Party Animal

'We're going to a party,' Bess tells me, words which would once have struck terror into my soul. The fear came from the part of the conversation which usually followed, first my objection on the grounds of not enjoying parties, then the customary admonitions of how I need to make an effort to be more social, how I need to make more of an effort to step outside of my comfort zone every once in a while, how I need to make more of an effort to be the person she should have gone out with instead of me. Happily, I married someone who has never played these sort of games, who doesn't engage in that kind of low-level bullying, and who would never make such a suggestion without there being a good reason.

Saturday comes and we pile into the car, then a short drive across town to Laura's place. Laura is in Bess's rock group, specifically an assemblage of women who paint rocks, in case anyone had begun thinking in terms of Judas Priest or the Ozark Mountain Daredevils. They paint rocks and leave them in places to be found by strangers, persons whose day might conceivably be left a little brighter by their having found a painted rock. It's actually a rock painting party.

I find a space in the fridge for my Newcastle brown ale, six bottles. Then it turns out that I'm the only one boozing, so there's no bottle opener. Well-meaning rock artists suggest ways in which I might open a bottle with the kind of inventive enthusiasm you might expect when trying to start a fire on a desert island, then someone realises that a previously mysterious dingus they've been carrying around in their purse is actually a bottle-opener and the day is saved.

We retire to the rock painting room.

I hadn't actually planned to paint rocks but it's not like I have anything else going on, so I take a seat at one of the two tables, sat between my wife and Jennifer's mother-in-law, a lovely woman who moved here from Mexico City and unfortunately doesn't speak much English. Sat opposite are Jennifer and Sandy, Jennifer's mother. The others I haven't met before, but they're all women and there's also a second Jennifer. In total there are about twelve of us, and I'm the only man here, as Joel Grey once sang.

Sandy hands out a few rocks, and we all get to painting. I start on a cartoon octopus, specifically a cartoon octopus with a mustache, bowler hat and smoking a pipe. It will pass the time.

On the wall behind Sandy are three dogs painted on canvas - one seemingly a poodle, another of indeterminate breed, and something like a terrier but without eyes. I guess it was never finished.

I'm using Sandy's pens, a specific type dispensing acrylic paint in liquid form, but they're not really working for me. The table is strewn with communal art supplies so I switch to a brush.

'What's with the dog?' I ask.

Laura explains that she couldn't get the eyes right and left it as it was.

'You could paint a pair of sunglasses on it maybe?'

'Oh! That's an idea.' She considers the proposal. 'How about you paint sunglasses? I think you might be better than me.'

I look at the painting and realise I like it as it is. 'I don't think I could, now that I come to think of it. It would seem wrong.'

'I don't mind.'

'No - I like it as it is. It has some sort of quality er… I just can't stop looking at the thing.'

There is something compelling about the eyeless dog, as though it has special powers and can see into the future.

I finish my octopus and start on Frankenstein's monster, inspired by my recently having been commissioned to produce a sequence of paintings depicting different stages in the career of Boris Karloff. We're mostly yacking away as we paint, because, as I say, I sort of know Sandy and Jennifer, and Jennifer once lived in London so we have that in common.

At no point in my life prior to 2009 did I foresee myself as the only male sat in a room of American women, and I find the realisation pleasing. At the same time I'm usually a little irritated by men who state a preference for the company of women, because it always feels as though they're engaged in some deeply wearying exercise in one-upmanship; but on the other hand it's nice to know that no-one will attempt to engage me in conversation about real ale, motoring, golf, football, sporting activities, science-fiction television shows, or any of the other tedious shit with which so many men fill their bewildering lives.

On the other hand, the women at the next table are all of a certain age with very short hair, and I suddenly have the sensation of finding myself in an episode of Orange is the New Black, the drama set in a women's prison; then I recall that a chapter title in J-Zone's autobiographical Root for the Villain asks Are Men the New Women?

It's time for more beer.

Craft Fair

I paint a canvas every Sunday afternoon, just something small about the size of an album cover. I'm working with oils. I've been painting with acrylics for decades, but I'm new to oils and the techniques involved are very different so I'm having to relearn a lot of things. I've been at it since the beginning of the year and I now have a stack of canvases which I'm ready to sell.

Bess meanwhile has been painting rocks for a year or more, decorating stones with mandalas and related designs of increasing complexity. She protests that she has no artistic ability, but the evidence of her work suggests otherwise. She's posted pictures of her rocks on facebook and strangers have asked to buy them.

