Temperature Rising

I'm back in England, and as usual I haven't been particularly looking forward to it or to the disruption of my daily Texan existence. Also as usual, it turns out that the thing I haven't been particularly looking forward to is the flight, not so much being in the air, but the bullshit and misdirection of airports, the stressful automated transactions which always inevitably go wrong for my discomfort and inconvenience, and spending up to twenty-four hours of my life in constant motion; but aside from these aspects, it's mostly okay - as I always seem to forget.

I'm at Heathrow with just a single National Express coach left to catch, the final leg of my Tolkienesque quest. As usual, the first thing I've done is to purchase tobacco. I don't ordinarily smoke and have accordingly developed a superpower by which, should I be driven to do so by anything stressful, I can smoke my way through a twenty-five gram pouch of tobacco then simply quit without having to think about smoking again until the next time, assuming there'll be a next time. Practically this means that I smoke, on average, for about three weeks of the year and don't miss it for any of the remaining forty-nine; and two of those three weeks usually occur in England because I don't like flying and I don't like waiting around, which I have to do a great deal when catching planes or coaches.

I pop into the WHSmith kiosk situated in Terminal Three, as usual. Strangely this has become a routine. The pouch of tobacco costs me £34 but I pay up because I really, really need a fag.

'Has it gone up in price?' I ask the small boy working the till, trying hard not to seem like some indignant expat gammon raging that you couldn't make it up!

'It has,' he explains, 'but it's airport prices too.'

'It was about a tenner this time last year,' I whimper plaintively, whilst trying to keep from sounding like I think it's his fault.

I go to stand outside the terminal building where there's a designated smoking area. I think about the sheer improbability of a complete fucking clown like Boris Johnson having become Prime Minister, and I think about my £34 worth of tobacco, and I look around half expecting to see someone pushing a wheelbarrow full of money into a bakery. The last time I came back to England, my initial unwelcome shock was provided by the headlines of newspapers on sale in the very same branch of WHSmith, mostly crowing over Brexit with creaking, witless puns such as SEE EU LATER or DOVER AND OUT. There's always something.

I take a coach to Coventry, then a taxi from the bus station to my mother's place in Earlsdon. She is now having trouble getting around, finds it difficult without a stick, and has had a stair lift installed. This follows on from a series of medical complaints of mysterious composition which began with an email amounting to I don't want you to worry but I think I've had a stroke. Thankfully, what medical diagnoses she has been given have at least confirmed that it wasn't a stroke, and neither was it anything in the general vicinity of cancer; so despite everything, the situation is at least not quite so terrible as I'd feared. I'd anticipated the beginning of the end, my mother seeming abruptly and dramatically two decades older than she was this time last year with a house miraculously transformed into the set of Steptoe and Son, neither of which have turned out to be the case.

Each night, we watch the evening news on Channel 4. I haven't really seen television news in over a year, more or less since my last visit. I avoid it at home in Texas because it clashes with Wheel of Fortune and features a depressing level of focus on American politics, which is never anything sunny. My wife and myself occasionally watch Eyewitness News on KENS5, but only because it precedes Wheel of Fortune and we sometimes want to know what the weather is doing; but otherwise it doesn't really count as news, mostly being gurgling horseshit about basketball.

My perception of what's going on in the United Kingdom, is therefore usually subject to distortion. For example, back in July, 2018, one of my neighbours posted on Next Door, our neighbourhood forum, giving account of her visit to London, which had coincided with that of Trump. Don't worry, she reassured us, the Brits love our President. I know there were some protesters, but I'd say there were about two-hundred of them at the most, so don't believe what the liberal media has been telling us. The liberal media - and a few of my facebook friends who had been on those same marches - estimated the number as being at least tens of thousands. I mentioned this but the subject was subsequently closed because I'd brought politics into it. The point is that what little I know is mostly seen through a funny-shaped keyhole.

