Alamo Heights Bike Tosser

No idea, but I guess this is what someone else's lousy day looked like.

It's already a lousy day, not least because we're in the middle of a global pandemic. Happily the pandemic hasn't made a great deal of difference to me, thus facilitating my irritation by inconveniences of lesser consequence.

The Lulu website through which I self-publish all sorts of things has had an upgrade, meaning that it no longer works and keeps forgetting my password. All morning I listen to my wife verbally wrestling with fellow programmers over an internet connection, now that she works from home, at least a couple of whom seem to know less about coding a webpage than I do. One of them routinely sets aside his designated tasks so as to concentrate on removing accidentally placed double spaces from lines of programming code, despite that a double space makes no difference to what the likes of you or I will eventually see on our screens. On other days he dedicates himself to highlighting different parts of code in different colours, supposedly for future reference by somebody or other, and my wife ends up having to finish off the work he was actually supposed to be doing. I've a feeling that the Lulu upgrade may have been coded by persons such as this. It doesn't work and half of the regular features are missing, but it looks like the British Airways site, and apparently that's what we really wanted all along.

Additionally, it's hot and windy out, which is a weird combination, and my ingrowing toenail - which has been fine since I was about sixteen - is playing up.

Anyway, I head out on my bike. Today I'm going to cycle to Bike World over on Broadway before I hit the trail. I've had the same tyres for a year, and the back one is bald, having covered something like five-thousand miles. I've already tried to purchase replacement tyres from Bike World, but they only had an ostentatious racing tyre in my size; so I'm trying again, and this time I'll simply ask them to order the fuckers if they don't have anything in stock. I'm trying to avoid using Amazon. I'm trying to support local business.

It's half past eleven in the morning and Bike World doesn't open until twelve, at which point they will allow just four people in the store at any one time. I lock up my bike and cross the road to Bird's Bakery, looking to get something to eat and to use up some time.

I examine the menu on the table set up outside. A woman comes out to take my order.

'I'll take a chicken sandwich,' I tell her.

She takes my card and goes back inside, then returns a couple of minutes later. 'I just figured I should let you know before I swipe your card, it will take about a quarter of an hour.'

'Fifteen minutes?'

'Yes.'

I look at my watch. I look at Bike World across the road, still shut. By the time the sandwich is ready, the store will be open, thus negating the entire fucking point of my buying the sandwich.

'Okay,' I sigh. 'Never mind.'

I wander up the road to the meat market but it doesn't seem like the sort of place which is likely to sell anything snacky.

I return to Bike World, and to three others who have arrived to wait in my absence, a young couple and an Alamo Heights Bike Tosser, a middle aged man who looks as though he's no stranger to the golf course and who regards himself as a better standard of person. He stands there with his mountain bike. I walk in front of him, pointedly unlock my own bike, then wheel it around so that I am now stood behind him.

'Sir,' says the younger guy who is here with his girlfriend, 'you were before us.' He gestures for me to come to the front of the queue.

'It's okay,' I say. 'There are four of us, and I don't mind so long as I don't end up waiting outside once they open.'

We all stand there for another few minutes.

The door opens and a bike dude emerges. He sees myself and  Alamo Heights Bike Tosser stood with our bikes. 'If you guys need repairs, you'll have to go to the double doors around the back.'

'I just need tyres,' I say.

Alamo Heights Bike Tosser says something which suggests that he has indeed brought his bike in for repair.

We wheel our bikes around to the back of the building, to the double doors as instructed. Because I was at the end of the queue, I am now first to get to the double doors, so I knock.

After another moment, the door opens and another bike dude pops his head out. He looks at me. 'Okay, how can we help?'

I look to Alamo Heights Bike Tosser. 'Didn't you need your bike taken in to the shop? Maybe if you're just getting it taken in…'

This is me being polite, having - so it turns out - misread the guy's needs. It's already been established that I was here first, so I hardly need to rub it in his face.

'Yeah,' he says to the Bike World guy, 'I'm going to need tubes and tyres, plus a rack too,' and off he goes with a list of all the stuff he intends to purchase. It seems that he's replacing everything on his bike except the frame.

The double doors close as the Bike World guy goes inside with Alamo Heights Bike Tosser's bike and long, long list of requirements.

We stand there in silence for a minute or two.

'Hell of a way to run a business,' says Alamo Heights Bike Tosser as though we're all in this together.

I wait another minute.

'Fuck it,' I say, walking off with my bike. 'I'll come back some other time, maybe when there are a few less cunts who want to go in front of me because they're more fucking important than I am.'

I say it loud so as to ensure that he will hear, and I take pleasure in doing so. My objection is poorly constructed, I know, but hopefully conveys just how much I dislike the man.

I cycle home. I was going to head out onto the trail but it's too hot and I'm too pissed off.

Everyday People

The people we recognise without really knowing form the living furniture of existence, or possibly the background noise. It's strange when they're gone because we often hadn't even realised they were ever there. Back in the late nineties, now over two decades past, I delivered mail to Tarbert Road, East Dulwich. More recently, at least within the last couple of years, I had reason to walk down Tarbert Road on the way to somewhere or other while visiting England. It was weirdly nostalgic, and particularly so when I spotted a particular blonde man with glasses and a pony tail. I couldn't remember the name but he lived in an upstairs flat on the even side of the road with his wife and a small child. He was someone I'd once spoken to almost daily for a couple of years, and I hadn't even noticed his having gone missing from my routine. He said he didn't really remember me but that I looked familiar.

I find this kind of detail fascinating, namely the stuff which doesn't quite mean anything you can describe.

The faces I now see regularly in terms of familiar people I don't actually know are mostly cyclists, runners, or persons out walking on the Tobin Trail, a public greenway which forms an almost complete circuit around the city of San Antonio. I cycle twenty miles of it every day to McAllister Park and back and these are the people I see.

Asian Friend. For a while Bess regularly ran around our neighbourhood and so built up her own pantheon of persons regularly seen but not actually known, one of whom she referred to as Asian Friend, because the woman was of Asian extraction and they would usually wave to each other. For a while we assumed that our respective Asian Friends were one and the same but it has since emerged that the one I usually see is a bit older and has the look of having had a facelift at some point.

Book Bloke. He always walks along reading a thick hardback, walking slowly so as not to fall over, I guess. I've never been able to tell what the books are, but hopefully the Bible isn't one of them.

Crap Writer. He read his slightly lurid spy thrillers at some writer's group I attended, and then suddenly I realised it's the very same guy I saw out walking with his ancient parents more or less every day. The spy thrillers mostly seemed to concentrate on our hero meeting ladies and then engaging in acts of which I suspect the author may not have had much direct experience, if any at all. I said hello a couple of times, then stopped bothering because he never returned the greeting and seemed embarrassed to see me; which is fine because frankly he struck me as a bit of a wanker. I haven't actually seen him in years now, so maybe his career took off and his exciting spy thrillers sell by the truckload. That's probably what happened.

