Doctor, No

Six months before I moved to Texas I had a blood test. The results came back confirming my being in possession of so much cholesterol that I could have caught fire at any moment, and that my blood pressure was so high as to facilitate my fighting crime as a sort of blood-gusher-based superhero by opening a vein and blasting criminals with a high-pressure geyser of claret.

'It's winter and everywhere is frozen,' I explained to my doctor, 'I've been sat on my arse for the last six weeks, but okay - I'll make the effort to get out and about a bit more.'

She wasn't having it and prescribed Simvastatin, which struck me as a little premature seeing as I felt fine. I had the feeling she was just really into writing out prescriptions.

After three days of taking the drug, I hadn't slept for so much as five minutes, hadn't even felt drowsy, and I wanted to kill myself. By suggesting that I wanted to kill myself, I don't mean to imply that I felt a little bit glum and went around with a frowny face. I mean that I wanted to kill myself. I therefore stopped taking the pills and immediately felt better.

My doctor told me off, saying that I should have consulted her before quitting the prescribed medication and that I'd been very irresponsible.

'It's because I couldn't sleep and wanted to kill myself,' I explained.

'Of course, there are sometimes minor problems of that nature,' she admitted, 'but side effects usually pass after the first couple of weeks.'

'I would have killed myself by then.'

I refused further medication, instead knuckling down to riding my bike fifteen miles each day regardless of ice and snow. Six months later I underwent another medical examination at a Harley Street practice, as required by the immigration people. My cholesterol was fine and my blood pressure was normal.

Gosh.

More recently I underwent a medical examination at the Oakwell Farms medical center, something required by my medical insurance. I came close to weighing 210lbs before Christmas and had therefore been trying to get my weight down, mainly just through increased exercise and less snacking. It seemed to be working, and I was down to about 194lbs when I went for the medical.

'Shouldn't I take off my clothes or something?' I asked.

'No. Just get on the scale,' said the nurse. 'Do you know how much you weigh?'

'I was 194lbs this morning.'

'Well, you're 205lbs now.'

'That would probably be the boots and the three layers of clothing.'

The examination was over in minutes and struck me as lacking attention to detail. The results came back confirming I had more cholesterol than anyone who had ever lived in the entire history of triglycerides, and my blood pressure was so high that I could have severed my feet at the ankles and blasted myself off into outer space like a human rocket.

The results pissed me off so I ignored them. For one thing, my blood pressure was usually normal when I had it checked at the periodontist's office three or four times a year.

Another couple of months later I decided to have yet another medical examination. It seemed like high time I should have a doctor stick his finger up my arse in search of prostate cancer, and I figured I might as well have a proper check up on the same ticket. I was exercising every day, losing weight and doing well, so I wanted to know just how well because the previous examination had been a bit of a joke.

The nurse weighed me, stood me next to a tape measure, filled five big Cumberland sausage sized test tubes with blood, and asked a string of questions.

Do you smoke?

How much do you drink?

How many fingers am I holding up?

Can you tell me the name of the president?

I pulled a face answering the last one, and so did she.

The doctor came in.

'Are you going to stick a finger up my arse?' I enquired.

'No. No. There's no need. Cancer screening is all part of the blood test these days.'

'Okay.'

'I see that you smoke,' he said happily.

'No.'

'You don't smoke?'

'No, I don't.'

He seemed disappointed. 'Well, your blood pressure is a little high.'

'Is it really?'

'Yes, if I could—'

'I can tell you now, I'm not taking statins.'

'Statins are used to treat cholesterol, not high blood pressure.'

'Oh okay.'

'Well, perhaps we'd better wait until the results of this latest blood test come back.'

We waited, but I'd already knew I didn't like the guy. He was younger and fatter than myself, and I was somehow the wheezing porker in the equation. I could already sense him angling to prescribe something. He seemed to be fishing around in my medical history for anything he could work with. That was the impression I received, and the phone call came a few weeks later.

'The doctor urgently needs to discuss the results of your blood test. You have so much cholesterol that we've had to invent a new number by which to quantify it, and your blood pressure is such that at first we thought it was simply that Hulk Hogan was somehow living inside you.'

'Oh fuck off,' I didn't say, not actually slamming the phone down. I made an appointment, then cancelled it and made another for a day on which my wife would be able to come along, because she works in healthcare and is fairly adept at bullshit detection.

We were bang on time because they charge twenty-five dollars for missed appointments, a fine imposed because they could have spent those minutes curing someone, and healing the sick is the only thing with which they are concerned. Forty minutes later we were at last ushered into the presence of my doctor.

'You have a 13% chance of contracting heart disease before you reach seventy,' he smiled.

'Well, no-one lasts forever,' I said, 'and 13% - aren't those about the same odds as I have of being hit by a meteorite?'

My wife pointed out something statistical regarding the hereditary aspect of heart conditions such as the one which had an alleged 13% chance of killing me. I didn't really understand all of what she was saying, but the doctor did, and didn't really seem to have an answer for it, not directly.

'So, is there any history of heart disease in your family?'

'It isn't really a disease though, is it? I mean you can't have a stroke because you ate a sandwich with heart disease germs on it, or have I failed to understand some aspect of my impending doom?'

'It's a very real condition,' he said, apparently not having grasped my point. 'Do you know if anyone in your family has suffered with heart trouble?'

'No-one whatsoever, although significantly more or less all of them have had cancer, which was the actual reason I came here seeing as that seems a more pressing concern from where I'm sat.'

'Well, you're fine on that score.'

'That's good to know.'

'Everything is looking good aside from the cholesterol and the blood pressure.'

'Well, I'm not taking statins as I already told you.'

'Statins have come a long way and have been greatly improved over the last couple of years.'

'I don't care. I'm still not taking them.' I reiterated the account given in the first nine paragraphs above, mainly because it seemed as though he'd forgotten our having met on the occasion of the examination which had yielded the results now under discussion.

'Yes, I've heard all about your NHS,' - he curled off a wry smile, almost a sneer - 'no diagnosis, just chucking a handful of pills at you and sending you on your—'

'There's nothing wrong with the NHS,' I said, noticing I'd used that tone of voice which expresses openness to the possibility of finishing the conversation outside in the parking lot. I wasn't having this fucking tosser running the NHS down.

'Well, for now we can consider other options, healthier eating and so on.'

'I eat healthy,' I said. 'I suppose you're going to tell me I should cut my McDonald's intake down to just four visits a day, or something of the sort.'

'We eat very healthily,' my wife confirmed. 'He does all the cooking and it's all fresh. We don't eat salty things.'

'You may not think you do, but even when you open up a can of Campbell's soup because it's in the recipe, well, the salt content—'

'That isn't,' I cut him off with just a hint of Margaret Rutherford in my voice, 'the sort of cooking in which I engage.'

My wife has a recipe book typed out by an ageing relative during the great depression. I barely recognise any of the recipes, which truly belong to a culture to which I am alien. Many of them seem to combine ingredients which are already recognisably food, a tin of mushroom soup poured over battered onion rings, then baked as a casserole - and the recipe concluded with a bewildering comment of sooooooo good or similar. It seems like the sort of cooking I tried when I was fifteen, baked beans plus a teaspoon of every herb or spice on the rack because if one is good, then twenty-six will surely be amazing. I like to think I've evolved beyond the culinary level of a bewildered teenager left to his own devices.

'I apologise if it seems like I'm on the defensive,' I said without feeling even remotely sorry, 'but you have to appreciate that I eat pretty well, I don't smoke, hardly drink, and I cycle one hundred miles a week, and you're telling me that it isn't enough. I may as well be sat on my arse scoffing pies and cakes all day for all the difference it makes. That's what you're telling me.'

