A Day in the Life of the Global Pandemic

Somewhere there will be a diary kept during the second world war in which the average entry reads, still no oranges in the shops, think I might go for a walk a bit later. The current coronavirus pandemic arguably constitutes the single event to have the greatest, most tangible impact on humanity since the second world war, and I've suddenly noticed how dull my own nightly diary entries seem, or at least how potentially dull they will most likely seem to future generations, assuming there are any; Thursday the 2nd of April, for example:

I managed to cycle twenty miles just before the rain set in. Apparently we have five or six days of rain, so that may be my cycling for the week. I guess we'll see. Bess sewed masks. I wrote and edited an MP3 of Bukowski*. We got a take out from Shake Shack yet again, but somehow it wasn't as good. Eddie of Little & Large snuffed it. This is the first pandemic where I've noticed celebrities dying. Having finished The Wire, we watched the first of season three of Ozark. I'm afraid I found it a bit incomprehensible.

Unfortunately for the sake of both dramatic tension and future warnings from history, our current global pandemic hasn't made a whole lot of difference to me. I was never particularly social, so the main points of adjustment have been 1) that my steady mail order supply of eighties comic books has temporarily dried up, 2) that Bess and myself are no longer able to dine out, as we would ordinarily do on Thursdays and Saturdays, and 3) that I have to wear a mask.

Additionally, Bess has been working from home since January, the company having decided to save money on costly office space; and the boy now attends virtual school conducted through the internet at his grandmother's house, and specifically at his grandmother's house because she used to be a school teacher and is as such qualified to apply scholastic pressure when necessary. Bess has also been making face masks, averaging around one-hundred a day, giving them away to whoever should need them, requests from hospitals and nursing homes, that sort of thing. I tried one but the elastic hurt my ears after a while, so instead I cover my face with a bandana, which is more comfortable and hopefully implies gang affiliation, or at least that I'm no stranger to narcocorrido music - anything to keep idiots at a distance, not due to any specific fear of coronavirus, but mostly because I dislike idiots. I'm surprised we haven't seen more convenience store robberies given that it's now possible to wear a mask in broad daylight without anyone giving you a second glance.

I've still been cycling to McAllister Park each day, at least during the week, a round trip of twenty miles which doesn't really bring me into close contact with anyone.

Shopping hasn't been much of a problem given that our household gets through toilet paper at a fairly average rate, and we've seen no need to stockpile four-million additional rolls in the garage. The boy, as he approaches seventeen, seems to be turning into Zippy the Pinhead, exhibiting a peculiar fixation with television advertising while favouring a diet of instant crap which the rest of us tend to avoid unless it's the end of the world and that's all we have left in our bunker - Ramen noodles, Kraft Mac & Cheese, and so on. These have been in short supply, but he's managed somehow. There was one strange week where no-one had any onions, but luckily I had a few already in the fridge. This is as close as I've come to hoarding.

There has so far been one day on which I had to queue for five minutes before being allowed into the local supermarket, allowing them to keep the numbers down so as to facilitate social distancing. The most annoying aspect of this came next day when there was no queue. I asked the security guard if he wanted me to start a new queue, and I had to ask five fucking times before he understood. This turns out to be because Americans don't recognise queue as a word, instead preferring the verb to stand in line.

Now I only stand in line to wait for an available cashier, a practice implemented by the supermarket so as to prevent us all squashed up and breathing on each other in the vicinity of the tills. It's hardly a massive inconvenience, aside from the awkward eventuality of finding myself directed to tills I would ordinarily avoid, specifically the two worked by members of staff whom I've found disagreeable in the past. I was herded to the till worked by the woman with Karl Malden's nose only two days ago, for example. I stood six feet away from the woman then being served. Once she'd paid up, she walked away and I took her place.

'Sir,' said Karl Malden's nose lady, 'you have to stand at the end of the conveyor belt when I'm serving a customer.'

'Yes,' I said, 'that's why I was standing over there,' - I pointed - 'at the end of the conveyor belt when you were serving that woman who just left.'

Every time I've been to the till of Karl Malden's nose lady, there's always a problem. It's hard to not take it personally. On one occasion she kept all of my purchases at her end of the belt after scanning, with me stood at the other end twiddling my thumbs, unable to pack anything into my bag. I could only assume she thought I was going to do a runner.

Try telling that to those people who lived through the Holocaust.

The inconvenience of life during the global pandemic has been, to me, so barely significant as to be hardly worth mentioning - aside from here in the context of illustrating how little point there would be in mentioning it. Social distancing is easily achieved in our part of Texas. The death toll for Bexar county stands at twenty-four at the time of writing, more than half of those from the same nursing home on the south side. This is after a month of this thing, nearly a month of masks and closed diners and all the other measures, a month during which other counties and other states have been hit much, much worse. Prophets of online doom inevitably predict that one morning we'll wake up in a scene from 28 Days Later which will somehow serve us right, but I'm so accustomed to the barrage of fear that I've stopped noticing it, and have instead continued to worry about more immediately tangible problems such as how long it will be before I can resume buying up all those back issues of Alpha Flight.

I know this thing is terrible, and that it's real, and yes I'm taking it absolutely seriously; but at the end of the day - as the footballing cliché goes - it's not actually bubonic plague. For once I'm lucky enough to be in a position where a global catastrophe isn't having much direct or immediate effect on me; and having once spent at least twenty years of my life at the mercy of Darwinian economics and accordingly shitting myself as to what tomorrow might bring on an at least weekly basis, it's quite nice to have nothing much worth writing about in my dairy. I'm fairly sure there were plenty of people already leading miserable existences before we all had to start wearing masks, but apparently it's only the end of the world when it impacts upon people who've worked hard, paid their mortgages, and who therefore deserve better.

*: For the sake of clarity, this sentence aspires to report that I engaged in writing in addition to editing a sound file of a reading by the poet, Charles Bukowski rather than describing a single undertaking.

Chuck Ramirez

I'm in HEB, my local supermarket. My shopping basket is, as usual full of cat food.

'Oh. My. God.'

I look up. There is a vaguely Hispanic looking dude stood in front of me with his mouth hanging open. A couple of seconds have passed before he realises that he should probably say something.

'You are the very image of a friend of mine.' His mannerisms seem a little camp, which I realise may not directly correlate to his sexuality, but this really sounds like a chat-up line.

'Okay.' I'm not sure what else to say. If he thinks I'm hot, it really doesn't bother me.

'A friend but - well, he died a while ago. You look just like him. Have you ever heard of an artist called Chuck Ramirez?'

I haven't. I shake my head. 'Sorry, no.'

'It's the eyes…' He seems to be moving his hands as though framing a film he's planning to make. 'You could be his brother.'

'Okay.'

I can't help but think of Richard Ramirez, the serial killer, which means at least I won't have any trouble remembering the name of my alleged doppelgänger.

'He was a photographer,' - my admirer suddenly remembers something and steps back a little. 'I need to take a photograph of you. Is it okay if I take a photograph?'

'Sure.'

'They ain't gonna believe…' he fumbles in different pockets. 'I don't have my phone with me.'

'Well, I'm in here every day about the same time, usually buying cat food.'

'I'll look for you again.'

'Sure.'

I'm smiling as I head for the checkout because it's funny.

'It sounds a lot like he had the hots for you,' Bess suggests when I tell her about the encounter that evening. She hasn't heard of Chuck Ramirez either, but she looks him up on her phone, and there actually is a resemblance, stronger in some photographs than others, and particularly around the eyes. A website called Ruiz-Healy Art has this to say:

Chuck Ramirez (1962-2010), one of San Antonio's most beloved artists, was a major force in the San Antonio art community before his untimely death in a 2010 cycling accident. A 2002 Artpace resident, Ramirez' work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. As an artist and graphic designer, Ramirez employed the visual and conceptual techniques found in contemporary advertising and package design, isolating and re-contextualizing familiar objects to explore cultural identity, mortality, and consumerism through his photographs and installations.

The next evening we're driving back from Jim's diner, or possibly some other diner, and something catches my eye as we cross North New Braunfels onto the Austin Highway.

'Holy shit!'

'What?' Bess squeaks in panic, almost losing control of the wheel for just a fraction of a second.

'Look!' I point.

We are driving past the McNay Art Museum. What's on at the McNay is advertised on four sides of an immense wooden cube permanently situated on the grass triangle adjacent to the museum. The side facing us is taken up with the fourteen foot high image of a woman's handbag, top open to expose key chains, pills, a cellphone and so on. Above the handbag is the name Chuck Ramirez. The poster promotes an exhibition of his work. It's just started and will run for the next couple of months.

I've lived in San Antonio since 2011.

I'd never heard of Chuck Ramirez, my double, before yesterday.

Today I see his name in letters several feet tall.

It feels a little like the universe is fucking with me, as though it's only just thought of this guy.

Next evening we go to have a look at the exhibition, which is called All This and Heaven Too. It mostly comprises large photographs of small everyday objects, handbags, a vase of flowers, trash, Mexican candies and so on. It reminds me a little of the work of Andy Warhol, which is unfortunate because I couldn't care less about the work of Andy Warhol, generally speaking. I find it bland, and that it seems in many cases to be intentionally bland is not enough to excite my interest.

Each to their own.

The gallery is packed, I guess because it's only the second or third night. I anticipate people dropping their drinks and standing, open-mouthed to point at me, maybe even a few screams.

Oh my God! It's him! There he is!

It doesn't happen. Maybe the resemblance is dependent on lighting, or whether or not the eye of the beholder finds me sexually attractive; leaving just the art as the sole source of potential pleasure, and it simply isn't the kind of art I'm ever likely to appreciate.