I spend some of my time in England with my dad, and whilst he hardly mentions Brexit - perhaps having finally realised that we're never going to see eye to eye on this subject - his general fear of reality expresses itself in other ways. Whilst out walking, there are a couple of points at which he somehow steers the conversation around to the history of the environment. Our climate is now very different to what it was in prehistoric times, he explains as though this will be news to me. He doesn't quite get so far as to deny climate science, but it feels as though that's where he's heading. Later, as we wander around Coventry city centre with my Aunt Lynda - presently visiting from Australia - I hear him conclude some muttered discourse by telling her that England is full up. Later still, Mary - who would have been his third wife but for the fact that he didn't want to get married again - tells me that what she likes about Donald Trump is that he says what he's thinking.

Channel 4 News therefore comes as quite a shock to my system because I'm not accustomed to discussion of climate change as something which is absolutely, definitely happening right now; and  I'm not accustomed to discussion wherein angry numbskulls who don't understand stuff aren't steering the conversation. So there's coverage of the Extinction Rebellion protests, very much impressing upon me a sense of scale, and just how many people are genuinely pissed off by how things are going. There's coverage of glacial retreat, green valleys which were filled with compacted ice just ten years ago. There's coverage of coastal towns and villages abandoned as sea levels rise, both in Wales and Rhode Island.

It's horrifying, but at the same time it's kind of uplifting to realise that people are actually talking about this stuff, and a lot of people, and people who can string a fucking sentence together without having to pull a rolled up Daily Express from their back pocket and have another look at the headline. Channel 4 News additionally visits a Swedish plant which sucks carbon out of the atmosphere; the message being that, contrary to the received wisdom, the technology exists. Rendering the planet unfit for human habitation is now something in which we have options. We could make a start on undoing the damage right now; or we could bow to the shitheaded edicts of people who demand that there be two sides to every story when they can't even get their own arguments straight.

Against the usual odds, I return from England feeling better about the world, because I return with a better understanding of the shape it's in, and a significantly better appreciation of how many people actually give a shit. On my last day in England, the Supreme court essentially tells Boris Johnson to go fuck himself, and then later in the evening I learn that impeachment proceedings are underway back in the US, at long fucking last. It feels as though we're coming to our collective senses. It feels as though we're finally getting to claw back some ground from the shitheads.

Eyewitness News

Our local news programme is broadcast by KENS5 and is called Eyewitness News, or at least I think that's how it works in so much as that I assume KENS5 is the name of the station. It seems to alternate with CBS. We get the CBS national news before six, and then the local stuff afterwards on the same channel, up until half past - at which point the immeasurably more informative Wheel of Fortune comes on. Our anchorman is usually Jeff Brady, distinguished by his eyebrows being a different colour to the rest of his hair, like Max Clifford; and like Max Clifford, he's a white guy. All of the news team are white, apart from a few unusually pallid Latinos. It still strikes me as odd that here in San Antonio, a city wherein a mere 40% of the populace are anything other than Hispanic, a city wherein most kitchen sinks have three taps - or faucets if you really must - hot, cold, and Cholula sauce - and yet our news is brought to us by the whitest people you've ever seen. Last week we had a light brown guy vaguely resembling Barack Obama sitting in for Jeff, who was presumably otherwise indisposed, but today we're back with Jeff.

Except I'm not because I've missed the first minute, so I turn on in the middle of a news report brought to us by Henry Ramos. Some kid has been shot. We focus on the boy's father for a little longer than seems comfortable. He is distraught, in tears and rocking back and forth saying that his boy was amazing, over and over.

'He was amazing,' he says. 'He was amazing. He was amazing.'

The police are claiming that there is some discrepancy between the evidence and the father's statement. In the house they have found three handguns, an AR15 - which by the way stands for army rifle - a shotgun, and more than fifty live rounds of ammunition. Maybe the guy was protecting this innocent weaponry from liberals and other people who hate America.

