she's talking about, of the dentist who had failed to recognise several thousand dollars worth of surgery, but I'd begun to suspect as much. I told him how keen she had been to sign me up for implants I didn't want, and he sighed. The impression I got was that things had been much better when Dr. Yarbrough himself had been running his own practice.

I've been back to Dr. Stalker's office every three or four months since, and on each occasion the cleaning has been less and less laborious as what teeth I have left have begun to recover from four decades of abuse. I have ten teeth less than most people, but the gaps are all at the rear of my mouth and I have no difficulty eating or chewing. I have a gap on each side of my upper jaw, same place each side, so where there were once three molars in a row behind each upper canine, there are now two with a space between them leaving those at the rear isolated, each stood alone at the back like the rock tower in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, or the stumpy tusks of some weird Paleocene herbivore; it felt weird at first, but it's really no big deal.

My most recent appointment was distinguished by the announcement that the pockets which once ran so deep into my gum line are now entirely gone, fully healed despite my having once been told that I was stuck with those over a centimetre in depth. Dr. Stalker's verdict is that I will almost certainly be keeping those teeth I have left because my mouth is in good shape with no sign of gum disease for what is probably the first time in my life. Bess has concluded that her own initial scepticism regarding Dr. Stalker most likely came from frustration. He'd been unable to treat a fragment of shattered bone that had come loose in her jaw and had suggested that her only option was to grin and bear it, not through professional indifference so much as simple honesty. The fragment would work its way out and it would heal, but in the meantime there was nothing he could do. With hindsight she has concluded that this was at least preferable to snake oil, or to the practitioner who sees the patient only as a fountain of revenue.

On this latter note, the hygienist at Dr. Stalker's office recently noticed the beginnings of a cavity in one of the borderline teeth, one of those which almost got pulled but was left in the hope of it being worth saving. I was recommended to the excellent Dr. Woodbridge as a dentist who dedicates himself to the work which needs doing rather than what he can justify. Dr. Woodbridge filled the cavity and then asked about whether I'd intended to have implants. I said no, told him why, and asked what had prompted the question. He told me that my most recently and expensively capped molar had been fitted with a crown of a kind quite specifically tailored to accommodate neighbouring implants.

I suppose I might be justified in feeling slightly angry about some of this, as I was when I submitted an unfavourable account of my treatment at Dr. Yarbrough's clinic describing some of the above to Yelp, a website by which members of the general public share their experiences of medical centres, dental clinics, hospitals, restaurants, garages or anywhere else you might hope to avoid getting fucked over for the sake of a dollar. Curiously my review has been removed from the supposedly impartial site, leaving just the one which gushes with praise; but it no longer bothers me given that I no longer have to worry about my teeth falling out, or rotting into stumps, or the lottery involved in seeking further treatment should it be necessary. Given that I've spent my entire adult life having nightmares about the state of my teeth, I'm still not sure I've even quite taken any of this in.

Of course it also means that I am essentially the English male equivalent of a Thai bride as purchased from a catalogue; and that I no longer have quite such traditionally English teeth because Bess had me all fixed up just as soon as I came out of the packing crate, but I think I can live with that.

World of Sport

We were in a pub having a drink, very probably watching some band when three young men approached our table - two white guys and a skinny Asian with a leather jacket and long hair. They wanted a quick word with my drinking companion, Popeye the Sailor Man. They were forming a band and wanted to know whether he would sing for them. I kept a diary going for most of 1985 and yet can find no reference to this encounter, although I've a hunch it may have been Saturday the 23rd of March, upon which I noted:

Today I went to Rochester flea market with Popeye the Sailor Man and Olive Oyl. I found out that I am not so overdrawn at the bank as I thought, and by quite a margin in fact. That cheered me up. We visited all sorts of shops and places. I like Olive Oyl. She is a nice person, childlike without being childish. I also met Rosa who was also nice. She is a professional fashion designer who has been in i-D magazine and Look Now! I watched Doctor Who, which was ace, and went to the Good Intent to see the Product who were excellent. Some flat-top beer wallies were slam dancing at the front, although surprisingly there was no violence. Popeye the Sailor Man did an hilarious impersonation of the really fat one. Olive Oyl also came to the pub a bit later. I love Chatham. It is such an interesting and diverse place with nice people and no arty types.

Obviously this wasn't really Popeye the Sailor Man. The individual concerned was hypothetically my best friend from our course at Maidstone College of Art. He lived in Chatham, and I laughed at all of his jokes and regarded him as a musical genius. We had little contact with each other once our course came to an end in 1987, but just enough to have subsequently fallen out for stupid reasons, specifically either because I posted unkind remarks about his favourite television programme on facebook, or because I think I'm cool but I'm really not, or because I've failed to remain exactly the same as I was thirty years ago. People change and these things happen, and these days he may as well be Popeye the Sailor Man so far as I'm concerned.

To get back to the point, I was there when Andy, Rajun, and Alun asked Popeye the Sailor Man to sing for their band. The band was called Apricot Brigade and was, I suppose, something in the general direction of contemporary psychedelia - nothing so obvious as a revival but approximately post-punk with occasional nods to the Doors or the less ponderous regions of Pink Floyd's oeuvre. By way of contrast, Popeye the Sailor Man was himself of a more traditionally gothic sensibility, tending towards tortured songs of self-loathing, regret, and that feeling you get when you've drunk the last of the rum with two days to go before you hit port. Oddly, the four of them all seemed to match each other quite well, and Apricot Brigade became regulars on the Medway live circuit, even attracting something of a following.

