Mark

From September 1985 to August 1987 I lived in the village of Otham in Kent, specifically in Hollytree House, a cottage situated on the imaginatively named Otham Street. Hollytree House was student accommodation and cost me a tenner a week in rent, sharing with four others. I lived in student accommodation because I was a student taking a three-year degree course at Maidstone College of Art. My subject was fine art, specialising in film and video. I was taking the degree mainly because I'd had no other better defined direction in which to proceed after I left school.

My three years came to an end without my having formulated any clear idea of what I wanted to do with my life beyond that I knew what I didn't want to do; and unfortunately, as with both joining the army and working at McDonalds, it had turned out that fine art was one of the things I didn't want to do. Nor did I have much enthusiasm for working in television, the route taken by many others on my course, most of whom were significantly more motivated than myself. I'd discovered that I liked playing in a rock band and I enjoyed comic books - both reading and drawing them - none of which seemed likely to form the basis of a career.

The final term was fun while I managed to avoid dwelling on my distinctly uncertain and potentially miserable future out there in the big, bad world of rent, dole, and job centres. I knew the rude awakening was coming. Once college had finished, I stayed on at Hollytree House for as long as I could manage, although I knew I'd have to be out by October. I didn't want to move back in with my parents for obvious reasons, and yet I was scared to go forward, fearing whichever direction I took would almost certainly leave me beached somewhere I didn't want to be. Simultaneous to this, friends I'd made at college seemed to drift away. There were exceptions, but persons I'd considered myself on good terms with seemed distant, almost as though they were unable to work out what I was doing on their doorstep. I felt like the creepy older kid still turning up at the school gates long after leaving.

As might be gleaned from the above, I may not have been a whole lot of fun to hang around with; and my increasing sense of distance from the college environment brought a realisation, namely that I hadn't actually liked many of my fellow students in the first place. It wasn't that I actively disliked them, but we'd never had much in common. I didn't care about their world, or their aspirations, or that which they held to be of value. I found them self-involved. They had  too much faith in the art world, in contemporary art, and realms about which no-one sane gave a flying fuck.

So my friends were people I came to know through art college, or because I was there in Maidstone at that time rather than because we ate sandwiches at the same government subsidised refectory. A couple of these friends were people I knew from the White Horse, which was the village pub. Technically they were townies, as my fellow students would have referred to them, meaning they were of local origin, worked in regular jobs and probably didn't care a whole lot about abstract expressionism. You could probably substitute the term working class for townies without changing the relationship.

My time at Hollytree House was characterised by my sharing with four girls - as I would have deemed them at the time. I was myself too lacking in either maturity or testosterone-driven confidence to constitute a threat, or so I imagine, and I never tried to cop off with any of them because I never tried to cop off with anyone for the duration of those three years. Even had it seemed like a good idea, which it didn't, I wouldn't have known where to start. This domestic arrangement suited me, and I appreciated being spared the usual macho bullshit generated when you share a kitchen with young men. Naturally, everyone at the local pub was in love with the girls of Hollytree House, usually from afar, and being the token male I was often regarded as someone who might effect an introduction without it seeming too creepy. I never did because it almost always was too creepy. Some of the locals speculated on the topic of what I must get up to surrounded by all that fanny, as they delightfully put it; although half the time I was up the pub because I needed a break from the girl talk.

My townie friends at the pub were Bob, Dave, Mark, and Dez by default because he tended to hang out with the other three. Dez, who resembled Dickie Davies, was usually too drunk to form words and spent most of the time sat grinning and chuckling at a table, occasionally crooning People are Strange by the Doors in response to whatever had been said to him. Bob was, by his own terrifically blunt description, a cripple, having suffered from childhood polio which left him either on crutches or in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. It seemed fair to say that he hadn't had it easy, but his hardship had left him both socially fearless and blessed with a caustic sense of humour. Dave was a smartly dressed wide boy who worked at the local branch of Topman. He was only a few years older than me and was very funny, and we became close enough for the exchange of Christmas cards. I'm fairly sure I remember his initiating our friendship with a monologue along the lines of art and all that stuff you do - it's all bollocks innit, and I couldn't actually disagree. Our friendship was fortified by my ability to quote the lyrics of New Model Army's Vengeance in full, which impressed Dave no end.

'Here, come and listen to this,' he said to some hairy biker stood at the bar. This was Mark. He was roughly the same age, wore a leather jacket, and seemed as though he might be handy in a fight.

'What?' he said, looking unusually bored.

Dave pressed me to recite the lyrics to Vengeance a second time. After a minute of coaxing, I conceded because a refusal would have been even more embarrassing.

'Gets a thousand pound fine after months in court, while the lawyers get fat and the law gets bought,' I eventually concluded, voice wobbling like I was at school and had been told to read in front of the entire class.

'That's great, innit,' said Dave. 'Proper song!'

'What a load of bollocks,' Mark observed drily, not actually sounding like he cared either way.

'Don't you think those are great words?' Dave tried again.

'No, I don't.'

Somehow the ice was broken. Mark joined us at our table and we drank some more. I don't remember what we talked about because it was thirty fucking years ago, but there was a lot of laughter and we became good friends. It was unexpected because I'd grown up in a town full of bikers back in the Midlands, which hadn't left me well-disposed towards their type; and this guy was the real thing, but he was smart, and he was funny, and he was great company. It turned out he knew exactly what I was talking about when I told him about the denim clad spotty twats of my childhood in as diplomatic terms as I could muster. He had his own little gang of such kids as acolytes, mostly riding fizzies - junior's first motorbike in the late seventies, the one which makes a noise like a sewing machine. They followed him around and treated him like a guru, forever asking him to describe memorable road accidents and so on.

At the time I was busily writing and drawing a comic strip wherein the Dovers - the band for which I thrashed a guitar - had ludicrous escapades involving plots to take over the world, angry Gods, and the like. My fictitious version of the Dovers were managed by Richard Nixon, former president of the United States and now tenant of a bedsit in Lewisham, but most of the characters were people I knew; and Mark began to appear in the strip because he was a laugh and I didn't know many people who were. The continuing story - all made up as I went along, ran to about sixty or seventy pages before I ran out of steam. I'd intended to publish it as a series of fanzines but never got around to it, which was probably for the best.

One evening, I nervously showed Mark a few pages of the strip because he was in it and I'd recycled a few of his jokes. Amazingly he was flattered and thought it was great, at which point he mentioned his love of Paul Sample's Ogri, a strip which once appeared in the back of Bike magazine. It turned out that we both loved Ogri. My dad had read Bike regularly when I was a kid, and I always nicked his copy after he'd finished which, with hindsight, was probably what set me on the path to drawing comics in the first place.

In response to my strips, Mark read me some of his poetry. It came as a real surprise that he wrote poetry. I knew a couple of poets and they all seemed a bit neurotic, whereas Mark was more like an amiable Viking, someone who surely didn't need to write poetry but did it anyway. Anyway, I recall it as being very powerful, and enough so for me to get over my dislike of poetry, generally speaking.

This guy was a dark horse. He had hidden depths. The bikers I knew back in school days were mostly arseholes defined by the same patches sewn on all their denim jackets - logos of heavy metal bands occasionally drawn on by hand and spelled wrong if they couldn't get the patches - Judes Preist, Motohead, States Quo and the usual suspects; and if you weren't in their gang then you were almost certainly gay. They made it very easy for me to decide whether I really wanted to move away from the town in which I grew up.