I think of people I knew at art college, still plugging away, these days as facebook friends who post slightly blurry photographs of an old tin mug on a piece of wood, or rusted cooking utensils. The photographs appear frayed at the edges as though printed on handmade paper, and always there's the associated information about what type of camera or lens were used. I've never worked out why they share such images with the rest of us, or what I'm supposed to get from them.

The exhibition isn't that big, and after twenty minutes it feels like we've tried, so we go to the gift shop. I look at the art books. Most of them seem to be geared towards fostering an appreciation of art amongst people who don't actually like art but might not mind getting some gifty book for a birthday or Christmas present: Matisse, van Gogh, Picasso, Warhol, Dalí, all of those guys…

Bess buys chocolates for her grandmother, and we head out for a quick look around the other galleries, the permanent collection, the place where they hang paintings by Corot, Dufy, Renoir, Courbet, Marsden Hartley and others; and I remember how much I like these paintings, like a good beer after a bland yet efficient hamburger which I hadn't really wanted in the first place.

Worldcon

It's late summer, 2013 and there's going to be a science-fiction convention right here in San Antonio, something called Worldcon which happens every year and is apparently a big deal. I read a lot of science-fiction and I also write science-fiction, but I've never really quite been able to bring myself to think of events of this kind as having anything to do with me. Advertising will typically centre on some person from Babylon 5 being in attendance to sign copies of his autobiography, but that's a television show. I suppose it's science-fiction, technically speaking, but foremost it's a television show. I can't think of a television show I'd watch rather than read a book, and were there one, it probably wouldn't be science-fiction. I vaguely recall having seen two or three episodes of Babylon 5 - one of the good ones, according to its devotees - but it did nothing for me and it seemed to lack a sense of humour.

Apparently I have what is termed an elitist or snooty attitude, meaning I think I'm better than everyone else because my opinions do not reflect those of the majority. All I know is that after the first ten minutes of most television dramas, I'm usually restless and I begin to wonder is this really all it is?; and then my mind wanders to whatever I've been reading of late, meaning I begin to lose track of which character is which and why they just said that to wossisname. It's difficult to avoid a certain sense of superiority when it dawns on you just how easily satisfied so many of your contemporaries appear to be - predicated on their being able to sit through an entire hour of this shit - but then, doesn't everyone regard themselves as superior to those around them? Psychosis aside, is there anyone who genuinely thinks I'm the same as other people, or even I'm much worse than everyone I know?

Still, Roberto will be in town, and he's been making noises about Worldcon, so I figure maybe I should go. It might be interesting and it might even be fun, which probably wouldn't be the case were I to go on my own. When I say Roberto will be in town, I'm referring to San Antonio but I suppose I also mean America because he's Italian. I know Roberto only through an internet connection. He's one of a seemingly dwindling international group of persons who frequent an internet stoop dedicated to the science-fiction author Clifford D. Simak. Simak wrote quietly contemplative and distinctly pastoral science-fiction novels which achieved some popularity throughout the fifties, sixties, and seventies, but he seems to have been largely forgotten in an age wherein the term science-fiction has come to mean generically bland CGI splattered noisily across a screen. The appeal of Simak has apparently determined that those still reading his novels tend to be people who, like myself, don't like loud noises and probably come across as kind of boring to those who do.

Of course, no corner of the internet would be complete without a few disagreeable wankers, and we've even had to banish a few ornery varmints from the virtual stoop upon which we Simak readers perch with our pipes discussing how we all preferred the old beige before some dang fool tried to modernise it and only ended up making it worse; and there's Old Bill who seems eternally committed to proving that he loves Simak so much more than the rest of us, who signs his missives from the bluff, as though he's not sat whining at a fucking computer in a house with electricity, gas, and running water. Old Bill took particular issue with my views on Simaks' somewhat disappointing A Choice of Gods of 1972. I had the impression that Old Bill felt I should have consulted him before expressing an opinion, and he referred to things of which I would probably have had a better understanding had I grown up in the bosom of nature like what he did - oblivious to the fact that I lived on a farm for the first decade of my life.

Anyway, Roberto is one of the more communicative members of the group, even though he sometimes claims to struggle with English. We struck up some kind of rapport when he was ordering a framed print from an artist based somewhere in the American south-west. The problem was that the postage to Italy was extortionate, and in any case he didn't really care about the frame. In the end, he bought the print and had it delivered to me in San Antonio. I removed the artwork from the frame, repackaged it in a sturdy cardboard tube, and then mailed it to him from England when I flew back to visit my parents. It was a convoluted process, but he seemed happy and I was glad to be able to help out. He and his wife have been to America before, notably visiting the small town of Millville, Wisconsin in which Clifford D. Simak was born. This time they're visiting my end of the country, so it seems like an idea to meet up, and their holiday coinciding with Worldcon suggests itself as an opportunity of which we should probably take advantage.

Happily the kid is staying with his father this weekend, because since learning of visitors from Italy most of his conversation has been limited to jokes about Mario Brothers and pizza. It's already sufficiently nerve-racking meeting new people without having to worry about Junior breaking into a few verses of Do the Mario, regardless of the potential irony that he is himself vaguely Italian if you go back a couple of generations.

My wife and I pick Roberto and Rosanna up from their hotel, and I suddenly realise that I'm now the guy showing the out-of-towners around the place I live; which is weird because I was still the foreigner when I woke up this morning. I'm in a position equating to authority and I'm not sure I like it.

We go to eat at La Fonda which specialises in a local variation on Mexican food. It's been called Mexican food for people who don't like Mexican food, but that's really just snobbery and doesn't reflect the quality of what they serve. The place is no Blanco Cafe or Bandera Jalisco, but the food is nevertheless decent, and it seems a prudent choice given Roberto's stated suspicion of anything involving volcanically hot chillies.

We eat, trying not to dwell too long on matters of what Simak may have had for breakfast or who we think would have won in a fight between Simak and any other science-fiction author of his generation. We talk about life in Italy, England, and the United States, and how we all came to be here. Roberto's English is heavily accented but excellent, despite the doubts he has expressed in his virtual missives. He is a little older than I am and reminds me of Carl Sagan. He perhaps speaks slowly for fear of not being understood, but his caution gives his words surprising gravity which works well in conjunction with a powerfully dry sense of humour. Rosanna, his wife, speaks no English but Roberto translates, and her Italian sounds sufficiently close to Spanish for Bess and I to follow the general thrust of what she says. My fears were that this initial meeting might seem incredibly awkward, but we've had a wonderful time.

We meet again the next day. It's Saturday afternoon and Worldcon is in full swing, but we've agreed that we don't really care for much of it. We just want to browse for books we haven't read in the dealers' room, so we're going to do that on Sunday morning because it will work out the cheapest in terms of admission. It's Saturday afternoon and we meet in the heart of San Antonio at their hotel. Bess drops me off so I'm on my own with the visitors and another guy, Kevin who has travelled a couple of hundred miles from somewhere in the north-east of the state, a town on the Louisiana border. He's another fan of Simak and he's here for the Worldcon and to meet Roberto and myself. He's young and chatty, and he seems like a nice guy but our meeting under such circumstances makes me feel somehow uncomfortable.

Meeting was once easy. You went to the pub, and beer and ciggies would do the rest, and even if the person or persons you were meeting turned out to be arseholes, you wouldn't mind because - fuck it - it was a night out. Unfortunately though I no longer smoke, and I'm no longer particularly keen on the booze, and in any case they don't really have pubs in America, just bars, which are a different thing entirely. Meeting is no longer something I do so I'm out of practice, and bereft of a common purpose involving alcohol or tobacco, I'm no longer even sure how it's done. Additionally, one version of the story has this as my home town and I'm showing my friends around; but I've only been here two years and I'm still pretty much lost past the end of our road; and Kevin is a genuine American so he's showing us around by default, taking the lead, which I somehow find both annoying and at the same time a great relief.

I know, I feel like saying as Kevin explains something else without having been asked, I live here, and yet I'm aware that it's not like I'm actually bringing anything useful to the table.

We wander through the Alamo, or at least through the church because it requires no admission fee, but the day is baking hot and it's beginning to feel like we're just using up the time for reasons no-one has quite defined. We could talk about Simak as we wander around the city, but I'm feeling increasingly uncomfortable about Rosanna's partially inevitable exclusion from the conversation.

Kevin mentions Jethro Tull for some reason, and I tell him that I also enjoy their music, prompting his thoughts on the same at a level of detail far beyond anything I've ever cared about. I just listen to the records because I like how they sound, and it feels like I'm being lectured. The only note of accord we strike comes when someone mentions Old Bill who writes from the bluff. It seems we are all at least united in considering him a bit of an idiot.

We go for ice cream at Baskin-Robbins for the sake of something to do, but the place has no tables and we end up all ludicrously squatted along the low window-ledge outside the place watching our fellow tourists crowd into the Alamo. It's too hot and it's difficult to talk and ice cream is dripping onto my hand faster than I can lick it from the cone.

For fuck's sake...

Rosanna takes a photograph of the three of us, the Simak dudes. I resemble Sir Les Patterson in a stetson, which irritates me so much as to inspire the realisation that I must take charge and rescue this encounter from itself, this meeting which isn't so much a meeting as a random juxtaposition of people who vaguely know each other. Rosanna's only concern is that she gets to pick up a few artsy-crafty things for the folks back in Italy, so I've decided that's what she's going to do. I know just the place. There's a massive craft market over by Mi Tierra cafe and bakery, and it's a Mexican craft market so they have great stuff there - hand-made and hand-painted and absolutely no tat, and there's really nothing which is ever considered too weird for sale in a Mexican craft market, so they're always great places to look around even if you're not buying.