The next minute, we're into the weather. Bill Taylor seems to be on the television all the time. He may even be his own channel by this point. He's one of those big grinning wardrobe shaped men who walks like a crab and seems to have been modelled on John Wayne. His grin reveals a large gap dividing his two front teeth, and his speech is often peppered with cornball jokes of the kind you see in old shows such as Leave it to Beaver. The weather has been record breaking, although which record it has broken this time is left unstated so maybe it's a figure of speech. Anyway, there was a storm last night and it's been raining a lot. Bill warns us that the water level of the San Antonio river is rising, which is what tends to happen when it rains around here. Bill shows us footage of rainfall and pictures of water. He grins and flaps his arms and cracks jokes, but he really could have just left it at it's been raining a lot.

We return to the main desk. Jeff talks about his experience of it having rained a lot, and then we go to Sharon Ko for a traffic report. It's been raining a lot so there's a lot of water on the roads and highways, and Sharon shows us footage of what that looks like in the hope that it will inspire us to take care when driving. It doesn't rain much in our part of Texas, but when it rains, it rains a lot and so the rivers fill up and there is water on the roads and we all have to drive carefully. That's how it works.

Three minutes in and we inevitably go to the subject of the Final Four, with the guy who resembles Barack Obama now relegated to reporting from somewhere downtown. The Final Four is some kind of major basketball event which has taken over the city. Everyone is coming to San Antonio to see it, and everyone is excited apart from me. There will be live bands and everything. The Obama guy asks Dan Gavitt what makes San Antonio such a great city in which to host the Final Four. I don't actually know who Dan Gavitt is, but here's his answer:

'Some of it is the history of the tournament here. Some of it is the culture of this great place. I mean certainly, you know, the river walk, proximity to the Alamo Dome, hotels… It's such a convenient place for everyone to attend the Final Four. It's special.'

So there you have it. While Dan explains, text runs along the bottom edge of the television screen, briefly referring to news items either less important or less local: President Trump has done something or other, there have been shootings, something about a mosque in Canada, then cures for cancer, and a claim made that social media is making America look bad in the eyes of the rest of the world.

Regardless, we're still concerned with sport sport sport sport sport, and now specifically the news that Trevone Boykin has been arrested, and that's really his name. He's some big cheese football player and he was born in Mesquite, Texas. To further establish the theme of local boy made good then more recently less good, we are told that he was arrested right here in San Antonio back in 2015 for assaulting one of our very own cops. This time he has tried to choke his girlfriend and has broken her jaw, which we can see from the footage of her trying to speak through a swollen face.

Go Seahawks!

At six minutes past, we return to the traffic. A woman stands blue-screened over footage of traffic crawling along our major highways, one scene of the same thing after another. We can see an ambulance on the hard shoulder in the final scene, lights flashing.

'There's been another accident on I-35,' our woman tells us, presumably having just noticed it on the monitor, off camera.

So that's what those flashing light van things are for.

Jeff promises that we'll be curing diabetes right after these messages. The screen is a montage of burgers, fries, tacos, and all manner of greasy food. My guess is that someone will be telling us how this sort of food is bad for us, particularly if we don't want to catch diabetes.

The messages are a trailer for Wheel of Fortune, then one for Neighborhood Eats, a morning show in which some guy checks out different diners and eating places right here in San Antonio. All the trailers I've seen for the show seem to feature him eating burgers.

There's a facebook group dedicated to this same thing called Eat in SA, but I got tired of the discussion about burgers.

Hey! I had a really great burger at this place the other night.

San Antonio has many great restaurants and eating places with cuisine from all over the world, and as you might expect given the cultural composition of the general populace, some of the Mexican places are so good that I'd happily bear arms for them should it ever be required; and yet there's somehow still people seeking that elusive perfect lump of ground beef in a fucking bun. My position on this is that whilst a decent burger can be nice every once in a while, it's basically children's food and is as such fairly limited. In a city where you could be eating the mole poblano served at Guajillos on the corner of 410 and Blanco, if you're still looking for the perfect burger, then frankly you're a fucking idiot, to my way of thinking.