Yet Mark was somehow sprung from a different branch of the same tree, and I realised there was something to that whole deal about not judging books by their covers. Mark thought about things. He didn't seem to care about running with the crowd or having a fave band as your entire identity.

After Otham, I moved to Chatham but we stayed in touch for a while. Mark asked me to paint something on his garage door. It was  decorated with a bottle of Newcastle brown ale which he'd painted on there a few years before. It impressed the hell out of me but Mark felt it was time for a change.

So one Sunday - October, 1987 from what I can work out, I went over to his home in Senacre Woods on the outskirts of Maidstone and, for want of any better ideas, spent the day painting a series of non-sequiturs in a cartoon form drawn from the comic strips I'd shown him.

I wasn't really sure what I was doing, but it seemed to go okay. Mark spent the day working on his bike just a few feet away, so we doubtless talked bollocks for the duration. I paused every so often to assess my progress, and also for a fag - cigarette breaks being an essential part of the creative process.

'That's the problem with this sort of work,' Mark observed in philosophical spirit as he stepped back from the bike to wipe oil from his hands. 'You keep forgetting to smoke.'

We lit up, and contemplated my efforts on his garage door. I felt a bit of a fraud and half expected my patron to ask, what the fuck were you thinking?, but somehow it was exactly what he'd wanted. It was a long day, but pleasant and satisfying just as the right sort of labour should be. It probably wasn't equivalent to that Pope asking Michelangelo for something nice on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, but it was fun, and I liked creating art for someone who obviously appreciated it.

We lost touch soon after. I ended up moving around a lot over the next couple of years and lost touch with a lot of people, and by the time I'd noticed that Mark was among them, it seemed too late to do anything about it.

Thirty or so years later, I'm living in San Antonio, Texas, and the internet is a thing. Of all the long lost friends I'd managed to track down on social media, Mark remained frustratingly elusive; so it was a great day when he resurfaced on facebook, or when I resurfaced on facebook, depending on how you look at it. So much time had passed that I don't think we knew where to start, so we didn't, instead settling into the routine of occasional jovial exchanges. He'd changed, but not in a bad way, and he was still a warm, funny guy - one of those rare people you somehow can't imagine being disliked by anyone. We looked at pictures of each other's cats, and all of the usual thing. He asked me to design a tattoo for him but I never got around to it. I've never really understood tattoos and the idea that some shit I might come up with would be reproduced on an actual person felt like a lot of pressure, at least compared to painting over a lovingly rendered bottle of brown ale on a garage door.

More recently, I made vague plans to go and see him when I was back in England but it never worked out.

Now, as it has turned out, he's gone. I'm not sure I even realised he was ill. It seems incredible that one can be hit so hard by the passing of a person you haven't seen in decades, but I guess he made an unusually good impression.

There's not much more I can say.

He was my friend and it was a privilege to have known him.

It turns out that the above is more or less a rewrite of a more detailed post from eight years ago (when Mark was still with us but before he'd resurfaced on facebook) which, should anyone care, can be found here. This probably goes some way towards explaining why this is the first post on this blog in over a year.

 

Crazy Snot

We drove up Olney to North Vandiver, then along as far as Urban Crest. At Urban Crest we took a left to Crandall, then a sort of shimmy along to Greenwich at the end, and then again at Harmon, back down to North Vandiver and home. These are streets, lanes, roads, drives and places in Alamo Heights but no-one here seems to use suffixes which don't always even appear on the street signs. I'm in the habit of saying I live on Timberlane rather than Timberlane Drive because it would seem weird to me, as though I were trying to make a point; which is something different to my continued English pronunciation of the words banana and aluminium. Were I to go native with those two it would feel like the kind of impersonation which could lead to descriptions of things as real swell,  purty, or mighty fine. Yet I'll say gas rather than petrol station because it's easier. I don't know what the rules are.

We drove up Olney to North Vandiver, all around and then back down again for the sake of measuring the distance, which came to five and a half miles. Today I'm taking the same route on foot in the name of exercise because my bike is still at the repair shop. If I can be arsed, I tell myself, I might do a couple of circuits of the block demarcated by Urban Crest, Greenwich, and Harmon, and I've worked out that if I do that five times it will add up to the twenty miles I might have cycled on my bike; except of course I know full well that I'm not going to walk twenty bloody miles, so I'm just walking until I get bored.

Hailstones the size of golf balls and even larger fell on San Antonio last night. It was terrifying, not to mention deafening, and I've never experienced that sort of weather before. Thankfully, neither had my wife, so I'm hoping it won't happen again in my lifetime - it isn't one of those Texas things I'm just going to have to get used to, like incorrect pronunciation of banana or ambiguity as to whether such and such an address amounts to a road, a street, or a drive. This morning as I take my walk I'm also taking stock of the damage, because peculiarly ours seems to be the only house which didn't have one of those meteorite sized chunks of ice come through the roof. My wife's car is similarly undamaged. Walking up Morningside I pass a few vehicles with smashed wind shields, and plenty with hood or roof pitted by impact dents.

The first damage of which I take stock is my own knee as I miss a step and fall whilst walking across the parking lot at the dentists' office. This is Dr. Yarborough's surgery, so it's probably some sort of curse they've put on me because I got pissed off by the expensive and unnecessary treatment they attempted to con me into signing up for. I awkwardly get to my feet, direct dark thoughts towards the building, and then continue on roads strewn with the leaves of palms and yucca, plant detritus from gardens smashed up by last night's hail.

Eventually I reach the point at which North Vandiver crosses the Austin Highway, and I'm beginning to feel hungry. I suppose that's a couple of miles so far.

Fuck it, I decide, and enter the L&L Hawaiian Grill situated on the corner. Bess and I have been fascinated by the place for some time, wondering what the hell it is they actually serve. We have no idea what Hawaiian cuisine might look like and have assumed that the place is probably just a burger joint wherein a chef in a grass skirt sticks a slice of pineapple in your bun; but we don't know this for sure because neither of us have ever quite summoned up the courage to investigate. I order loco moco because it isn't a burger, and it's the weirdest looking thing on the menu, at least to my eyes. Loco moco turns out to be a bed of white rice, two beefburgers of the kind I used to buy frozen from Sainsburys back in England and which seem conspicuously absent from American menus, all topped with a couple of fried eggs. There's also some sort of gravy on this, and a side of what appears to be a cross between macaroni cheese and coleslaw but without the cheese. As I eat, I study the menu and find a lot of burgers, amongst them a salmon burger which looks decent, and dishes which somehow hint at sushi. Being new to this, it all strikes me as food invented by crazy people, or as a burger joint owned by a maniac who suddenly decides he's running a sushi restaurant, with a knowledge of sushi based exclusively on a scene from a 1960s Batman comic. The food is mad, but strangely it actually sort of works. It tastes pretty good, although there's too much rice, and crucially it tastes home cooked, which means even with a loony at the wheel, L&L Hawaiian Grill already has a head start over Popeye's and all of those places.

Given our working hypothetical model of an establishment selling mainly pineapple burgers, Bess and I have often wondered how the hell L&L Hawaiian Grill manages to stay in business; and now I have my answer in that it's packed with marines and other servicemen presumably attached to Fort Sam just down the road. I guess some of them will have been stationed in Hawaii, and so they come here from time to time. Bess later tells me that moco is Spanish for bogies - or boogers as she inaccurately terms them - but loco moco nevertheless tastes pretty good for something with a recipe which may as well be what do I have left in the fridge which hasn't gone off? It's hard to get past the thought that I am eating a dish named crazy snot, but not impossible.