I am going to lead my people forth across the town of San Antonio unto the Mexican craft market, and they will see that it is good, and Rosanna shall be happy, and everyone wins. So we trek and we trek following Commerce past the hotel where Roberto and Rosanna are staying, and at each corner we stop and I tell them it's only a little further; but eventually we realise that it isn't, and it's ninety in the shade. Roberto thanks me for making the effort, but he and his wife feel the need to get back into the air conditioning of their hotel. Later I realise I had been leading my people east along Commerce, and Mi Tierra is west. I've only been here a couple of years. I don't have much cause to visit the centre of the city.

Next morning, Kevin, Roberto and myself convene at the entrance of Worldcon. We stump up an admission fee and go and buy books. Roberto's face lights up as he encounters a brace of early editions of Simak novels with covers he's never seen. He has a long talk with the dealer working the stall and I get the impression that this might be the highlight of his visit. It makes me happy for him. I pick up a few books for myself, and the three of us talk about what we've read, what we would like to read, who sounds interesting and so on.

'This guy is supposed to be pretty good,' Kevin observes picking up a novel by Mark Hodder, so I get to be the arsehole who had the bloke in the back of his cab, once again.

We marvel at the Lego and eventually leave as the place starts to close, each going his separate way, Kevin back to the north-east, Roberto to the hotel and eventually to Italy.

It ended well.

A Glossary of American Television Shows

These are only shows I've seen since moving to San Antonio in 2011, otherwise we'd be here all day. I haven't included anything which I've watched and then found myself unable to remember what it actually was. For example, I've probably watched at least one episode of The Flash, but who fucking knows?

A Charlie Brown Christmas - By the way, I'm also including American shows I saw whilst living in England if I've seen them again since moving here, and my wife watches this religiously every Christmas so it makes the cut. It also makes the cut because it's a classic. Just the scene with Schroeder tickling the ivories whilst a stage full of kids engage in oddly repetitive expressive dance is by itself better than anything else seen on television since about 1995.

Agents of SHIELD - This is some Marvel Comics thing based on a bunch of spies living inside a giant floating helicopter. It had the Man from UNCLE in it, or one of those guys - not David McCallum, the other one - unless it was just somebody who looked like him. I have no memory of what happened in the episode I watched except that it involved a lot of people discussing the importance of teamwork, and some guy in a dark room kept looking at a green glowing thing.

Amazing Race, The - Various unpleasant couples competitively quest forth to different locations in different countries so as to find clues as to the next place to which they will all be required to race amazingly. Some shit found in a windmill in Holland will mean they all get to spend the next episode questing forth to the place in Germany where Hitler gave his famous speech, for example. Most of the couples wear bright lycra jumpsuits and they spend a lot of time either running around, sweating, whining, or giving it 110%. Most of the couples come across as horrible wankers. It should really be called The Unpleasant Race.

American Dad - This is one of those animated shows which appears to be drawn by the Garfield artist - what with the big, heavily-lidded eyes and everything - and it contrasts the cutesy appearance with edgy jokes about date rape, sodomy, farting, coprophilia and so on. Junior loves it, and it's one of those things he'll watch over and over, hopefully missing 99% of the references. American Dad gives the impression of being funny as I pass through the front room while it's on, but once you sit down to view an entire episode, it gets headachey pretty fast - one to file under trying too hard.

Andy Griffith Show, The - This was a show from the fifties or maybe early sixties. It's the black and white adventures of a rural law enforcement officer and the hayseeds under his jurisdiction. Most of the jokes can be discerned as incoming about five minutes before they happen, much like weary travellers seen approaching from afar upon a lonely road, and the episode I saw was based around an hilarious mix up occurring when impounded jars of moonshine were stored in the same room as the lemonade the kids had made for their stand. I can't remember why Andy Griffith had nabbed the lemonade as well, but I guess that's cops for you. I actually found this show pretty funny.

Angel - Angel is a good vampire, and was probably the first of the current glut of good vampires who shun human blood. He solves supernatural crimes in this Buffy the Vampire Slayer spin-off, and although the show suffered from the same problems as the corporate entertainment franchise from which it was spawned, it was generally pretty good, particularly when it wasn't taking itself too seriously; and once they ditched the predictably heart-warming yet tormented Irish-themed character from the first series.

Aqua Teen Hunger Force - Laboured date rape funnies delivered by anthropomorphic fast food items in a production which additionally attempts to distract viewers from the piss poor animation by making jokes about its own general ineptitude. Worthless.

Arrested Development - I have no idea how I missed this one when I was living in England, but presume it must have been on after my bedtime, what with my having to be up at five every morning and everything. Arrested Development is fucking great - apart from the final series which was rubbish - and is not actually particularly far fetched. It could quite easily have been based on half the people who live in Alamo Heights.

Battlestar Galactica - Meaning the recent, heavily revised version, rather than the seventies one which was more or less Starsky & Hutch in a space rocket. This was one of the first things I watched when I got here and discovered that my wife-to-be had Netflix, one episode a day until I'd seen the lot. It was pretty darn great too, aside from the shitty ending with a Jimi Hendrix song as some sort of avatar of cosmic infundibularity, or whatever the hell was supposed to be going on there. Science-fiction television is mostly drivel aimed at selling action figures, but this was decent.

Better Call Saul - This is a Breaking Bad spin-off which is better than Breaking Bad. American television has spewn forth a ton of drama serials about lawyers, solicitors, and chartered accountants over the years, and it's a testament to the creators of this thing that I didn't even notice that this was one of them.

Big Bang Theory, The - This is a comedy show based upon the hilarious premise that nerds collect Batman comics and retain an in-depth encyclopedic knowledge of minor details of Batman continuity. Ha ha. It's also one of those sofa entrance hilarity comedies distinguished by half the cast being sat upon a sofa facing the viewer as another enters the room to a soundtrack of general hooting and hollering so as to suggest that we will soon be laughing our arses off. The new arrival usually makes some amusing observation such as I guess I missed the Nicks game, huh?, and that's when the comedy happens. Oh my aching sides. The Big Bang Theory seems to be very popular amongst people who don't actually understand what humour is or how it works.

Big Brother - American Big Brother is even worse than the English version. Unlike the English version, American housemates are free to discuss who they will vote to have evicted from the house, so that's pretty much all the fuckers ever talk about; and there's no phone-in vote so viewers aren't involved other than as passive observers. Additionally, where English Big Brother excels in filling its house with people more or less guaranteed to want to kill each other, in America it's mostly just whiny annoying wankers, and the obligatory Texan almost always turns out to be a closet white supremacist thus making the rest of us look bad, which is disappointing. The most annoying contestant I've seen thus far was the fedora-hatted Californian skateboard tosspot who asked a housemate from Colorado, so how's life in 'rado?, because man, those first two syllables - ain't nobody got time for that. Thankfully, he proved even more hateable than the rest of them brought together for that particular series and his anus was promptly booted back to 'fornia after the first week.

Black-ish - here's yet another one of those families, but with four kids rather than three, and they're black. As situation comedies of this general type go, it beats the shit out of about a million others, and the jokes are mostly funny, but I don't know. I'll watch it and I may even chuckle, but for some reason it never occurs to me to tune in the following week.

Bob's Burgers - It's a cartoon set in a burger joint featuring one of those cartoon families with three children which manages consistent brilliance without resembling The Simpsons in the slightest.

BoJack Horseman - I've seen the pilot episode twice, and I seem to recall a few chuckles, but for some reason I've never bothered watching the rest.

Breaking Bad - If not the greatest TV series ever made, definitely the greatest TV series about a chemistry teacher cooking crystal meth so as to finance cancer treatment ever made. The only problem with Breaking Bad is that you end up hating everyone in it by the third series, possibly excepting Jesse, and yet feel compelled to watch anyway. Having briefly regarded Breaking Bad as the greatest show ever made, I was surprised to find it such tough going and considerably less enjoyable second time around. In fact we gave up with the final series on second viewing. It was just too horrible.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer - Decent but possibly overrated series about a teenage girl and stuff who kills vampires and stuff and related supernatural horrors and stuff. It somewhat went off the boil and stuff when later episodes and stuff began to take themselves far too seriously and stuff, and the bovine Tara turned up to moo at viewers and make us feel all bad about shy people being shy and stuff; and then with the excessive reliance on mumbling Buffyspeak and stuff began to outstay its welcome and stuff; and it's a damning indictment that by the end the only good thing about the show was an American dude pretending to be Sid Vicious and stuff. Thank fuck and stuff they cancelled it.

Caprica - Incomprehensible but nevertheless enjoyable attempt at making a Battlestar Galactica spin-off. Shame it didn't last.

Catfish - This is another reality show, one in which online sweeties discover that the person to whom they've been emailing their intimate hamburger or hot dog shots is actually a fifty-year old male sex criminal from Missouri and not, as they have been led to believe, a youthful Beyoncé lookalike eager to move in and start a family. It's sort of fascinating to watch, providing you can get past the entirely unnecessary soundtrack of the worst music you've ever heard and the fact that everyone involved refers to each other as bae - because it can sometimes be hard to spell the word baby; but sometimes it gets a bit too depressing given the high quota of tattoos, piercings and ear gauges on display; and as for those text message montages of u mean so much 2 me, I feel like I can tell u anything, and the rest - sweet Jesus.

Chowder - This is a children's cartoon about a little purple guy who looks a bit like a cat, and who seems to live in some sort of pseudo-mediaeval feudal society. All I can really remember of it is that the episode I saw - possibly the pilot episode - featured a joke which made me laugh so much that my sides hurt, so that really happens.