Then at some point which I've failed to record in my diary, presumably during either the spring or early summer of 1986 - I was asked to join the band. I was already in a band - Total Big, with my friends Carl and Chris - but whilst it was a lot of fun, Total Big hadn't quite been the sort of band of which I had ever envisioned myself as a member. It was loose and conspicuously lacking in Joy Division style bass lines, and I'd always aspired to something a little more self-important and po-faced. I didn't really see why I shouldn't be in more than one band at the same time - although I later learned this to have been the cause of some frowning for Carl and Chris; and besides, Popeye the Sailor Man and myself had played together with some frequency in the course of our respective solitary musical dabblings at college, and so it didn't seem like my joining his group would be such a wild leap.

Alun Jones - Apricot Brigade's drummer - had gone into the studio with the Dentists - a more conspicuously popular Medway band - and contributed to the recording of their Down and Out in Paris and Chatham EP around Easter 1986. This had inspired some debate over Alun's loyalties particularly as the Dentists had recently lost their previous drummer, Ian Greensmith. It was probably also significant that Alun and Popeye the Sailor Man didn't appear to get along particularly well, which with hindsight I would attribute to Alun having been a fairly good judge of character, possibly excepting his friendship with Bluto. Amongst the solo recordings made by Popeye the Sailor Man in the sound studio at Maidstone College of Art is a track called The World of Alun, apparently named in a general spirit of sneering at that which he considered saaaaaad in some respect, the world of Alun presumably being a modest realm characterised by jumpers your mum knitted for you, quite unlike Popeye the Sailor Man's important cosmopolitan multiverse of existential contemplation and tortured poetry. I chose not to notice it at the time, but Popeye the Sailor Man seemed stricken by a pathological need to define himself by means of his enemies, possibly adapting to the fact that he made enemies fairly easily. This was effected mainly through drinking to excess in combination with shagging whoever seemed available, activities which tended to generate self-loathing on his part and open hostility in others.

Popeye the Sailor Man inevitably regarded Alun's jumping ship as a betrayal on the scale of that which it might have been had their initial encounter been characterised by some sort of oath drawn in blood; but on the other hand it also meant that Alun graduated to a better band, one which released records, and that I was presented with a new opportunity for scowling meaningfully before a paying audience in the hope of some of them consenting to sexual intercourse with me.

Of course the most obvious objection to my replacing Alun as drummer was that I had no drum kit and no experience of playing one. I expect this may have initially made me something of a tough sale so far as Rajun and Andy were concerned given that they had no reason to view me as anything other than the scruffy bloke who always turned up at the pub with Popeye the Sailor Man and laughed at all his jokes. I was to operate a drum machine, play keyboard, and help take the band in a new direction. I had the feeling this new direction was driven mainly by Popeye the Sailor Man, but I could be wrong.

Uncle Fester - as Andy insisted we would now be called - had its first rehearsal at his dad's house in Chatham on Saturday the 14th of June, 1986. We worked our way through five or six Apricot Brigade songs, shifting them around a little so as to accommodate my presence. Rajun provided me with a Roland TR606 drum machine and Roland RS09 polyphonic keyboard, in addition to which I played manual electronic percussion on an MPC Industries Kit and Clap. I also had a small four channel mixer and a couple of Roland pedals to beef up the otherwise unimpressive rhythms I was either playing or programming. Andy provided an ironing board upon which I could set up all of this equipment; and if I wasn't playing two fingered organ melodies or tapping the pads, I was out front drumming away on whatever bits of metal were to hand. This was because it was 1986, and we weren't going to be left out of the loop in terms of what Nigel Ayers describes as fashionable metal percussion in the sleeve notes of Nocturnal Emissions' Drowning in a Sea of Bliss album.

So the line-up of World of Sport - as was Andy's next suggestion for a name, and the one we really should have stuck with - was Popeye the Sailor Man on rhythm guitar and vocals, Andy playing bass, Rajun playing lead, and myself doing something else depending on the song. I was in essence a musician without portfolio - possibly excepting the musician element - and this was probably what doomed me to failure, namely that I wasn't really required to do any one specific thing, and it was sometimes hard to tell quite what was expected of me; and given that I wasn't quite sure what I was doing, I tended to take a back seat.

Nevertheless, it was initially fun, not least being in a band which sounded more like the sort of thing I would listen to at home, and less like the sort of thing which traditionally would have had me as a member. To point out that the songs were self-involved and lacking in humour is at least as much of a dead end as suggesting that the Barron Knights lacked gravitas; and Rajun was a great guitarist, and Popeye the Sailor Man had a great voice. It sounded at least as dark and serious as the Sisters of Mercy, without necessarily resembling them; and it was fun in a social sense as well.

I would cycle the eight or so miles to Chatham every Friday evening, stay the night at Andy's place, and then we'd have a rehearsal on the Saturday depending on the state of the hangover incurred by Popeye the Sailor Man. Andy's dad never seemed to be around, and I don't even recall if I actually ever met the man. I believe Andy's mother had left some years before, so it was usually just the two of us. It was odd and a little awkward - although not to the point of being unpleasant - because I didn't really know Andy well enough to be staying at his house with such regularity but he was the only one with a spare bed. His house was spotless, almost a show home, large and suburban middle class of the kind associated with sitcoms in which Terry Scott shits himself because his Rabelasian boss is coming over for tea on the evening of June Whitfield having scheduled a visit from their unusually prudish vicar. I felt vaguely guilty simply walking through the front door, as though I might abruptly find myself sans trousers and about to deposit a turd dead centre of the pristine living room carpet before I knew what was happening. Additionally, while Andy was generally both amiable and very, very funny, he tended towards the sort of quiet reserve which leaves you wondering what he's thinking, even when he may not be thinking anything, which did nothing to allay the fear that I might be imposing upon his hospitality.

On one occasion I stayed at Rajun's house for some reason, although it was less practical, Rajun's house also being occupied by his parents and his brother, Prez. I'd met Prez a few times and got on well with him, and vaguely knew their parents from the Blue Lagoon, the combined burger bar and music venue they ran in the high street. I didn't know them so well as to strike a casual attitude when crossing the landing in the middle of the night in need of a pee only to encounter Rajun's dad stood glowering in the dark in just his pants.