I walk on along North Vandiver, passing the Quaker's Meeting Hall and a series of utilities trucks repairing overhead power cables brought down by last night's anomalous weather. I turn up Urban Crest, and stroll into the quieter depths of Alamo Heights. I've answered my own question of what food is served at the L&L Hawaiian Grill, and now I get to answer who the hell buys those things? This is a thought which occurs each time we pass a place on the side of the highway selling giant brightly painted figures beaten into shape from sheets of tin. It's always roughly the same line up of cows, dinosaurs, banditos, cartoon characters and so on. They're garden ornaments, and whilst the sight of them always raises a smile, I can't imagine wanting one for our own yard, and I have no idea who buys them. A hot dog in a sombrero grins at me over the fence on the other side of Urban Crest. He's about nine foot tall, as is his friend, the chicken, and so I have my answer.

At the corner of Northridge I pause to inspect a lawn embellished with a Trump campaign sign. It seems worth looking at because this is thankfully the first Trump campaign material I've seen in real life on this side of the internet. I've seen plenty of Bernie and Hillary material, and a fair quota in support of our own homegrown Republicans - Straus and others - but this is my first physical evidence of real people apparently believing Donald Trump might be worth a vote. I notice how there's similarly a Trump campaign sticker on the rear bumper of the truck parked in the driveway, next to one of the state flag with the word secede superimposed in forceful block capitals.

What sort of person might live here? I hear my inner Loyd Grossman ask. I suppose it depends upon which aspect of Trump's campaign most appeals to this individual, although given that Donald Trump seems to hate more or less everyone, it's hard to take a guess. This person might have a problem with all those Mexicans supposedly flooding across the border, and may therefore respond to Trump's vow to represent his or her views in that regard. Of course, someone who dislikes Mexicans choosing to live in San Antonio would have to be a fucking idiot, which doesn't necessarily preclude the possibility of this being the detail which has secured his or her vote. The secede sticker refers to the popularity of the idea that Texas might secede from the union of the United States, thus meaning we no longer have to have anything to do with jazz musicians or hippies who wear open-toed sandals - visits to Austin excepted - which is a nice idea but probably won't happen. I therefore have to assume that our mysterious family not only wish for a big fucking wall built across the bottom part of the state, but for Texas to become its own country, and one which logically wouldn't actually be under the jurisdiction of President Trump; unless they want Trump to move down here before we close the doors and change the locks. Maybe they haven't really thought it all through. Maybe they're just idiots.

If I have any idiotic qualities, they have been lessened by my walk, statistically speaking. I return home via HEB, our local supermarket, clocking up a sum total of just under seven miles, which seems like enough. I've eaten crazy snot, penetrated the mystery of L&L Hawaiian Grill, discovered who the hell buys those things, and observed Trump support. I am moderately wiser than when I set out this morning.

Popeye's Concentration Camp

It's the weekend and the kid is away, most likely on his father's boat down in the Gulf of Mexico, face glued to a screen as he plays a game in which you have to manoeuvre a virtual kid onto a boat and get him fishing; so Bess and I have a day of doing whatever we like.

'How about Crystal City?' I suggest. 'How far is that?'

'Not too far,' She tells me, and it's settled.

She has been reading Jan Jarboe Russell's The Train to Crystal City, an account of the internment camp which was there during the second world war - the concentration camp, if we're to be honest. It was set up for the detention of persons of Japanese and - to a lesser extent - German or Italian heritage, those mostly American citizens whom the government suspected of having potentially divided loyalties. It was a long, long way from being fair, and life in the camp was tough in many respects, but on the other hand, aside from no-one being able to leave, I gather the inmates were for the most part looked after at least as well as anyone staying at a Ramada Inn. Some were to serve as bargaining pieces to be repatriated in exchange for the release of American families or hostages trapped over the other side, and so it was in everyone's interest that they should suffer no great hardship. In the historical hierarchy of concentration camps, Crystal City had very little in common with those set up by the Nazi regime in Poland; and yet the very existence of the place seems peculiar, like something from an alternate history - America's concentration camp.

It was nothing to be proud of - not least when some Jewish families were repatriated back to what had then not quite been officially recognised as a genocidal regime - but it was otherwise tame compared to what was happening in Europe and Japan.

Crystal City is about twenty miles from the Mexican border, south-west of us, therefore a drive of about 120 miles which we guess will take a couple of hours. The place isn't exactly near anything, which is presumably why it was chosen for the camp.

It's sunny, hot but not unpleasantly so, and we set off, initially heading for Pearsall - which is where Bess grew up - then taking US-57 west towards La Pryor. I've been west to New Mexico, but this is further to the south and the landscape is quite different. Mostly it's flat and arid, a forest of mesquite trees from one horizon to the other, and these are small, crabby mesquite, nothing ever reaching the heights or stature of the one we have in our garden in San Antonio.

As my wife read about Crystal City, I'd been ploughing my way through W.W. Newcomb's The Indians of Texas, picked up when I realised how little I actually knew about those who had occupied this land for most of its history. Unfortunately it turns out that not too much is known of the native Texans, partially because so many of them were nomadic cultures, and partially because it seems their decline began even before Europeans turned up and started building. San Antonio borders the former territories of a number of different groups, and the land to the south was inhabited by a disparate array of wandering tribes now remembered as Coahuiltecs, more for the sake of geographical convenience than anything. I was familiar with these people only in so much as that the Mexica who built temple platforms in Tenochtitlan far to the south would have dubbed them Chichimecs, a generic term for the nomadic tribes of northern Mexico roughly implying those who suckle at nature's breast. In the case of our Coahuiltecs, Newcomb suggests that the lifestyle was a matter of making do rather than choice, and that tribes inhabiting land such as is found in the far south of Texas have most likely done so having been driven away from some more fertile terrain. As nomads who lived rough and left few significant cultural artefacts behind, the Coahuiltecs are not so well remembered as their more settled neighbours, seeming more suited to the misleading historical role of the savage. Newcomb's book somewhat redresses this misconception, suggesting they were a quick-witted, civilised, and above all, adaptable people who managed to thrive in an environment which would have left most of us struggling at best.

Now as we head for Crystal City, I realise we are passing through what might be considered former Coahuiltec land, which is an oddly exciting thought. I gaze from the car window and consider what it would be like trying to get by out here. It's a subject Bess and I have stumbled across in the course of idle conversation many times, most recently as I related what I'd read about Coahuiltecs finding themselves obliged to eat poo.

It's not such a leap as you might think - or at least it doesn't seem so to me - but there is simply no milder way of putting it. I regularly see deer turds whilst I'm out cycling, and to me they resemble a more rustic version of the Lion Bar, containing plenty of large seeds, some dry grass, and very little material left to be identified as the actual turd. Barring the advent of the apocalypse, I'm never going to pick one up and take a bite, but I can see it might not be such a terrible option if your hunger becomes a matter of life or death. Hunger almost certainly was a matter of life or death for the Coahuiltecs, some of whom occasionally went one stage further and recycled undigested seeds found in their own poo, a practice referred to as the second harvest, and I can't even tell if that's funny or not. It's either disgusting or else it seems disgusting to me, but times were tough and I guess they knew what they were doing.

'Wouldn't you just eat grass?' Bess often suggests, horrified. The question usually arises as she describes the true story of someone forced to eat their own sofa during wartime conditions. It was a leather sofa.

Now we're following US-83 from La Pryor down to Crystal City, the home stretch, and we're both looking at the scrubby mesquite forest thinking about how it would be to live in this land without any real shade.

'What about mesquite beans?' she asks. 'Those trees make a ton of those things.'