'Well, I'd like you to imagine the effects of a stroke, being unable to speak, maybe one side of your body paralysed—'

Now he was trying to scare me, somehow imagining I had no idea what a stroke could be or how it might affect a person. 'Sure, but if you don't mind I'll just keep on as I am. I've lost a stone since Christmas and a little bit more drops off every week, so I'm not even sure what I'm doing here.'

'Well, we can see how you're getting on in another six months.'

'Fine.'

We left with no real intention of coming back. It seems I put on weight when I first moved to America, because the government forces us all to eat a cheeseburger whilst saluting the flag every morning; I have about a stone to go before I get back to what is supposedly my ideal weight for my age and height. I will get there, and if my blood pressure and cholesterol remain high then I'll just have to assume that's how it's going to be.

A Gastropsychogeography of England

Philip Best of notorious room clearance outfit Consumer Electronics observed that I was a food pusher. I was visiting him in Austin and making delivery of some of my home made pork pies - because it's easier to make too many than it is to make too few and we can't get them in Texas - and the comment came as I was describing a brief period of the nineties during which Jim Macdougall stayed over at my place every other weekend and I'd make us a chili in the hope of keeping him alive - his strict diet of beer, fags, bar snacks and Temazepam being nutritionally questionable; so Best's observation seemed fair. Thus deciding to embrace the role, I hereby declare my invention of gastropsychgeography, a philosophical discourse in which one gives account of what is eaten, where, and what it means. This follows on from psychogeography, a practice devised by Ivan Chtcheglov which seeks to map the meaning of a place in terms of its history, and psychochronography in which Sandifer ingeniously lists what was at the top of the hit parade when certain episodes of Doctor Who went to air. Gastropsychgeography is therefore, in essence, a travelogue of meals consumed by an author except much more important; and this is where it begins. This time next year you'll be reading Alan Moore's brooding testimony of Northampton's finest chip shops and Sandifer will be self-publishing tallies of previously obscure forms of iconic artisan bread consumed whilst binge watching Who, but it was all my idea. You're welcome.

Fish and chips, Earlsdon.
My mum gave me a tenner and sent me up the road for fish and chips from Gabriel's Fish & Chips in Earlsdon, Coventry. Being fifty-four years of age, I was conscious of this being one of those grand English traditions once immortalised in the likes of Beano and Dandy, so grand in fact that I'm surprised some red-faced gammon has yet to fume over imagined EU rulings preventing English mothers sending their offspring up the chippie with a tenner. We had two portions of battered cod and a single helping of chips between the two of us, because Gabriel's single helping is a shitload of chips in itself. It was pretty great, and we ate while watching Downton Abbey, an episode in which one of the butlers gives in his notice and the other one gets a bit sniffy about it.

Doner kebab, Earlsdon.
This time my mother sent me in the other direction, down the road for doner kebabs which I didn't enjoy quite so much as I thought I would. They were okay but not amazing, the main selling point simply being the pleasure of a doner kebab served in pita bread with chilli sauce, like nature intended - as distinct from a puffy flatbread with no sauce of any description, which seems to be a Greco-Texan thing. We watched The Curse of the Were-Rabbit whilst dining, which I hadn't seen before, so that was nice. Less entertaining was that Motecuhzoma took a small measure of his revenge on the both of us the following morning, so that's a lesson learned until next time.

 

Battered sausage with chips, Foleshill.
I was out with the intention of catching performances by Cristiana Ilie and Hainbach at the Tin, a venue situated in Coventry's new fangled Canal Basin, but I hadn't eaten. I'd called at the City Arms, a Weatherspoon pub, about an hour previous in the hope of ordering their Full English breakfast, discovering that it is only served until noon. With my gastronomic plans having been thus foiled, I therefore had to ask around and was directed to the Sandy Fish Bar in Sandy Lane, which was just around the corner. The expedition impressed upon me how the Tin is but five minutes walk from the home of Martin of Attrition, and I'm surprised he doesn't have some kind of residency there, knocking out a set of handbag house standards every Sunday evening or whatever. He literally lives so close that there wouldn't even be much point getting a taxi for the sake of a cumbersome tuba. Anyway, I ate my sausage in batter and chips on the seating provided at the aforementioned Canal Basin, all the while monitoring the venue for signs of activity seeing as I'd arrived about an hour before even the bar staff. The sausage was, in particular, pretty good.

Sausage sandwich, Coombe Abbey.
I asked for a sausage roll and this was the closest they could manage, although it was decent so I'm not complaining. I was at the Café in the Park with my dad. We were up that way having gone out for a stroll during which he hardly mentioned Brexit at all, although there were several ominous remarks hinting at a sceptical view taken regarding climate science. It didn't seem like there was anything to be gained in rising to the bait, so I didn't. I was a bit surprised by the general youthful bewilderment which greeted my attempts to describe a sausage roll to the café staff, but never mind.

Dinner, Binley.
This was prepared by my dad some hours after the above, and comprised steak pie, roast potatoes, runner beans, carrots and squash. The pie was hand crafted and amazing, and the vegetables were all from his allotment. The squash seemed an initially incongruous addition, but was slightly sweet and went very well with everything else. We manged to avoid talking about Brexit, although on a related note, my dad's wife - or at least the woman who would have been his third wife had they bothered to get married, which they didn't - opined that the good thing about Donald Trump is that he's not afraid to say what he's thinking. I couldn't be bothered to argue. Whatever gets you through the night.

Persian takeaway, Earlsdon.
Grilled lamb, rice, and houmous delivered by the Cyrus Restaurant once the guy on the other end of the phone line grudgingly conceded that yes, they did deliver if we really weren't able to get down there to pick it up. The food was at least as good as anticipated, and the rice in particular was delicious, light and fragrant. We ate while watching an episode of Midsomer Murders during which I realised that I sort of fancy Camille Coduri. I knew I'd seen her on telly somewhere before, but couldn't remember where. Later I looked it up and found out that she once played the mother of Bingo from the Banana Splits in Eccleston era Who, which was a bit disappointing.

 

Cream tea, Coventry Cathedral.
Part of the reason for my visiting England, aside from seeing my parents and other people, was because Lynda would be there. Lynda is my mother's younger sister - my aunt. She moved to Australia in 1973 and none of us had heard from her since. Thankfully the reunion was a delight and not at all awkward as a few of us had feared it might be. Part of Lynda's visit entailed wandering around Coventry like tourists with myself and my dad - who likewise knew her back in the sixties due to his having married my mother. There was a lot to look at in Coventry, and certainly one fuck of a lot more than there had been when I lived there. Our particular favourites were the Doom Painting in the Holy Trinity Church - a recently restored fifteenth century mural depicting what happens to sinners in enthusiastic detail - and the Cathedral. My grandfather - Lynda's dad - was a structural engineer whom they consulted when they were building the thing so as to ensure that it wouldn't simply collapse into the tunnels dug by coalminers from Keresley colliery, so it's all connected somehow. Anyway, we had cream teas in the Rising Café in the basement of the modern cathedral, which was nice. The central axis of a cream tea is a scone, which is like the thing which an American would call a biscuit for no obvious reason, but better. A biscuit in the American sense is usually too salty to be considered a scone and is therefore thematically equivalent to a gammon flavoured ice lolly, at least from where I'm stood.

Pizza, Earlsdon.
My mother and I stayed home and had a Waitrose pizza, which was probably a bit scant between the two of us but then she doesn't eat a whole lot and I was probably still full of scones. Midsomer Murders had inexplicably vanished from the television schedule so we watched Have I Got News for You? because I hadn't seen it in fucking years, and it's one of the few English shows I miss. I had no idea who at least three of those involved were, but Paul Merton is still funny. One of the most amusing exchanges concerned an elephant dentist from Peppa Pig. Sarah Kennedy - whom I know from my art foundation course in Leamington Spa back in the eighties - provides the voice of Nanny Plum from Peppa Pig. I think Sarah also had something to do with The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, so like I said, it's all connected. Alan Moore probably hasn't even heard of Peppa Pig.