Fruity Grandmother. I say grandmother, but she's probably my age, or maybe younger. She has pigtails, little round sixties spectacles, and wears a variety of self-consciously eccentric t-shirts, one of which is something to do with having loads of cats, so I'm sure she's all right. The fruity quality, as expressed in the occasional cheery greeting, is probably down to my imagination as formed during all those years of being a postman; besides which, I'm very happily married and intend to stay that way.

Granny Racer. He's a young dude, skinny but muscular and bald, and he runs, but runs while pushing a very old lady in a wheelchair, possibly his mother. She's on the small side and can't weigh much, but it's still quite impressive to watch. I usually find those who engage in ostentatiously weird forms of exercise a bit obnoxious, but I like this guy, and his mother is obviously having a whale of a time into the bargain.

My Indian Girlfriend. This is actually the name by which Bess refers to her, which is hilarious, obviously. We first got talking when she flagged me down and delivered a slightly garbled testimony about a doggie seen roaming free at the Tobin Park Trailhead. I wasn't really in the business of rescuing stray dogs, but I guess she needed to tell someone. As it turned out, I did actually happen to know of people who were in the business of rescuing stray dogs so we got there in the end. I usually stop and talk to my Indian Girlfriend whenever I see her, which is usually every few weeks, because otherwise I don't actually have a social life and I miss hearing English spoken with an Indian accent. We talk about pets, because she's been following the saga of our neighbour and the fence we've had built to keep him out, and we talk about the president, because neither of us like him very much and I think she feels the need to vent. Actually, I don't think she's too crazy about white people in general, which is understandable.

Obelix and his mate. Middle-aged, handlebar moustache, fat with a skinnier friend, they're always cycling together, usually side by side making it awkward to pass them when I've been coming from the other direction; and always yacking away which is why they absolutely must cycle side by side. They used to get on my tits for this reason, along with my nodded greetings going unacknowledged on a couple of occasions, but then I once almost crashed into the fat one whilst combining cycling with rocking out to a Henry Rollins CD, the embarrassment of which seems to have levelled the previously uneven surface of our communal etiquette landscape, or whatever you would call it. So these days we vaguely acknowledge each other as we pass, plus I think we had a conversation about a large puddle of water at some point, so that broke the ice a bit.

Raggety. As with many of these individuals, I don't know their actual names and have therefore given them ones suggested by my own subconscious, as one tends to do without really thinking about it; which is why some of the names may seem a little cruel, not least being this one. Raggety was originally a wood troll associated with Rupert Bear, a slightly disturbing supernatural figure of disheveled appearance. Back at school, my friend Pete once referred to Rose Wilson by the name Raggety because she was small with a slightly rustic quality, which I thought was perhaps a little cruel even at the time. Nevertheless my subconscious had no such qualms in transferring the label to this woman whom I've seen either running or cycling more or less every day since I moved here. Of late she's taken on a striking and unexpected resemblance to seventies Woody Allen, but I think I'll stick with Raggety for the sake of consistency. She's small, even child size, resembling both Rose and Rupert Bear's nemesis, and is possibly of indigenous lineage. I've waved and said hello on numerous occasions to no avail, and yet have found her both chatty and personable when there's been some passing reason for conversation. She has a strong Texas accent and is definitely from around here, unlike myself. She seems like a reassuring presence, and I like people who understand that nothing need be said when there's nothing to say.

Responsible Medical Father. He's usually wearing scrubs, so I guess he might work at Northeast Baptist, and he's always walking with his kid, who clearly has some fairly severe physical disability and is in a motorised wheelchair. I wave, they wave back, or at least the father does, and they always seem happy. Also, I see them more or less every day, suggesting there's some actual proper fathering going on, which is nice to know in his shitty old world. We could use more dads like this guy.

Santa. Always walking, big white beard, and always called out good job whenever I passed him on my bike, usually as thanks for my having already called out so as to alert him of my intention to pass. Come to think of it, I haven't actually seen Santa in a while, which is particularly worrying as it's not even Christmas.

Skeeter. The name only just came to me now as I realised my subconscious was yet to tag this gentleman with a convenient if slightly insulting label. He looks unusually Texan, as though he knows how to fix a truck. If he isn't actually called Skeeter, he's probably related to someone who is; but he's all right by me. We once had a conversation about an owl, and a conversation which didn't end up with his assuming I'm Australian, so that works for me. If there's any sort of organising force in the universe, I suspect it may have provided Skeeter for the purpose of filling the ecological niche recently vacated by Santa.

Tim. So called because that's actually his name. He vaguely knows my wife's friend Andrea from when they both used to eat at La Fonda. One day my wife joined her friend for lunch and Tim happened to be there. He explained that he cycled on the Tobin Trail almost every day, and Bess said that he should look out for me, and that he would recognise me by my hat, so now we wave at each other whenever we pass. 'Hey, Lawrence,' he calls out. 'Hello, Tim,' I usually say in response. Movie rights to this story are still available if anyone's interested.

Withered Leg Man. Always on his bike, head to toe in lycra, and always racing. Ordinarily I wouldn't have noticed him amongst all of the other Alamo Heights bike tossers who clog up the trail with their ostentatiously weird and expensive cycles, recumbent or otherwise, five wheels and tractor tyres but no seat, requiring that one mounts by lowering one's bumhole onto the ergonomic pilot buttplug. Withered Leg Man has one withered leg, as the name implies, with seemingly normal bone structure supporting hardly any muscle. I'm genuinely impressed by his triumph over apparent adversity.

Wossername. Small, Hispanic, always walking her dog. My Indian girlfriend told me her name but I can't remember it. Apparently she doesn't really care much for white people either. This is probably why she's just sort of looked at me on the couple of occasions of my having said, good morning.

Another One of Those Days

It's August in Texas and therefore fucking baking, but so far I've just about managed to avoid my annual psychological meltdown arisen from ordinary daily pressures amplified in the heat. I've found that the twenty daily miles I cycle from Monday to Friday helps to keep everything nicely balanced - mentally speaking - and this year I've managed to get out each day before the heat gets too much, although it hasn't been easy. I cycle along a local greenway called the Tobin Trail which runs a circuit around most of the city but for a few places where different stretches are yet to fully connect. I cycle the Tobin Trail because Texas roads are frequented by shitheads in trucks the size of fucking houses who believe that running a cyclist off the side of the road represents a blow struck against the forces of both communism and anyone who ever laughed at your tiny penis.

Sometimes it can be difficult to cycle along the Tobin Trail due to repair work. For example, the end of Holbrook Road has been impassable for at least this last year, possibly two or three. This is due to renovations being made to the city's drainage system. I watched as a massive hole was dug in the road opposite the Black Swan Inn, a hole of volume sufficient to conceal a truck. Reinforced metal sidings were lowered into the hole, then pipes of the kind along which rebels traditionally flee for their lives in dystopian science-fiction movies, and then they filled it all in. About a month later they dug it all up again and repeated the exercise about fifty yards along from the first hole. They're now on their third hole, and it's beginning to look one hell of a lot as though they just can't decide where to bury the fucker.

I lived in London for twenty years and I saw a lot of road works in that time, but I've never seen road works which suggest that someone got the map upside down, necessitating whatever they buried being dug up, then reburied a little further on. It's almost as though fucking idiots are in charge. Some mornings in London I'd walk to the shops, passing workmen just getting started on a hole in the road, and the thing would be all done with tarmac being rolled flat by the time I came back the other way, heading home.