'They ate those too, but not all year round.'

'Well, there are cacti.'

'Yes.' I note how there is barely a patch of sandy ground as far as can be seen which doesn't have nopal cacti springing from it. Black vultures circle in a distant part of the sky, so I guess there must also be the occasional bunny, maybe even deer.

Bess is still scowling. 'I don't know - eating your own poo...'

'Well, they probably had a lot of mouths to feed, and we'll never know how it was for them. I guess they did what they had to do.'

We pass a wild turkey at the side of the road. It's tall, slender, and quite dark. It reminds me of a dinosaur from Jurassic Park. This is only the second time I've seen one.

They're very intelligent,' Bess tells me. 'Not like the farmed ones. Those things are really goofy.'

When we come to Crystal City the place looks deserted, although to be fair, having grown up tightly packed into the twenty or so square miles of England's countryside, it doesn't even resemble anything I would call a city. The road is long and fairly straight and I can see a sum total of about three houses set back in the bush at any one time - as I suppose you would call it - rusted farm machinery occupying adjacent plots of dry ground. Eventually some of those buildings we pass seem a little bigger, and one of them is a library, so I suppose I may as well accept that it's a city by some definition.

'Wait,' I say, struggling to recall something to which I hadn't paid too much attention on the local news. 'Isn't this the place where there's no-one left in charge?'

Bess nods, but she doesn't recall much detail either.

The mayor and a whole load of city council types presently reside in the stripy hole on charges of corruption. We watched them all led away in cuffs on the KSAT news programme a few nights ago as we were waiting for Wheel of Fortune. There is no-one in charge - whatever that means - and this realisation strikes me as momentarily alarming in relation to the state of the place. We pass an occasional vehicle, but I see no people. I'm half expecting a tribe of cinematic anarchists from a TV show to emerge from a distant street, all shaking firearms and crowded onto the battered skeleton of a truck pulled by a team of horses.

We find the concentration camp on Popeye Lane. There's a sports ground, an athletics track, and a housing project a little way away. All that is left of the camp are crumbling concrete squares marking where the huts once stood, smaller squares at the centre of each which I guess may have been fireplaces. The ground is flat and incongruously waterlogged with crab grass concealing puddles here and there. We stand and read the plaque which has been mounted in acknowledgement of the place and how we probably shouldn't feel too proud of this detail of American history.

Bess is looking for Popeye.

Crystal City was known for its spinach, and in turn for its spinach factory, which I assume must have been a canning plant. Half of the accounts recorded in the book my wife has been reading mention a statue of Popeye, the cartoon sailor and spinach enthusiast, seen by inmates arriving at the camp. She consults Google on her iPhone, and then we drive a little further to where the statue has been relocated. I guess no-one felt too good about having Popeye the Sailor Man associated with a concentration camp. We find him under a canopy on what I assume to be Crystal City's main strip. For some reason I was expecting something on the scale of the Statue of Liberty, but this Popeye is more or less actual size. In fact, aside from the chin, his proportions seem oddly human. Perhaps the statue originally commemorated some nautical culture hero on whom Popeye was based, I think to myself.

We look around a little, inspecting a line of inexplicably closed-up shops one of which continues the Popeye motif with enthusiastic frescoes of both himself and Olive Oyl jigging a sailor's hornpipe across the facade. There's also the stalled caboose of an old railway a little further along the main strip, and no explanation as to why it's there. We look inside and find Christmas lighting of the kind which tends to be hung from lamp posts at the centre of town.

After another few minutes, we drive home.

'Wouldn't it be funny if that turkey was still there?' I suggest as the thought occurs to me. 'I wish I'd taken a photograph.'

Mere seconds later I realise that somehow I have been able to distinguish this particular section of highway from the rest, and had therefore been reminded of the turkey because there he is, or possibly she - still pecking away at the side of the road.

Bess slows the car some way past, and I get out, pulling my camera from its pouch, but the turkey is already gone.

Durham, NC

'Don't you just love fandom?' the fanzine editor asked me. We'd met for a drink and there had been a peculiar lull in the conversation, at which point he just came right out with it. It was as much a statement as a question, and to my ears it had the cadence of isn't life so much better with the love of our Lord Jesus? The problem was that I didn't love fandom and I didn't know how to answer. I felt bad for the fanzine editor, and then bad for myself because he was the nice guy whilst I was the cynical gremlin of judgement, not even true to myself, choking back my own poison lest it reveal me as such and ruin the mood. I had once enjoyed the thing enough to have bought a ton of tie-in novels and to be able to hold a conversation with the fanzine editor, but my interest had dwindled when the television company resumed making the series; and my interest had further curdled to a faintly carcinogenic slurry as the show began to engender a new, more toxic species of fan, and as their numbers began to multiply.

My problem stems principally from the fan aspect, at least as I understand its contemporary meaning. There are plenty of things which I like but for which I'm reluctant to call myself a fan. There are probably entire episodes of The Sopranos which I can recite line by line from memory, but that's because I like The Sopranos. I have no need to belong to a greater whole of anything, or to define myself as such for the benefit of my peers. I see fandom as being about branding - dedication to a commercial franchise signified by a set group of ideas and images. Whatever may be done or said by those ideas and images is usually of importance secondary to their repetition; and when I say branding I specifically mean brand loyalty of the kind which either excludes everything external to the franchise, or which at the very least favours mainly that which echoes some aspect of the franchise, not least the fact of it being a franchise as distinct from any more organic expression of culture.

I hadn't been to a comic book convention since the early nineties. I no longer really draw comics as I once did, and as for reading the things, I've had an on-off relationship with the medium for the last two decades. There are comics I still enjoy, but nothing I enjoy so much that I need to pay fifty quid or equivalent for the privilege of dressing up as one of the characters whilst hanging out with others similarly costumed as what may as well be corporate mascots. I've never wanted to belong to any club which would have me as a member because if they want my membership then it's unlikely that they really know anything about me, or that they care to know anything about me.

Besides, in my day - seeing as I'm now of an age which allows for use of such a preamble - it was the fancy dress parade. I refuse to acknowledge the term cosplay - a clumsy conflation of costume and play by which participants distance themselves from an activity traditionally associated with very small children. It isn't the activity which particularly bothers me so much as the implicit anticipation of not only my approval, but my hearty endorsement of persons who feel best able to express their inner selves by dressing as Batman, or River Song, or Pinkie Pie. It isn't that I disapprove so much as that if you reduce yourself to a dull, juvenile symbol by your own free will, if you identify so heavily with what is essentially just merchandise, then I simply don't think that you and I will ever have much to say to each other because I suspect that behind the glitter and the cape, you probably won't have much to say about anything; and this makes me feel sorry for you, and disappointed. I don't want you banned, stamped out, or subjected to scorn, but neither do I want to have to think about you for any length of time, and you don't get a cookie just for being you. You shouldn't need my approval.

I hadn't been to a comic book convention since the early nineties, but Charlie said he'd been invited to one in Durham, North Carolina - right here in America. I told him, 'great - maybe me and Bess can fly up there and meet you or something.' This had been suggested in England back in June - one of those commitments you make as a sort of place-holder whilst knowing it will cost and therefore probably won't happen. I mentioned it to my wife as soon as I was home in Texas, and she provided the motive force which would ordinarily have faltered as I faced up to the reality of travel plans and plane tickets and places to stay. I'm glad she did, because Charlie is one of those people I should have seen with a little more frequency over the past couple of decades. We were at art college together, we attended comic book conventions together, and so much as any of us ever had a little gang, we were in the same one. Then our lives flew off in different directions and everything became complicated; but once a couple of decades have passed, life becomes too short to let the complications get in the way.