Cleveland Show, The - See American Dad. It has its moments, and I wanted to like it, but...

Dance Moms - Pouting borderline psychopathic mothers encourage pre-teen daughters to compete in competitive dance events whilst pointing out how the offspring of rival matriarchs got to prance about to Like A Virgin last week and so this week it's Shanillia's turn, you fucking cunt. The high levels of passive-aggressive on display in this show are frankly terrifying. It's like a live action re-imagining of hell as envisioned by Hieronymous Bosch but with greater emphasis on little girls in pink tutus dancing to that Cher song which sounds like it was recorded inside a flying saucer.

Deadwood - It's about a load of cowboys in the old west who say fuck a lot, and the worst of the bunch is the bloke who runs the local antiques shop, which is called Ye Olde Bide-a-Fuckin'-Wee Antiques 'n' Shit. I tried one episode but it all looked a bit grim and seemed to feature more murdered prostitutes than I usually require of a television show.

Don't Trust the Bitch in Apartment 23 - I saw two or three of these and I think it made me laugh, but I can't remember anything else about it except that the blonde one reminded me of Lamb Chop of Shari Lewis fame. I think there was a scene set in a whole food restaurant because I vaguely remember being annoyed.

Duck Dynasty - Duck Dynasty is a reality show following the fortunes of a family of hillbillies who run a duck call manufacturing operation. For some reason everyone seems to think it's amazing. The five minutes I watched comprised footage of them arguing at the warehouse, with the argument escalating into open hostility disguised as pranks. One guy emptied a sack of some white powder over the other's head. The victim looked pissed off, as was then underlined by footage of him commenting upon the incident, explaining how the guy had emptied a sack of some white powder over his head, but that dang fool had better watch out because payback sure 'nuff do be a bitch. This was followed by footage of the victim emptying a retaliatory sack of some white powder over the first guy's head. I'm not sure what the powder was, although I have a feeling it probably wasn't cocaine. It was like watching an episode of The Three Stooges in slow motion.

Empire - My wife loves this one, and it's basically a Mexican telenovela by virtue of the dramatic faces pulled every thirty seconds; except I suppose, technically speaking, it's actually just Dallas with black people, and instead of oil they're trading in R&B singers.

Family Feud - I think this was remade as Family Fortunes in England. A game show host asks thick family members to name a kind of animal with four arses, and points are then awarded depending on whether their answers correspond with those given by members of the general public who have been asked the same question. Our current version is presented by the comedian Steve Harvey who is otherwise very funny, and makes the best of finding himself obliged to work with idiots, but is still very much polishing a turd where this thing is concerned.

Family Guy - See American Dad. I almost liked this one. As with all the other Garfield spin-off shows from the same stable, it's hilarious until you sit down and watch an episode all the way through.

Futurama - Brilliant, obviously.

Garfield and Friends - See my treatise entitled Garfield = Jeremy Clarkson which is to be found elsewhere on this blog.

Glee - This one started off so well that it fooled even me, then took about a series to reveal itself as the same old aspirational stage school shite about all which can be achieved if you just dare to dream hard enough. I suppose it might be awarded points for smuggling a gay character onto mainstream telly, although all the gay people I know - and for some weird reason I seem to know a ton of the fuckers - hated Kurt's guts, so I'm not even sure if that really constitutes a victory. The best thing about Glee was the psychotic sports coach played by Ayn Rand. She was great.

Goldbergs, The - The Goldbergs is a situation comedy based on someone's actual memoirs of growing up in the eighties in America, and sometimes it makes my wife laugh so much that she falls off the sofa. Having grown up in the eighties in England, I find this one a bit mystifying in places. It's not without chuckles and I can appreciate that it's a quality product, roughly speaking, but more than anything it impresses upon me that America and England are very different countries, despite the superficial resemblance.

Hell's Kitchen - If Gordon Ramsay has any failings it is only that his generosity of spirit leads him to go easy on those who foolishly agree to be fired out of an allegorical cannon on one of his celebrity cheffing shows. Additionally, much of his televisual work wastes precious airtime pissing about with recipes, airtime which might be better spent showing Ramsay kicking some perpetrator of culinary idiocy down a fire escape or battering an uncooperative waiter about the head with a cricket bat through which twenty or thirty six-inch nails have been driven. Never mind. I never really liked this one so much as Kitchen Nightmares because I've never really cared whether Paul Daniels can make a soufflé, or that Noel Gallagher has just turned up, and - blinkey-blonkey-blimey - he's ordered the curry! This is like the English one except I have no idea who the celebrities are, and when Ramsay starts bollocking his team they salute him and bark sir, yes sir like in Full Metal Jacket.

Hey Jessie - Jessie is a Texas teenager who goes to babysit a bunch of wisecracking kids in New York City with presumably hilarious consequences. I've never actually seen the thing, just heard the annoying theme song blasting from the kid's room at Motorhead decibels over and over, one episode after another. Jessie herself is currently starring in a shampoo advert of some description, thus allowing me to report that she resembles a Hispanic Kerry Katona, but is significantly easier on the eye than such a description doubtless implies. Hopefully Jessie, as a Texan, spends most of the show either protecting the second amendment or threatening to secede from the union, but being as it's a Disney production I imagine it's the usual crap about brushing your teeth and not being mean to the weird kid, not even when that screwy-looking son of a bitch is effectively giving it away.

Ice Road Truckers - All I can remember of this one is footage of some guy wrapped up so as to endure subarctic temperatures stood forlornly upon a frozen river pointing at his truck, its front end sunk deep into the ice. 'My truck is in the ice,' he explains to the cameraman, and then we watch various attempts to pull the truck out of the ice. The most interesting thing about this one, at least to me, is that it's edited by an English bloke, and an English bloke I know because I was at college with him. I saw him last year and he explained that he landed the job because apparently Americans don't know how to edit reality television and regard English people as experts in the field. They should probably ask English people what they should make their reality shows about too while they're at it. Had they asked me, I could have told them that this one probably wasn't the greatest idea.

Jessica Jones - This is another Marvel thing. The character is somewhat after my time, although I gather there's a tenuous connection to the Purple Girl who used to be in the Alpha Flight comic book, which I used to quite enjoy. Her powers seem to be mainly to do with smart-arse one-liners and shagging, and apparently Doctor Who shows up in the later episodes. Comics sure have changed since I was a kid.

Keeping Up with the Kardashians - I saw about a minute of this once, and it was the one with the arse whining about something or other. I don't know who these people are or why they exist.

King of the Hill - I always loved this animated show, but I love it even more now that I live in Texas. When people ask me how my life now compares to how it was in England, I tell them that it's a lot like King of the Hill because it genuinely is, and as it happens, yes, I do know someone just like Boomhauer. It is my firm belief that King of the Hill may ultimately prove to be the greatest television show ever made.

Kitchen Nightmares - As with the English version, here Gordon Ramsay descends upon the eating establishments of fools in order to explain why no-one wants to eat their shit food. The high point of the English version was probably the complete knob who fancied himself an award-winning chef despite never having actually trained, and who was serving a hockey puck sized slice of black pudding on square plates drizzled with chocolate sauce as his signature dish. Ramsay naturally had him crying within about three minutes. It was amazing. Unfortunately the American version is less entertaining, because we don't like those sexual swearwords over here, never mind the sight of someone having their head kicked off by an irate Ramsay. Most of the venues upon which the lad descends seem to be either pizza places or burger joints, and whilst he nevertheless scares the living shit out of everyone involved as good as he ever did, I guess the really violent stuff just doesn't get broadcast. It's sort of like giving Pavarotti his own show on the condition that he doesn't sing. Also, there's sometimes a bit in which they all get together and pray out loud, usually something along the lines of dear God, please make it that so our restaurant stops being shit; and Ramsay joins in too, when really he should be stood to one side, mocking them all whilst smoking and drinking a can of Kestrel.

Leave it to Beaver - I'm not sure how I ended up watching an episode of this. It's a black and white thing from the fifties, the slow-moving adventures of a small, well-meaning child who finds himself embroiled in moderate scrapes with vaguely amusing consequences culminating in a heavy-handed message - you have to help your friends, that sort of deal. I'm not opposed to gentle television on principal, but it really makes you wonder how dull the rest of the schedule must have been during the era when this was a hit. Leave it to Beaver resembles early video art more than it resembles comedy.

Lilyhammer - This isn't a Sopranos spin-off although I get the feeling it wants to be, and the Jools Holland of Bruce Springsteen's band is easily as watchable here as he was playing Silvio Dante. The Scandinavian setting comes close to inspired, and the show only really falters when it really does pretend to be an episode of The Sopranos, getting Paulie in to play that priest, implausibly sending half the cast to New York and so on. Stick to the episodes with ice and snow and you won't go far wrong.

Lost - This was amazing for three or maybe four series, and then turned suddenly and dramatically to shit. New mysteries were piled on top of older, still unresolved puzzles, and it began to feel as though they were making it up as they went along for the sake of seeming weird and interesting like some goth drawing spiders on his own face before he goes to sign on. Particularly pointless was the killing off of Charlie the former Hobbit. It didn't quite do it for me as I'd always hated the character and didn't really care that he'd pegged it, so it felt like an ostentatious diversion from everyone having forgotten what the story was supposed to be. Charlie as a supposed Gallagher brother never really worked if, like me, you regard Oasis as the most worthless bands of more or less all time, and yet they still found a way to make him even more annoying with his dreary fixation on Clare and the baby, who became his equivalent of John Steinbeck's Lenny asking George to tell him about the rabbits.