Full English breakfast, Earlsdon.
I was vaguely inclined to give Weatherspoon a miss, my enthusiasm for cheap beer past its sell by date having waned since the homeless Thundercat who owns the chain started banging on about Brexit; and my friend Carl pointed out that most Weatherspoon pubs have the atmosphere of a cross-channel ferry due to the surfeit of red-faced gammons on a quest for cheap booze; but a full English breakfast is a full English breakfast. I had mine with a couple of slices of black pudding and it tasted fucking fantastic, just as it always does. I had no reading matter to hand and was dining alone, so reluctantly browsed the Weatherspoon corporate magazine. Naturally there was a special feature on Brexit, lifting opinion columns from publications on both sides of the political divide, because that's how much the homeless Thundercat - whose name is Tim Martin, by the way - loves democracy. Each piece was supplemented with commentary from himself under the byline of Tim Says which, in the case of those pieces in support of the remain argument, tended to kick off with what the author fails to realise is that blah blah blah, reducing the enterprise as a whole to something of a stacked deck. The rest of the magazine was mostly interviews with bar staff, so I watched the telly instead, sound down but with captions. They were showing live footage from the Supreme Court legally proving that Boris Johnson is a massive cunt, which was more interesting than the Weatherspoon corporate magazine.

More fish and chips, Earlsdon.
Once again my mum gave me a tenner and sent me up the road for fish and chips from Gabriel's Fish & Chips in Earlsdon, Coventry. The queue wasn't quite so enormous this time, comprising just three people. As usual, there was some fish left over, so that was saved for next door's cats, Geoff and Pig who are brothers and both ginger with white bits. By the end of my stay in Coventry, Pig had taken to meowing his head off every time I went into the garden in presumed anticipation of my handing a tupperware box of cod over the fence. I think that's how he got the name.

Bread and cheese, Earlsdon.
My aunt Lynda told us that her favourite food is bread and cheese, and specifically sourdough bread because other types of bread tend to give her digestive trouble. My mum therefore gave me a fifteener and sent me up the road for sourdough bread and an assortment of cheeses from the Co-op in Earlsdon, Coventry. I came back with edam, brie, one of the blue mouldy ones, and a fourth cheese I can't remember. Lynda was delighted beyond expectation. It turns out that this love of cheese is apparently a familial trait. Some doctor once told my mum that she might like to think about cutting down on the cheese. She told him that it wasn't going to happen because were she to make such a dietary adjustment there would be no point in being alive.

Curry, Greenwich.
Back when I lived in London, I often went for a curry with my friends Carl and Eddy, their choice because whilst I enjoyed Indian food, there were other things I preferred. We usually went to the Mogul in Greenwich. Since moving to America, my love of curry has increased for reasons I don't fully understand, so I was fairly keen to revisit the Mogul and give it another go. Unfortunately the Mogul experienced some kind of civil war in my absence, resulting in a diaspora which led to the establishment of the Mountain View on the Trafalgar Road, so that's where we went. I recognised the staff, and even shook the hand of Ron, who I believe runs the place and for whom Carl and Eddy seem to be the equivalent of season ticket holders. I had chicken korma with saag paneer, which was gorgeous.

Tunnock's tea cakes, Solihull.
I went to visit my friend Martin who lives in Solihull. I know Martin from the art foundation course we took with the woman who went on to become the voice of Nanny Plum. Martin was in the very first line up of the Cravats, and later played in different bands with both Carl and myself. As we'd scheduled an afternoon of just hanging out rather than alcoholic abandon, we started with a trip to the corner shop for Mr. Kipling's cherry bakewells and Tunnock's tea cakes, following which we drank tea and listened to the Shameful Ca$hin album. Shameful Ca$hin is Martin's current band and they've recorded an album at Woodbine Street Studios in Leamington Spa, soon to be issued on vinyl, all going well. The album reminded me a little of the punkier incarnations of the Cravats with a touch of the Stranglers and a bit of a rockabilly undercurrent. It's possibly the greatest thing Martin has ever recorded. I opted for Tunnock's tea cakes out of curiosity, having no real memory of them whilst being aware of a wave of nostalgia having spread their legend across certain stretches of social media. They're essentially chocolate covered marshmallows, arguably the English equivalent of American snack foods such as Hostess Twinkies and the like. I thought they were okay but nothing special, and Martin didn't seem to like them at all. Also worth noting is that Martin has a ginger cat called Jeff. He really loves that cat.

Thai curry, Earlsdon.
My mother and I stayed home and had a Waitrose Thai curry, which came in a natty little wooden box, and was excellent. Midsomer Murders had once again inexplicably vanished from the television schedule so we watched three episodes of Upstart Crow on DVD as I'd never seen it before. Having grown up in close proximity to Stratford-upon-Avon, I'd pretty much had enough of Shakespeare by the time I was seven, so I didn't know what to expect but nevertheless found it very watchable. I don't actually have anything against either Shakespeare or his works, unlike Martin who is of the considerably stronger opinion that it's all bollocks, but Upstart Crow almost made me wish I'd developed more of an appreciation. My mum on the other hand thinks Shakespeare is the shit, to phrase it in terms with which she is most likely unfamiliar.

Melted cheese sandwich, Shrewsbury.
I went to visit my friend Charlie who lives in Shrewsbury. I know Charlie from the fine art degree we took with Martin who was in the very first line up of the Cravats. Charlie is best known as artist of the Walking Dead comic book and is accordingly now a local celebrity, which was impressed upon me when I noticed that the local art gallery was advertising an exhibition of his work with his name in massive letters. We went for a bite to eat at a small café called, I believe, Ginger & Co. We talked mostly about comic books, superhero movies, comic book publishers assuming that, having finished with the Walking Dead, what Charlie really, really, really wants to draw next is even more zombies, and we talked about Comicsalopia, a comic art convention which was held in Shrewsbury a few months ago. Apparently it hadn't gone so well as hoped due to organisational complications arisen from one of the major sponsors screwing up with the wonga whilst failing to fully understand the genre, expressed as an unusual fixation with Peppa Pig. The sandwich was fancy and involved spinach and possibly mozzarella. It was very tasty.

Another full English breakfast, Coventry.
I had this one at Café 37, Earlsdon, which seems almost like it's just some bloke's front room. I've been there a few times over the years and don't ever recall any other customers, so I'm glad it's somehow managed to stay open. The food was good, sort of like the Weatherspoon version but with a bit more soul. Options for reading material were Coventry Evening Telegraph, Daily Mail, and the Sun. I tried with the Coventry Evening Telegraph but it mostly seemed to be articles on the level of how some local sports club had purchased a new tennis racket. The only piece I read in full was something about the council intending to pull down the swimming baths, which makes me a little sad as they were structurally engineered by my grandfather. I reluctantly switched to the Sun and was pleased to notice that whilst the right-wing bias was such that it actually came off on my fingers, the paper generally wasn't quite so rabid as I remembered, its mania being concentrated in small, evenly distributed flare ups within the wider context of a generally gormless whole. The only article which really caught my attention was an argument against the closing of private schools, at least partially predicated on the notion that if Jeremy Corbyn thinks it's bad then it's actually good. I don't know where the readership stand on the matter, but it's always entertaining to see members of the working class moved to fuming indignation over threats to the well-being of chinless Etonian twits who regard them as, at the very best, a slightly smelly economic resource.

Yet more fish and chips, Earlsdon.