The Neighborhood Eats trailer is followed by commercials for Champion AC, World Car Nissan, Conn's Home Plus, and Chevrolet. We're nine minutes in.

Next up is Real Men Wear Gowns, a regular feature of Eyewitness News dedicated to men's health, although usually covering health issues which apply to more or less everyone. Tonight we're looking at men's diabetes, or diabetes as it is also known.

'We know there is no cure for diabetes,' Jeff tells us, 'but researchers right here in San Antonio are working to change that,' and so follows the report from Jeremy Baker, who reminds me a lot of Kenny, Earl's gay friend in My Name is Earl. Kenny - or rather Jeremy - introduces footage of Mr. Rodriguez who presently suffers from men's diabetes. We learn that it's good to eat fresh vegetables and to engage in regular exercise, but it's bad to sit on your arse stuffing your face with the sort of crap beloved of the guy on Neighborhood Eats; so that's another one of life's eternal mysteries well and truly cleared up. Mr. Rodriguez says that he is going to try to get more exercise in future, and the rest of Real Men Wear Gowns looks suspiciously like an advertisement for Forxiga, a pharmaceutical product which already has its own advert and which some medical dude just happens to be studying.

At eleven minutes past the hour we go back to more commercials, beginning with a particularly weird one for Aramendia Plumbing, a local company working to a presumably tight budget. The adverts feature horrific CGI gremlins knackering someone's bathroom, as discovered by horrified overacting children. It's followed by a commercial for Rooms to Go, then a trailer for yet more of Bill Taylor's weather - coming up later on Eyewitness News - then Popeye's fried chicken with that irritating bloody woman, Ram trucks, then Chevrolet, yet again.

At fourteen minutes past, we learn of a question which will be included in the 2020 census. The question is are you a US citizen? The State Representative for El Paso has been campaigning against the inclusion of this question in the census, rightly suggesting that it will skew the results by leaving those who aren't citizens reluctant to fill in the census for fear of being rumbled, then personally loaded into a cannon by the president and fired back over that wall he keeps saying he's definitely going to start building any day now. The question seems to have been included because Ted Cruz, who was born in Canada, asked for it to be included. Ted Cruz, for the benefit of anyone unfamiliar with this wonderful man, is essentially an unfriendly version of Grandpa Munster.

Sixteen minutes in and Jeff tells us about how recent weather conditions may have impacted upon local agriculture, specifically those with strawberry farms whose livelihoods may be left in tatters by the winter we've just had, which has been a really weird and screwy one by Texas standards, but that's just one of those things rather than anything to do with climate change because climate change was invented by lefties who never learned to drive and are jealous of the rest of us with our cool sports cars.

Anyway, the point is that certain farmers are probably fucked.

'The weather we've had could be berry bad for business,' Jeff quips.

'Oh no you didn't,' we hear Bill Taylor chortle in response.

Hilarious.

Enjoy your new jobs at McDonalds, farmers! Ha ha!

At seventeen minutes past we join Bill Taylor for the weather yet again. I've lost count of how many times we've had the weather so far, but it feels like this is the third or fourth instalment.

It's been raining a lot.

This is the section of the news which feels like some sort of CGI showreel. Bill talks and grins us through seven or eight variations on the same basic bit of information, utilising a bewildering series of maps, graphs and imagineered forecasts. It takes a full three minutes to get through the lot, during which the text running along the foot of the screen announces the advent of a pinball machine themed to the songs of hard rock group, Iron Maiden. The pinball machine will be called The Legacy of the Beast, and definitely no more storms tonight, even though it has been raining a lot.

Now we see Bill wander across the studio to meet with Joe Reinagel, the sports guy and another one of those big grinning wardrobe shaped men who walks like a crab and seems to have been modelled on John Wayne.