Part of the Tobin Trail runs along Salado Creek, which is dry at this time of year. This stretch comprises nearly a mile of raised wooden walkway named Morningstar Boardwalk. A few months ago I noticed a sag at one part of Morningstar Boardwalk, presumably where the supports had given way underneath. Then last week temporary signs appeared at each end informing us all that Morningstar Boardwalk would be closed for repair from Monday to Friday. The damage really didn't look like five days work to me, but then what do I know?

So it's August in Texas and therefore fucking baking, but I'm doing okay. I'm due to fly back to England in a couple of weeks time but I'm not thinking about it. I don't like flying. I don't really like England that much. I don't like my connecting flights being cancelled, distending the misery and discomfort of long-haul travel to forty-eight hours or more, and my connecting flights tend to be cancelled two out of every three times.

Like I say, I'm not thinking about it.

I deduce that I can exit the trail before I come to Morningstar Boardwalk, head through the subdivision along Astronaut Drive, then out onto the common land following the electricity pylons at the end of Luzon Drive. My theory is that I will be able to get my mountain bike down to Salado Creek from there, then across to rejoin the Tobin Trail at the other end, bypassing Morningstar Boardwalk altogether.

Monday is a bit hairy. The land across which I end up pushing the bike on foot is dry but overgrown with reeds and the like. I go slowly so as to be able to hear rattlesnakes, having seen at least one in this general vicinity. Then I recall I've also seen a wild hog down here, thankfully from the safety of the boardwalk at a distance of several hundred yards. It was too big to make sense. I couldn't tell what I was looking at and was momentarily reminded of interviews with people who claim to have seen Bigfoot. I'm told that wild hogs are to be avoided in the same way that mountain lions are to be avoided.

Nevertheless, I make it to the other side and I'm back on the trail. I can't quite face more of the same when coming back, so I wheel the bike parallel to the boardwalk, half suspecting that the promised workmen won't yet have turned up to effect the proposed repairs and that my detour will have been for nothing. There are a couple of trucks parked as I come to the damaged section. I expect someone to tell me that the boardwalk is closed and that I'm trespassing, but they only look at me and shrug.

I follow the same route on Tuesday, albeit later in the day. I explore the creek along the cracked, dry beds of water courses, eventually finding one which, if longer, seems less hazardous with less places which might conceal a rattlesnake; but it's way too hot so I turn around and head home, making up the usual mileage by doubling back on myself at certain points.

Wednesday is better - across Salado Creek and then back again as planned, although I still have some trouble remembering which dry stream to follow and end up getting lost in the reeds.

Boris Johnson suspends Parliament, and I add it to the other stuff I'm not thinking about right now - the Amazon in flames, the probability that Donald almost certainly will get a second term, everything turning to shit.

My sleep is restless and I dream about getting back somewhere or other, and I'm racing against the Beatles in their moptop incarnation in the matching suits with weird collars. I'm puckering my mouth and giving McCartney the thumbs up, mocking him by singing nursery rhymes. You know that Bah Bah Black Sheep - that's one of your songs, that is…

People I don't know are defending Boris Johnson's decision to suspend Parliament on facebook, proclaiming that he's a guy who gets things done, and I remember how much I'm not looking forward to whichever Sun opinion column my dad will be recycling for my benefit when I return to England in a couple of weeks.

I try to feed the cats as usual. Grace won't come in because Gary terrorises her. I pick Gary up and try to take him inside but he scratches my face, drawing blood. I'm really beginning to tire of his bullshit.

I hit the trail, then Astronaut Drive, then I cross Salado Creek. I'm cycling across rocks and dried mud. The ground is uneven, so I'm in first gear. I notice the bike has slipped into third for no fucking reason as I attempt to scale a particularly annoying mound, so I flip back to first and there's an agonising crunch. Everything stops.

The entire gear array - the derailleur as it's known - has somehow chewed itself up between the chain and the rear wheel, consummating damage first implemented by Ian the arsehole back in November. I dismount, which isn't easy on this ground, and make an inspection. The thing is beyond immediate repair and will need to go into the shop. I'm fucked. I'm about six miles from home and I'm fucked.

I push the bike towards the boardwalk, planning to follow the route I took on Monday. It's still closed off for repairs. The repair team is one fucking bloke sat in his truck, which doubtless explains why the work was estimated at taking a full week. I pass the section of boardwalk currently under reconstruction, at least in a general sense. Unless I'm missing something, the work is such that it should have taken a morning to complete, but maybe it's special wood which only grows on the planet Venus and the one fucking bloke sat in his truck is waiting for the next shipment.

I have 2Pac's posthumous Better Dayz playing on my Discman, and now I turn it off because I'm irritable and it's begun to get on my tits. I've been listening to a lot of 2Pac over the last week, mainly because I've realised that I have all of his CDs and I'm only really familiar with a couple of them; and now I realise that this is because, truthfully, he was a bit of a berk. In the wake of his undoubtedly tragic demise, 2Pac has somehow been held up as the black Noam Chomsky on the grounds of having read a book or two, even if one of those books happened to be Linda Goodman's Star Signs; but if his heart was in the right place, he still had some way to go, and simply repeating wisdom and understanding over and over whilst pulling a wise face is not the same as having depth. This is the man who decided that NIGGA was an acronym for Never Ignorant Getting Goals Accomplished, who insisted on a new, more positive meaning for the word thug, and so Better Dayz is all thug life, thug nature, thug passion, thug this, thug that, and by the time we get to the thug hot water bottle* I've really had enough of this shit

Once past the section under repair, I haul the bike up onto the boardwalk. I call my wife on the phone but she can't get away.

'Never mind,' I say. 'I just needed to vent. I don't mind walking home. It's all exercise.'

A trail steward stops as I reach Ladybird Johnson. 'You doing okay there, buddy?'

'My gears are knackered.' I point to the scrap metal wrapped around my rear axle. There's nothing he can do, and I can't be bothered to have a conversation about either bicycle repair or how I'm from a different country.

'Sorry,' the steward says.

'It's okay.' I tell him. 'It's not your fault.'

My phone pings with text messages. It will be Bess, but I can't be arsed to go through the rigmarole of stopping, finding my glasses, finding some shade then reading a text, whatever it says. I call her back once I reach Los Patios.

'My co-worker says she could pick you up,' she suggests.

'It's okay,' I say. 'It's only another couple of miles.'

I stop and take a look at the derailleur. I manage to unscrew it so that it's at least no longer wrapped around the chain. The chain now hangs loose, but I am able to cycle. Unfortunately I can't go much further than twenty feet without the chain slipping from the cogs and jamming, so I freewheel or walk the rest of the distance. I wonder if I'm sufficiently stressed to resume smoking again.

'You doing okay?' the black dude asks.

I've seen him enough to nod some vague greeting. He's about my age and is usually walking five or six dogs of various shapes and sizes. I can never tell whether they're his dogs or that's just his job.