Louie - Louis CK is presently my all-time favourite comedian, roughly speaking, and whilst this not-quite-autobiographical show isn't always what you might conventionally term funny, I think it stands as a testimony to his wit that he can come up with some of the most profoundly depressing material ever broadcast, and yet somehow it still feels like comedy, even when you want to slash your wrists afterwards.

Mad Men - I think I made it to about the sixth episode before I realised that I couldn't give a shit whether any of them lived or died, or what happened next. It probably could have done with a few jokes. Maybe it had a few jokes but I just didn't notice. The thrill of seeing a man smoking a ciggy on telly also wore off after a while.

Making a Murderer - This is a thoroughly depressing ten-part documentary about a supposedly innocent man being locked up in prison for eighteen years of his life, freed when it's finally proven that he didn't do it, then locked up again for a new crime he almost certainly didn't commit just as the state was about to say sorry. I say supposedly innocent for the sake of impartiality, but he looks innocent to me. Some have accused the programme makers of bias, but you might just as well say that all those World War II documentaries made Hitler look bad and there was a lot more going on that we don't know about. On a positive note, Making a Murderer at least shows that people still know how to make documentaries - contrary to what you might believe from a quick glance at the History Channel - but unfortunately this one is, as I say, profoundly depressing because it doesn't say much for the legal system.

Malcolm in the Middle - This was a prequel to Breaking Bad, and is probably the best thing any of these people have ever appeared in.

Maron - See Louie, but with an entirely different comedian, and again one who doesn't really do jokes. The episode with Danny Trejo is pure gold.

Middle, The - I still don't know what it's supposed to be the middle of, but never mind, and Malcolm is nowhere to be seen. Like Malcolm, Bob's Burgers and a thousand other fucking things, this is a comedy about a family with three children, a big one, a medium-sized one, and a little one. Despite the wearying familiarity of the premise, The Middle is sort of watchable because the actors are good and the jokes are funny, or at least superbly crafted - although it never quite loses the feeling of having been designed by committee.

Mighty B, The - My wife likes this one because the main character is called Bess, which is also my wife's name and is what the B stands for. This is another children's cartoon, but one of the good ones. It has a lot of energy. It's sort of like listening to three different Ramones albums all at the same time.

Mike and Molly - This is another sofa entrance hilarity comedy with the unique angle of there only being room for two on this sofa because Mike and Molly are both quite fat, which I suppose means they're jolly. I only saw about ten minutes of this, and most of the jokes seemed to be about cakes and how hard it is to not eat them, but it made me laugh a couple of times.

Modern Family - This is an odd one in that it does all the sort of things I tend to enjoy in a comedy, and doesn't bother with a laugh track, and it has obvious wit, and yet...

Munsters, The - Obviously the greatest situation comedy of all time (please disregard any previous claim I may have made to this effect) and superior to the Addams Family because the Munsters don't realise that they're monsters. They may as well have stopped making television shows after The Munsters. It has pretty much everything.

Must Love Cats - I don't remember much about this one aside from it being a reality show about a guy who visits people who own cats, and who sometimes sings songs about them - the cats I mean, not the owners. He has an acoustic guitar. I seem to recall one episode in which someone with a massive garden had enclosed the entire place in a vast Jurassic Park style cage with overhead walkways, all for their cat. It impressed me anyway.

My Cat from Hell - This is very similar to Must Love Cats, and the guy even carries a guitar case around as he visits cat owners. His name is apparently really Jackson Galaxy, and he used to be in some band or other, but now the guitar case is just full of cat toys. It's often fascinating, and Galaxy somehow manages to be both likeable and aggravating at the same time.

My Name is Earl - Along with The Sopranos, this was the greatest show ever made; and along with King of the Hill it's more or less as close as dammit to a description of how I find life in Texas. I don't yet have my hair cut into a mullet, and I don't drive a Camino, but otherwise it's more or less the same. Of all the cancellations ever to cruelly pluck decent shows from the starry firmament of our viewing, this has surely been the most bewildering and the most criminal.

Nanny 911 - I used to watch Supernanny - roughly speaking the English version of this - and found it sort of enjoyable in so much as any of those bullying shows wherein simpletons are reprimanded for their oafish ways are sort of enjoyable. Weirdly, the American version seems to staff itself from the exact same pool of English televisual nannies - at least one of whom I always found slightly bothersome due to her resemblance to an ex-girlfriend. Weirder still, these nannies seem to represent a Thunderbirds style task force answering the call of distressed parents unable to cope with their generally repellent offspring. They all live in a quaint English cottage - apparently their version of Tracy Island or Avengers Mansion - and each week the Overnanny draws their attention to a new case. The Overnanny is an ancient nannorial matriarch of such wisdom and power that she never actually leaves the cottage. She isn't formally identified as the Overnanny, so I'm just taking a guess with the name. Anyway, each week she bids that her teamsters do gaze forth upon that which is revealed in the mystic mirror of telling - usually footage of screaming toddlers flinging bowls of cereal at clueless parents; the nannies pull faces like unto the duck of disapproval and make tutting noises, and then the Overnanny decrees which of them has powers most suited to the challenge. Many Americans seem to have a weird and possibly unhealthy fixation with all things English. Apparently only we have the power to tell junior to shut the fuck up, clean his room, and stop acting like a cunt.

Nurse Jackie - Following whatever the hell happened at the end of the final series of The Sopranos, Carmela got a job in a hospital, changed her name to Jackie and started banging Father Phil who, by pure coincidence, has also undergone a complete change of identity and profession. She took a load of drugs for a few series, was sacked for taking drugs, then was reinstated, over and over so as to save having to change the name of the programme to either Nurse Zoe or Former Nurse Jackie. It was great while it lasted, but after she'd been sacked and reinstated the seventh or eighth time, the plausibility of the whole situation began to suffer, and it all turned to shit.

Office, The - I've only watched the first episode so far, and whilst it's clearly a quality product, I really can't get past it being a more or less word for word cover version of the English situation comedy starring Ricky Gervais and others. I liked the original a lot, so I find this karaoke act kind of strange, although I guess I'd be interested to see what happens in the later episodes, those made past the point at which they ran out of Gervais to recycle and had to generate their own material.

One Step - I've checked online and this is the name given to an advertising campaign for something called Prevnar 13, specifically to a commercial repeated with such frequency that it has come to seem more like a television show, and it's always a mad scramble to find the remote and hit the mute button when it comes on. American television commercials are weird. You might imagine them to be fairly slick, but the great majority appear home made, like those things you used to see at the cinema in the seventies - fancy a meal after the film? Then why not come to the Jade Pagoda conveniently situated in the high street and so on and so forth. Living in Texas, this means that half of the adverts I see involve a red-faced man shouting about trucks whilst stood in front of his car dealership. Generally more professional are the adverts for products designed to stop you dying of something, generally aimed at seniors and shown in the breaks during Wheel of Fortune; and these seem to go on for minutes and minutes, usually with somebody reading out a long list of legally prudent disclaimers - may cause drowsiness, may cause death, and even may increase severity of asthma symptoms, which turned out to be one possible side effect of a product otherwise promoted as a means of relieving asthma symptoms. Anyway, Prevnar 13 is some kind of jab which inoculates against a whole variety of conditions - so far as I can tell - and so the advertising runs with the gimmick of it being just one thing which is able to address many problems; and so we see footage of perky oldsters doing just one thing in order to illustrate the point - some guy cooks a single sprig of asparagus on his barbecue grill, a slightly aggravating woman purchases a single strawberry from her grocery store, and most annoying of all Dr. Russell from Space 1999 goes to the gym and does her single sit up. It probably isn't Dr. Russell from Space 1999, but the woman looks a bit like her except more smug and a lot older. She's got the leotard, the leg-warmers, all the shit. She unrolls her exercise mat - or whatever you call those things - and then does a single sit-up, her face bowling forward to fill the screen as she does so. She says, 'One,' out loud, counting her single sit-up, and then gets up and goes home. It's the expression on her face as she counts her single-action work out, a sort of half-smile with just a faint hint of superiority which asks and just what are you doing with your life, you fat fuck? It makes me want to kick in the screen, but I never do.

Orange is the New Black - Semi-autobiographical life in a women's prison and amazingly they managed to not screw it up, at least not yet. This one's right up there with The Wire and The Sopranos in my estimation.

Pair of Kings - Pair of Tossers would be more like it. Junior was briefly addicted to this show, and thus did I see a few more episodes than I would have liked, the number of episodes I would have liked to see being none at all. The premise is that a pair of wisecracking kids implausibly end up as rulers of an obscure presumably south-sea island, the kind where cars tend to be made out of bamboo with a couple of logs for wheels, like on the immeasurably superior Flintstones. This thing might have had some charm had it been made by Hal Roach back in the thirties, but it was made by Disney and ran from 2010 to 2013, so just how good do you think it could be?

Parks & Recreation - This one is a work of art - just beautiful. It's only failing is that Ron Swanson isn't a real person.

People's Court, The - The People's Court is a televised court presided over by a Judge who isn't actually a Judge so much as just some woman who makes decisions about what seems right. The cases brought before the court are usually things like when some bloke sells his car, but the car turns out to be shit, or somebody put their penis into an extra-marital vagina, or some guy owes twenty dollars and he doesn't think he should have to pay it. It's mostly minor stuff, and you can usually watch about three of these things before you begin to feel bad about yourself. A recent National Enquirer headline ran with something about People's Court being rigged, which I suppose would mean something to readers under the illusion of it being a real court, just like the one in which Steven Avery was found guilty of a crime he had no reason to commit. Talking of hysteria and the wisdom of the mob, some readers may have encountered facebook idiocy concerning sharia law and how entire cities in Englishland are now under sharia law because of Muslamic immigrants and political correctness innit. Aside from being untrue, I watched a documentary about sharia law as practiced in Islamic countries a while back, and the weird thing was that it actually seemed a lot like People's Court, so I'd say facebookers need to know what the fuck they're talking about before repeating such bollocks.