Having both arrived at the same place, we've decided to hit the craft fairs, to try selling our work from a stall. We've looked at a few such events and have settled on a fair held at a retirement community in Boerne as a good place to start. The pitch costs twenty dollars and there are no weird restrictions about bringing our own food. We had a look at the fair held regularly at the Black Swan Inn just down the road, and they were asking fifty dollars a pitch with a ban on anyone inclined towards self-catering, presumably so as to guarantee business for whichever food trucks might be in attendance.

So now it's Saturday morning. We're up early. We've fed the cats and we drive out to Boerne to set up, ready for when the doors open at nine. I've spent the last week making a free standing wooden frame upon which I can display my canvases, seven foot tall, but it all comes apart so that it's no big deal getting it in the car. It's made with beams of poplar bolted together and I'm quietly proud of it. My inner pessimist has already predicted that no-one will give a shit about my paintings, but I will have at least one Hank Hill type conversation about the pleasures of woodworking and craftsmanship.

We arrive at the Kronkosky Senior Center around eight and it takes about half an hour to set up. I bolt my frame together and attach rows of canvases using small G-clamps. Bess spreads a black cloth across the circular table we've been allotted, then unwraps all of her rocks. There seem to be hundreds of them, as well as a few vinyl albums she's repurposed and decorated with similar designs.

The hall is of medium size, most likely a canteen during the week. There are fourteen other pitches, described thus in my diary:

• Custom hair bows by emo-country goth chick, her Tristan-esque boyfriend*, and their dog.
• Black lady selling unpleasant kitsch ornaments repainted in clashing dayglo colours.
• Overcharging artist community of wizened burnouts asking $200 for the one painting I actually liked.
• Crazy grandma in red, selling items of redwear.
• First timer selling mason jars as tissue dispensers and personalised Starbucks cups.
• Cactus lady.
• Quilts advertising John Deere heavy agricultural machinery.
• Crochet stuff lady.
• Hostile jewellery lady who writes books about driving the arrogant British out of Ghana.
• Gay men selling pots of plants mixed in with gnome housing.
• Blind artist, formerly a Brigadier in the USAF.
• Tacky arrowhead art.
• Soap woman.
• Creepy custom handbag guy.

Nine o'clock ambles past, and we eventually realise that the doors are indeed open by virtue of three or four very old people seen wandering amongst the stalls. They don't seem to be buying anything, but it's clear that they aren't selling either. The big rush comes about an hour later with numbers up in the sevens and eights, and all very old.

'These are people from the retirement home,' I tell Bess.

'I get the feeling they didn't advertise very well,' she says.

'How far are we from Boerne, like the main strip?'

'About a mile.'

The main strip of Boerne is crammed with stores selling antiques, trinkets, nick-nacks, collectibles, and other junk, and it gets pretty busy, particularly at the weekend and on a warm day such as today. We should hopefully begin to experience some of the run off any minute now. It's still early. No-one goes out before noon.

'I'm bored,' I say, 'I think I'll have a sandwich. Do you want one?'

'Not yet.'

I've made sandwiches, corned beef for myself, ham and mustard for Bess. I've also made pasta salad and filled a couple of flasks with iced tea. I eat one of my sandwiches, reasoning that I'll save the other one for later as something to look forward to.

No-one is looking at my paintings. They are behind us but against the wall at an angle. I wonder if it might not occur to people that they are for sale, that they're just part of the hall, but I'm not sure what else I can do. It's not like they can't be seen. I've been painting simple still life compositions - flowers, cacti, and a couple of deer skulls, because these are things I see in Texas. It occurs to me that paintings of skulls might not be the sort of thing likely to sell well in a retirement home.

'These are nice,' an old woman coos over Bess's rocks. She circles the table picking up various examples for closer inspection, then wanders off to buy a fucking horrible plaster clown painted orange and green from the next table along.

Bess and I sit and stare at the woman's wares, scarcely able to believe anyone would try to sell such abominations. We guess that she goes around thrift stores buying cheap, kitschy ornaments from the sixties and seventies, then brightens them up a bit. Somehow she found a way to make that stuff worse. We should probably be impressed.

'What's with the woman in red?' I ask.

There's a round old lady at the other side of the hall dressed entirely and flamboyantly in red. Even her hat is red. All the clothes for sale at her table - all hand made by the look of it - are red.

'It's some sort of senior thing,' Bess explains.