'Hello, Mr. Amin,' I squeaked pitifully. 'Just needing the er...'

Mr. Amin glowered and said nothing.

Maybe he was sleepwalking.

Anyway, ambiguous silences and nudist fathers notwithstanding,  I got to know Andy and Rajun reasonably well and grew to enjoy their company. Peculiarly I even got to know Alun whom I had replaced, and found him considerably more personable than Popeye the Sailor Man, which was strange and unexpected. Despite Popeye the Sailor Man being the one member of the band whom I'd known for longer than five minutes, I never stayed at his place, if he even had a place at the time. Let's just assume that Olive Oyl probably didn't want strangers trudging through the house waking Swee'Pea.

At some point or other, we settled on Envy as the new name. Inspired by one of Andy's more surreal monologues, I'd come up with a logo for World of Sport - a candle burning gothically atop a football, but Envy sounded a bit like Greed, which was an album by the Swans, so that was it. As well as a name, we had our first gig - Friday the 8th of August, 1986 at Pickwicks in Rochester High Street. We were support to a band called Robert Underwater, and according to my notebook of the time our set comprised Pale Orchid, Cut So Deep, an untitled instrumental, Cat & Mouse, We Will Fall during which Andy had some trouble with his bass, Twenty-One Years, I Yam What I Yam*, No Sound, Goodnight, and Howling Moon. I don't remember anything about it because it was thirty years ago and I was almost certainly drunk, although I have a feeling Robert Underwater all wore sunglasses despite it being night time.

Our next date was Friday the 29th of August, 1986 at Churchills in Chatham as support to the Strookas and Swinging Time. Our set comprised the still untitled instrumental, No Sound, Carmilla, Goodnight, We Will Fall, Twenty-One Years, I'm Strong to the Finish 'Cause I Eats Me Spinach*, Cut So Deep, Pale Orchid, and Cat & Mouse. I have dim memories of this performance being better than the previous gig, but that I felt vaguely ridiculous in my role, essentially an imposter. The other three were producing music. I was pressing buttons or hunkering down on the floor to hit an empty petrol can with a tack hammer; and I wasn't the only one having doubts. In my sketchbook, a note dated to Saturday the 30th of August, 1986 reports:

Andy has just said he's left the band. He may have changed his mind by the morning, although I doubt that he will. I'm sad, and I hope that he does change his mind, but I can fully understand his decision. It's all gone bad - very bad. We argue constantly, and so far as I'm concerned a drum machine should provide fast bone crushing rhythms that kicks the audience in the teeth rather than something which could quite easily be replaced by a metronome. Also I'm sick and tired of having to apologise to Popeye the Sailor Man for pissing him off by finding myself sick and tired of his shit.

Andy changed his mind, and we played another gig at Churchills in Chatham as support to the Herbs and the Martini Slutz on Wednesday the 3rd of September, 1986, possibly not representing a significant improvement because in my sketchbook on the following Tuesday I note:

I am in a band of which I don't really know if I want to be a member. It isn't fun any more, and that should surely be the most important part of it. It isn't even as though I add anything to the equation.

Murmurs about the worth of my contribution accordingly began to emerge, mostly voiced by Popeye the Sailor Man, and unfortunately lacking any concrete suggestion of what was actually expected of me beyond some nebulous definition of loyalty dependent upon my understanding of how lucky I was to be in the group, and how many strings he had pulled to bring this about. I'd seen him pull this same sort of passive-aggressive shit before, and was at last beginning to recognise it for what it was - just Popeye the Sailor Man playing divide and rule.

So I contributed a song, not a very good song, but a song nonetheless. It was called Said I Was A Reptile and it sounded like Portion Control impersonating the Cure. We rehearsed it once at the Blue Lagoon, in the basement which also served as bar and music venue. It felt like a waste of everyone's time.

The next diary-equivalent note to appear in my sketchbook, and the last to refer to the group, dates to Wednesday the 17th of September, 1986 and reads thus:

Today was my twenty-first birthday. Andy gave me a small baseball bat so I can hit things during gigs. Envy played at Churchills in Chatham with the Sceptres. Our set comprised the instrumental, No Sound, We Will Fall, Twenty-One Years, Cut So Deep, Pale Orchid, Carmilla, Sailor's Hornpipe*, Goodnight, and Cat & Mouse.

I'd found some more old oil cans on a bit of waste ground, the kind which would have held three or four gallons, and I pounded these with the baseball bat during whichever song it was we had decided would benefit from inept metal bashing. It was probably a novelty in terms of Churchills, but doubtless looked absurd to anyone who'd ever been to see Test Department. Another couple of rehearsals slid past, possibly even a gig I failed to note in my sketchbook, and the moment inevitably came.

We need to have a talk.

It had been a decent Saturday afternoon on Rochester High Street, possibly following some sort of Dickens related public festival - more or less a weekly occurence in that part of the Medway towns - and I was as usual lightly but pleasantly drunk. We all went to sit upon the grass opposite what is now the Tara Baker Hair Studio, and may have been the Tara Baker Hair Studio even then for all I can remember. I had assumed we were just going to talk about stuff, but immediately realised it was a sacking.

'It's not working,' said Popeye the Sailor Man, making it clear that this wasn't something to be negotiated.

'But but but,' I countered ineffectively.

Andy stepped in with unexpected anger, pointing out just how many weeks I'd had in which to scour local rubbish dumps for the sort of scrap by which I would transform Envy into a sort of Kentish Einsturzende Neubauten, and how I hadn't actually done this. In fact it was difficult to say what I actually had brought to the group, and obviously he made a good point.