A couple of weeks ago my wife and I got a new kitten. She just turned up on our doorstep so we took her in. She seems to have bonded with Jello, a slightly older cat who now seems to regard her as his kitten and occasionally grooms and bathes her with his tongue. Daisy, which is what we've called her, is not yet allowed outside. When Jello comes in, she always perks up, running to meet him, tail aloft and meowing happily.

This is kind of what happens when Bill and Joe meet, and I think we're supposed to find it cute by some definition. They joke, but their humour is tedious, mostly upper arm punches and how 'bout those Cowboys! Tonight they're talking about the Final Four. We see footage of sports dudes arriving by coach from Chicago right here in our city! Then we see footage of a plane landing.

'It's an exciting time for all of us,' some guy declares. As a news item, this amounts to the event which is going to happen soon is still going to happen soon.

Next we learn that the San Antonio Spurs lost, or they won but in a bad way, or something happened, or maybe it was a draw. Joe describes some aspect of this as crucial, and we go to footage of Gregg Popovich, the Spurs head coach, mumbling something in relation to whatever Joe just told us.

'It doesn't mean crap. None of that stuff matters. It's kind of cool and we did that for a long time; and other than that, it's worth a cup of coffee or something.'

That's what he actually says, so I have no idea what any of this could be about beyond that it seems to devalue Joe Reinagel's assignation of anything being crucial. More interesting to me is that the coach's name is Gregg, spelt the same way as that of the bakery.

Anyway, we're onto the subject of whether or not there will be a ban regarding sports persons kneeling for the national anthem, or possibly failing to kneel for the national anthem, whichever is worse. This doesn't actually seem to be a news item so much as a rhetorical question.

The final commercial break advertises the upcoming Selena festival celebrating the life and music of Selena, who was a big deal here in San Antonio. This is followed by something about wheelie bins, then Alamo Toyota, and finally the Texas State Aquarium.

We're back to Eyewitness News for the Final Play, as Joe calls the feature, usually with a grin or a wink to signal that we're in for a real treat right after these messages.

Better hold onto your hats, kids. This one's a real doozy, yes sir.

This time he's dispensed with the usual chortling preface to what is almost always YouTube footage of some sports person falling over or failing to catch a ball. Instead we see a baseball player at the edge of the field exchanging his bat for a hot dog with some supporter. This occurred during a game.

Ordinarily we would pan across to Jeff, Joe, Bill and whatever the lady newsreader is called all chuckling away.

Have you ever in your life seen anything like that!?

We pan across tonight, but just for a few seconds. Usually we get half a minute of banter as they describe people falling over or recall previous side-splitting instances of sports persons failing to catch balls.

We must have run out of time.

It's over.

I can't remember much beyond more weather than we could possibly need and sport sport sport sport sport…

Six hours later, thunder splits the heavens and I am woken by brilliant flashes of lightning.

The Gift

'I need to buy rhinestones,' my wife told me. 'I'm going to glue them to the pumpkin.' It was the most profoundly Texan thing I'd ever heard her say. She was decorating a pumpkin for Halloween. She'd painted it black with a grinning muertito skull on one side, embellished with floral patterns; and now she was going to cover it in rhinestones.

She bought a large bag from Michaels, our local arts and crafts superstore. It was a big pumpkin but she still ended up with some rhinestones left over, so she glued those to the novelty wooden plaque which Mary had given us.

Mary is my dad's partner. She would have been his third wife but he didn't want to remarry after the second one passed away. He didn't seem to think it would be appropriate. Mary means well.

In 2009, I packed in my Royal Mail job in London and moved back to Coventry. The plan was that I would stay at my mother's house, generate some money by selling off my accumulated crap on eBay, and apply for the fiancé visa which would allow me to move to America and marry Bess.

Mary was initially sceptical. 'Never mind, lovey,' she told me, as though it had already all gone tits up. 'You can always move back here if it doesn't work out in America, and I think you'll find Coventry has a lot to offer.'

Nevertheless, I stayed at my mother's house, generated some money by selling off my accumulated crap on eBay, applied for and was granted a fiancé visa, following which I moved to America and married Bess.