'Like black power for old people?'

'Kind of.'

'So cute!' Another woman is examining a rock. 'My grandson will love this!'

The rock is one of the three or four that I've painted with silly cartoon characters, just little things which take about five minutes to do because Bess asked me to do them. This one is a banana with a face and a big grin - the sort of thing one used to see in the margins of comic strips by Leo Baxendale.

'Three dollars,' says Bess, and we have our first sale of the day. I'm a bit embarrassed that it's one of mine.

Another hour dribbles past.

Aunt Edi shows up. She has driven all the way out here to lend moral support, but also to buy a painting from me. It's for her friend Becky who is visiting from Phoenix, but who is presently staying in San Antonio. Edi takes photos with her phone, and Becky relays that she is interested in a particular painting of the nopal and agave cacti in our garden.

'How much?' asks Edi.

Going by the shite I've already seen at other craft fairs, I'm underpricing myself, but I've divided my paintings into two groups - those which actually I like, and those which I'm not too sure about, for which I'm asking $60 and $40 respectively. I'm trying to sell paintings, and I'm going by what I myself would pay. I'm not trying to skin anyone.

'That's forty dollars,' I tell Edi.

Becky relays that she is very happy with this and so that's another sale. She also relays that she was looking for something which would remind her of Texas when she heads back to Arizona, and so my painting of cacti apparently ticks all of the right boxes. The strange thing for me is that the painting was my first effort, one I could never quite decide whether I liked it or not. It was the one during which I learned that you can't paint in oils using techniques learned from working with acrylic, so if it came out okay - as Becky clearly believes - then it was in spite of me. I didn't actually anticipate anyone ever wanting to buy it, so that makes me happy.

Edi takes a seat and shoots the breeze with us for another hour, then leaves.

Bess eats a sandwich.

A couple of people buy a few of her painted rocks.

An old guy asks, 'How many records did you ruin making these?' He means the vinyl albums upon which Bess has painted her designs. She picks up job lots of junk albums no-one wants and decorates them, because it's 2018 and no-one sane still cares about Ferrante & Teicher's Bouquet of Hits collection.

'Ha! Ha!' we respond because we can't tell whether the old guy is joking or just being a cunt.

Noon arrives and I do a circuit of the hall to see what other people are trying to sell. I've waited until noon so as to break up the day a bit.

Our fellow first timer seems nice, but the stuff she's selling - and which people are actually buying, it should be noted - seems weird to me. The personalised Starbucks cups are, as described, generic plastic cups from Starbucks to which she has added Mark's Cup, for one example, perfectly lettered and everything. I'm not sure who would want to buy such a thing - someone called Mark, I suppose.

I stop at the other stall trying to sell oil paintings. They seem like old hands at this thing and there's a bunch of people at the table. Their canvases are huge, some vaguely representational, nothing too kitschy, and a few abstracts, but the sort of abstracts which tend to be painted by people who paint abstracts because they otherwise can't actually paint.

'These aren't all by one person?' I ask.

'There are three of us,' the woman explains. 'We're an artists' community.'

Of everyone here today, they seem the most at odds with a consumer demographic which will pay for a unicorn in violet, silver and turquoise.

'How much is that one?' I indicate a small portrait of a woman, something vaguely post-impressionist and quite nice.

One of them picks it up and studies the reverse. 'Two-hundred.'

Fuck me, I don't actually say, but I think it. 'Well - good luck,' I offer as a fellow artist trying to sell to senior citizens, a group notoriously reluctant to part with their money.

I pause at the jewellery stall because there are books. I pick one and study the cover.

'I wrote those,' the woman tells me in a defensive tone.

I read the blurb on the back, something about people of Ghana pitted against the arrogance of the English colonial forces at the turn of the nineteenth century.

'I know all about the arrogance of the English,' I chuckle in an attempt to break the ice, and to convey that I'm impressed by anyone who has published their own novel.

'Have you been there?'

'Well, I'm from there.'

'Where are you from?'

'England, I mean. Not Ghana. Have you lived in Ghana?'

'Yes, I lived in Ghana.'

I guessed this from what is written on the back of the book, and because her accent is an unfamiliar hybrid of something or other.

'I've been to North Africa. Well, Morocco, which I know isn't the same.'

She looks at me.

'I lived in London. I knew a few blokes from Ghana.'

'The novels are ten dollars each.'

'Well, I'll probably look back a bit later.' I smile, unsure how best to remove myself from her strangely frosty presence.