'Yeah,' I say, and a minute later I notice that I've launched into a barely coherent summary of my life up to this point. I'm waving my arms wildly like Suzanne from Orange is the New Black and have made an embittered reference to the one fucking bloke sat in his truck.

'Well,' says my audience, 'I hope the rest of your day goes better.'

He means it, but you can tell I came across like a crazy person.

I'm less than a mile from home and I guess I feel better, having sobered up on the viscosity of my own mania.

What a fucking day.

*: This stands for Brothers Only Try To Live Excellently, y'all better recognise.

The End of a Fair

We have yet another craft fair booked at Mission Plaza - Bess and myself - although this one is a slightly bigger deal than that to which we're accustomed. Higher attendance is anticipated due to it having been tied in with some cycling event, and there will be a live band. This means we have to leave earlier than usual to set up. Ordinarily this would bother me, but for once I've managed to get my ass into gear and we loaded the car up last night, so amazingly we're there before nine. It's a nice day too, clear blue sky and just warm enough to be pleasant. Without having really kept count, we think this is probably our eighth or ninth stint at Mission Plaza. It feels strange to have become old hands at something we only began this year, and so much so that we can set up without having to think about it.

We put up the canopy, stake it into the soil; out with the table and camping chairs; Bess spreads out her rocks and painted things whilst I bolt together the frames upon which I display my canvases; and soon we're done, ready for the rush - which is usually two or three people every twenty minutes or so. We're situated between the food bank and the Mexican guy who sells cacti. Because it's some sort of special occasion, today the food bank is a whole truck loaded with refrigerators and the like, so they take up twice the normal space. It's a mobile market stall for vegetables mostly grown by volunteers, and they accept food stamps. Last time we were here they gave us some stuff to take home as thanks for our help with their own canopy - butternut squash, potatoes, a massive onion, and a sweet potato I still haven't got around to using.

There are a lot more canopies than usual, and a big huddle of them over the far side of the field. This is something to do with cycling, specifically an organisation called FrankenBike.

The entire field doubles up as a drive-in movie theatre, because I've now reached the point of my acclimation at which it feels strange to refer to it as a cinema. The screen is a huge concrete wall to our right, curved and painted turquoise, excepting the white rectangle upon which the works of Michael J. Fox are projected. At its base is a raised platform which serves as stage when the occasion demands, as it will today. There are doors in the screen, presumably leading to inner rooms and storage spaces. It's a structure unlike any I have previously encountered. Usually someone trails a mains extension out from within the screen to a speaker sat alone at the front of the stage and we spend the morning with a soundtrack of peculiarly unpredictable composition - salsa, tejano, country rock, hits of the sixties, hits of the twenties, and occasional bewildering excursions into dubstep, trance or drum and bass. We're yet to hit the Swedish death metal playlist, but it can only be a matter of weeks. Normally I might find this annoying, but the music has thus far been okay and has in any case kept itself to the background.

By ten we've already had a few nosing around, and Bess has already sold a couple of rocks. A few people have told me they like my paintings, which is nice, and which is what happens instead of me actually selling any of the fuckers; but I don't mind. I know we're in the wrong part of town to sell a painting for sixty dollars. My prices are based on what I myself wouldn't mind paying, and on the fact that I'm not even sure I want to sell at least a few of them so the price has to be one which feels worth my while, and on prices I've seen charged by others. I've noticed very few people asking less than a hundred for an oil painting, excepting the only notionally talented who tend to paint lop-sided pictures of Batman, the Joker, and Harley Quinn, the Joker's girlfriend. I therefore feel confident that sixty dollars is a reasonable price for a proper painting produced by someone who can actually paint, namely myself; and luckily - I suppose - I don't really mind them not selling. I've come to think of our stall as a temporary gallery with knobs on, and it's a nice day out.

Also by ten, we're both inexplicably hungry. There's no sign of Chinga su Madre!, the taco truck which is usually here parked just behind the woman selling home made cookies; and yes, the guy really does trade as Chinga su Madre!, which is doubtless hilarious in neighbourhoods where no-one speaks Spanish. I therefore cross the highway to Nicha's, which sports a banner claiming itself to have been voted San Antonio's best Mexican restaurant. I've a feeling I've seen the same banner outside plenty of other places, but Nicha's is nevertheless decent. Nicha is short for Dionisia, and we've already made all the jokes about how if you gaze long enough into the salsa verde, the salsa verde will gaze back into you.

Happily, there's no sign of Snooki, who usually takes my order. She earned the name through an unfortunate resemblance to Snooki from Jersey Shore and because she always seems to find the taking of my order to be a colossal pain in the ass.

'Chicken fajitas on corn,' I will ask.

'How many?'

'I don't know. Just chicken fajitas on corn. I want however many there is in one order of chicken fajitas on corn?'

'How many do you want?'

'I want however many you gave me the last time I ordered chicken fajitas on corn without having to specify how many I wanted. They're for my wife.'

She'll sigh and narrow her eyes. 'You need to tell me whether you want one or two.'

'I don't know. Two, I suppose. My wife eats them. Usually I'm also eating rather than sitting there counting how many fajitas you've given her.'

'Two chicken fajitas on corn, and what else?'

'Street tacos.' I don't have to specify the required number of street tacos because they always come four to a serving, although I resent having to call them street tacos which sounds suspiciously like hipster terminology. I just adore Mexican street food, I recall a person of my vague acquaintance from Portland once screeching in reference to what is simply known as food in Mexico.

Snooki is nowhere to be seen, and even more exciting is that I saw a help wanted sign on the door. Snooki's replacement seems nicer and is able to take my order without extraneous negotiation. She also likes my accent and tells me that her boyfriend is from France. I tell her that I like the French and I try to remember whether I've been to his bit of the country.

Back at the craft fair, we're half way through Goldilocks and the Three Bears on the stage, as performed for the benefit of an audience of maybe fifteen, but those watching at least seem appreciative. I watch for a couple of minutes. This version of the tale has been given a local spin with the bears making a big deal out of how much chilli they've added to the porridge before going out on their walk. I can't tell if this works or not, but the little kids seem to get a kick out of it.

For the sake of something to do, I embark upon a new painting, having brought my paints, easel, and a canvas. Having taken up oils I'm concentrating on painting directly from life, simply for the sake of stretching my artistic horizons. I paint the tree behind our stall, and because there's a red truck parked next to the tree, I paint the back end of the truck, which seems to make sense in terms of the composition as a whole.

A band starts up on the stage, three middle-aged guys playing the sort of thing middle-aged guys tend to play. Writing about this one week later, it will have become impossible to recall quite what they were doing - but probably generically competent country rock, something of that sort.

Woo hoo.

We sell some more, or Bess sells some more and everybody tells me how much they like my paintings. One woman definitely has her eye on two of them, and will bring money next time we're at the Mission Plaza, which will be March.

'What?' I ask Bess. 'March?'

'Yes, this is the last fair of the year.'

'Really?'

'Afraid so.'

'Damn.'

I now realise this explains the big send off with performance and the FrankenBikes and everything else. A guy sat with our cactus retailing neighbour walks over and gets in the red truck. I feel suddenly awkward.