I had no defence, and although I'd become accustomed to the passive-aggressive observations of Popeye the Sailor Man, these harsh words from Andy came as a complete surprise and a shock. I don't think I'd even seen him angry before that moment. Weirdly, I started crying, which probably didn't help my case. I felt ashamed because I'd really wanted it to work, but I knew it had been a waste of time all along. Possibly the others had also known this, but it had still seemed like it was worth a try.

They carried on without me, acquiring a proper drummer, and continuing for as long as any of the respective members could stand to be in the same room as Popeye the Sailor Man, each eventually and inevitably making it onto his enemies list for one reason or another. I have seen both Rajun and Andy since, and it was great to see them again, and to be able to have a decent conversation without giving a shit about that stupid band we'd been in. I resumed full-time pissing about in Total Big, appreciating it all the more having briefly gone through the misery of being in a serious band performing songs about what is to be seen as one gazes stony faced into the blackness of the human soul vowing that never again shall those shallow fools laugh at thine tortured musings as scribbled in diseased hand upon the cursed parchment of eternity...

You live and learn.

*: Not really.

Bob the Raspberry

It is Friday night, a cold and miserable December in 1984. We're all crammed into the unheated cottage of uneven floorboards for warmth, music, and the downing of enough cheap booze to fool ourselves into believing we're having the sort of wild time you're supposed to have when you're nineteen. Bob is leaning forward, speaking in confidence but unable to quite pull it off because he never really got to grips with discretion and is in any case already too drunk.

'That one with the red hair,' he says. 'I could really do something for her.' He probably means Amanda, who could almost be Mary Poppins but for the short cropped hair dyed bright crimson.

'Oh yes?' prompts Alison, amused but uncomfortably aware of the direction in which the conversation is heading.

'Yeah - and I could do something for you and all. Do you want to come to bed with me?'

She laughs, but it's very awkward. 'Erm... no.'

Bob looks up to me. It's difficult to tell whether he's glaring, or if that's just how his eyes are. 'If he wasn't here I could say more,' he growls. 'Is he your boyfriend?'

'No. He's a friend.'

Phew. Bob sighs his relief, a theatrical noise which almost makes light of the uncomfortable situation. 'I didn't think your taste in men was that bad.'

I barely know Bob. He isn't a student, but someone from the village, a regular at the White Horse which is our local pub. He's probably in his early thirties, conspicuously single, and Hollytree House - in which Alison is presently living and which serves as the venue of the party - has been traditionally populated by young female students, some of whom are - as Bob has quite clearly noticed - a bit on the tasty side. You can't really blame him for trying.

It's awkward because I've been following Alison around like a lost puppy all evening, hoping for some opening - conversational rather than gynaecological on the grounds that in an ideal world one will lead directly to the other. If I can just talk to her without interruption, if I can just get some time in which to reveal my sensitive side, if I can just...

Except I already know on some level that any effort I make in any romantic direction will be inept and intrinsically comical and is hence doomed even before I've broached the subject of my record collection. I'm wasting my time, just hanging around like this, but I can't help myself; and in some sense this situation serves me right.

Somebody told me that Bob suffered from polio as a child. This is why he alternates between crutches and a wheelchair. He has the legs of a ten-year old boy. He is like a weird human ball, a balloon with two useless strings dangling beneath, and he delights in how uncomfortable this makes the rest of us with our Ben Elton™ brand student politics, and our reluctance to say anything which might somehow make us look like arseholes and in turn reduce our chances of getting laid - pointing out that Bob is actually a disagreeable tosser, for one obvious example.

'What's the hardest part of the vegetable to digest?' he asks, savouring the horror on our faces because we've all heard the joke before, but in exclusively able-bodied company.

No-one says a word.

'The wheelchair!'

We laugh, but we're all trying to work out whether this is the empowerment of the differently abled through the deconstruction of offensive stereotyping, or just some poor fucking cripple jumping through hoops for attention, helping out with his own exploitation. It's okay to use the word cripple because that's how Bob describes himself. Well, okay - he doesn't, not exactly...

A year or so later, we are now sort of friends, or at least drinking buddies. Bob wheels back from the bar of the White Horse carrying one pint at a time, apologising for the delay which is due to his being a raspberry.

'You're a raspberry?'

'Raspberry ripple.' He looks at me like I'm stupid. 'I'm a fucking cripple, ain't I? I thort all you students were supposed to be intelligent.'

This is also what I once believed, but I've been taking my degree at Maidstone College of Art for almost three years, and I'm beginning to wonder. To be fair, it's not that my colleagues lack intelligence by any means, but somehow I have failed to really connect with them. I don't understand them or what motivates them, and sometimes the bewilderment seems mutual. I've been living in the village of Otham for nearly two years, and by this point have made friends with some of the locals in the pub, people my own age or a little older with no connection to either the art college or any related or conspicuously Bohemian demographic. I find their company refreshing and direct. One advantage of living in a house in which I am the only male is, I suppose, that I serve as an ambassador for those locals eager to make an impression on my housemates. They find it is easy to talk to me without giving the game away regarding any ulterior, more blatantly testicular interest in the other residents of Hollytree House; although some of the regulars are clearly less bothered about subtlety.

Dez is one such individual. When my housemates are around he wheels out clichés like the one about how they could both make beautiful music together, or he asks what a nice girl such as herself might be doing in a place like the White Horse without any trace of irony. He resembles Dickie Davies, presenter of World of Sport, and he seems to be drunk and happy most of the time. Communication is rendered almost impossible by his inability to focus on any one subject for longer than a minute, and most of the time he is lost in a quiet, happy world of his own.

'How's it going, Dez?'

He chuckles, smiles and begins to sing. 'People are strange, when you're a stranger...'

'That's the Doors, yeah?'

'Faces come out of the rain,' and more grinning, more laughter as he sinks into his seat swaying gently from side to side. He was a child of the sixties, so he once told us, although no obvious vestige of his supposed former hippiedom remains beyond the playlist of his internal jukebox. Apparently he's married, but we've never seen his wife in the pub. The quality of their relationship is probably quantified by how much time he spends here, and how none of us have ever seen him sober. Maybe she just doesn't like the Doors, which I can understand. I don't like them either.