Maybe she just hates the English.

Back at the table, we eat our pasta salad. Bess has sold a few more rocks.

The lady in red is now browsing. 'These are very nice,' she says. 'I'd buy one but I'm trying to get rid of everything before I die.'

The organisers asked to stay until three, but a couple of tables have already given up and gone home, and it's clear that there isn't going to be an early afternoon surge.

Bess goes off in search of soda.

The woman with the horrible clowns picks up a rock as she passes by our stall. 'You did this?'

'My wife painted them.'

'I can't even draw a straight line!'

I smile because I don't know how else to respond.

Bess returns and I relate the exchange for her consideration. We both look at the table of dayglo clowns and Disney characters and wonder how she's managed to sell anything.

'Did you hear what she said to the goth chick?'

'No,' I say.

'They were talking about their dog, and how it's a service dog. She just said, I hate dogs!'

'What a lovely woman!'

We sit and watch as more tables vanish like stars going out during the final heat death of the universe.

'I sure have heard a lot of country music today,' I say.

We've been tuned to a country station since we got here, twanging and whining across the hall, hour after hour. That said, it's probably not so much country music as what we now have instead of country music - which is like country music but with autotune, trap drum machine pinging away, and Jed, Jethro, or Tammy whining about poor cellphone reception in rural areas.

At two we decide to call it a day.

We've made about eighty dollars, all told.

I sold a painting to someone I already knew.

Bess sold a few rocks, but considering how most of them cost just a couple of dollars, and they're beautifully painted, she should have cleaned up; which at least means it wasn't us.

It was them.

*: Resembling Tristan, whom my wife knows at work.

Schnitzel & Giggles

So far as I can remember, my first village fête was in Wimpstone, a row of houses in rural Warwickshire which I'm not even convinced was ever really long enough to be called a village, although it probably seemed like the big city when I was five. The River Stour runs along the back of Wimpstone, past the last house and under the main road, and I imagine the fête must have occupied the triangular patch of land framed by road, river, and the garden of whoever lived in that last house. That's how I remember it, although it was nearly half a century ago so I could be wrong. I recall attractions which didn't even do much for me at the age of five, if that's how old I was; and I remember old crap turfed out from attics and cupboards beneath stairs for sale upon tablecloths laid across the grass. I bought a book about Robin Hood, or at least I cadged pennies off my mother and bought a book about Robin Hood. It was an orange hardback, the kind which would once have been wrapped in a garish technicolour cover, and it was illustrated. It seemed like quite a find and left a bigger impression on me than anything else that day, or from any village fete since.

Just once, I would like to have been as excited about a village fête as Randy is about the Camden County Fair in My Name is Earl*. 

Hey, everybody! I'm Gus, the Camden County Fair bear, runs the commercial while Randy tries hard to keep from exploding with anticipation. Who's ready for some fun? Enjoy food, fun, prizes, an Osama bin Laden shooting gallery; And this year, get your picture taken inside the actual car from Smokey and the Bandit. It's gonna be bear-tastic!

Subsequent commercials additionally promise that the event will be not only bear-riffic, but fully bear-awesome. I know bear-awesome doesn't make any sense, and yet it sort of makes perfect sense; and one day I'll attend a village fête which will be genuinely bear-awesome. Maybe that day has come.

We're out driving. We don't know where we're going because we're having an adventure; or Bess may have some vague idea seeing as she has the wheel because I never learned to drive, but I suspect she's playing it by ear. It's June and we live in Texas, so needless to say it's fucking hot, somewhere up in the vicinity of 100° Fahrenheit; but our lower humidity makes the heat marginally more bearable than it would be in England, and in any case I don't know what that is in old money, so it's just something we deal with, even if it rules out long rural walks at noon.

As we approach Boerne, we see a sign for the Berges Fest, which isn't a village fête because we don't really have villages in Texas; but it sounds like it might be a county fair, and might therefore be bear-awesome. I guess Berges derives from berg, apparently meaning mountain in German; and Boerne is a culturally German town on the edge of the Texas hill country, which I suppose amounts to more sense than my assumption of this being the Berges County Fair, because there is no Berges County. Boerne is in Kendall County.

We park in a suspiciously empty lot, probably a field which has only just been opened up to handle the overspill from the existing lots. We walk amongst giant trucks and make appalling jokes about what we're going to find, because we don't yet know what we're getting into. Thankfully it isn't a Klan rally or an international swingers' expo. It's a fair, if not strictly speaking a county one. It's food, music, heat, and booze. Fest is probably as good a term as any.