It was my last evening in England, at least for a while, so my mum gave me a tenner and once again sent me up the road for fish and chips from Gabriel's Fish & Chips in Earlsdon, Coventry. This time was a bit later than usual. My mother is an independent benefits advisor, meaning she gives advice to, or even represents in court, those who have been wrongfully denied benefits, which is pretty much everyone who has been denied benefits due to government policies which hold that numismatic hand-outs are the only thing preventing most claimants from becoming high paid executives. Anyway she had two such persons turn up at six in the evening seeking her advice, one of whom had no head and only one leg but had nevertheless been declared fit for work and denied disability benefit. My mother had anticipated that their case would take about fifteen minutes to sort out, so I should go up the road for fish and chips once they were done. Unfortunately their case took about an hour to sort out, and in the meantime Sue from next door, patron of Geoff and Pig, came round. She was trying to separate the two sections of the tubing of a vacuum cleaner which had become stuck. I was unable to pull the two lengths of tubing apart. One of the people who had come to see my mother gave it a go, but he couldn't do it either. Anyway, it was close to seven before everyone left and I was able to go up the road for my final fish and chips from Gabriel's Fish & Chips in Earlsdon, Coventry. Now as I compose this account in a house built on a different continent, I know that even as I write, Geoff and Pig are probably finishing off the bit of cod that we couldn't manage. It's a circle, my friend.

Full English breakfast with Japanese influence, Heathrow.
I'd got up at ten to five in the morning so as to catch the flight back to lovely, lovely Texas, and yet somehow I'd managed to end up with hours to burn, just bumming around the airport; so I figured I may as well eat to pass time. Wagamama caught my eye because I recall having loved their food back in the nineties, and there was a full English on the menu which struck me as weird. I went in thinking about bowls of big fat noodles with crunchy ginger stuff, but somehow just couldn't not order the full English because it would be my last one in a while and its presence at Wagamama, which let us not forget serves primarily Japanese and Asiatic cuisine, seemed improbably incongruous. It came in a bowl and incorporated spinach and shitake mushrooms, but was otherwise the genuine article - sausages, bacon, couple of fried eggs and so on - and yet it had some Japanese quality which seemed to justify its place on the menu and yet was difficult to pinpoint, something in the subtle flavours department stemming from how it was cooked; or it could just be that I was prevented from blobbing the customary dollop of tomato ketchup on the side. Naturally I asked for ketchup, even qualifying the request with sorry to sound like a caveman, but… - but they didn't have it, and I was therefore forced to tackle the flavours unalloyed, which was okay because it was delicious. I read some more of The Face in the Abyss by Abraham Merritt as I ate. It's about four hard boiled blokes who go off in search of lost gold, and who keep having arguments about which one of their party might be considered the dirty double-crossing rat. They talk like James Cagney in a gangster movie, often finishing sentences with an interrogative see. So far I'm enjoying it. I picked the book up at the Oxfam shop on Broadgate in Coventry, which is a fucking great shop and seemingly the closest England comes to having a branch of Half Price Books, albeit a somewhat compact one. I also picked up a Rupert Bear annual and two Hornby Railways catalogues which I had as a kid - which is apparently what my midlife crisis looks like. I only mention these details because I haven't found a way to shoehorn Peppa Pig, Shakespeare, or anyone named Geoff into the account.

Rap Autopsy in a Diner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Funny Foreign Food

Here's what I ate whilst back in England visiting the folks, nothing I've been unable to live without, but food which I've nevertheless appreciated on some level, and have eaten as something like exotic cuisine, despite having grown up with it.

Pork pie. I think it was from Sainsbury's or somewhere of that general type, and it made for a respectable restorative as I wrestled with a jetlag hangover resulting from the previous eighteen hours spent in more or less constant motion. Having failed to find pork pies in Texas, and being reluctant to pay $70 refrigerated postage for something I would ordinarily eat only twice a year, I have learned how to make my own. The process is a bit long-winded but has resulted in the best pork pies I've eaten by a wide margin. The one I ate in England probably wasn't great by comparison, but timing is everything.

Full English breakfast. This was at the City Arms in Earlsdon, Coventry, which is a Weatherspoons pub - fried egg, baked beans, a sausage, bacon, couple of fried slices and black pudding; of which only the fried egg and bacon can be conveniently reproduced back in Texas with any degree of authenticity. I'm not sure what's different about American sausages, but they are different, possibly due to the influence of the mighty German sausage. American bread is also different for no reason I can really pin down, and English baked beans are sweeter. So far as I'm concerned, most of these serve as a vehicle for black pudding, because it would probably be weird just eating solo black pudding, although that's the one thing I really can't do in Texas. There used to be an Argentinian delicatessen which sold something that was a lot like black pudding, but the establishment converted to an exclusive club accessible only to persons in the catering trade, which was a pain in the ass, so no more stateside black pudding for me. I suppose I could try to make it myself, but the recipe seems laborious and messy and would in any case prove prohibitively indulgent when I can't even pay my own wife to consider black pudding as edible. Anyway, the saga of this specific full English breakfast - such as it is - was that, feeling jetlagged, I realised I couldn't be arsed to walk a couple of miles to Carphone Warehouse to buy one of those cheap disposable phones used by crack dealers, so instead opted to stuff my face at the pub, an enterprise which, like that with the pork pie, proved similarly restorative.

Here it is again.

Meringue. I've tried to make them but my meringues are comical, like something from an overambitious school science project. Texas doesn't seem big on meringues either, so it had been at least a year since I ate one. The first was nice but smaller than I remember them being, which struck me as related to those factors which make it appear as though policemen are getting younger and younger. The second meringue was about the size of a football with a swirly orange pattern giving it the appearance of the planet Jupiter. The swirls were due to it being a passion fruit meringue, although you couldn't really taste anything but meringue, not even the cream. This was because it didn't have cream, although clearly needed some for sake of contrast with everything else. I obtained the Jovian meringue from Warren's Bakery in the precinct in Kenilworth, ten foot from a hole in the ground which had once been the local toy shop when I was a kid, and from which I made purchase of a number of Micronaut figures, vehicles and accessories, notably the Crater Cruncher which was a sort of futuristic digger. Although Warren's meringue needed work, his Cornish pastie was pretty great, and the shop proudly sells pies and cakes from beneath an athletic looking sign reading Forever Fit owing to the presence of a gymnasium on the second floor of the building, which is amusing.

Fish and chips. I've always thought fish and chips were a little overrated, but when the moment is right, they're amazing. The Long John Silver restaurant chain here in Texas does fish and chips which are so close to the real thing without being quite the same as to constitute a decent alternative, at least in the sense of methadone being an alternative to heroin; but actual fish and chips served in a chip shop by a fat bloke with a red face takes some beating. All the same, I'm nevertheless left a little weary by the mythologisation of fish and chips as one of the five things Americans understand about being English*.

Two sausage, egg and chips. This was my proverbial daily bread for at least twenty years, and is difficult to recreate in America mainly due to the sausage thing. Not only are we talking about an English sausage, but a caff sausage which I suspect has been prepared using very specific techniques understood only by those in the biz - possibly fried beforehand, then kept at a specific temperature by heated buffet technology. The first two sausage, egg and chips of my trip was consumed in a caff in Bermondsey, which is significant because two sausage, egg and chips was actually invented in Bermondsey - and you can check that on Wikipedia if you don't believe me. As I ate, an elderly diner at an adjacent table congratulated a small boy on his choice of football team with the words, yor a little Gooner, aincha!, so it was the real thing; and it was beautiful, although I somehow propelled some of my egg from off the side of my plate and onto the floor during the excitement. I ate the dish again, or at least a variation on the dish additionally incorporating baked beans, at the Star Cafe in Coventry, which is part of the coach station. This second serving was okay, but the situation obliging one to petition a caterer for sachets of tomato ketchup in the absence of anything squeezy readily available at the tables, was disconcerting. As a city, Coventry has had a troubled history characterised by Hitler's bombs and whatever scrapping compelled the formation of the racially progressive Two Tone record label, so I assume there's still some concern that hooligans might use ketchup dispensers as weapons were they more freely available. Also, the sausages weren't so good as those eaten in London. I propose that this deficit results from the Star Cafe's distance from the two sausage, egg and chips epicentre and their cuisine can as such be likened to the shadow of two sausage, egg and chips cast upon the wall of Plato's cave.