On the other hand, I have myself come to feel something of a stranger over recent months by terms which both Dez and Jim Morrison would possibly recognise, because it's 1987 and this is the end of the road I've been on more or less since I started school. I am about to find myself squozen from the metaphorical nozzle of the education system, deposited as an incoherent and unemployable dollop upon the cold, grey cake of reality. I have no idea what I am going to do or how I am going to move forward. I have no discernible skills for which anyone in their right mind would pay me a wage. I've spent three years taking a degree course, studying film and video in a fine art context, and from this study I have learned that I have neither aptitude for nor interest in either film, video, or fine art. Up until this point it has been easy enough to coast along, picking up the grant cheques, paying the artificially reduced rent, and hoping something will come along before I'm in the position of having to worry about it; but the free ride is over. I have my useless degree, and I've spent the summer at Hollytree House, hanging on for as long as I can before the arrival of fresh students obliges me to find somewhere more expensive under my own steam. Most of the people I know have gone home to parents for the summer, so it has been just myself and the locals from the White Horse, more or less. Peculiarly, I am now one of them because I am no longer a student, just another hairy no-hoper drinking and smoking to kill time between dole cheques.

Okay - it's not so bad as all that, because I have at least learned that I am capable of making friends with regular people, people who couldn't give a shit about the films of Tarkovsky, people who don't engage themselves with projects, who don't have a show coming up in a small privately run gallery on the Upper Fant Road. Mostly we talk about music, or life and how generally shit it can be, or anything that's funny; and we drink because it provides a sense of continuity in a world of uncertainties.

Dave was the first of the locals to talk to any of the students, possibly being a little younger than most of his colleagues - closer to our age - and less inclined to join in with the ribaldry of fuckin' student scrounger arty wankers dyed hair pouff smoking that marrer-banana are you a boy or a girl, mate? Dave is well-dressed and looks sharp, like he might play the congas for Modern Romance. I think he works at Topman, but he's very funny and he likes New Model Army so he can't be all bad. Sometimes he brings someone over to our table and has me recite the lyrics to Vengeance because I know them off by heart. This is part of a campaign in which he hopes to convert others to the cause of New Model Army, so dutifully I oblige.

Escaped the net in '45, hiding out in South America,
Protected by money and powerful friends,
Hoping the world has forgotten by now,
All the things that you did in the Nazi Death camps,
The people that you tortured and killed.
You can live your life in expectant fear,
Sure some day you'll be made to pay.

I believe in justice
I believe in vengeance
I believe in getting the bastard, getting the bastard, getting the bastard...

I gulp my lager, face red from having been put on the spot whilst nevertheless enjoying the attention. Mark sits, but seems unimpressed. This is Dave's friend, a biker with the leathers and the thin spiv 'tache across a face otherwise reminding me of Bill Beaumont, captain of the England rugby team.

'Don't you think that's great?' Dave asks, incredulous.

'Not especially.'

Anyway, we talk, and weirdly we become friends over the next few evenings. Mark is intrigued by the fact that I've taken up cartooning, mainly for my own amusement. He mentions Ogri as drawn by Paul Sample in the back of Bike magazine. I remember Ogri well from reading it when my dad was a subscriber, and suddenly we have things in common.

Mark loves bikes and spends his spare time taking them apart then putting them back together again. He seems to have become something of a local authority in his field, and has a gang of little followers from around the Senacre Wood estate on the edge of Maidstone - impressionable school leavers with bum fluff moustaches who burn around the country lanes on their tinny little fizzies - a fizzy being a 50cc motorcycle of the kind you ride if you're not yet old enough to legally ride a more powerful machine. I confess to Mark that I always hated those little twerps, and so he regales me with hilarious accounts of the feckless ineptitude of his little band of acolytes. He too finds them somewhat comical. This is all conversationally alien territory for me, and not the sort of thing about which I would ordinarily give a shit, but Mark is witty and a nice bloke, and he spins a fine yarn.

We almost have a little gang now, myself, Dave and Mark, then those on the periphery such as Dez, Bob the Raspberry, and AJ.

It's difficult to figure out AJ, the bearded man-child with the squeaky voice. He seems kind of simple, but slips into nasty comments with worrying ease. Bob has become similarly difficult. His humour is a means of dealing with his disability, and because he finds it funny to make people feel uncomfortable, but sometimes he just takes the piss and needs to be reminded that we're not all the enemy. My friend Paul Mercer comes over for a drink one evening and we sit in the pub trying to come up with names for our band. Alun Jones has left Apricot Brigade and I have joined as replacement, but whereas Alun played drums, I'm operating a drum machine and playing a Roland SH09 keyboard. It will, we suppose, be very different to Apricot Brigade, so we need to come up with a new name. Our ideas are dreadful, and Bob wheels himself up to our table to suggest Artific - a variation on the word terrific which includes art because both Paul and myself were at art college. It's a terrible suggestion, but it makes a pleasant change to find Bob in jovial frame of mind, as opposed to roaring drunk and hell bent on offending as many people as possible. Sadly it doesn't seem to last and he becomes an increasingly distant figure as September approaches.

'Ain't choo bought no girls wiv you?'

'Not today, Bob.'

'Fat lot of fucking good you turned out.'

Months pass, creeping in terrifying fashion towards the date at which I must make a decision about what I am to do with my life and secure alternate accommodation before I'm physically turfed out. I'm trying not to think about it too much, but at least I can commiserate with the guys at the pub.