'I'm going to miss this.'

'I know. Me too,' Bess sighs.

More time passes.

I can't tell if I like the painting of the truck and the tree, and I can't tell whether or not I've finished it. Just in case I have, I cross the field to the public bogs to wash my hands which have begun to feel greasy from the linseed oil with which I thin the paints.

When I return, Bess tells me that the guy who owns the truck came over to examine my work. He liked it.

I mosey over to the cactus stall. 'Hey there. Hope you don't mind me painting your truck. It just seemed to fit the picture.'

I'm surprised at how happy he seems. 'You have a lot of talent,' he says. 'I wondered what you were doing at first.'

'Yeah. I didn't realise it was your truck. That time when you got in, I thought, oh fuck - he's going to drive off and I haven't finished.'

We both laugh, then I go back to the painting. I think I'm starting to like it, although I'm not yet sure that it's finished.

Our friend who sells cacti comes over to see. 'You know he loves that truck. He is very happy to see you have done this.' He points at a large sticker in the rear window. 'He is very proud of that too.'

I squint but I can't quite read it - something to do with the military, so the guy is clearly a veteran.

The stage is now host to a performance by some kind of local tejano class - guitarist and drummer accompanying a string of little kids playing accordions. Some of the kids are significantly smaller than their instruments. Tejano is what happened when the Spanish music of post-conquest Mexico joined up with the oompah bands which German settlers brought to Texas. The ability of the kids, some of whom look to be about seven-years old at best, is astonishing - wheezing ninety mile an hour accordion trills with not a bum note or missed cue to be heard. It's not entirely my thing but it beats the blandly competent country rock we had earlier. The grand finale has all of the kids playing at the same time, seven or eight accordions blasting away on stage; and I come to the strange realisation that one accordion sounds the same as seven or eight played in series.

I finish the painting, hypothetically speaking.

'How much do you want?' the owner of the red truck asks. It hadn't even occurred to me that he might want to buy it, and I hope he doesn't think I painted it in expectation of his coughing up the readies. I feel a bit guilty, so I say twenty because he seems like a decent guy and his obvious enthusiasm makes up at least some of the difference.

It has been a really good day, and as I said, I'll miss this place over the coming months.

Englishmen (pl.) in Texas

When I first got here, my wife feared that, deprived of the companionship of my own countrymen, I might wither on the vine. Whenever she heard of some English guy in the vicinity she would joke about setting up a playdate so we could meet and talk about Coronation Street and figgy pudding, or something. This was how I met Clive, whom Bess encountered through Toastmasters. Toastmasters was a lunchtime club at her place of work to which she found herself volunteered. It sounded a little like a writers group, but a writers group specialising in after dinner speeches, motivational or otherwise, and as such an unfortunately significant draw for those who enjoy the sound of their own voice without necessarily having much to say. On one occasion of my being away in England, Bess went to some Toastmasters weekend in Houston for the sake of something to do, and there she met Clive.

'He's English,' she told me, clearly energised by the discovery, 'and he lives in San Antonio!'

Clive and I met at La Madeleine, the French style bakery and cafe. It turned out that he was originally from Eastwood, the town in which D.H. Lawrence grew up. He had childhood memories of a few more ancient neighbours scowling about how that young David Herbert had been a rum bugger and no mistake. As an admirer of D.H. Lawrence, I found this quite exciting. Clive was in San Antonio because, like me, he'd married an American. He'd recently bought a disused diner which he was planning to reopen as a hot dog restaurant.

That's all I can recall of Clive. He seemed like a nice guy, but I'm just not very sociable and we didn't stay in touch, possibly because there was never any strong reason to do so. His diner remains vacant. Each time Bess and I drive past, we wonder what happened, and then why anyone would consider a hot dog restaurant a good idea.

There have been others, but once we've established our shared point of origin, there hasn't usually been much else to be said; possibly excepting Chris, another person my wife met through her job. Chris was from Catford in south-east London, specifically from an address to which I almost certainly delivered mail at some point during the early nineties, so that was funny. Chris is all right, but he's about ten years younger than I am with very different priorities.

The celebrated writer Michael Moorcock spends some of the year at his American home in Bastrop county, which is about an hour's drive. I've read and enjoyed plenty of his novels, and we communicate on facebook, but otherwise I'm a bit too starstruck to introduce myself directly; besides which I'm told he tends to avoid the company of expatriate English people. I'm beginning to see why.

Malcolm is Brook's long-distance boyfriend. They met on the internet and now he's flown all this way to visit her, so we simply have to meet - as everyone keeps telling us. Our first exchange is on facebook, through Brook. I tell him Newcastle Brown Ale can be purchased from HEB, our local supermarket chain. I tell him this because American beer is undrinkable, and it's the sort of information I would appreciate were I in his shoes.

Newcastle Brown Ale is even worse than American beer, he tells me with what I imagine to be a sneer. He prefers Pabst.

This places me in the position of fearing that I have become a real ale bore whilst resenting what felt like Malcolm telling me to stick my friendly advice up my arse, whilst additionally resenting the retort on the grounds that Pabst is fucking awful, the 8-Ace of the Americas.

'I haven't even met the bloke,' I grumble to Bess, 'and I already think he's a dick.'

Nevertheless we meet, and much to my relief he seems okay. He works in the oil business and travels the world as part of his job. He's visited the United States many times before, so I can see my attempted friendly advice may have seemed condescending. He's from the north-east and therefore speaks with one of my all-time favourite regional accents. He has none of the abrasive quality I had begun to anticipate.

On the other hand, he begins a sentence with the words, 'one thing your Mr. Trump has got right…'

I have two bikes so I invite him to come over and join me for my daily twenty miles. He's clearly into exercise and agrees because it will be fun.

The morning comes and he's at my house at the agreed time, having jogged three or four miles from where Brook lives. Clearly I don't have to worry about whether he'll be able to keep up.

I make him a cup of tea - something I don't get to do very often - and we talk; or rather Malcolm talks. I don't even know how he got onto the subject, but it's something about long distance relationships. He once had one with another American, someone in the north-east. She told him she would be seeing other people in between his visits.

'That's how women are,' he tells me. 'They're all like that. I don't care what anyone says.'

'Okay,' I submit, before abruptly changing the subject.

He picks the mountain bike and we head out. He doesn't seem to experience any confusion regarding which side of the road we should take, which is a relief. We cycle a mile or so to Holbrook, then onto the Tobin Trail, leaving the traffic behind. He cycles at my side and talks. I realise there's been no point during which he's shut up since he arrived thirty minutes ago. He's been talking all this time. I'm not even sure what about.

His work takes him all over the world.

He's been to Mexico several times, specifically to Tampico. He was reluctant to sample much of the night life due to the visible presence of the drug cartel, something beginning with s, whatever they're called...

'The Sinaloa Cartel,' I suggest.

'That's the fellah.'

We cycle to Los Patios, then on to Morningstar Boardwalk. He says hello to everyone we pass. Some respond. Some don't. I recall how I too greeted almost everyone I met when I first came here.

We're off the boardwalk, heading for the bridge at Wetmore, then up the hill, and all the while he's been talking. He never fucking shuts up. Yap yap yap the whole bleeding time.