Mary was very happy for me, once it seemed as though it had worked out after all, despite everything. She seemed to like the sound of Bess, whom I had described as having blue eyes, reddish hair, and a generous build, because I don't believe in the ideal female figure, and if I did it wouldn't be a lettuce-scoffing stick insect.

'They're very jolly, aren't they?' Mary observed thoughtfully.

'Yes,' I said, scarcely able to believe my ears, what with it being the twenty-first century. I suppose if she had been black, Bess would have been praised for her natural sense of rhythm.

'Here,' Mary said. 'I bought this for you.'

She'd been shopping at Morrisons and had apparently called in at some sort of retailer of nick-nacks on the way home. She gave me a heart-shaped piece of wood painted white and embellished with the words Love laughter & happily ever after. I wasn't sure if it was missing a comma and couldn't tell whether the words represented a list or an instruction, although both readings probably amounted to the same thing. There was a piece of string at the back by which I would be able to hang it in my home in America, now that it had all worked out, despite everything.

'Thanks,' I said.

Mary went back into the kitchen and my dad leaned across to stage whisper, 'Listen - if that doesn't make it into your luggage when you fly back, I understand.' He glanced towards the kitchen. 'You know she means well.'

'Yes,' I said, relieved to discover that my father and I were on the same page of this particular book.

A few years earlier one of Bess's friends gave us a thematically similar piece of wood for Christmas. It resembled a wooden baton, about a foot in length, painted black with always kiss me goodnight printed along its length. I suppose the point is that you leave it on top of something as a reminder. If left on top of something near a doorway or entrance it could perhaps also be used to strike an intruder. I don't know why such a thing would need to exist. Were our marriage headed down the toilet, advice printed on a piece of timber wouldn't make much difference one way or the other; and because our marriage is going pretty darn well, despite everything, we don't really require physical restatement of the fact.

Love laughter & happily ever after was hung from the dimmer switch in the front room because I didn't know what else to do with it. I would have felt bad excluding it from my luggage because, as my dad pointed out, it was meant well; and I would have felt awkward just chucking it to the back of some cupboard for the same reason.

'Gross,' my wife commented, trying not to laugh.

'I know,' I said, and we left it there because it was sort of funny, and it saved us having to think ill of those who give freely despite having no taste, because that would in turn lead us to think ill of ourselves, ungrateful pair of snarky cunts that we are.

The dimmer switch in the front room connects to an annoying chandelier type affair of five lights, a massive lump of swinging metal with which I frequently brain myself when doing anything on that side of the room. I don't even know why we have a dimmer switch. Pissing about with the voltage seems to dramatically shorten the life of the bulbs, and at one point we seemed to be replacing one of them every couple of weeks. Furthermore, it's not like there's ever anything to be gained from having the lights low. We don't indulge in romantic dinners because we're not fucking teenagers and we usually watch Wheel of Fortune whilst eating from folding tray-tables at the other end of the living room; and for all its fine qualities, Wheel of Fortune is seldom arousing.

Then a month ago, the dimmer switch began to emit a worrying electrical fizzing sound, so we stopped using it. Bess looked at the cost of getting an electrician out.

'Fuck it,' I suggested. 'Let's do it ourselves. How hard can it be?'

We watched a couple of YouTube videos, bought a multimeter and a new light switch - the regular on/off kind, not a dimmer - and I made the repair. It took about ten minutes and the replacement switch cost something like sixty cents.

Love laughter & happily ever after lost its home and went to live in the garage, because otherwise it would have fallen to the floor whenever we turned off the lights in the front room. Then Bess rescued it and hung it somewhere else because she said it seemed right to do so seeing as how she'd speckled it with leftover rhinestones and all. We no longer have to spend so much money on light bulbs, and I've learned how to use a multimeter. I am now able to stick the prongs into electrical sockets so as to check the voltage with casual abandon.

That's your happy ending right there.