No ketchup dispenser? Thanks a lot, Hitler!

Co-Op sandwich. My dad and I ate Co-Op sandwiches in the absence of pub food, which the White Bear in Shipston-on-Stour didn't seem to feature. I'm pretty sure the George, twenty yards up the road, still did pub food, but it probably would have been served on square plates and involved jus. Therefore we went across the square to the Co-Op, which had been a post office back in our day - as distinct from the Co-Op which had been Fine Fare back in our day - and which is bewilderingly situated at a mere fifty yards distance as you head for the public bogs in the Telegraph Street car park in what is a very small town - not somewhere you might expect to be served by two supermarkets, and definitely not two branches of the same supermarket virtually next door to each other. We had consumed beer, we had shared hilarious anecdotes of inept local law enforcement, and we were hungry, so sandwiches it was. We both chose bacon, lettuce, and tomato. Following purchase, we walked down to the River Stour, just by the Old Mill, and discussed things we could remember when they were all fields. Those were probably the best sandwiches I ever bought from a supermarket chiller cabinet.

The River Stour which my dad and I were able to remember when it was a field.

Doner kebab. I have been confused by the differences between English and American variants of the mighty doner, particularly with the latter being served in something more closely resembling naan bread and without chilli sauce. I suppose, given that I live in San Antonio, the absence of the seemingly crucial chilli sauce is something to do with how everything else I eat is usually drowning in the stuff. The American doner kebab is nice enough, possibly even more authentic for all I know, but I can't see it being much use at two in the morning after forty pints and a homeward bus trip to the wrong part of town with your trousers worn on your head. Somehow I failed to reacquaint myself with the mighty English doner kebab when I was last over that way, so this time I made a point of getting myself down to that kebab place on the Butts, which is an amusingly named street in Coventry rather than a sequence of arses. A crusty looking bloke with tattoos stopped me to ask for a light before I'd made it into the shop. I whipped out a lighter and he said, 'thanks - a fucking human being, at last,' which seemed to contribute to the experience somehow.

'I'm going to enjoy this,' I told the bloke behind the counter. ' I haven't had one in two years,' which led inevitably to a conversation about the state of American kebabs, and why the bread is so weird, and how Disneyland Florida isn't as great as you might think, and why people voted for Donald Trump.

The kebab was good, but not so good as I remembered, so possibly I was specifically thinking of London kebabs; unless it's just that I wasn't sufficiently pissed.

The man we discussed in the kebab shop.

Chinese takeaway. I once loved Chinese takeaways and would order them as a treat for myself on occasions when it seemed like I deserved it, and always sweet and sour pork balls with egg fried rice. Then one day - I would guess late nineties - some sort of paradigm shift occurred within the world of Chinese takeaway, sweeping away all that had been served in those tidy little foil trays and replacing it with something which seemed broader in culinary scope, but just not as nice. Thankfully this development coincided with the advent of Pizza Pan, who delivered, had an outlet on Barry Road, and who got to know me so well that all I had to do was phone up and ask for the usual please, Kristos. Where Chinese takeaway once crunched, it became a sort of warm slurry dominated by the tang of monosodium glutomate, so I moved on. A conversation about Chinese takeaway with my mother somehow resulted in our ordering from Lucky Star - who had popped a delivery menu through her letterbox at some point - despite the thrust of the conversation having been that I'd gone off Chinese takeaway and she'd never liked it in the first place. Anyway, Lucky Star proved to be lucky mostly for those who like their chicken balls to resemble scotch eggs in terms of volume and structure - bland, chewy chicken embedded in a thick mantel of bland, chewy batter. We didn't eat much of it, then pulled off the alleged batter so as to give the chicken to Geoff, next door's cat, who seemed to enjoy it more than we did. A couple of nights later, we tried again. My mother gave me, a fifty-two-year old man, a tenner and sent me to the Chinese at the end of the road. Unfortunately it was closed so I found one called Peking House up the next road along - surprising myself at the fidelity of a vaguely remembered impression of another Chinese takeaway having been somewhere in the vicinity. The food was a little better, and the inch-thick layer of batter at least had a bit of crunch, but Geoff still had most of it in the end.

Geoff, or possibly Geoff's brother.

Biscuits. It's not that you can't get biscuits in America, but choices are often limited as the market is swamped with cookies, which are soft and doughy and are therefore not biscuits. Cookies came about when a Chicago biscuiteer named Herb Cook decided he didn't have time to finish cooking a batch of biscuits because he needed to play a video game and support his local football team while eating a burger, so the cookies - as they came to be known - came out soft, and achieved popularity with those who don't like the distraction of anything crunchy while playing a video game or supporting their local football team while eating a burger. This is a shame because biscuits are fucking great where cookies are truthfully a bit shit, on the whole. Consequently I ate my way through three or four packets of Fox's ginger custard creams during my stay in England.

*: The others being the Royal family, the Beatles, Keeping Up Appearances, and Benedict Cumberbatch.

Barbecue Quest

It's that time of year again. Byron is competing at the Barbecue Cookoff and has bunged us a couple of tickets. We're going along partially because it's his weekend with the kid - Byron's son, my stepson - and there's probably a limit to how much fun Junior can absorb from such an event whilst his father is busily setting lumps of meat on fire, so we're going to pick up the boy and whisk him back to the safety of his room and his games system. The Barbecue Cookoff is ordinarily part of the annual Stock Show & Rodeo, which is nice because it means we get to see the cows; but this year the event has been moved to a different site for some reason, one without much in the way of available parking. The plan is that we park at the AT&T Center, which is where the Barbecue Cookoff has been staged up until now, and we take a shuttle to the new site which is two miles away. The shuttles have been specially laid on. There must be a reason for this new, somewhat laborious arrangement, but neither Bess nor myself can work out what it might be.

This whole thing about parking then taking the shuttle seems like a pain in the ass. Bess looks on the map and notices that the site is about ten minutes walk from the Jack White Park Trailhead, or that's how it looks. The Trailhead is part of a greenway which follows Salado Creek south towards the old Spanish Missions. We've both been along there before, and it makes for a pleasant walk through a largely wooded strip of land away from the noise and traffic of the highway. So that's the box we're ticking.

We park at the Trailhead, oblivious to the fact of an empty parking lot suggesting that no-one else considered this seemingly obvious shortcut. We cross beneath the interstate, then a smaller railway bridge, and we follow the creek. We can hear stadium country in the distance and the smell of barbecue faintly smokes the breeze. Stadium country is country and western without the redeeming features, more X Factor than Hank Williams; but in its favour, it can always be heard at great distance and as such provides useful navigational information to the occasional questing wanderer.

'It can't be much further,' Bess suggests.

Sixty seconds later, we notice that the music now seems to be behind us. We look to the source, to the eastern line of trees, and the possibility occurs to us that we're on the wrong side of the creek. We turn around and head back for the interstate.

'Maybe if we head up that way,' I suggest, pointing.

'That's along the highway,' Bess says. 'We won't get very far.'

We're both looking at the headquarters of the Lucifer lighting company, which is at least on the same side of the creek as the Cookoff. The grounds of the Lucifer lighting company slope down towards the water, and there seems to be a path worn into the grass, so again we head off.