We come to McAllister Park, and we're back to sharing the thoroughfare with the occasional truck. I realise - as just such a vehicle approaches - that I've been in the middle of the road, politely attending to Malcolm's never ending monologue.

Blah blah blah…

I pull back and slip to the side of the road to get out of the way, but as I do so, Malcolm inexplicably turns right. My front wheel grinds into the gear assembly of the mountain bike he's riding and I'm off.

'Oh fucking hell,' I scream.

I land on a knee and an elbow and roll onto my back in the grit. He's shouting oh no and I'm so sorry.

We gather ourselves together in a daze. The gears on the mountain bike look fucked, but the wheel is good so we should be okay; except my front tire is somehow flat, which makes no fucking sense at all.

I fitted both bikes with brand new tires and tubes about two weekends back. We push the bikes over to the picnic area. I invert mine and make ready with the puncture repair kit.

'I'm so sorry, Lawrence.'

'Yeah.'

I try to pump up the tire but it's not having it, and I realise the valve has somehow torn itself away from the tube during the collision. 'How the fuck does that even happen?'

'Do you have a spare inner tube?'

'No. I'll have to call Bess, get her to pick us up.'

There's a station wagon parked across the way. The guy comes over. Just what we need.

'You need help.'

'No, you're all right, mate.'

'You're not from around here?'

'No,' we both answer.

'Where you from? Australia?'

'England,' Malcolm tells him.

I'm saying nothing because I'm not having this fucking conversation again given that I actually live here, and anyway I'm trying to call Bess.

'What's up?'

'We've had an accident.'

'Oh no!'

'Can you—'

'I can't. You know I have that thing.'

'Shit.' I'd forgotten. 'Maybe—'

'Let me call Byron. He owes me.'

She calls Byron, then Byron calls me, and I try to describe our location. Malcolm is still talking to the driver of the station wagon. I just want the guy to fuck off and leave us alone.

'Byron's going to come and get us.'

'Okay.'

'I have to take Gary to the vet at about three, so I need to get back.'

'I'm so sorry about this, Lawrence. I feel terrible.'

'Don't worry,' I say. 'It's just one of those things. I shouldn't have been so close behind you.'

'I didn't realise that we were going straight on, so I turned.'

'I'm just collecting wood,' the guy from the station wagon announces. He has half a tree in the back of his truck and a branch held in one hand, recently chosen from the ground nearby. He's clearly having a whale of a time. I wish I were at home, having an ordinary day.

There's a huge crater in my arm, just below the elbow, and yet there's no pain beyond a little soreness. I compare it with the other elbow and realise something is very wrong. A few more minutes of flexing leads Malcolm and myself to conclude that it's simply a bruise. The crater is actually the illusion of a dip formed by the side of lump such as you would ordinarily see on the head of the teacher in the Bash Street Kids after Plug, Danny or one of the others has dropped a housebrick on him from a great height; except it's on my elbow.

Byron turns up after about twenty minutes. My directions were not the best. We lift the bikes into the back of his truck and he drives us back into town. Byron's company comes as unusually welcome. He talks, but not constantly, and I at least feel I understand him. He's a known quantity. Malcolm sits mostly silent in the rear seat.

He feels terrible about the accident, and I'm still not convinced it was particularly his fault, but all I can recall is the constant fucking yap yap yap yap blah blah blah…

Byron drops us off at my place. Malcolm leaves after another few minutes. He's not a bad guy, but it will be nice to not have to think about him for a while.

Life During Rainfall

It doesn't seem to rain much in Texas, so when it does rain it seems all the more dramatic. It's been raining for three days solid. There have been breaks during which I've zipped out on the bike and ridden the usual twenty miles. I kept the waterproof jacket and trousers which came with the job at Royal Mail, and they're enough to make the ride bearable under conditions of light to moderate rainfall.

Life has gone on as normal for everyone except the cats. Where most of them go out to attend to cat business during the hours of darkness, they've been stuck inside these past few nights. I am greeted first thing by a front room full of irritable felines, and usually a couple of protest turds strategically laid at the traditional locations. Nibbler is the worst, marching up and down, hissing and swiping at everyone and everything as though a couple of hours in the company of other cats has been too much for him; so I let him out, although it's not like he's going anywhere given that it's still raining.

Our internet connection fizzles out on the third day, just as it always does. Rainfall destroys our internet every time, and I still don't understand why. We jump through the same hoops over and over, and it's always due to some junction box a few blocks away. My theory is that our internet is beamed directly to this junction box, and that the signal is quickly baked into tiny pies by magic pixies so small as to be effectively invisible. The pixies then convey these pies across a small lake the size of a penny, to a receiver. The pies are fed into the receiver, and from that point on the internet comes directly to our house, enabling us to watch Wheel of Fortune without it resembling a Nine Inch Nails video. When it rains, either conditions on the small lake become so treacherous as to prevent the magic pixies crossing, or else causing the pie crusts to dissolve in transit.

Nevertheless, we phone the help desk.

'You need to turn the modem off and then back on again,' the lady suggests.

'Why not?' I say. 'We've already done that three or four times, but maybe the fourth will be the one which effects a magical transformation.'

'She can hear you,' Bess hisses, indicating that she has her smartphone set to speaker.

'I know,' I smile. 'That's why I said it.'

We turn the modem off, and then back on again. We remain without internet, and I imagine losing a limb to a chainsaw, phoning the hospital in agony.

Before I submit the ticket, could you first try walking around the room for me?

Then, did that fix the problem?

They're going to send someone out tomorrow morning. There will be a phone call first thing asking me to confirm that the internet hasn't just grown back of its own accord, and that I still require assistance.

No Wheel of Fortune for us tonight.

We watch a couple of episodes of Kenneth Clark's Civilisation on DVD. It's interesting, but two hours of Kenneth Clark is more than enough for one night, and besides neither Bess nor myself fully agree with his definition of what constitutes civilisation. Also, I'm disappointed at the free pass he's given to certain fucking awful examples of overly sentimental eighteenth century painting, given the opprobrium he heaped upon significantly less offensive works in the previous episode.

I look through cupboards full of DVDs and notice Mamma Mia! 'How about this?' I ask.

'I hate that movie,' Bess tells me.

'I know. We could watch it and take the piss. I've never seen it.'

'Well, I guess…'

We wait for the thing to load.

Her first husband gave my wife the DVD for Christmas, despite her having told him that she had hated the film. He also gave a copy to his friend Karen Eliot* that same Christmas, so it was probably some kind of two for the price of one deal. It later emerged that he'd been knobbing Karen Eliot on the quiet, all of which partially accounts for why he is no longer married to my wife.

We watch about twenty minutes.

It's basically Four Weddings and a Funeral with more exotic locations, all floppy haired Englishmen exclaiming gosh and laying on the self-deprecation with a silver-plated trowel. It's the story of a girl whose father could be any one of four mysterious photogenic men - Colin Firth and Piers Brosnan amongst them - seemingly implying that her mother was pulling a train at the time of conception; and every couple of minutes they all foghorn and bluster through a song by Abba so as to illustrate some point or other.