It's got to the stage where now, as I return from Maidstone on the bus, sometimes I'll stop off at Mark's house in Senacre Wood to see what he's up to. Usually he'll be out front, underneath his bike fiddling away. His place is easy to find because he's painted a six foot tall bottle of Newcastle Brown Ale on the door of his garage, and made quite a good job of it. I stand around in my long, long coat - acquired from Oxfam and traditionally beloved of Joy Division fans in the early 1980s - and we talk as Mark continues to piss about with carburettors and the like.

'That's the problem with working on one's machine,' he announces, getting up and reaching into a pocket. 'I keep forgetting to smoke.'

So we have a fag and talk some more.

My cartooning has achieved focus in the form of an ongoing strip which I have a vague plan of publishing as a series of fanzines. It's the story of the band I'm in - the Dovers - although most of it is either heavily embellished or completely made up, and I'm improvising as I go along with no clear idea of where it's going. The story entails Chris, our drummer, being reborn as an all-powerful force of evil named Dark Chris, and the manager of our band is former president Richard Nixon who now lives in a flat in Lewisham. Mark himself has entered the story as idol and leader of a bike gang comprising slightly clueless juveniles. He seems to appreciate my inclusion of the cartoon version of himself.

One evening he drops in on me at Hollytree House in order to inspect the progress of his latest adventures as a cartoon character, the scribblings as he calls them. Unexpectedly he has bought a notebook of his own poetry with him. I had no idea he had any creative instinct, but I guess he had no really good reason to mention it before, and probably hasn't had much encouragement. He reads some out, and I record in my diary that I am surprised and impressed, which I state as someone who generally isn't well disposed towards poetry as a medium. Mark is a dark horse, testament to my realisation that there's really no such thing as just some ordinary bloke. As I have long suspected, the dividing line between the wildly creative visionaries of art college and all those sofa-based product-sponge consumers out there on the other side is something we have invented in order to make ourselves feel special. This is the first thing to make me feel good about the prospect of life beyond the art college safety net.

Eventually, following a series of bus journeys back and forth between Otham and Maidstone, and Maidstone and Chatham, I have a new place to live in the Medway towns, specifically Glencoe Road. It's a bedsit - one large bedroom with a sink and a cooker in the corner - and is basically crappy, but it seems like a step in the right direction.

Bob lives with his mother opposite the White Horse. I've never called on him before, although sometimes I've met him at the gate and we've both gone across the road to get drunk. He's been off-ish of late, but I'm moving out of the village and that seems a big enough development to justify my calling on him. One last drink and then I'm off.

'What jew fuckin' want?' he jokes.

I explain.

'Well have a nice life,' and he closes the door, and I realise he wasn't joking. I suppose it wasn't completely unexpected.

I have a final pint in the White Horse, alone, and that's the end.

Gruts

Signing on for a three year fine art degree at Maidstone College of Art back in September 1984 was a big move for me. I'd just turned nineteen and probably had not previously been away from home for longer than a couple of days. I was loosely familiar with beer and the genitalia of one specific member of the opposite sex, but I was otherwise generally naive; and now I was living in Kent amongst complete strangers. Home was Warwickshire, which may as well have been on Mars, or so it seemed at the time.

Whilst I was doing my best to remain open-minded to new experiences, I had developed a general scepticism regarding poetry as something which really wasn't for me. What poetry I'd been obliged to read at school and then in further education would, so I believed at the time, have worked better either converted to prose or set to music, and poets themselves seemed a self-involved bunch. Admittedly I didn't have a great wealth of experience with poets amongst my vague circle of friends, but I'd watched The Young Ones on the box, and Steve the poet with whom I now shared a student house in Leeds Village was doing nothing to disabuse me of the impression fostered by Rik Mayall directing condescending odes at his enemies. Steve was both funny and amiable at a certain level, but I always had the feeling of everything being part of some larger chess game to him. He was barely able to buy a packet of crisps without it resembling strategy. His poems, so far as I could tell, amounted to everybody stop what you're doing and look at me. He almost certainly would have told me about the Medway Poets, about Billy Childish and Bill Lewis - these being people he clearly admired - but it wouldn't have made much sense to me. As I say, I wasn't really drawn to poetry as a medium.

Traci Emin, a noisy Turkish girl in second-year printmaking was in the habit of scaling tables in the college canteen to announce some event or other, and she would do this roughly every two or three days. The events for which she evangelised were rarely ever anything which caught my interest, and I wasn't sure what to make of the girl, so I generally paid her no attention. She knew Carl, then Student Union president, one of the first people I got to know at Maidstone, and still a close friend today. Carl had briefly introduced me to Traci, just as she barged into our conversation to haggle over Student Union business of some kind. She scowled at me and observed isn't your 'air 'orrible! with her wonky gob, dropping the aitches like a younger, vaguely Turkish Irene Handl.

Charmed, I'm sure, I didn't bother replying as I began to weep bitter internal tears of self-loathing.

Now she stood on the canteen table bellowing like a lonely mountain goat, and the words resolved into something about a poetry reading in one of the lecture theatres. My curiosity outstripped my scepticism as I recognised the name of one of those who was to read - Billy Childish. I didn't know much about him, beyond whatever it was that Steve had told me, but apparently he was a local name of some distinction. I now realised that I had read about his band, the Milkshakes, in Sounds music paper a year or so earlier. I'd never heard their music, but it seemed like it might be interesting to watch some bloke who had been in Sounds reading out his poems, and it was something to do.

The hour came and the lecture theatre was dark with just a table at the front. Billy Childish had short, severe hair and wore what appeared to be his grandad's demob suit. He didn't smile. He didn't look like a man who had ever found any good reason to smile. In the midst of flourishes of artistic flamboyance, he appeared streamlined, efficient, even ruthless. He rattled off his poetry as though reading out a statement in a police interview room. He demonstrated neither charisma nor stagecraft, a deficit which seemed curiously highly charismatic in its own way. He sounded bored, as though he was trying to get through the fucking things as quickly as possible. The performance was, in spite of itself, incredible.