First we have cups of corn, something my wife recalls as having been a treat when she was young, but of course a new one on me. We stand next to the fifteen foot inflatable cob and the guy fills polystyrene cups with bright yellow corn. We get plastic spoons and are invited to mix in our own butter - which is in liquid state at this point - mayonnaise, and paprika. Surprisingly, it's delicious.

We approach a covered marquee with open sides, one of two. There's a stage in the middle and an oompah band, all pigtails and lederhosen. The musicians are arranged upon the stage in a half-circle, three rows of them, all seated, because technically they are an oompah orchestra. Sadly there seem to be more people on stage than in the audience, but happily those on stage are having such a great time that they don't really care; and not once am I reminded of that scene in Cabaret.

Finishing our corn, we investigate the other marquee. Within, we find an array of craft stalls, but they seem to be of the kind we see everywhere selling the sort of stuff which fills the stores of Boerne and New Braunfels - pieces of wood embossed with motivational slogans, and the like. There are also stalls selling car insurance and double glazing.

Who the hell goes to the fair and buys double glazing?

There's an ice cream stand run by a likeable old coot with a moustache of the kind my English relatives probably imagine to be more common in Texas than is actually the case. Bess chooses coconut and I decide that I want the eggnog flavour, so our guy works his way around a succession of nine or ten freezers before locating our requested flavours. The ice cream is home made, frozen onto sticks, and delicious.

Beyond the marquee, we find a rodeo in progress, or at least we guess it's a rodeo because there's a rodeo clown stood in front of an audience. An absent minute passes before we see the cattle in a pen on the far side of the bleachers. There's also a distorted commentary coming through the tannoy, but we can't tell what he's commenting upon because nothing seems to be happening, and the commentary is delivered in that accent which sounds like someone playing with a selection of rubber bands. The rodeo clown is just standing there.

Another minute saunters by, and still nothing has happened so we walk in the direction of cheering and excitement. Here is another, smaller crowd, and they too are watching something narrated by a man with a microphone. We shuffle to the front of the crowd and see dachshund races in progress, a couple of little sausage dogs being petted and steadied at one end of a track with their people waiting at the other - doggy people, one of them a woman wearing a t-shirt upon which is written don't ever let go of your wiener in country and western lettering. Suddenly the dogs are off, tails wagging, some panting as they happily trot off in the vague direction of the finish line. They don't seem to be in particularly competitive spirit, but another minute passes and we have a winner. His name is Michael and his owner scoops him up and lavishes him with kisses.

The dachshund is a popular dog in our part of Texas, second only to the chihuahua; but it's hot, and it's difficult to imagine a full afternoon at the dachshund races; and already my wife has been distracted by a food truck, not because she's hungry, but because she's drawn to novelty. The truck has a name, as though it's just a restaurant on wheels. It's called Schnitzel & Giggles, so my wife takes a photograph and posts it on facebook.

It seems like we've had all the fun there is to be had, so we leave. It's been the kind of occasion which might have seemed more significant if we lived in Boerne, which we don't. It's been a great way to spend thirty minutes, but fell sadly short of bear-awesome.

*: Stole Beer from a Golfer, the seventh episode of the first series, in case anyone was wondering.

Get at Me, Dog

It's about seven in the evening, still light, and we're watching King of the Hill. For the past half hour I've been dimly aware of a dog barking, although it's more like yapping because it's a small dog. There are dogs around here, mostly spread out in an assortment of yards so we hear rather than see them. One of them gets to barking and they all join in and it becomes background noise, something you no longer notice after a while; but I notice it now because it's on our porch, right outside our front door.

'That arsehole,' I mutter as I get up.

I suppose it's a stretch to say that we live in the 'hood, but at times you could be forgiven for thinking so. By zip code we're in the affluent part of the city, except we're in the crappy, run down corner, which suits us just fine. It's affordable, and we don't have to look at no socialism signs stuck in anyone's lawn, or have doctors, lawyers and dentists complaining to the city about the state of ours. More obnoxious relatives tend not to visit, possibly for fear of some neighbour stealing their hubcaps, so it all works out quite nicely. On the other hand, we get to be neighbours with Shooty the drug dealer. He's a young man living at home with his family and certain social issues meaning that he doesn't play well with others. He's been inside the stripey hole for something or other, but now he's toned it down, just selling the occasional baggie to fellow enthusiasts.