I've never felt particularly protective of Abba, but I liked them when I was a kid.

'This is awful,' I announce. 'I don't think I can watch any more.'

We switch to Kath & Kim DVDs and I let another cat out, this time Kirby who pads onto the back porch and concludes that yes, it is indeed still fucking raining. She looks back at me.

'I don't know what you think I can do,' I tell her. 'My powers are limited.'

Every time I open the door I hear the white noise of rain and the constant drip as it sluices from the roof into puddles. It's been three days and it's getting a bit much.

Next morning, I'm still at home. I can't ride the bike even though it isn't raining.

The guy turns up at eleven, fiddles around for a while, then concludes that the problem is indeed with the junction box and those magic pixies - or however it works. He's going to call the people who fixed the same problem last time, and the umpteen times before, and they'll get it done just as soon as they can. It should take an hour.

Four hours later, we still have no internet connection.

I walk to the supermarket to pick up some cat food. I've been using my Sony Walkman again, now that I have all of my cassette tapes back. I'm listening to something Andrew taped for me back in the late nineties, a mix of Dinosaur Jr., Tad, Eleventh Dream Day, Pavement - all of those American guitar bands he used to like so much. Andrew died in 2009, and here I am listening to his tape of American music whilst actually in America. Not for the first time, it feels as though I'm in a film, and the sun is out at long last.

*: Name changed so as to protect the not even remotely innocent.

Home School

There have been a couple of bombings in Austin, anonymous packages left on porches and one of them set off by a tripwire. No-one knows what is going on, but people have been killed and Austin is just down the road, relatively speaking. Now one of the bombs has gone off in a FedEx depot on the outskirts of San Antonio. Someone on facebook suggests that it seems like the sort of thing Atomwaffen Division have been known to get up to. I've never heard of them, so I have a look on Wikipedia and discover them to be a neo-Nazi organisation who, aside from anything else, somehow have a presence in San Antonio. I find this last detail particularly bewildering because I would have thought that, had I grown up preferring the company of white people to such an extent, San Antonio would be the last place I'd want to live; but then maybe my expectations of logic and consistency are outmoded, given events of the last year or so. Atomwaffen Division might have cells in Kenya or Bombay for all I know.

This is on my mind as I cycle to McAllister Park, as I do each morning. I imagine tripwires strung across the trail waiting to blow me to bits, but it's just one of those thoughts you have and about which you can do nothing. What will be, will be.

I cycle to McAllister Park every day, a round trip of twenty miles which keeps me fit, roughly speaking. Now that I work from home, my daily commute has become a separate oxbow of my time, its own phenomena divorced from the need to actually get anywhere in a geographical sense. About nineteen miles of the journey follow a greenway called the Tobin Trail through countryside and undeveloped land, away from the traffic. It's mostly cyclists, runners, people out walking their dogs and so on.

The point at which I turn around and come home is a covered pavilion at McAllister Park, near some bogs. I usually stop off and take five minutes rest while drinking my flask of iced tea. Usually I'm alone, but today there are others, women with small children. I listen to them as I drink my tea and realise that these are home schooling parents who have, for whatever reason, chosen not to send their kids to a regular school containing teachers. I am told that if you are able to demonstrate that you can teach your kids at home to a reasonable standard, then the American educational system is okay with that. It sounds dubious to me, and the term home school seems suggestive of parents who don't want their offspring learning about no darn evolution or any of that fruity stuff, but then what do I know? My wife's cousin Jenni was home schooled, and Jenni is wonderful, so either I have it completely wrong or there are exceptions.

I sit drinking my tea listening to the screech of free range children. I listen to their parents. They sound normal enough, although it turns out that two of the kids - brother and sister, both very young - are named Samson and Delilah. I don't know what to conclude from this realisation.

Cycling back, I pass a discarded plastic water bottle at the side of the road which runs through McAllister Park. I pass discarded plastic water bottles all the time, but every once in a while it annoys me enough to impede my progress. I get off and pick up the water bottle with the intention of popping it in the blue recycling bin which I will pass as I exit the park. I pick up the bottle and notice another about five feet away, then a plastic carrier bag swaying in the breeze, caught in the thorns of a bush. I might as well finish the job, I tell myself, as usual.

Litter annoys me, but this type of litter particularly annoys me because it's almost certainly runners or cyclists, the sort of self-absorbed wankers who habitually purchase bottled water. They're happy to improve themselves, but not the planet. That's asking too much, so they presumably just drain the bottle and off it goes into the grass to spend the next five hundred years half-lifing into the soil. I see them every day, self-important old codgers in bright green lycra on the weirdest, most expensive bikes money can buy. They don't believe anything is legitimate unless they've spunked away a ton of money on it, so you'll see them in their artisan cycling socks, glowing in the dark on streamlined Branestawm contraptions with an unorthodox quota of wheels and the seat mounted in the last place you would expect to find it.

Having been raised right, I can't even imagine what it must be like to drink a bottle of water then just lob the bottle into the hedge. I didn't even do it as a kid, and I wasn't even a particularly enlightened child. Were I running the show, littering would carry a mandatory ten-year jail sentence, but then a lot would be different were I running the show.

I'm now standing in the grass with two plastic bottles in a carrier bag pulled from a bush. I can see a flattened beer can about ten feet away. I sigh and pause the music on my Discman so as to be able to hear the warning rattle of any rattlesnake which may be in the area. Poor People's Day is a great album, but I don't want to die. I gather up the beer can, then another bottle, then notice a second plastic carrier bag down near the pipe which allows water to pass beneath the road in the event of flooding. There is something in the carrier bag. It seems to be a turd, specifically a human turd. I suppose someone was caught short, maybe a little kid, and so we end up with a shit in a bag tossed from a car window.

The toilets are situated about one hundred yards down the road.

Poo under other circumstances constitutes a fertiliser, but this one is in a fucking carrier bag.

Where do you even start?

What the fuck is wrong with people?

Thankfully the smell isn't that bad, and I've been able to pick the thing up without coming into contact with its precious cargo. I empty the first carrier bag, spilling plastic bottles and a beer can out on the road, put the bag of poo inside that, then tie it at the top. I manage to squash all of the bottles with the can into the other hand, get back on my bike, and ride off towards the bins.

As I arrive home, I hear from my wife.

'They've caught the bomb guy,' she tells me, then adding, 'he was home schooled. He blew himself up before they could catch him.'

His name was Mark Conditt. He was 23, white, and was described in the New York Times as follows:

Mr. Conditt grew up as the quiet, socially awkward oldest child of a devout Christian family that held Bible study groups in their white clapboard house, where an American flag hangs from the front porch.

Mark Conditt didn't approve of same-sex marriage, described himself as a conservative, and wished to see an end to the sex offenders register; and, as I said, he was home schooled; so this is, by pure coincidence, the second time today I have found myself thinking about home schooling.

I feel there's a pattern in all of this, but maybe it's just me.

Banbury

'What a handsome fucker!' exclaimed the Pixie happily.