Charlie draws a hugely successful comic book called The Walking Dead, itself the inspiration for a hugely successful television show, and he is as such probably the closest I come to knowing a celebrity. My comic habit is severely reduced compared to what it was, and I haven't really enjoyed what few episodes of The Walking Dead I've seen. I can see that it's a quality product but it probably just isn't for me, which isn't unusual given there being very little television I like at all these days. Charlie, being both a fully grown man and a nice guy, doesn't seem to mind.

Because I don't just love fandom, I suppose I have a few reservations about the event, but the point is getting to hang out with my old pal, and getting on a plane and having an adventure, and the sort of adventure which Junior might hopefully appreciate despite it occurring in the real world rather than on a screen. It's the sort of thing which we, as a family, probably need to do more often.

We fly on Friday the 13th, changing at Atlanta then arriving at the airport in Durham after dark. We haven't spent long in the air when you add it up, although with all of the waiting around, it feels as though we have. Happily I have not been driven to silently grinding my teeth whilst assembling a series of barbed comments, as occasionally transpires when we spend time as a family. It's not that I don't get on with Junior but that his behaviour can sometimes be quite demanding. On bad days he may come across as rude, needy, and entitled, although in all fairness this could be partially because I have become actively attuned to notice such behaviour - feeding the irritation like you scratch at an itch. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle and rests significantly on the fact of his being a twelve-year old boy, and things tend to go better when I'm able to keep this in mind. The prospect of the three of us up in the sky squashed into economy seats for a couple of hours was one I had been trying not to think about, but once it happens it's fine.

We land at Durham and take a taxi to the Marriott Hotel, the one in which the comic book convention is to be held. The trip seems to take some time and I guess that the airport is some way out of town. I find it frustrating that it's already dark because even just the bushes and trees at the side of the highway - what I can see of them in the glare of sodium lamps - are a testament to our being somewhere other than Texas. I've been to North Carolina before but just passing through, changing flights or a night at some anonymous hotel when a flight has been cancelled. I want to get a look at the state to see how well it compares with my mental image, cohered during many hours of listening to David Sedaris describe his formative years growing up in Raleigh. I want to be able to see if the place is anything like I imagined, but it's dark and all I can do is boggle at trees with tall, thin trunks and the unsettling absence of cacti. We come to Durham and I try to recall the name of the flooring company run by Paul Sedaris, younger brother of David, but I know it's unlikely that he would have an office or an outlet in Durham, or that we might just happen to drive right past it, or that it will mean anything if we do.

The hotel is huge and ornate, tall ceilings with gold fittings and many reflective services. We sign in, and the receptionist chuckles as she notes that we are from Texas. 'Like I couldn't tell.'

I'm wearing my Stetson and one of my favourite shirts, one that makes it look as though I'm wearing the state flag, most likely originated with either a garage or some fried chicken concession.

'He's not even American,' my wife chuckles, and we all laugh. The joke should be old by now but it still contains some magic.

We find the room and realise there's been a misunderstanding. We have two single beds. This means the boy will have a bed of his own as requested, but Bess and I will have to sleep whilst balanced side by side on a mattress with the dimensions of a long thin sofa cushion, and neither of us are what you'd call petite. Otherwise, the room seems fine. We return to reception and explain that one bed fails to meet out requirements as Texans. Unsurprisingly there's nothing they can do. Everything is fully booked due to the convention.

There seems to be a dining area, a raised enclosure at the heart of the lobby in which persons dressed as characters from The Legend of Zelda pick at plates of hotel food. We're all hungry, not having eaten fried chicken for a number of hours, and so we pick a table and direct meaningful glances at staff whom we hope are passing waiters but who may simply be porters. We watch entire teams of Avengers and other characters I don't recognise pass by and at least know that we are in the right place.

I've sent Charlie a text message to explain that we are here but I haven't heard back.

'He's probably busy,' Bess suggests.

Having myself been let down by mobile phones failing to work in foreign countries, contrary to the claims of the network provider, I'm not so sure; and I'm almost at the point of scarfing leftover fries from the abandoned plates at the table recently vacated by girls dressed as Japanese cartoon characters. I go for a walk to find a waiter or someone, just so far as the end of the lobby, although it should probably be noted that you could almost certainly park a Boeing 747 in this particularly lobby. I follow Spiderman, Deadpool, and a couple of Klingons past the bar to the glass double doors beyond which are the convention halls. I can see security guards and swarms of people dressed as cartoon characters on the other side of the glass. Stranger still is the promotional poster pasted to a board: NC Comicon and just one name in huge letters, Charlie Adlard.

'Fuck,' I say to myself, quite loudly.

I've understood my friend's fame at least since the days when he briefly considered changing his name to Charlie X-Files Adlard because that was how it was written by everyone else. He's now Charlie Walking Dead Adlard and it has only just sunk in. I have an urge to grab complete strangers by the sleeve and tug and point and yelp, 'that's my mate!'

I return to the wife and kid, and miraculously we attract the attention of a waiter who delivers conflicting statements: the kitchen is now closed but yes, he will be happy to take our order. We've been waiting forty minutes and are grateful just for the attention, even if we can't quite tell whether we've just ordered food or not. It eventually turns out that we have, and that with which we are served probably isn't great but nevertheless tastes amazing to us; and in any case Junior is past caring, being at the point of kid-overload having spotted the millionth person dressed as a ninja from some game or other. I wonder to myself whether he knows these are simply regular people dressed up, or whether he thinks those three stood over by the elevator are actual Mario brothers. It probably doesn't matter.

By the time we've eaten, it's late so we go to bed. Bess and I do our best, balanced on our thin strip of mattress. Junior snuggles under the sheet of his bed to yelp and hoot to himself for another couple of hours whilst playing games on his iPad, at least until I let fly with some of the barbed comments I'd set aside for just such an eventuality as this. Part of the problem is that he requires no more than about ten minutes of sleep a week, and short of gagging and locking him in a trunk, he can on occasion be slow to respond to suggestions such as shut up and go to sleep. I'm not even convinced he quite understands it as an instruction. If he considers his room-mates at all, I expect it's only in terms of what he will tell us about the game over which he's been yelping and hooting next morning, because we'll be dying to know.

Parenting is more difficult than it looks, although not necessarily more difficult than I thought it would be.

We don't sleep well, but we do sleep and are awake at eight. I have a bath and we return to the lobby for breakfast, which is when I notice that I've had a message from Charlie. Still jetlagged, he hadn't received my text until after we were all asleep. So we have breakfast and I give him a call. We arrange to meet at one of the dealers' tables within the convention, a retailer of signed Charlie Adlard originals.

We enter the convention and wander around for a little while. I don't see anything I understand well enough to want to buy, but probably about half of the attendees have come in some sort of costume and it's entertaining by itself just watching them. I stand by everything I said in the first couple of paragraphs, but find there is nevertheless something oddly life-affirming about this peculiar situation. Everyone seems to have made a significantly greater effort than they ever did in my day, and regardless of which corporate mascot is represented, I cannot help but appreciate how much fun they all seem to be having, and the fact that no-one really seems to give a shit what anyone thinks.

Why are they doing this?

For FUN, man! Pure fuckin' FUN!, I think, recalling the line from one of my favourite Baby Sue comic strips. I dislike fandom and cosplay and the obsessing over details which only matter because it's either that or recognise that one's entire life has been a waste of time, and I dislike these things particularly when they are pursued to the exclusion of every other potential cultural experience; but when you glance across a crowded room to see some guy dressed as Groot, the tree person from Guardians of the Galaxy - presumably on stilts inside a papier mache construction resembling a tree trunk, those objections are reduced as unto a fart in a thunderstorm whipped up by Thor himself.