Once he called out, 'Nice bike!' as I rode past.

Another time he asked if I'd like him to mow my lawn, which struck me as a stupid question given that I was myself in the act of mowing it when he made the enquiry.

That's been the full extent of our interaction, although I once helped his mother push her stalled car to the side of the road. She was intrigued by my displaced nationality and I had the impression she was taking the piss out of me, just a little.

A couple of years back Shooty supposedly shot someone in the head inside his own home. I guess they must have had a disagreement about something. The entire street was full of cops, and even a television news crew, but no gun was ever found. Everything returned to as it was before, except that now I had a nickname for the guy which saves me using the more nebulous those people qualified with similarly vague hand gestures.

Shooty has a dog, a chihuahua. He's had it for about a month. It roams up and down the road, just yapping away. It never seems to be inside his house. It's always there, sometimes yapping outside our window at two in the morning. Sometimes I see Shooty walking his dog, which just means that he walks alongside it as it covers its usual ground, up and down the road, yapping away. We have cats, so it's becoming more and more annoying.

'That arsehole,' I mutter as I get up and rush out onto the porch to chase it off. No-one fucks with my cats.

Shooty himself is there, stood at the end of our drive, stood on our drive. 'Good boy,' he says in his stupid sing-song voice. 'Good boy.'

He's a walking, or at least shuffling, cliché. He makes me think of Chico and the Man, although truthfully I barely remember the show. He's the racist beaner caricature of the stupid, simple Mexican who wobbles his head from side to side as he grins and admits I no know, Señor. It's a bit of a shock to realise that such people exist.

'Good boy,' he says as he watches his dog bark at the side of my house, as though this isn't something the dog would be doing regardless of his tutelage, like this is some fucking trick he's managed to teach his pooch. 'Good boy.'

How the fuck is that good?

I stand on the porch, arms spread like I'm Ice Cube in Boyz n the Hood as Ferris drives past. It's a challenge. Get at me, dog.

'You maybe want to call him away - off my lawn,' I suggest kind of forcefully. I should probably be scared of this arsehole, but I just can't get there. I can't bring myself to respect this walking cliché; and besides, twenty-one years as a postman has made me pretty hard to kill. I can feel myself wanting him to start.

'He like to chase the cats,' Shooty explains happily, because like, liked, likes - that be some complicated shit right there. Ain't nobody got time for that.

'Yeah, I can see that,' I say. 'That's why I want him off my lawn. I don't want your dog chasing my cats. Do you understand what I'm saying here?'

Incredibly he doesn't, and I hear some sort of question forming as I slip back into the house and close the door, because I've remembered that there's never anything to gain from getting into arguments with morons, and this moron supposedly shot someone in the head. Additionally, it's mainly just the yapping that's driving me batty. Not even Holly, our smallest cat, is bothered by the chihuahua.

'Something's going to happen to that dog,' my wife mutters darkly, and over the next few days we realise we've both been thinking the same thing. The dog is always there, with his owner usually nowhere in sight. All we need to do is to lure him into the car, drive out to Boerne or Selma or somewhere, and let him go, hopefully to find a better home with owners who actually give a shit and don't just let him roam free. The plan changes to taking him to an animal rescue center in another city, then to the one in our own city because it's not like Shooty's going to bother to check.

One week later we hear Shooty having an argument with the guy over the way. The guy over the way owns a couple of large flat-faced dogs, quite vicious looking. One of them escaped a few years ago and met me as I returned home. It was sat on my own porch growling at me, and not that happy waggy-tailed growl of when Fido or Rags or Scamp just wants to play; so thankfully the guy over the way makes sure his dogs stay inside his yard. Excepting this one occasion, I guess.

'How can you be so stoo-peed?' Shooty is screaming. 'He jos' a leel' puppy dawg! He never done no harm to no-one!'

My wife and myself peer out of the door, across the way, then duck back in before we're seen. Shooty is stomping back to his own house. As keen practitioners of the detective arts, my wife and I are able to ingeniously piece together a scenario equating to what we think must have happened.

The chihuahua was roaming up and down the road unsupervised, as it always is. One of the larger dogs escaped and attacked the itinerant chihuahua. Elementary, my dear Watson.

So fuck it, we're definitely going to dognap the yappy little bastard. Truthfully, we feel sorry for him having such a shitty owner. Maybe he'll have a better life with someone else. We're definitely going to do that.