Phineas and Ferb - I have a feeling this is Disney getting down with the kids. It's animated in that sort of wacky angular post-Ren & Stimpy style favoured by production companies who've realised that three kids and a crime-solving dog will no longer cut it with today's sophisticated under-tens, and it follows the vaguely wacky adventures of a boy-child who invents things; but there's something unpleasantly wholesome about it, and the nagging hag of an older sister as stool pigeon and destroyer of all that is fun strikes even me as a bit sexist - and I couldn't ordinarily give a shit about that kind of thing.

Portlandia - Much that is terrible about the modern world, or at least its media image, apparently comes from Portland - twenty year-old men with full beards, breakfast cereal restaurants, bands called Ha Ha Tonka, multinational conglomerates attempting to pass themselves off as a Women's Institute knitting circle but with hippies, and adverts for the same soundtracked with corporate ukulele; and Portlandia takes the piss out of all that. The only problem is that it somehow seems to resemble the very thing it's taking the piss out of, or at least it does to me. These Americans can be so inscrutable at times.

Raising Hope - I get the impression that this was an attempt to remix My Name is Earl in such a way as to avoid cancellation. It has some of the Earl magic for sure, but steers just a little too close to sentimentality for my liking, although I like the funny-looking woman with the ukulele and a missing tooth. She's cute.

Real O'Neals, The - They're Irish, they have three kids, and one of them is a homosexual. I say they're Irish, but they're actually Irish-American, which isn't the same thing. No it isn't. Drinking Guinness and wearing a green hat with a shamrock printed on it is not the same as being from Ireland. I know actual real Irish people from Ireland, and most of them think you're fucking ridiculous, quite frankly. This show was probably okay, but I couldn't get past my own irritation, even despite the presence of the otherwise wonderful Martha Plimpton. Also, I'm not sure quite how they qualify as real given that this is a sitcom rather than a fly-on-the-wall documentary. I suppose they're real like The Real Ghostbusters were real, so I guess this is a meaning of the word real with which I am unfamiliar, specifically one which translates to not as good as the film. Sure enough, my impression of The Real O'Neals was that it is not as good as Bridget Jones' Diary, which is the worst film I can think of at the moment.

River Monsters - Junior presently spends most of his time attempting to impress people by relaying fascinating facts in a portentous voice resembling that of Doctor Doom as depicted in seventies animated superhero fare, usually the sort of fascinating facts no-one with half a brain would care less about - the life cycle of the world's most dangerous squid, the amazing stuff which you can get from Japanese vending machines and so on. Needless to say, he's a big fan of River Monsters in which some bloke relates folk tales of this week's reputed killer fish, describes just how terrified he is, locates something significantly less deadly which clearly isn't the thing he was looking for, and then concludes that perhaps we shall never know as the music swells to a predictable crescendo. The show would last about three minutes if you edited out all the embellishments, recaps, and associated horseshit.

Roseanne - I watched a few of these in England about a million years ago, and they seemed fairly funny. I saw a repeat more recently whilst living here, and it still seemed fairly funny. I still don't understand how Friends got made. I'm not saying Roseanne was some sort of comedy year zero, but Friends nevertheless seems like a backwards step by comparison.

Salem - I managed about ten minutes, but it was too much like listening to a Fields of the Nephilim album for my liking.

Simpsons, The - It may be well past its golden age, but it still beats most of the competition.

Six Feet Under - It wasn't quite The Sopranos, but Six Feet Under was still pretty darn good. It wasn't quite a comedy, but it had a sense of humour, and as such probably struck just about the right balance for what is essentially a soap opera based around a funeral parlour. I'll add extra points for it keeping up the pace right until the end, rather than tailing off into an implausibly shite treading water phase after the first three or four series as was the case with both Lost and Weeds.

Sons of Anarchy - I assumed this was some sort of post-apocalyptic deal but no, it's just a bunch of bikers, pretty much The Sopranos in piss-stained leathers with a chicken stapled to its jeans. They drink hard, they raise funds by illegal means, they ain't keen on the law, and they communicate exclusively in short gruff sentences excepting the point in each episode during which young Jax Teller reads a little more of his late father's unpublished memoirs and it briefly turns into The Waltons. It's kind of shit, but it's watchable.

Sopranos, The - I probably could have lived without quite so many dream sequences, but otherwise this was more or less the greatest show in television history, which I offer as scientifically verifiable fact rather than mere opinion. If you disagree, or if you're reading this with even so much as a twinge of now just hold on there a moment, stop reading right now and get yourself to the office of your nearest education authority because you need to start all over again at grade school level. People who don't like The Sopranos are just wankers, and useless wankers into the bargain. It's as simple as that.

SpongeBob Squarepants - Words seem inadequate as medium for the summary of just how great this show is. If you've just woken up from a long space voyage spent in suspended animation. SpongeBob is a yellow cuboid denizen of the deep who hangs around with a starfish and works at an undersea fast food outlet, and as such his adventures closely resemble the science-fiction novels of A.E. van Vogt. I'm not even sure I'd call it a children's show. It's kind of a thing in itself.

Super Mario Brothers Super Show, The - See Don't Do the Mario, Please... elsewhere on this blog.

Suspect - See Catfish, except lacking the generally entertaining presence of Max wossisname, and suffering from the problem that it's the exact same thing every week. Some person is worried that their friend or partner is moonlighting as either a prostitute or a stripper, but it turns out that they're just taking an evening class; and it's easier to call in a nosey television show than to simply ask what the fuck is up with you never being around and shit? The show is further hamstrung by the leaden presence of co-presenter iO Tillet Wright - and yes, that's how we spell it with the first letter in lower case - who is named after one of Jupiter's moons and reminds me of more or less everyone I ever crossed the road to avoid back in 1987. She is the human embodiment of the decision to wear a fedora with a leather jacket whilst playing a trumpet in Camden Market. I'm sure she's a delightful person, but she makes me want to buy Whitesnake albums and eat the raw meat of something I've killed with my own bare hands.

Toddlers and Tiaras - This is another reality show in so much as that it comprises footage of stuff which actually happened, but in all other respects it's what Heironymous Bosch would be doing if he was alive now and working for whatever lame channel thought this shit was a good idea. Every week we meet a different group of psychotic morons and watch as they tart up their five year-old like a hooker and have her compete in alarming beauty pageants. I don't know if Gary Glitter is particularly a fan of this show, but I wouldn't be too surprised if that were the case.

Total Drama Island - Junior has watched some seriously headachey shit over the years, but this one makes most of them look like one of Harold Pinter's less eventful plays produced in a Trappist monastery. Total Drama Island is animated in that vague sort of animé Pink Panther style which seems very popular with the younger generation, and purports to be an animated reality show, sidestepping the point that the only saving grace of most reality television is its spontaneity. Total Drama Island works if you regard the word awesome as a viable humourous punchline regardless of the context, or you piss yourself laughing when something is described as swag, or when an observation is prefixed with the word hashtag, as though all human experience is one big Twitter feed. For the rest of us it's just screechy zero-ideas shite which doesn't need to exist, and it was probably written by a computer.

Trailer Park Boys - I saw one of these and can recall having received the impression of it being just the sort of thing I might like, but that was four years ago and I still haven't got around to watching a second episode. I guess that must tell you something.

Ugly Betty - As everybody in the universe knows, Ugly Betty began life as Yo Soy Betty, La Fea, a Colombian telenovela about a right old munter attempting to make it in the fashion biz, and the Salma Hayek version is just one of numerous regional variations. Less well known is that Yo Soy Betty, La Fea wasn't that amazing. At least I didn't think so, and assuming I was watching the Colombian one rather than some regional variation. It just looked like your average telenovela with endless scowling, leering, heavy breathing, heaving bosoms, dramatic exits, and not much in the way of chuckles - not that there's anything wrong with telenovelas, but Ugly Betty is significantly better, just as anyone who ever covered the Velvet Underground will logically improve upon the original.

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt - I didn't watch enough of this to be absolutely certain of how she qualifies as unbreakable, but I suspect it's probably her relentlessly perky disposition thrown into sharp contrast by life on the mean streets of the big city. It's a comedy written by Tina Fey, which probably tells you all you need to know. If you piss yourself laughing every time Tina Fey wrinkles her nose and pulls that I'm just a little bit quirky face, then this may well be the show for you. Personally I thought it was shite.

Uncle Grandpa - This is another Cartoon Network children's animation which tries far too hard to be weird, hence the name, and probably the fact that I can't remember the first thing about it beyond how entertained I wasn't. SpongeBob has a lot to answer for.

Waltons, The -  I know it's schmaltzy, wholesome enough to have someone's eye out, and features writing so heavy handed as to make your average episode of Scooby Doo resemble the work of Jorge Luis Borges, but Goddammit I loves me some Waltons, and so do you, unless you've got something wrong with you. Even my mother likes The Waltons. Sometimes you just have to swallow your pride and accept that nothing good ever came from attempts to reinvent the potato.