'That always struck me as a funny name for a lighting company,' says Bess. 'Like Beezebub plumbing or Satan parcel delivery.'

'You know Lucifer means light bringer?'

'Really?'

'Actually I'm not sure, but it's something like that. Luce means light in Italian, so…'

'Well, the fallen angel - I guess he was supposed to be pretty hot after all.'

Approaching the railway bridge, the path takes us into a labyrinth of reeds, dried stalks of Arundo donax, an invasive species which can grow up to twenty feet in height and does well in really shitty, contaminated soil. It's one of those things which thrives around industrial estates and places you probably don't want to go, and the earth beneath the bridge is accordingly decorated with flattened beer cans and burnt patches. Forward progress becomes difficult.

'I'm having my doubts about this one.'

'Let's turn back,' Bess sighs. 'I don't feel like getting assaulted today. I suppose at least we tried.'

We return to the car, and grudgingly drive to the AT&T Center where the parking lot is already filling and we have to pay ten dollars on top of the Cookoff ticket price. We follow the crowd on foot, everybody drawn to the point from which the shuttle will depart. Everyone is wearing a Stetson and my head feels suddenly naked. I'm overdue a haircut, that being one sin for which a Stetson usually compensates. I've been meaning to buy a new hat for some time. My current Stetson has had a lot of use and is consequently so old, crappy, and distressed that it could pass for the cover of a Nine Inch Nails record.

The shuttle arrives and we all pile on. It's actually a school bus, the large yellow kind as driven by Otto in The Simpsons. I've never been on one of these buses before, and yet they are universal to the experience of almost everyone I know. The interior is cramped and crappy and it feels as though someone will almost certainly bring either a goat or chickens on board at any moment.

'You must have seen that in Mexico though,' Bess says.

'Not really. The buses seemed a bit scary and confusing. I took coaches out of the city but that was different.'

'No chickens?'

'Mostly businessy types. I caught a Pesero in Tula but there was no-one with a chicken on there. It was a bit freaky because I was just following what everyone else did, and no-one seemed to be paying when they got on, so I sat down and assumed you were supposed to pay when you got off. Then the next few people who got on paid the driver, making me look like an arrogant cunt tourist.'

'What did you do?'

'I paid him when I got off and tried to explain that I was a clueless gringo. He didn't seem to care that much.'

We head off and I think about Mexico, and then crazy school bus drivers described by Henry Rollins in his spoken performances. Thankfully our guy just seems to be doing his job. We take a side road I've never noticed before into what may as well be open country, and yet we're still in the middle of the city because that's how San Antonio works. We are surrounded by scrubby fields of cacti and we pass stables with horses stood around.

Finally we arrive. We get wristbands and find a map posted on an information board, from which we learn that Wack 'Em & Stack 'Em have a concession just a little way further along the main thoroughfare. The place is packed.

Wack 'Em & Stack 'Em is the name of Byron's barbecue team, apparently taken from a song by Ted Nugent. I have no idea when it all got started, but he's always been a good cook. Apparently someone at some point told him he should compete in barbecue competition events, so he did, and in doing so acquired a whole team of helpers, crew, hangers-on, or whatever you want to call them.

'So what do the rest of those guys do?' I ask my wife, because she's telling me the story. 'Do they just hang around and maybe pass him an onion if he needs it?'

'Pretty much,' she tells me. 'Byron does most of the actual cooking. They turn things on the grill while he's doing something else, or they stand around and make sure the beer is drinkable.'

'So it's really Byron who wins the competitions?'

'Yes, but to his credit he's never really been about personal glory in that way.'

It transpires that Byron has a rival team formed from Wack 'Em & Stack 'Em dissidents who felt sidelined by his superior cooking ability, despite his repeated emphasis on everything having been a team effort, even when it wasn't. We're better than this, they apparently cried out. We can barbecue as good as any man, and no more will we stand in the background occasionally handing a tomato to some superstar…

We find the concession and we have wristbands which grant admittance. There's a marquee and a bar. The barbecue trailer is at the back, a huge open-sided thing on wheels with Byron and a couple of others working away. We find Junior in a caravan next to the trailer. He seems glad that we've arrived, but we have to tell him that we're not leaving just yet seeing as we only just got here.  We talk to Byron and Robert and have sodas from the bar. One of the bartenders wears a hat resembling a turd, specifically a furry cartoon turd with a smiley face. It's not that much of a surprise.

Having found our bearings, Bess and I take a walk. There are a couple of stalls selling hats around the corner, including Stetsons. It takes a few tries but I find one which fits my apparently massive head, and it's only twenty dollars. I buy it and feel that the journey has been worth my while. We wander a little further but come perilously close to where some band are still belting out the stadium country by which we forged our earlier path. We head back to the Wack 'Em & Stack 'Em concession.

Just outside the concession I pause to read postcards pinned to a board. They're from little kids, all addressed to Byron and mostly thanking him for buying their cow or pig. I get the impression that in most cases, the cow or pig in question has been hand-reared by the child who wrote the card.

'Did you see this?' I ask Bess.

'Oh yeah,' she says. 'He does a lot for those school 4H clubs.'

'4H?'

'Horticulture, husbandry, and a couple of other Hs.'

'Hogs?'

'No.'

'But it's like agriculture and stuff?'

'Yes.'

I take another look at the postcards. It seems like these kids put a lot of love into raising their animals. 'They know what Byron does, don't they, why he's buying their animals?'

'Oh yes.'

This is one I'm just going to have to keep from thinking about too hard, given that I already know where meat comes from.

Byron appears, jovial as usual. We shoot the breeze for a couple of minutes, wishing him luck with thrashing the dissidents in the upcoming competition. He horses around as is his way, a man truly in his element.

Then we gather up the kid, and head home.

Darkest Warwickshire

I spent the first eighteen years of my life in the county of Warwickshire, then five years in Kent, and the rest of the time in cities up until I came to move to Texas in 2011. By my mid-twenties, Warwickshire had become something like a foreign country. I visited only infrequently because I had no reason to do otherwise. My parents lived in different parts of the city of Coventry and I'd lost touch with more or less everyone I'd known at school. The countryside in which I'd grown up was reduced to a lost rural idyll occasionally seen as decorative background on a television programme.

In 2009, I moved from London to Coventry in preparation for  the larger transatlantic leap. My job in London had turned to shit, as had my domestic situation. It was time for a change.

The first revelation which came to me once I'd relocated to Coventry, was that I could cycle out of the city and find myself in the countryside in a matter of minutes. This hadn't been possible in London. Having become so accustomed to an environment comprising endless lines of vehicles belching fumes across a panorama of fried chicken outlets, rural England seemed newly magical to me. Everything sparked off some long-neglected childhood memory - grass verges blooming with cow parsley, tiny colourful birds flitting in and out of hedgerows, the silence of just wind and maybe some distant aircraft crossing a landscape of fields dipping down towards hidden church spires. I found myself in quiet lanes wherein my existence would have made no sense at any point during the previous two decades. I was entirely free of the pressures I had endured for so long. Even the novelty of it being ten in the morning and there I was not breaking my back whilst getting yelled at by an overpaid metropolitan idiot was astonishing, and such realisations continue to astonish me even today.

In 2015, I spent a couple of weeks back in England, visiting my parents, both still living in Coventry. The visit included excursions out into the country, into rural Warwickshire, even to Shipston-on-Stour where I had attended high school. Neither of my parents had much reason to visit the old places, and so my presence allowed for the indulgence of low-level nostalgia, just seeing how things had changed. One such expedition took us back through Newbold-on-Stour, a village at just a few miles distance from where I once lived. The White Hart was still there so my dad and myself stopped in for a pint. Wouldn't it be funny if we saw Gordon, I said to myself, and there he stood before us, right on cue as though summoned into being by my thoughts.