My wife and I are speechless - awestruck, and Junior is close to exploding with kid-excitement.

Somehow even more impressive is a distinctly well fed Ghost Rider - a kind of supernatural biker with a flaming skull for a head, in case you've made better use of your life than I have. Our boy simulates flames with a day-glo orange wig over a rubber skull mask, and if any of his friends have pointed out that he's a little on the chunky side compared to the comic book character, then I guess he must have told them to piss off. I'm so impressed that I take his photograph.

When we encounter Charlie he is with a young woman whom he introduces as his personal assistant. Her name is Nicole, and by absurd coincidence it turns out that she once lived in San Antonio, and she lived in a place just off Eisenhauer, a road I cross on an almost daily basis. I briefly wrestle with the coincidence, and also the realisation that Charlie has a handler these days. He submits a fake growl and paws the air with imagined claws like an enraged bear, and I fail to notice that as we discuss hotels and schedules, Nicola is batting away autograph hunters so we can talk in relative peace. Bess fetches out a stack of issues of The Walking Dead because there are a load of folks back home in San Antonio all lined up for autographed copies. They can scarcely believe I'm friends with a genuine star, and Charlie doesn't seem to mind because he's a nice guy and I guess he's used to it. He whips out a magic marker and scrolls an elegant signature across the covers of copies for the kid, his dad, and Duncan, our boy's best friend at school whose entire family identify as Walking Dead obsessives. Charlie has a mammoth signing session this afternoon but will be free to talk under less hectic circumstances for a while after that, so we arrange to meet again around six.

We look around the dealers' room.

'Nice costume,' some guy tells me, because I still have my Stetson on. I was going to tell anyone who asked that I'd come as Hank from King of the Hill, but I suppose I could just as easily be that Walking Dead guy; you know - the one with the hat.

Image Comics have just published a hardback called The Art of Charlie Adlard, and I leaf through a copy at one of the stalls. It's strange to see some of the older material in this historical context, and I can remember him spreading pages of The Tar Baby across the dining table at my dad's house in Coventry. His figures had an initially exaggerated, cartoony quality, but have since tightened up, and his use of shadow has always been astonishing. It feels amazing to see someone I know personally having done this good, having gone so far in his chosen field without either compromise or turning into a dick. It's the kind of success story which sod's law generally prevents, but just this one time it has all worked out just right. I've known this for a while obviously, but now that I've seen the evidence I feel so proud of my old friend that it's embarrassing.

The guy running the stall comes over and tells me he can probably get hold of a signed copy if I'm interested. I buy Mark Millar's 1985 instead.

We have a look at the Lego exhibition, and then Junior stops at a stall selling wooden props, an actual size recreation of Thor's hammer or a replica of the gun with which Bloodstab shot Facepuncher in that issue of Foe Destroyer. He examines a selection of fake swords, then picks an angular wooden shield with a black squiggle on the front, which is handy because it's the only item airport security are likely to allow on the plane. It's from The Legend of Zelda, Junior explains to us in greater detail than we really need.

'Shield bash!' he keeps exclaiming, pulling a melodramatic expression and thrusting the wooden plaque at an imaginary enemy. 'Shield bash!,' he tells us over and over.

The thing looks kind of underwhelming, pretty much an irregular offcut of wood to which someone has added a fabric handle and varnish; but Junior thinks it's great and that's what matters. Even as I write, six months after the fact, I notice that he still sleeps with the thing in his bed from time to time.

Eventually we get tired and return to our room to rest, passing an impressive Asian incarnation of Patrick Troughton's Doctor Who as we do; and then we share an elevator with an individual who I'm fairly certain is the real Captain America.

I only rest for a little while, and then go out for a walk around Durham just to get the lay of the land. Strangely it feels like England to me, or at least more like England than Texas ever has. The trees are all different but they're more or less the same shape, and whilst curbstones and buildings are definitively American, the air tastes similar, or maybe it's some chemical on the breeze, or just the fact of it being so cold as to warrant layered clothing. I experience no nostalgia because I am reminded of those freezing days when the sun barely rose above the level of the rooftops on the other side of the street, which is something I know I will never miss. I walk so far as something called the Old Five Points. It seems to be a run down neighbourhood suffering the first incursion of gentrification so far as I am able to tell. There's a parking lot full of people with some kind of makeshift stage being set up, and some guy asks if I would like to be included in their prayers.

'I'm good,' I tell him as though I've just been offered a cigarette, smiling like we both know how hard it is to give them up.

After an hour I make my way back to the hotel. My wife is awake and is watching the news which is now full of explosions in Paris but with not very much in the way of actual information. Everyone interviewed says that they think what has happened is terrible, which doesn't really need stating. I guess we must be gearing up for another war.

At 4.30PM we return to the lobby as arranged and meet Charlie for a beer. He's been signing autographs for most of the afternoon, both him and Gerard Way, the former singer of My Chemical Romance. It turns out Gerard Way is here because he's written a comic book called The Umbrella Academy which has proven popular, winning awards and everything. I try to remember what I know of My Chemical Romance, which isn't much but I have an impression of them sounding like the Bay City Rollers with black eyeliner. Charlie doesn't seem to have any strong opinion of the music, but he regards Gerard Way himself as a decent guy. Typically we spend most of the time talking about bands, one of the threads of our shared narrative being the band for which I once played guitar supporting the one for which he once played drums. Charlie has recently been in the studio with the Cosmic Rays for whom he presently plays drums. We talk about the album they've had pressed, and the new guitarist, and the old guitarist, and absent friends, and America. Junior has his picture taken with Charlie, but is otherwise suffering from stage fright. Bess later observes that for her the best part of the entire weekend was seeing the smile on my face as Charlie and I caught up.

He has to return to signing duties around six so the rest of the evening is mostly just bumming around and filling time for Bess and myself. Junior plays games on his iPad. At one point I step outside for a walk and buy an issue of NC Slammer from a gas station.

NC Slammer is a local newspaper comprising the mugshots of everyone arrested in the Wake County area presumably since the previous issue, giving names and reason for arrest - overdue library book to kiddie fiddling to mass murder and all points in between. The paper is divided into sections, grouping certain kinds of perp together. The Love Birds - Jail Birds section, for example, lists married couples who have been arrested together. This pair of doozies, reads one typical and dubiously grammatical entry, was arrested in Auburndale, FL for stalking and harassing their neighbors. And their neighbors' elderly parents. Tearing down their fence, putting up surveillance cameras, hollering out obscene insults, shining high intensity lights through their windows all night long. Threatening to kill their dog! and mug shots of the unhappy couple are inset into a pink love heart. A disclaimer runs along the foot of the page reading all suspects are presumed innocent until proven guilty, just in case you had forgotten. I suppose if nothing else it brings comfort to angry shut-ins, at least confirming that the rest of us really are out to get them.

Who's paranoid now?

I take my copy of NC Slammer back to the hotel and show it to Bess.

'This is what your friends and relatives think America is like,' she sighs.