I leave Newbold, Warwickshire around eleven, cycling a zig-zag path heading east along the smallest country lanes I can find in the hope of avoiding anything you'd call traffic. Sue has offered to give me a lift from Halford, reasoning that it's a long way on a bike and Sunrise Hill will probably kill me. I've told her I'll be okay because I need the exercise and enjoy cycling.

'I scoff at hills,' I roared laughingly in the manner of Brian Blessed, but not out loud. My laughter was internal. I hadn't heard of Sunrise Hill, but I've cycled up other hills, and surely it couldn't be any worse than the one outside Wellesbourne; and people who cycle less than I do always seem to regard the smallest speed bump as a giant escarpment; and other reasons, probably...

I cycle from Newbold to Halford, then on to the villages of Oxhill and Upper Tysoe, at which point I come to Sunrise Hill; and unfortunately it is indeed a bastard. Fuck you, I mutter to my inner Brian Blessed, conceding defeat after about a hundred yards and getting off to push the bike the rest of the way. I stop to catch my breath three or four times, and after about ten minutes I'm at the top of the hill. I follow the road into Shenington, along what turns out to be the edge of the escarpment, dipping right back down to my original elevation and then back up again three or four times, up-down-up-down-up-fucking-down and rarely has such agricultural language been directed against a single geographical feature.

After seventeen miles I'm in the next county, Oxfordshire, and specifically I'm in Banbury. My guesswork regarding travel time has been a bit out and I'm late for Tom and Fiona's barbecue.

Tom probably isn't quite my oldest friend, but he's the first I visited on a regular basis. He lived in an old farmhouse in the village of Darlingscote, Cotswold stone, exposed wooden beams, and uneven floors. I found the place magical. The main thing we had in common was, as with all children, probably that we were the same size, but we shared a sense of humour and we both liked Star Trek. We'd play in the fields at the back. He was probably Spock, which I'm guessing from the fact that he'd keep calling me Jim, and somehow, despite this, I was a Cyberman from Doctor Who. The logic of these scenarios probably doesn't stand up to much scrutiny, and the continuity is all over the place, but I guess it worked for us at the time. My assumed identity for such childhood roleplay tended to be one chosen for its silent implication of terrible power, which unfortunately didn't necessarily translate well when the point of the game was in pretending to be captured on an alien planet or whatever. Tom didn't seem to mind, or possibly even to notice that my Cyberman was a fairly boring choice of persona; although I distinctly recall Sean objecting to my electing to be the Mighty Thor on the grounds that Thor was never really known for jumping around all over the place, unlike Spiderman.

Somehow we drifted apart about half way through secondary school, our respective peer groups polarised by divergent relationships with pop music and the automotive industry. Years later we ran into each other at a school reunion, having both reached an age at which what differences we had cultivated no longer seemed to matter; so that was nice; and amazingly, he was still very, very funny. Stranger still was that he'd married Fiona, with whom I had shared a table during art lessons for most of the fourth and fifth years.

I've been to see them once before in Banbury, back in 2015 during a previous visit to England, and this time they're having a barbecue. My road map doesn't extend into Oxfordshire, so I've scribbled directions on post-it notes copied from what I could find on the internet. I don't know Banbury at all, despite having lived nearby for the first twenty or so years of my life. I asked my mother about this and she told me we'd simply never had any good reason to pass through Banbury. It wasn't on the way to anywhere we ever went. This might partially account for why I'm already lost. I stop to ask directions, and happily it turns out that I've been heading the right way, and that Tom and Fiona's house is only a little further. Tom calls my mobile just as I turn the corner into his close.

'Where are you, Loz?'

'I'm right outside. I think I can see you,' but the bloke pottering about in his back garden seen through two panes of glass is someone else. I've been here before but none of the houses look quite familiar; except maybe one of them does, sort of...

I lock my bike, shove it down the side of the garage, then pass down the side of the house into the garden, greeted by a chorus of jokes about where I've left my horse. I'm wearing my stetson, so I only have myself to blame.

Nathan, son of Tom and Fiona, crushes me with a bear hug and a grin.

'Hello, Nathan,' I wheeze.

He lifts a glass from the garden table to show me with some pride. 'I can drink beer now!'

'Blimey,' I suggest, doing the mental arithmetic and realising he must have passed eighteen since I last saw him. 'I'm surprised you remember me. I was only here for an hour or so, and that was two years ago.'

'I remember you.'

Sue is already here. 'I told you I'd give you a lift,' she sighs.

Tom works the barbecue, flipping burgers and hot dogs, and Zoe is here too. I haven't seen her since school. I vividly recall thinking she was the blondest girl in the whole universe on our first day at Shipston, and she is still lovely as ever. It seems almost scary how little we've all changed, and mainly because we obviously have all changed but it's hard to tell, so I'm probably losing my marbles.

I pull up a lawn chair and we get down to the important business of talking complete bollocks, catching up with the last thirty years of business.

Paul Betteridge is definitely dead, we conclude. The facebook account has to be someone using his identity for reasons best known to themselves. Sue remembers his demise quite well, and with good reason given his attempt to brand her with a lump of red hot metal, fresh from the furnace. I don't remember him being such a bad lad - really more of an inventive nutcase, but then he never tried to brand me. This at least means that I haven't just imagined him ending up in a coma after crashing a stolen combine harvester into a haystack, or whatever it was that happened.

We discuss who has had a sex change, mostly referring to sons and daughters of people we knew at school, or daughters and sons depending on how much time has passed since I wrote this. It's difficult to imagine how such a conversation would have gone one generation past, but in 2017, none of us seem that bothered by the idea. It's weird and out of the ordinary for sure, but I guess we're all too old to give that much of a fuck about someone else's business.

Fiona and Sue talk about work, which opens out into a wider discussion of the joy of telling people we don't like to either piss off or stick it up their respective arses. We talk about Nathan, the kids, and even a few grandchildren who've been buzzing around at the periphery of the conversation, what they will do, what sort of world they will live in, the usual stuff.

The strangest development of all seems to be that Tom, Fiona, and Nathan are one of those ballroom dancing families you hear about, all three of them, and they're probably fairly good at it because they keep winning prizes. Tom invites me to inspect the shed he's built at the foot of the garden. It's bananas and yet brilliant - a stroke of genius. It's his own tiny dance studio, complete with the mirrored wall and all the trimmings; at which point I notice he's lost a spare tyre since I was last here. I guess it's good for him.

We eat burgers and hot dogs, and Fiona and I compare notes about diverticulitis which she recently contracted. Thankfully she's getting better now.

I hit the road about four, reasoning that I want to be back in Coventry before it gets dark, which I just about manage. I've covered one hell of a distance on just two wheels, and it's been knackering but absolutely worth it. I've spent an afternoon in the company of people I never really anticipated seeing again once I'd left school, and not because I ever had a reason to avoid anyone, but because we all seem to have shot off on different paths; but meeting up again, I realise that we probably all have more in common than we did first time round; and that we've made it to fifty without turning into arseholes, which is nice.

Darkest Warwickshire

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enter Brutus.

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

There is a silent awaiting of Brutus' plea.

'—fried eggs!'

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

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

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

'—bacon!'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'The countryside is dying,' he tells me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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