Weeds - Weeds was amazing up until they accidentally burnt the entire subdivision to the ground, forcing the cast to relocate to a house near the Mexican border whilst Nancy took a job in a shop which, by pure unlikely coincidence, housed one end of a tunnel leading to the home of some hunky cartel dude. I'm not sure how many series that was, but I think it was about three, and then it all turned to shit. It felt as though they were just throwing any old thing into the mix in the hope of something working - Nancy shags the cartel bloke then everyone else, Kevin Nealon finds a suitcase full of heroin at a circus and has to flog it all before the clown notices that his stash is missing, an alien saucer lands and they come in search of a truly mellow legal high blah blah blah... It just became hard to care after a while.

What Not to Wear - Clothes-horsey woman and a bloke bearing an unsettling resemblance to my wife's boss coax tattooed hoochie-mommas into not dressing like they're still fifteen and auditioning for an Insane Clown Posse video shoot. As makeover shows go, this one seems harmless and fairly watchable, I guess, if you like that sort of thing.

Wheel of Fortune - The host is a million years old and apparently a font of all sorts of horribly Republican opinions - according to the headline of something I didn't bother reading on facebook - but really, who gives a shit? It's a game show and it does it's job without shouting at you, and is as such significantly less headachey than Family Feud. It's also the closest America comes to Countdown, which I sort of miss, so that's nice too. My only real criticisms of Wheel of Fortune are that having the contestants engaged in continuous applause, even apparently applauding their own often unremarkable contributions, makes them seem a bit lobotomised; and secondly, those words and phrases. For those who have never seen it, Wheel asks contestants to pick letters and guess at a phrase or term denoted only by blank spaces on the quiz board with a clue given by categories such as around the house or sayings. The problem is that some of the categories just seem a bit ridiculous - things being one of the less helpful examples. Anxiety disorder, pearls before swine, and stegosaurus cheese alienation could all legitimately be regarded as things. In fact everything in the universe is a thing by some definition, so I don't really know why they bother with that aspect; and then we have clues leading to popular phrases such as people who dwell in glass houses shouldn't hurl stones or a rolling rock doesn't gather moss, or even living creatures like beautiful birds flying south. I know it's a petty grievance, but I really feel that whoever sets the puzzles needs to get their shit sorted out before the show ends up with contestants required to guess random sequences of letters, because that would be pointless.

Wire, The - The Wire was amazing, and it probably says something about me that I prefer television serials which aspire to be books, or rather to work in the same way as a good novel, as was a stated intention of this one. What it says about me is that I am a fully grown man. That's how I see it.

Year Without a Santa Claus, The - This is an animated children's thing from 1974 made by someone called Rankin-Bass. It seems to enjoy nearly legendary status over here, and yet I'd never heard of it. I guess maybe the English TV stations didn't buy everything America had for sale in the seventies after all. Anyway, I'm not actually sure what happens in this as I didn't see it all the way through, but it involves various reindeer and a character called the Heat Miser who has a dualistic counterpart in the form of the Snow Miser. Both of them sing their own big band numbers, which sound like they were written by the Foetus bloke. This was some seriously weird shit.

Reading Stuff Out Loud

One morning last summer, Holly failed to turn up for breakfast. Holly is our youngest cat. Our cats tend to spend summer nights outside, patrolling the neighbourhood and doing cat stuff before returning at dawn to meow their heads off at the prospect of a bowl of cat food; except for Holly on this one occasion. I tried not to worry because they don't always all show up at breakfast, and when they go missing they have thus far always come back.

Holly turned up in the late afternoon. I opened the door to let her in and noticed that she seemed subdued, which could result either from having found herself trapped overnight in some neighbour's garage, or maybe just because it was a baking hot afternoon; but I noticed that she was hopping along on three legs, and worse - one back paw dangled from the ankle like an earring dangles from its lobe.

'Meow,' she said pitifully.

The vet told us that the leg was broken clean through. It could be set, but he could give no guarantee that it would return to full function afterwards, and it would probably be expensive. Thankfully the forecast was in error regarding Holly losing the use of that leg, although they were right about the expense. I could have flown back to England at least six times with the money which got sucked into that vet's bill.

'Damn,' I said to myself as I sat staring at a screenful of text much like this one. 'I really need this shit to start paying out.'

I'd been paid for the novel published by Obverse in 2013, and since then there had been bits and pieces here and there - mostly paintings done for the covers of other people's books; but I was conspicuously still some way short of buying a yacht, or even paying to fix the leg of a small cat. Maybe I should be reading this stuff before an audience, I told myself, recalling that it was the spoken performances of Jello Biafra, Henry Rollins, David Sedaris and others which had got me writing autobiographical material in the first place. The big money is in performance - that's what everyone always says, plus that's how you shift units, units in this case mostly being my print-on-demand books. Were I ten years younger I would have written to the local radio station, maybe even to NPR saying look, you've never heard of me but that doesn't mean a thing. I'm the negative universe David Sedaris in that I'm English, I'm over here, and I'm not gay. I'm hilarious and you need to give me my own weekly show, and to pay me for it. This had been my promotional strategy at least since when, at the age of sixteen, I wrote a letter to Fetish Records explaining that I would probably one day be at least as famous as Throbbing Gristle, so can I have a record contract, please - oh and send me a blank tape so I can send some of my music for you to listen to. I can't afford blank tapes because I'm just a kid at the moment. Now approaching fifty years of age I had learned to accept that my promotional strategy was cranky and off-putting, and I needed to start at the beginning.

I would accrue valuable experience reading my shit out to a live audience, to any live audience I could get to stand still long enough, and eventually I would end up on either stage or the wireless with a regular pay-check, droning on about that time when me and Sean Downham nicked some penny chews from the Goose Lane newsagent in Lower Quinton as an aside to whatever memory I had decided to administer to my many millions of bewildered followers as an anaesthetic that week; and I would have money to fly back to England on a more regular basis, and vet's bills would no longer be a problem.

I nosed around online and decided that open mic poetry readings were probably the way to go given that no-one would be required to pay admission and there would be no expectation of my being any good. I had no intention of reading anything I would ever call poetry, but it seemed a better idea than attempting to pass myself off as a stand-up comedian, that being the other option.

Pretzels - what the hell are those all about? Am I right, guys? Am I right? Goddamn pretzels, man - all weird and shit.

It just wasn't me.

There was an open mic night, an event called the Blah Blah Blah Poetry Spot held at the Deco Pizzeria here in San Antonio on the first and third Wednesday of each month. It seemed as good a place to start as any. My wife drove past the venue a few nights before, to be sure of where it was and so that we could take a look. It was a free-standing building in part of San Antonio characterised by striking art deco architecture. The venue seemed decent, so I dug my old minidisc recorder out from a box in the garage and tried to remember how the thing worked because I'd need to record the performance.

I'd had a couple of years worth of weekly writings gathered together as a print-on-demand paperback called An Englishman in Texas - after the blog upon which the essays first appeared - and I was going to read something from this to my as yet notional audience, something short which might hopefully get a few laughs in the right places. That was the theory. My printer is of the kind which refuses to work when a new printer cartridge is inserted whilst insisting that normal service will be resumed just as soon as I insert a new printer cartridge, so my printing off anything I'd written on sheets of A4 for recital before a live audience wasn't going to happen. This was a worry because I'd kept the font used in my paperback edition of An Englishman in Texas pretty damn small so as to cram it all in and to keep the size down to a manageable six-hundred or so pages. The book resembles a small housebrick but is easy enough to read in bed providing I'm wearing glasses. I would read from it on stage, or whatever was going to serve for a stage.

I spent a couple of days wandering around the house reading aloud from the paperback, timing myself so as to deduce what I could get away with. To my surprise and mild horror I found it took me a little over three minutes to read a page of my own text, meaning that I was pretty much limited to essays of three pages at most when the great majority of what I've written runs to at least five. I decided I might be able to justify four or five pages if it seemed likely that the material would go down well - keeping in mind that this depended on my ability to judge both the quality of my own writing and the tastes of the people who would comprise my first audience.

Well, not my first audience. I suppose, for the sake of argument, my first audience in this respect had been the teachers who judged the impromptu reading competition I entered when our school had some sort of activities week. I wasn't particularly interested in impromptu reading but I put my name down because I assumed it would be a piece of piss. It wasn't. It was nerve racking, and as I stuttered and stumbled through some unfamiliar and fairly dull text, I heard my own voice as though it belonged to someone else, and I realised that I sounded like a gurgling moron.

More recently - or at least back in the early nineties - I'd played guitar and sang in front of paying audiences as a member of the Dovers and then Academy 23, and I'd even begun to enjoy the experience before I decided I was fed up of being in bands and jacked it all in. The point here is that I'm not unaccustomed to performance. I suspected that reading prose wouldn't be quite the same, but assumed that it couldn't be too different.

When the day came I got in training by charging my discman with my most muscular Rollins Band CD for the morning bike ride; then by reading the piece I'd selected from An Englishman in Texas over and over once I was home; and then by changing my mind when I realised that Geoff was too long, I couldn't do a Tyneside accent, and in any case no-one would get the references.

The evening came and we drove over to the Deco Pizzeria. Bess stayed inside and shared a pizza with the boy, and I went out onto the patio which, judging by the speakers and assembly of people with a whiff of the poetic about them, was to serve as our venue. It was Wednesday the 19th of August and was therefore a warm evening what with this being Texas. I bought a beer and took a seat at a free table. The tables around me were strewn with sheets of paper, notebooks, tablets and the like, anything which could serve as a vehicle for text. It was still only seven in the evening. The Blah Blah Blah Poetry Spot was scheduled to begin at eight, but I was early. Everyone seemed young, or at least seemed mostly younger than myself by a decade or two. I could turn my head and watch Bess and the kid through the window enjoying their pizza. She had told me that she didn't want to cramp my style, or something of the sort.