We begin the next morning with another walk. I've spoken to Charlie and it doesn't seem like we're going to get another chance to see him, as we suspected would probably be the case. He's committed to another day of dishing out autographs. He's now at the stage where certain fans even have his autograph tattooed onto their flesh. We step outside the hotel and see a sandwich board pertaining to this morning's signing session. Charlie and the bloke out of My Chemical Romance will be signing your shit at ten in such and such a building, it says. The building in question is across the other side of the square. Fans clutching copies of Walking Dead and Umbrella Academy are already lined up in their Frankenstein boots and black eyeliner. The queue is about three wide and maybe two-hundred feet long, and it is eight in the morning - two hours to go before the doors open.

'I guess Charlie's going to be busy today,' my wife observes.

We have a stroll in the crisp morning air - something we don't really get in Texas - and then we gather up the kid and get a taxi to the airport. The taxi driver is from Somalia and he spends the journey telling us about his country, which I find fascinating because he's giving us a positive spin in telling us about his family and so on, reminding me that the qualities of a person or a place are rarely the same as what we Americans have heard about them on the news - using we Americans here for the sake of argument.

We fly back to San Antonio.

I have seen my old friend, and I have seen how well he's done for himself. I have seen a different state of the country in which I now live. Junior has his shield and is still proclaiming 'shield bash!' every thirty minutes, throwing dramatic shapes for the benefit of an imaginary audience; and he has his signed copies of comics for himself, his dad, and his friend Duncan. In my diary I have noted:

These conventions seem significantly less macho than the ones I used to go to, and there are more little kids so the atmosphere seems less oppressively spotty and teenaged.

I still don't love fandom, and I still think adults who dedicate their entire existence to what is in essence escapist children's entertainment to the exclusion of everything else are fucking idiotic, and I still have nothing to say to the person whom comedian Louis CK described as a non-contributing product-sponge cunt; but the weekend has nevertheless opened my eyes. I shared an elevator with Captain America, and it's an encounter I will never forget.

The Christmas Concert

Having once been described as one of London's top two-thousand guitarists, I experienced an unfamiliar swell of pride the day Junior, now twelve years of age, brought an acoustic guitar home from school.

'He has to practice,' my wife told me. 'It's part of his homework, to practice for fifteen minutes. He'll be playing in the school concert at Christmas.'

The song Junior was required to practice was called How Much Longer Do I Have to Do This? It was an improvised piece performed by slashing away at the strings as hard as possible with a plectrum so as to produce a sound not unlike that heard on a Derek Bailey record, whilst holding down an occasional note with fingers of the other hand. Additionally the piece required that Junior purse his lips causing his two front teeth to protrude, puff out his cheeks, and go cross-eyed whilst playing, maintaining this special comedy face for the duration of the work, excepting pauses during which he would call to Bess how much longer do I have to do this? or how long has it been? or is it fifteen minutes yet?

I've come to dislike the special comedy face because it usually serves as a substitute for the sort of ordinary human interaction one might reasonably expect. It says I'm not going to answer the question or return the greeting but here, check this out - I think you'll agree that it's pretty darn funny. He pulled the special comedy face on my first day of married life, seven in the morning in the kitchen the day after the wedding. 'Good morning,' I said.

He pulled the special comedy face, stood far too close to me and jumped up and down in the certainty of this being hilarious, because at some point someone had told him that it was, and he hasn't listened to any of the less favourable reviews given since.

'Go away,' I suggested.

Bess explained that the avant-garde nature of his guitar recital was probably put on for my benefit, because he is yet to notice that the special comedy face doesn't really work for me. I retired to the room with the computer, the sanctuary in which I keep my mammoth collection of Doom Patrol comics and A.E. van Vogt science-fiction novels. The music from the front room settled into actual chords, hesitantly strummed, but impressive for a kid who had only picked up a guitar about a month before. I was fourteen when Santa first stuffed one into my stocking, and it took me two years to graduate beyond the bass line of Babylon's Burning picked out on just the two lowest strings.

I said as much to my wife. 'You know, he's not bad at all. I just wish he'd take it seriously instead of trying to be the great entertainer all the time.'

The next week or maybe the one after, he forgot to bring the guitar home from school, apparently having become accustomed to the idea that the point of other people is to remember things on your behalf, sort of like when Alfred reminds Master Bruce that it might be a good idea to fill her up next time he takes the Batmobile out for a spin.

Junior practiced on my guitar instead, breaking a string during a particularly energetic performance of How Much Longer Do I Have to Do This? I was displeased. 'I've been playing guitar for thirty-five years now,' I pointed out. 'In all that time, I've probably broken three or four strings. You've been going a month and yet here we are already.'

I bought new strings, dipping into Junior's allowance for funds, and he continued to practice. By December he still remained some way short of Segovia standards, but at least he no longer sounded like he was attempting selections from a Ramleh album. Now it's two Thursdays before Christmas and we're driving to the school. There's nowhere to park so we drop Junior off at the main entrance and head over to the adjacent park, one reputedly frequented by gentlemen who seek sexual liasons with strangers. It's dark, near pitch black due to it being seven in the evening and the absence of street lights, but no-one attempts sexual liasons with us and within minutes we are back at the school. The church - which is part of the same building - seems packed, so we sneak upstairs to the organ loft. No-one else is there and we have a much better view. It feels a little like we've broken in, like we are somewhere we shouldn't be, but there's no-one to chuck us out so we take seats. We sat up here last time I came to the school for one of Junior's concerts, so I suppose it should be okay. If we weren't meant to be up here, the door through which we came most likely would have been locked.

The pews are filling up down below, and there's a large herd of first graders fidgeting away at the front, green and red colours predominant. Everyone has been told to dress festively. Junior accordingly wears a red pullover with some sort of fluffy white arrangement up front and across the shoulders.

'There he is!' I point to the transept where a group of older kids, the sixth graders, stand around looking bored with their acoustic guitars. I notice how in his red and white top our man looks as though he's come as one of the Doom Patrol from this distance, specifically one of the Doom Patrol from when Paul Kupperberg was writing the comic. I quickly realise there's not much point in my sharing the observation with anyone.

I try to work out whether this is the first Christmas concert I've attended at this school, and what seasonal occurrence the previous concert I witnessed had acknowledged, but it's gone. I saw a couple of equivalent concerts at the previous institution, San Antonio Guantanamo for Boys as my wife and I refer to the place these days, and those were pure arseache. They seemed to go on for hours, and more than half of that time was taken up by the oratory of their used-car salesman of a principal clearly very much in love with the sound of his own adjectives. What is the magic of this thing we call San Antonio Guantanamo for Boys? he would rhetorically enquire with Disney brand sincerity before introducing a series of laboured skits.

'What do you want for Christmas, Lester?'

'Well I always wanted to go to sea, but I guess a boat would cost a whole lot of money.'

'You know, maybe we can all go to sea... in a Yellow Submarine!' and into the song, and it would be that for the next couple of hours, fail then cheese, then more fail and more cheese, then yet more fail and yet more cheese - jokes which wouldn't have made the grade on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-in, and the millionaires of Alamo Heights equating this with value for money with a degree of faith equivalent to Junior's belief in the special comedy face. So maybe the teachers weren't required to have any sort of formal teaching qualification, but all that filthy lucre must be paying for something good, and hey - they're singing Yellow Submarine! That is sooooooo cute!

Junior has been doing significantly better at this school, and no-one gets a headache when asked to attend events of this kind, so everyone is happy.

The first graders launch into song. The evening is a mixture of the traditional and the slightly cheesy but done with such generous spirit that no-one really minds; so we kick off with All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth, or something of the sort. The only real problem is that the once traditional arrangement of kids singing to the accompaniment of their music teacher at the piano has gone out the stained glass window, so we have the little ones singing to the backing of some karaoke instrumental sourced from a laptop at the side of the stage. It's okay, but the percussion on the instrumental skates a bit too close to drum & bass and is as such difficult to ignore, so the whole is a little weird and tends to overshadow the children's performance. This is a pity because they're probably the most tuneful bunch of nippers I've heard, certainly a great improvement on the assembled atonal fog hornery of my own school days.