Then I go back to England for a couple of weeks, and a couple more weeks have passed following my return before I remember the chihuahua and realise that I haven't seen him around.

I mention it to the woman next door, having previously established that the dog's constant presence was likewise getting on her nerves.

'It died,' she tells me.

'What? Seriously?'

'I saw her just putting it in the trash so I had to ask, and she told me it died. It had been laying around ill for a week, then it was gone.'

'Maybe it ate something.'

'Yeah maybe - you know they just let it run all up and down the street. It could have eaten anything. They didn't really care for it none, just let it loose.'

I step back inside, a little shocked.

Poor little cunt.

I didn't like the dog much, but I didn't want it to die. Maybe somebody else enjoyed the constant yapping even less than we did and laid out poison.

Then again, I wonder if Shooty even bothered to feed the thing.

I guess I don't really want to know.

Butterfly Lions

I met my first Pekingese dog at some point during the seventies. We were living on Sweet Knowle Farm in rural Warwickshire and I must have been about five or six, maybe younger. We already had a couple of regular dogs - Keeper and Tina. Keeper was a black and white mongrel vaguely approximating something in the direction of a sheep dog whom my mother brought home as a stray whilst still living with her parents. Tina was a black, woolly poodle and she was blind, or was blind by the time I was old enough to form memories of such things. One or maybe both of these dogs were still around when the first Pekingese arrived. Some couple, friends of the family, were separating and needed to find homes for their dogs, an Alsatian and a Pekingese. We took the Pekingese. I recall entering the front room and looking across to see what resembled Dougal from The Magic Roundabout looking back at me from the sofa. I don't think I'd realised there could be such animals in the real world. I liked him immediately.

'This is Jolly,' my mother explained.

He was small, at least compared to regular dogs, with a flat face of dark bristles and big soulful eyes. He seemed like a hairier bulldog of some kind, but somehow more refined. He growled a little, and seemed initially wary of me, showing the whites of his eyes; but eventually he sniffed my hand and whatever objections he may have harboured seemed settled. Then inevitably I put my face too close to his and he bit me, because everyone has been bitten by a dog at some point as a child, usually a family pet leaving the mark that eventually prompts the question, what's that on your face? Now it was my turn, although I can't remember where Jolly bit me and he left no scar. Amazingly I was at least old enough to understand how it had been my fault and why there wasn't much point in getting angry with a dog who, after all, was in a strange place and had every right to be a bit jumpy.

He came with a pedigree, my mother explained, and his full name was Jolly Boy of Jancy - something like a secret identity, so it seemed to me. My dad occasionally referred to him as Jolly Bean because there was supposedly something of a resemblance to Judge Roy Bean, the nineteenth century Texan Justice of the Peace. Pekes are one of the oldest dog breeds in the world, and one branch of mythology attributes their genesis to what happens when a butterfly and a lion decide to make a go of it.

Perhaps because of it seeming like we had a canine celebrity in our midst, my mother began to take an interest in the breed, and in dog breeding in general. Through the pages of Our Dogs magazine we met a professional dog breeder resident at Shenstone Road, Edgbaston, Birmingham, a woman we knew as Queenie Mould. I dimly recall our driving to Birmingham to visit her. She was elderly with white hair and spectacles, but she seemed to like me and she laughed a lot. Our first visit was probably to buy a second Peke, a small female named Lucy, also known as Papanya Ni Sun although my spelling may be wrong. I surmise that I may have taken a shine to another of her dogs, a small, excitable female with a reddish coat, being as I vaguely remember feeling disgruntled that we weren't taking this other dog home with us; and I surmise that this was probably the first of at least two visits because I recall Queenie presenting me with a tin of Peek Freans biscuits and telling me that the small reddish dog with whom I had struck up a friendship had bought them for me - a sequence suggesting that the visit I recall amalgamates two separate trips. I had my doubts as to whether the dog had really purchased the biscuits, but I appreciated the thought nevertheless.