Then there was Bill Lewis, loud, theatrical, and intense. It was poetry performed more as I had anticipated it would be, and yet it was impossible to keep from being swept along by the force of his words and their delivery. He had a presence with which one could not argue.

Traci later made an announcement to the effect that she was selling various books of Billy Childish poetry. I had a hunch that I would regret it if I didn't go and see what she had, and so I did. I ended up buying the lot - Poems from the Barrier Block, Prity Thing, Will the Circle Be Unbroken and five or six others. Poems from the Barrier Block was a proper square bound collection, but the others were slimmer volumes of cranky dyslexic verse - if you could really call it verse - all hammered out on a broken typewriter. There were few concessions to grammar or spelling, but for want of a better qualifier, you could tell it was the real thing, the genuine article:

t.v. poetry scotch n piss

the t.v. said - 'we wanna make a film'
they said 'you read with this group of poets'
so i said 'yeah'
n they get us to do some readings
n this producer said to me -
'yeah great stuff - this is your program - you make it - we just film it' n i said 'yeah'

the contract said -
they give us a couple of qwid
for the filming then they could
use the film anytime they liked
with no payment
they said time place n the way to dress
this was ment to be a documentary about the real stuff

well a thew qwids a thew qwid so i said 'yeah' n signed
i got a cigar of one t.v. bloke n a double scotch of another
i went to the bog

i couldnt find the gents so i went to the ladys
i put me scotch down n had a piss
most of it got in the bowl
but some spatered in me scotch

it stank of piss but i drank it anyway

Reproduced without permission and probably (c) Billy Childish June 1982.

The oldest of the books I had bought was called The Man with Wheels, dating from 1980 and revealing Billy's formative interest in Kurt Schwitters, which made one hell of a lot of sense to me. I could see the progression. His poems were made of the dirt and the rubbish. They were unvarnished - raw and invigorating. Poetry had been men in silk cravats scoffing vol-au-vents and spicing overly elaborate love poems to unremarkable girls with a naughty word here and there, not so much to let us know that they were themselves from the mean streets, but that they knew at least one chap who was, and he was a really splendid fellow with his working class accent and leather jacket. Whatever Billy Childish was doing, it bore no relation to such distractions. It was not something in which he dabbled for the sake of something to do. It seemed like he was writing in an effort to keep himself from braining someone.

Some of the books were signed for Traci, with love - Billy, or addressing her more intimately as Dolli. The two of them had been romantically involved for a while, and I guess that this was around the time they began to drift apart; and so she sold me his old stuff, the books he'd had printed and had dedicated to her.

Over the next couple of years I became acclimatised to Kent, it being the county in which my adult personality was formed, adult in this case quantifying age rather than development. Finishing at Maidstone, I moved to nearby Chatham because half the people I knew seemed to live there by that point, and the town had some great bands. In fact the town had a scene in the sense by which Liverpool and Manchester have on occasion been described as having scenes. There were pubs which put on gigs, bands which played live and even put out records, fanzines, poets, artists, and people generally doing their own thing regardless of whether anyone else liked it.

Alun Jones of the Dentists said that Chatham, or specifically the larger Medway conurbation of which Chatham was part, was in some respects like a northern town transplanted to the south of England. At the time I rolled my eyes a little, having come to resent the popular cliché of the north of England as some sort of cultural Mecca inhabited by a friendlier, more down-to-earth, somehow more valuable people. I've never found people in the north of England significantly friendlier than those in the south, nor more culturally vital, and as for down-to-earth...

What would I need with your fancy book learning and your so-called toilet paper and indoor lavatories? I'm down-to-earth, me.

Nevertheless, Alun was right. Medway was a reasonably tightly knit community with its own distinct identity founded upon a major naval dockyard established in the 1500s and significantly expanded during the industrial revolution, around the same time as all those sprawling northern towns founded upon coal, iron, weaving and Hovis advertsing. Even in the 1980s Medway felt like the setting of Ada's Apron or some other typically harrowing television drama in which pramfaced chain-smoking schoolgirls made veiled references to men's cocks and disapproving matriarchs would address each other as chuck from across the washing line. It was the rain-soaked rooftops of utilitarian housing, row after row after cramped bricky row of hardened smokers coughing up their lungs in time to Herman's Hermits. You get the picture.

Within weeks of my settling in to the septic tank I had rented in Glencoe Road, I discovered Gruts café, a small establishment just before the railway bridge on Chatham High Street. A couple of summers earlier, my friends and I had discovered Ivor Cutler and had become so quickly and dramatically obsessed with his haunting monologues that by the time school came back around in September we were having trouble shaking off the soft Glaswegian lilt we'd developed during the holidays.

I walked past the café a couple of times, deeply impressed that there could be an eaterie named after one of my favourite Ivor Cutler pieces. Eventually I summoned the courage to go in, probably having at last spotted someone I vaguely knew sat on the other side of the glass. Being unemployed and without access to a television by which I could watch children's programmes and other daytime broadcasting at the taxpayer's expense, I became a regular customer at Gruts; and given the pitiful state of both my cooking and the cupboard which served as my pantry, the toasted ham and cheese sandwiches prepared and served by Gerald and Caroline - mine hosts - were probably what kept me alive long enough to see the nineties.

I had mastered the art of sitting around in pubs a few years earlier, and had reached the stage at which one realises that it can sometimes be fun to walk in a straight line or to wake in the morning without a splitting headache; and so I quickly adapted to the Chatham equivalent of café society because it was cheaper than the pub and better than sitting at home. Of the regulars I already knew there was the aforementioned Alun of the Dentists and Prez of the Martini Slutz, one of the most entertaining bands I've ever seen live. Tim Webster of the Sputniks and later Johnny Gash ran his own musical instrument repair business out of a workshop over the road, and would wander across for lunch with his apprentice, Tim O'Leary - lunch being one of Gerald's guitar maker's fancies, which Tim O'Leary recalls as being possibly the best egg mayo baguettes I've ever had.