Of the people I'd known at School, only Juliet and Gordon had been associated with Newbold-on-Stour, so far as I could recall. Juliet had turned up on facebook a few years earlier with creepy messages about how she'd always loved me, which I probably could have lived without. Gordon on the other hand had remained mysterious. We'd been friends at school - close, but apparently not so close as to have stayed in touch past the age of sixteen, and I'd never quite been able to work out why. I remembered him as one of the gang, perhaps a little too fond of puns, but generally decent. The two jokes which had stayed with me over the years, both of his own composition, had been as follows:

1) Proposal for a verdict which might be delivered by an official judging a competition comparing girls' fannies: On the hole I'd say it's all been very good.

2) Get the Murphy habit, a phrase spoken whilst giving a thumbs-up gesture, but with the thumb concealed in the palm of the hand as though partially severed. This riffed on get the Abbey habit - the slogan utilised in advertising for the Abbey National building society, similarly accompanied by a thumbs-up gesture - and the fact of Mr. Murphy recently having injured or possibly even lost one of his thumbs. I think Mr. Murphy may have been a woodwork teacher. Gordon took some pleasure from the delivery of the joke, and I recall being slightly irritated because I had no fucking clue what he was talking about or why he thought it was funny. I responded with a combined slogan and gesture of my own, a variation on Mr. Spock's live long and prosper thing accompanied by the wilfully unrelated phrase don't ask Arthur for a cheese sandwich. I could just have asked Gordon to explain, but I suppose I didn't want to pass up the opportunity to be a bit of a cunt.

I'm not sure why I should still recall these two jokes in particular, but I suspect it's something to do with their being the same sort of shite which I probably once produced, so it may stem from some sense of relief that I hadn't in these instances. On the other hand, Gordon lent me The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle when it came out, and we even had him as guest on a Pre-War Busconductors cassette, announcing I'm Gordon Everett and I don't appear anywhere on this tape. So it felt as though the two of us should be more than just fellow carbon blobs who merely happened to have passed through the same educational colon at roughly the same time; and when I realised that this was the older version of himself stood before me in the White Hart, I experienced a feeling of immense pleasure. Unfortunately, an hour over a pint in a pub with my dad present wasn't really adequate when it came to catching up on the previous thirty years, but it was a start.

Now it's 2017, and I'm back in England once again, and Gordon is right at the top of the list. We've enjoyed sporadic communication through social media, but it's not the same as having an actual conversation, and this is why I haven't spent too much time worrying over any political differences we may have developed over the intervening years. This has been a matter of concern from time to time, particularly now that the internet has brought everyone any of us ever knew back into present day reality. It's not that I expect everyone I've ever known to have stayed the same, or even to subscribe to views compatible with my own; but I dislike it when a person of whom one might once have thought highly turns out to be a complete fucking knob.

I once assumed, somewhat arrogantly, that it was my having spent my life moving from place to place which granted me some enhanced sense of perspective, allowing me to be right about things. This view was mostly based on my having stayed in touch with Tim, who had lived his entire life in his mother's shadow in the house in which he grew up, then married a woman closer to his mother's vintage than to his own count of years when his mother passed away, and then eventually ended up standing for election on behalf of UKIP because he didn't want his beloved United Kingdom to become like America or Japan. I didn't really understand this view or just which episode in the vast wealth of his worldly experience it had been drawn from, but this was apparently because I had run away from England, as he put it. Thankfully, as I have come to appreciate, Tim's brand of myopia tends to be an exception rather than the rule.

I set out around midday, allowing for three hours by bike, it being somewhere between twenty and thirty miles to Newbold from Coventry. I could have blagged a lift or taken a series of buses, but I need the exercise and I'm excited at the prospect of all that countryside. I avoid the worst of the traffic by following my own meandering route along minor roads, down through Leamington Spa, then on to Wellesbourne by way of Bishop's Tachbrook. One of the worst hills I've ever had to push a bike up is on the A429 just south of Wellesbourne, so I attempt to circumnavigate it by heading west through Loxley, after which it's mostly downhill to Alderminster then another couple of miles to Newbold. Taking the Loxley road inevitably means I nevertheless end up having to scale the same slope as I would have tackled on the A429, but in less concentrated and more scenic stretches. The entire journey is scenic, excepting the crappier bit of Leamington Spa. I stop every half hour or so to photograph lambs and sheep, or to gaze in wonder at rolling hills, or to munch on the pork pie my mother insisted I bring with me. I spend much of the journey talking to myself, mostly exclamations of would you look at that, because the landscape seems once again magical to me, despite the distant familiarity of childhood. It rains a little but I don't care, and I stop to watch pheasants strutting around in the fields - usually a spectacular male with the green and scarlet head, and his harem of little brown ladies. I stop in Alderminster to stare at my first primary school, long since converted into a funny looking house. I was only there a couple of months before being moved to Ilmington C of E Junior and Infants, but I can still remember my first day. All these memories have become like something I may have read in a book, intangibly exotic; and along such lines I'd intended to look for Whitchurch, a settlement abandoned in the sixteenth century of which only a farm remains, along with a Norman church in the middle of a field. My mother has told me about the place, and I'm astonished to have spent the first decade of my life living within two miles of this ghost village. I had intended to look for Whitchurch, but three hours has turned out to be an uncannily well crafted estimate and I don't have time.

I arrive at Newbold village green. There is a line of cottages running down the left hand side and Gordon lives in one of them. He didn't give me the address, instead suggesting that I phone him when I arrive, but he emerges grinning from the cottage on the corner before I can make the call. I'd guess we were about the same size when we were at school, but now he's large and imposing in a way which suggests a life of pounding fence posts into the earth with just his fists. He wears braces without it seeming like an affectation, and he has an oddly distinguished appearance. He looks thoughtful and confident. I expect I've changed too.

We chuckle amongst ourselves, discussing the weather and variations on holy shit, here we are; and then we wander across the green to the pub, taking Bumble the dog with us as we go. I later discover that Bumble was born on the farm constituting all that remains of Whitchurch. We talk about how things are, how things were, and the probable causes of how the latter became the former. We talk about people we knew, people who've died, people who are doing quite well for themselves, and how one of the hard cases of our shared youth has spent the last three decades as a one-man reenactment of the film Trainspotting. We always knew he wouldn't amount to anything, and it seems he hasn't.

It's a conversation of a kind which I've occasionally found uncomfortable. I worry that the person or persons to whom I'm talking will make certain assumptions about where I'm coming from. Look at me, I will seem to say in between listing all the exotic places I've been and famous people I've known, allow me to regale you with tales of my many, many adventures in exotic lands far, far away from where we both went to school. So if I have anything exciting to impart - like my recently having become related to Johnny Cash by marriage, for example - I'll play it down and try to make it sound like it's no big deal, no more interesting than what happened to the bloke who used to run the Kerry Tea Rooms over in Shipston. This kind of pre-emptive humility ordinarily makes conversation awkward, something to be negotiated; but for once, it's different. Gordon seems genuinely fascinated by how the hell I ended up in Texas. He hasn't taken the fact of my having done something as an accusation suggesting that he hasn't - which is how it often feels; and because patently he has done things, he feels no need to prove it.

In the mean time we talk about Jason Roberts, because Gordon recalls all sorts of details of our school biology lesson which have escaped me. We both sat at the back with Jason, and possibly Graham Pierce. The teaching methodology of Mrs. Lewis seemed mostly focused on our spending the next hour copying something out of a book as she busied herself with other activities, and so the back row of the class became a sort of comedy workshop hosted by Jason. I'm still able to recall the vaguely jazzy theme tune, Jason playing the bench like a piano, singing and winking at us.