The place fills and people hop from one table to another as old friends do, excited and excitable. They compare notes and discuss who will read what, pieces they've been working on. I sit alone at my table trying hard not to think of Charles Bukowski recorded on a VHS video I once saw, steaming drunk and describing how he walked out of a university when someone asked him to read his poetry. Hungover, he throws up and collapses on the grass outside the building.

'Look at that old man,' says a student he identifies as one of the little birdies. 'He's really fucked up.'

This is different because not only am I not a raging alcoholic but I don't even like the beer, and yet somehow the situation feels similar. Everybody is young and full of beans, and everyone knows each other, but there's this old dude sat at a table pretending to read his own vanity published book, and the old dude is myself. The next table is occupied by a young woman in her twenties with horn-rimmed spectacles and a fifties hair style. She leafs through pages of text, scowling and making notes with a ball-point pen. She looks ready to give some section of society or other a hard time using just poetry, and I tell myself that appearances can be deceptive.

At least I hope so given that I'm beginning to feel like the enemy, the white man, the narc, the informer, the undercover Republican dressed as a plantation owner in Stetson and guayabera, and I'm sat alone and friendless, just monitoring the situation with my own book before me on the table like it's a bible. I am in a minority, and this reminds me that white males who describe themselves as such are always, without exception, arseholes.

My fears are reduced when a young black guy approaches with a clipboard. He is one of the organisers and he is somehow able to tell why I am here. Amazingly, he recognises me as a type. He asks what I intend to read, and doesn't seem to mind when I tell him that it isn't actually poetry.

'How long?' he asks.

'About ten minutes,' I tell him, hopefully.

He explains what will happen. There will be an hour or so of open mic followed by a group performance which has already been scheduled. I will be on later rather than sooner because ten minutes is long compared to what some have planned. He will call me up front when my time comes.

We begin.

It's all poetry, maybe performance poetry if you want to split hairs. Some is read from iPhones or tablets, and some from memory. Everyone is either in their early twenties or younger. Everyone has stage presence and confidence, and performances are peppered with nods and in-jokes shared amongst the other poets of the audience. There is a lot of laughing and shouting. A young Latino guy reads a poem about his genuine appreciation of low-riders and other stereotypically Mexican passions, things his supposedly more-enlightened friends somehow believe should be beneath him. It's funny and it's pretty good. In fact most of what gets read is good, or sounds good. Two school age girls take to the microphone. They look like characters from a Japanese cartoon series. They speak alternate lines of a single piece, call and response, addressing the phantom of some censorious school principal. We're going to wear our short skirts regardless, they tell him, then share cruel laughter and ask why he was looking and whether he liked what he saw.

I sigh and think of Hank Hill.

Young people know everything there is to be known.

My time is here.

'He's come all the way from England to read for us tonight!'

I suppose it isn't actually untrue. I stand and shuffle towards the mic like the fat old man about to set these beatniks and homosexuals right, and to tell them to vote Republican. My copy of An Englishman in Texas feels as fat as a bible in my hand, a self-published symbol of my redundancy.

Good evening, children. Allow me to regale you with some most entertaining tales of my days as a younger man.

It turns quiet so I introduce myself. 'As you can probably tell by my accent, I'm not from around here, so I hope you can actually understand what I'm saying because a lot of people have trouble with it.' This is pre-emptive, and comes from how often I'm asked to repeat myself.

'Iced tea,' I will say, and the waitress boggles and looks at my wife as though hoping she will be able to translate whatever language I'm speaking. I don't believe my accent can be so out of place as to mangle just those two syllables beyond recognition, so I suppose it's simply that they don't expect to hear so unfamiliar an accent in Texas.

I am dimly aware that I am talking horseshit, but I can't quite stop myself, and my accent now sounds like a caricature even to me. I read an essay called The Mysteries of the Pyramids which was written after someone tried to involve Bess and myself in a pyramid scheme. I've chosen this one because it contains jokes, spends some time making light of my being a foreigner, and identifies the relentless pursuit of wealth as essentially idiotic. I briefly give some account of which English terms I'm not going to bother translating into American, whilst wondering whether such an explanation is really necessary.

Then I take a deep breath and read, leaning into the text and finding myself surprised by how my voice sounds amplified through the speakers. To my own ears I sound as though I'm impersonating John Peel or maybe Stuart Home, which I suppose is better than sounding as though I'm impersonating David Sedaris or Henry Rollins. It's difficult to read in the low lighting of the patio, but I'm coping and somehow I manage to keep a steady pace without screw-ups; and I even enjoy it a little. I like how the words sound. I like what I've written.

I stumble briefly as I begin a paragraph I'd already decided to leave out, and there are a few further hiccups, but I get through the thing in just under twelve minutes. 'I hope that wasn't too painful,' I say as I finish with the intonation of Johnny Rotten asking if you ever get the feeling you've been cheated at the last Sex Pistols gig. 'Thanks for being tolerant,' I add, because I have the impression that most of them were listening, even if they didn't get the jokes or didn't think they were so funny as to warrant laughter.

Thanks for being tolerant. Even as I say it I am faintly disgusted by my own peculiar need to apologise, my apparent desire for approval. If they enjoyed it that's great, but I don't need people half my age to stamp my card or tell me I did okay. I already know that I did okay.

There's a smattering of applause, ramped up somewhat by the compère, the black guy I spoke to earlier. 'He's flown a long way to spit for you guys,' he tells the audience, but he's still calling me Mr. Lawrence. I sit feeling vaguely dissatisfied, not with myself so much as the circumstances and I can't quite say why. The Mysteries of the Pyramids seemed to go down reasonably well, but somehow I can't take pleasure from it. Maybe next time...

The next time is the 2nd of September. Two weeks have passed and Bess has dropped me off so once again I'm alone and watching everyone hop from one table to another as old friends do, excited and excitable. They compare notes and discuss who will read what, pieces they've been working on. Again I don't feel nervous, not exactly. This is just something I'm doing and it's the waiting which is the worst part, that and the waiter failing to bring me a beer. I'm English so I'm accustomed to buying drinks from a bar, and I'm not accustomed to a waiter who comes to your table to take an order. You know where you stand with the English system, but this guy took my order nearly an hour ago. I've seen him three times since then, and on each occasion he's caught my eye, pulled a face to show that he's realised he has forgotten to bring me a beer, and then still failed to deliver. I consider the possibility of him bringing a beer the moment I go inside to buy one at the bar, and the possibility of losing my table, and I also consider that I don't actually want a beer, that I'm just passing the time.

The evening grows dark, the readings begin, and at last I'm back on. There are a few supportive whoops. Some people seem to remember me from before. I begin with an explanation, recalling how on the previous occasion I stood before them as some fat old white bloke whining about how his previous girlfriend didn't understand him, and I tell them that I was very much conscious of this. 'That really wasn't my intention,' I explain, 'and were it otherwise, I kind of hope a few of you might throw things at me and tell me to shut the fuck up.'

Amazingly there is laughter, and I get the impression that they are on my side, but the problem is that by now it's too dark for me to read the tiny print of my paperback copy of An Englishman in Texas. I've purchased a reading light from the supermarket, a tiny LED on the end of a flexible armature which you clip to the top of the page, but the light it casts is too feeble to make a difference. This is why everyone else reads from iPhones and tablets.

'Ugh - can I get some sort of light? This is ridiculous.'

A young Latina who could quite easily be my granddaughter illuminates the screen of her phone and holds it over my shoulder, allowing me to read Tin of Doom, the account of a previous girlfriend who didn't understand me.

I've picked Tin of Doom because it's much shorter than The Mysteries of the Pyramids and is much simpler, a basic comic account of self-involved idiocy. It's also the one essay which has been named as a favourite amongst those who have read my stuff on a number of occasions. It's a crowd pleaser, and this time everyone laughs in the places I expect them to laugh. It does its job, and I take pleasure from the telling. It feels less presidential address, more rock 'n' roll.

I finish and savour the applause, then return to my table and phone my wife, who comes to pick me up. I feel buoyed up and powerful, like I've stepped off the stage after a great gig.

Two weeks later I am indisposed, it being the day before my birthday, and then the 7th of October comes around and I realise I can't face another reading. I'm entirely happy with the material I have, but even when it's well received I've realised that I don't actually care one way or the other. I don't need the approval. Then there's the waiting around, sat on my own at a table trying to work out how to get hold of a beer I don't really want when I'd much rather be at home. It's tedious and there's no-one to talk to with whom I could have any sort of meaningful conversation, or even a mildly amusing one. I've never really been a social animal, and I'm way out of my depth. There will be other, better opportunities, I decide.

The cast comes off Holly's leg after about a month. It's been tough because she's had to have the cast replaced at the beginning of each week, each visit somehow costing a couple of hundred dollars. Then we have to detain her in a little cat tent to keep her from jumping up onto anything, and all the while she's trying to get the cast off, and she obviously isn't happy about any of this. Eventually she somehow manages to chew through the thing, plaster, bandages, plastic armature and all. She seems to be getting around okay, so we decide to forego taking her back to the vet and coughing up another couple of hundred dollars. She gets on fine, although her leg now projects backwards when she sits, straight out as though she's enacting Christina's World, the painting by Andrew Wyeth.

So Holly is okay. We managed without the revenue tsunami I hoped I might eventually generate by the power of my words; and whilst the readings remain part of some remote and poorly defined ambition, I suspect there is a better way of doing it. Eventually I will find out how.

Download poor quality but nevertheless free MP3 file of my first droning live reading here.