Bill Lewis has written of Gruts as having been known as the poets' café. I don't remember this at all, although maybe that's because I was never a poet. The description is probably justified by the regular presence of himself and Billy Childish, and even Sexton Ming on a couple of occasions. I got to know Bill Lewis fairly well as it turned out that we were almost neighbours and had mutual interests. Any idea I've ever ripped off from an American underground comic artist can most likely be traced back to the huge stack of comics by Harvey Pekar, Robert Crumb, Skip Williamson and others that Bill sold me. Bill would drop around for tea and tell me about Sandinistas and his time in Nicaragua, tales from a world I was yet to discover. I tried to paint his portrait, but my efforts were so awful that I threw the thing away. Like Billy Childish, he seemed in some ways a man out of time, someone who always seemed like he should have known Allen Ginsberg and Lenny Bruce; but it was only that he contrasted so dramatically with the feckless apathy of our respective generations.

I had never been introduced to Billy Childish and was slightly in awe of him. He was an imposing presence before which I was sore afraid, suspecting that whatever came out of my mouth would probably be dog shit.

Excuse me, Mr. Billy, I think your poems are really ace!

Happily the fears of my inner teenage girl fell by the wayside as Billy spent so much time in Gruts that my self-consciously marinading in silent awe whilst attempting to effect nonchalance in the presence of relative greatness became impractical, and obviously ridiculous. Aside from anything, it turned out that he was, if not exactly a nice guy by conventionally sappy terms, thoughtful, ruthlessly honest, and very, very funny. He was also pretty good at chess, a game I'd only recently been taught by Tim Webster and Prez one afternoon as we sat in the café slurping tea and smoking. The game became something of an obsession, and I took to playing every day, but unfortunately everyone else was better than me. I played Billy, and the match was over in about four minutes. He wiped me off the board. He'd spent most of that time staring out of the window or talking to Gerald. His matches against Alun, Prez or Tim Webster lasted longer, and were more enjoyable for the spectator. I seem to recall that he usually won, although I could be mistaken.

An exchange student from Germany named Andreas became a regular for a couple of weeks. He and Billy would talk about Hamburg, and he too was drawn into the never ending chess tournament. After one particularly long, drawn-out game he beat Tim Webster and Billy bought everyone a round of tea in celebration.

'I don't get it,' I said. 'It's not like this is the first time anyone has beaten Tim.'

'I know.' Billy sported the faintly disturbing smile of Harry H. Corbett. 'But this is the first time he's had an international thrashing.'

Gruts became much more than just a place to hang out with friends and talk crap. It became our place, almost a livelihood. Poets and writers sold their work from a small bookcase next to the counter, and Billy's own Hangman Records had taken to releasing an album more or less every month - beautifully pressed brand new long playing vinyl records of himself, Sexton Ming, the Pop Rivets, and others, and these were joined by releases from the Dentists' Tambourine label. Even the subject matter was locally sourced in Wally the 2nd Hand Salesman - one of the noisier compositions on Sexton Ming's Which Dead Donkey Daddy? album - being named for Wally, the proprietor of a junk shop just on the other side of the bridge. Billy had gone in there to give the man himself a copy of the record, so he told us. Wally had mumbled some token of potential gratitude and tossed the album into an open trunk full of rusting nuts, bolts, spanners and the like. He didn't really seem like a big record collector.

'Well, that's nicely filed away for future reference,' Billy observed, although I'm not sure if that was what he said to Wally or simply part of his account as told to the rest of us.

The albums were a fiver each, which meant that Gruts actually served as a better record shop than Our Price a few hundred yards along the road, not that Our Price was really up to much in the first place.

At one stage, I hung a load of my own pseudo-Futurist paintings on the walls of the café, following on from previous exhibitions by Billy and others. Mine weren't for sale, but the main point was that they were seen, and this even drew interest from the local newspaper, the Chatham Standard, who sent Judith Mullarkey along to do a short feature on me. The first entry in my comments book came from Billy:

I've seen this man's work before, and I said, and say it again - to the funny farm with him!

Sometimes we would watch the local crazy woman as she passed by outside, shouting mysterious accusations at the river. She too seemed to appreciate the art, and once dutifully came in to hand Gerald a drawing she'd produced of crabs at large on Easter Egg Island, according to the caption. Her technique wasn't great, but you had to admire the spirit in which it was done.

For a while life seemed to revolve around Gruts to the point that my friend Carl phoned the café on a couple of occasions, knowing I would be there, sat on my arse and weighing up my employment options. As I had no telephone, it was a better option than calling directly at my bedsit in the hope of my being at home.

It felt like being part of a family, and at the same time, because of all the stuff that was going on in and around Medway, it felt like we were part of history even at the time. It felt as though one day we would all be looking back and recalling where we were when we first heard Billy's calypso cover of Anarchy in the UK.

We were in Gruts, obviously.

He'd just bought in a freshly minted stack of the Blackhands album, and Gerald had stuck it on the record player so we could all have a listen. Some people remember seeing the Beatles at the Cavern Club, and some of us remember Gruts.

Naturally it didn't last, there being a limit to how much tea anyone could reasonably be expected to drink in a single afternoon, and although the place was nearly always full, or at least rarely ever empty, whatever Gerald and Caroline were making out of it wasn't enough. They closed, and it became the Bridge Roll, a well intentioned but similarly doomed tea room style café with laminated Gingham tablecloths run by a couple of middle-aged women, whose enthusiasm reminded me of my grandmother once harbouring an ambition of being known as good for a cup of tea and a bun amongst long distance truck drivers. The Bridge Roll wasn't terrible, but the new decor had the feel of something aspiring to the custom of a better class of diner, or at least better than we were.

Like all good things, it was over.