It's joke time...
It's joke time...
It's joke time...
So let's all tell some jokes...

Gordon recalls that many of the jokes were about a block of wood, the chicken crossing the road because it needed a block of wood, the big chimney making some comment about a block of wood to the little chimney, and so on. You probably had to be there.

On other occasions we plotted our first television series with proposals for sketches and the like, an example of which is one of Jason's many explorations of his fried egg theme, composed on one side of A4 which I kept for the sake of posterity.

Enter Brutus.

'Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your—'

There is a silent awaiting of Brutus' plea.

'—fried eggs!'

There is a great cheer from the crowd and Brutus is bombarded with fried eggs. The silence dies down and Brutus smiles proudly before his nation.

'Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your—'

The excitement is tremendous as the crowd await Brutus' plea.

'—bacon!'

There is suddenly an uproar in the crowd and an old man appears to come forward, looking up to face Brutus.

'But Sire, Sire - we have no bacon,' says the old man in a sorrowful voice.

'What? No bacon!?,' screams Brutus. 'How can we have fried eggs without any bacon?'

Jason really had a thing about breakfast foods and would randomly insert the words bean, bacon, or fried egg into historical essays; then proudly reveal the verdict a week later, very good work in red biro beneath a page claiming that Christopher Colombus was celebrated for having crossed the Atlantic to discover fried eggs in the new world. Mr. Lewis took the history class, and his teaching methodology seemed to have certain elements in common with that of his wife, our biology teacher.

I realise there's probably no-one else left in the world who finds this shit as funny as we do, Gordon and myself.

Following a pint or possibly two, we wander down the road so I can see what Gordon does, because as I mentioned, he's done things. We climb past hedgerow to a large, slightly knackered looking shed. Inside are a number of horse drawn carriages in various states of repair. Someone called Rod is in the business of restoring them. Gordon draws my attention to the plush finish of one, describing a process of layering paint which is then sanded down, then painted over many times until a perfect sheen is achieved, something like the quality of a precious stone.

'So you, er...' I'm still trying to work out Gordon's part in the equation, given that he's already told me this isn't his workshop.

He smoothly lifts a wooden box from the rear of one carriage, dark, brown wood richly polished, beautifully dovetailed joints, and inlaid fixtures of brass or similar, including a monogram. A tray lined with green baize lifts from the box and I see spaces for fluted glasses and wine bottles. Now I recall something he told me in the pub, something about having to start all over again with brass inlay because someone with too much money had changed their mind.

'Holy shit,' I say. 'You made this?'

He usually makes furniture, as I recall him having told me, but I didn't quite realise that he is a genuine craftsman. I think I imagined something like the shelving I habitually knock up from supplies picked up at the local hardware superstore. Aside from the presence of horse drawn carriages, the workshop is just a workshop, messy with a chemical smell in the air, crap blaring from a tinny radio, and pictures of women's tits on the wall.

'You must make a fucking fortune doing this,' I suggest, in direct response to a mention of Prince Philip having ridden in something tarted up beneath this very roof.

'You would think so, wouldn't you?' Gordon reports, then reminds me that very few of the filthily rich ever became filthily rich by paying their bills on time or agreeing to fair prices. It's the same with all those oil barons who live in Alamo Heights, back in Texas.

We walk back to the village green and, not for the first time, I curse the fact that I was unable to take the woodwork class past my third year of high school because it clashed with art.

I ask about Gordon's father. Their family used to live on a farm just outside the village as you head towards Shipston, a farm distinguished by a large complex of greenhouses full of tomatoes. The greenhouses are still there, as is Gordon's father, but everything else has changed, and not necessarily for the better.

'The countryside is dying,' he tells me.

The village is now mostly populated by people working in the city, or who have retired from working in the city. No-one makes any money from farming these days, and farms which can't adapt to what few niches are left to them are often sold off to developers. The news makes me feel somehow uncomfortable. It isn't like I was particularly tied into the rural economy when I lived here, but it's difficult to miss the changes and the sense of pessimism. Gordon doesn't even seem particularly angry about it. He's aware of it happening and is simply trying to adapt as best he can.

Here is the thing which I fear might divide us. He's quite clearly picked a side because he hasn't been given much choice, and that side is acknowledged by a Countryside Alliance sticker on the glass of the door of his cottage. I've a feeling I may be on the other side of this particular fence because I view fox hunting as unnecessary and probably barbaric, and suspect the Countryside Alliance to be mostly tweedy women in green wellies called Marjorie and people who believe that Nigel Farage is only saying what the rest of us were thinking. The thing I fear is discovering that I have no fucking clue what I'm talking about.

We resume drinking at the pub and Susie arrives with Floella - Gordon's partner and daughter respectively. Susie apparently regards me as famous by virtue of having read my blog, which is hugely flattering. The two of them argue about Yorkshire pudding. Gordon is cooking tonight, but Susie lacks confidence in his Yorkshire pudding, which tonight will be made using an arguably unorthodox recipe.

Gordon is philosophical, taking the position that the pudding may well turn out shite - in which case Susie will have been proven right - but asking whether any of us can really presume to know what the future holds?

Back at the cottage, I respond to a request to draw Floella. She giggles, but mostly sits still. She sends me shy glances but doesn't quite have the confidence to engage directly. Gordon tells me he has a loft full of stuff I drew at school, and I wince a little because I recall him being quite easy to caricature. Apparently there's a cartoon strip I drew called SuperGord which I strongly suspect to be a strip about a superhero with nose-based powers, Gordon being fairly well blessed in that department. I just hope I wasn't too cruel, and thankfully Gordon's report of having been immortalised in this fashion suggests that if I was digging him in the ribs, at least it wasn't with such force as to leave enduring scars.

As I draw, I marvel at being sat in a half-timbered cottage, and one which my old friend calls home. Living in the US, I now know people who have never even seen a building of such antiquity.

Dinner is wonderful, and the Yorkshire pudding is excellent. Gordon's seemingly reckless approach to cooking is vindicated.

Next morning we take the dog for a walk around the fields at the back. Gordon talks about the wildlife he routinely encounters, the hedgerows, and life in the country; but in case I'm making it sound like a lecture, it isn't. It's a conversation, and I have to admit I'm learning a lot. He even talks about fox hunting in a way which communicates points I'd never even considered. I'm still not sure I can budge on that particular one, but everything else he tells me has a terrifying underlying veracity, and his arguments, born from direct experience, are rock solid. The most basic distillation of his problem is that those attempting to make a living in the English countryside have been denied a voice, and even my own arguably skewed understanding of the Countryside Alliance would seem to confirm this; and because they are denied a voice, decisions affecting the rural economy are made largely by persons who remain unaffected by those decisions; and perhaps most crucially of all, human society as a whole - at least in the west - has become increasingly divorced from the seasons, from the cycle of life and death, and from the way nature works, which is possibly why we're all in such a mess, generally speaking. Perhaps it is because we don't like to be reminded of where our food comes from, that we don't like to be reminded where anything comes from. We, as a people, don't like consequences.

We walk and we talk about hunting and management of the land, controlling the populations of certain predators, and I realise that even where I disagree, or where I have reservations, Gordon lives here and he's the one who understands the place and how all its pieces fit together; and I remind myself that sometimes we need to admit that we just don't know, so we listen to someone who does; and that's what I'm doing.

We have breakfast, bacon purchased from the newsagent because the farm shop is closed this morning, and by chance we encounter Mr. Goodfellow on the village green. He was my French teacher thirty years ago. Weirdly, he remembers me, and weirder still. he doesn't appear to have aged. He laughs a lot more than I recall him having done back at school.

At midday I climb back onto my bike and head off towards Banbury, Oxfordshire, for a meeting with others from school, a day older and arguably a couple of years wiser.