After a few more songs, we get Silent Night scored for just kids and piano, which is wonderful except that they've given it a different tune for no good reason I can think of. The point of Christmas is surely, at least in part, tradition and repetition and doing the same thing you did last year and the year before. Silent Night was fine as it was. It didn't need jazzing up or improving.

Then we get bell ringing, both traditional carols and a few of the more Christmassy hits of the sixties, most of the actual music unfortunately coming from a laptop; and I consider that this road will eventually lead to Christmas concerts in which we sit around and listen to a recording of Bing Crosby whilst a child stands on stage and tries to keep time with a tambourine. It somehow suggests a lack of confidence in the children.

Junior shuffles on with his guitar, accompanied by another seven or eight kids with guitars. They all strum as the choir sings, and seemingly in time. Then at last we get a song for which every instrument is being played by a kid stood on the stage, even the percussion. It's the Little Drummer Boy, and it lurches here and there with some kids hanging onto previous bars a bit longer than necessary, but it has so much more feeling than the karaoke numbers. This is what we came to hear.

We leave happy as the concert ends, just an hour after it began, and we take with us all of the good stuff - the sweet, clear voices of the first graders, the enthusiasm of the children, and the pleasing knowledge of our boy having done well, holding it all together without feeling the need to break out the special comedy face. Back in the park, our car is where we left it and no-one has tried to have sex with it in our absence. As we head home, we briefly shudder as we remember the days of San Antonio Guantanamo for Boys, and we are endlessly thankful for all that we have now; so seasons greetings etc.

The Love That Isn't Quite Sure How to Spell Its Name

Even if you regard yourself as absolutely 100% decided in your sexuality, never to be swayed from your chosen path whether that be heterosexual or otherwise, is there not just one person who might be able to turn you, to change your mind? Is there a person you've been drawn to for reasons which feel weirdly inconsistent with what you have thus far understood about yourself, and what makes you tick, sexually speaking?

I'm paraphrasing, but this was the thrust of a question posed by Danny Baker on his phone-in radio show as it used to be on BBC London. Calls came in, and one bloke admitted that he often found himself watching videotaped footage of David Beckham's performance on the pitch over and above any real interest in football, whilst Baker himself confessed to a fascination with Bob Hoskins which even he found puzzling. As for myself, I was at work whilst the show was broadcast and was therefore unable to phone in, but were it otherwise I suppose I would have named Perry.

It wasn't even anything I'd thought about at the time, back in 1991 or whenever it was. All I knew was that there was something strangely appealing about the guy, and that I couldn't quite work out what it could be. He was my friend, a fellow postman and a couple of years younger. He was sort of funny, but not side-splittingly so, and he was bright, but some way short of anything required by either rocket science or brain surgery, and he was nice by some definition I still can't quite put my finger on. Also, he was incredibly good looking - at least so far as I could tell, not that I would really know what with my never once having been confused in that respect etc. etc. Brown hair, square jaw but not harshly so, blue eyes and a boyish smile, sort of like Leonardo DiCaprio as a charming English farmhand of the early sixties. Except I didn't notice any of this because he was just Perry, my mate from work, obviously.

Maria on the other hand certainly noticed, which was doubly annoying because within two weeks of her having started at our office - by which point I had made the formal decision that I would fancy her - she and Perry were an item; and because I was Perry's friend, I was soon also a friend to Maria and as such had ceased to fancy her, which was probably for the best. Perry put in a good word for me, and so Maria would give us both a lift in her car, out to our respective walks in Catford. I was delivering to the road which, by coincidence, was where Perry lived with his parents and sister.

Sometimes Maria and I would sit in her car, waiting because Perry had told us at last minute that he needed to take a shit. Eventually he emerged from around the corner of the office, red faced and with the three or four bundles of second post stuffed in his delivery bag.

'What happened?' Maria asked. 'Did it come out sideways?'

As Perry jovially told her to fuck off whilst taking up residence of the passenger seat, I noticed an unsettling feeling of pleasure at the extremely attractive Maria and I no longer being alone together. It was confusing. It felt like some horrible sixties film by someone French. We both loved him, or something.

I had a heavy comics habit, so Perry would lend me James Hudnall's The Psycho - to which I never quite warmed - or VHS tapes of the Manga series 3X3 Eyes, or the film Tetsuo; the Iron Man. He once lent me a tape recording of what appeared to be himself playing some animé based game. I watched ten minutes before I realised I would never understand what I was supposed to get from the viewing. In return I think I may have lent him Watchmen and maybe Frank Miller's version of Batman, works which had already come to be regarded as old school classics by 1991. We exchanged media, but never quite connected across whatever divide existed, either cultural, age or whatever. The shutters had come down behind me as I left school, meaning that neither video games nor Transformers nor anything bearing too close a resemblance to an episode of Marine Boy would ever make any real sense to me.

One evening I somehow ended up at Perry's house, having gone back after the pub. It was kind of awkward and we'd been drinking since about three. I'd watched the animés and he had presumably read Watchmen, but still we could find no common ground beyond the usual grousing about work. I say work meaning Royal Mail, although Perry now apparently had some sort of job on the side, a male model of all things, presumably standing around in his underpants and pointing at distant objects with a beatific smile. He'd told me about it, but I didn't really want to discuss the subject. I was glad he had found something besides the back-breaking shite at Royal Mail, but felt otherwise a little uncomfortable, as though just talking about it might take me somewhere I wasn't sure I wanted to go. He showed me the cartoon strip he'd been working on. It was terrible. It looked like the work of a ten-year old, and I suddenly realised he wanted, even needed my approval; and then he was crying.

'Are you okay?' He obviously wasn't but it seemed right to ask.

'You just don't know, Lol,' he sobbed, affording me a briefly terrifying glimpse into his world. He was just bright enough to realise that he probably wasn't that bright, and delivering pizza leaflets alternating with standing around in a pair of y-fronts was probably as good as it would ever get for him. I think he believed I might know something that he didn't, that I might be able to see a way out of our bullshit lives of carrying heavy weights in the pissing rain six days a week. This was all the more terrifying because I knew I had elevated him to a similar position, envying his casual veneer of confidence, his clear vision uncluttered by all that art college bollocks which was yet to pay off, and the way in which women all turned to check him out when he entered the room and he didn't even seem to realise it. I wanted to be him, but it seems even Perry didn't want to be Perry.

I stepped quietly out of Perry's room in the house of Perry's mum and dad, and caught the bus home. The next day we were hungover as we stood together at the sorting frames, which was not in itself an unusual occurrence. Our voices were just a little more self-consciously deeper, more gruff than they had been the previous morning; because we were men, and we had drunk such lakes of lager as to have forgotten last night, whatever it was that had happened after the sixth round. We were men and we laughed because that's how we were.

Bob the Raspberry

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

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

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

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

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

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

'No. He's a friend.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

No-one says a word.

'The wheelchair!'

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

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

'You're a raspberry?'

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

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

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

'How's it going, Dez?'

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

'That's the Doors, yeah?'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Not especially.'

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

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

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

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

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

'Not today, Bob.'

'Fat lot of fucking good you turned out.'

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

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

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

So we have a fag and talk some more.

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

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

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

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

'What jew fuckin' want?' he jokes.

I explain.

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

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