Lucy was small and cute, enough so to qualify as what is termed a sleeve dog after the oriental practice of carrying Pekes around in the voluminous sleeves of one's silken robe so as to keep your arms warm. Apparently she was also too small to have puppies, and the couple she birthed were born dead. Pansy, whose pedigree name I forget, came along a year or so later. She was a little more robust than Lucy with a silky reddish coat and somehow reminded me of Lieutenant Uhura from Star Trek - which was something to do with the look in her eye. Pansy had a ton of puppies, the father being Queenie's Mr. Redcoat of Kenghe, who was something of a celebrity in the Pekingese world and who had won numerous awards and fathered many, many children. This I found out only recently. At the time I may not even have been old enough to be aware of a father's role in the process of reproduction and may simply have assumed that lady dogs just kicked out a pile of puppies whenever the mood took them. Pansy managed seven, although one was born dead, another two didn't last very long, and a fourth made it to the end of the week. This left us with Bosie, Clunk and Enoch, here listed vaguely in order of size. Bosie - named after Oscar Wilde's very close friend - was a ball of grey fluff with giant paws and a beetle-browed face so black you could hardly make out his features; Clunk, presumably named after the glossolalia-prone aerialist inventor from Catch the Pigeon was like Bosie but smaller; and Enoch was the little black one with something to prove. He was also my favourite. I seem to recall him being named after Enoch Powell, which I think was something to do with my dad's sense of humour. Enoch Powell had spent a lot of time warning the public about people with black faces coming over here and taking our jobs. I don't think our family liked Enoch Powell very much, and my dad's record collection at least seemed to support this hypothesis. Bosie and Clunk were respectively also called Wimpstone Wind Song and Wimpstone Wind Chimes in reference to the village nearest to the farm on which we were living, although I'm not aware of either of them having been entered in dog shows.

Clunk and Enoch eventually went to hypothetically good homes, leaving us with just four, Keeper and Tina having long since departed to sniff celestial bottoms on the farm in the sky. My mother took Pansy to a couple of shows, but I don't think she won anything.

Pekes are small, but they're a handful when you have four of them, and taking them for walks was always an adventure. Gormless visitors occasionally stood bewildered and smiling, our garden gate held open as all four Pekes shot out, down the road and off into the fields, requiring that we chase after them. Their short legs and rolling gait made them easy to catch but it was still exhausting. Their short legs also made it difficult for them to get down stairs, so occasionally we came home to a worryingly empty house, see that the hall door was open and there would be four forlorn faces gazing down at us from the upstairs landing, all trapped and no lesson learned from the last time it happened.

Having grown up with Pekes, I still experience a thrill of excitement when I encounter one, and sometimes I remember my manners and talk to the owner as well, sharing certain details of the above by way of explanation. I still don't know what I think about dog shows or dog breeding, and Pekes are prone to respiratory problems and trouble with their eyes, but then the four I knew certainly seemed to live happy, healthy lives regardless of the received wisdom. Even looking at the photos of them now will occasionally bring a tear to my eye, because I grew up with them, and they made the sort of memories which tend to imprint quite deeply on childhood. It doesn't seem like they can really be gone, but I suppose the important thing is - as I've probably said before - that they were here at all, and I had the good fortune to be in the same picture.

Drinking Until You Can't Stand Whilst Stuffing Your Face

It is April and Fiesta has come around once again, Fiesta being the week long festival commemorating the battles of the Alamo and San Jacinto back in 1836. I've now done most of the significant Fiesta events - the river parade and that weird thing in the theatre with the kids of assorted local billionaires wearing capes made out of diamonds. The only event I am still to attend is called a Night in Old San Antonio, so that's the one we're doing this year.

I like to pace myself, not being a huge fan of crowds and all.

Old San Antonio here sounds like a term of endearment but refers to the old part of San Antonio located at the heart of the city, a village's worth of narrow streets of stone houses on the bank of the San Antonio river, just a short walk from Mission San Antonio de Valero, the building historically known as the Alamo. It's not quite the sort of thing you expect to find in America, or at least it wasn't quite the sort of thing I expected to find in America because it looks too old for something built by people who weren't native; but then I'm forgetting that we used to be Mexico.

A Night in Old San Antonio is actually four nights and mostly seems to be about drinking until you can't stand whilst stuffing your face. This is probably why I've left it until last as I've never really regarded either pursuit as a justifiable end in itself, at least not to the extent which is apparently customary for the festival.

We drive into the centre of town, myself and my wife, pay much more than normal to park, and then queue for admission to a section of the city into which we would simply be able to wander at any other time of year. It's all been corralled off, the old town, turned into a fairground with the majority emphasis on drinking until you can't stand whilst stuffing your face. We queue for about fifteen minutes and then the gates open. We already have tickets so we get wristbands advertising the fact. Most of the old houses are stores and their associated workshops during the day, mostly artisan stuff, people making things for tourists, but generally quite nice things, I suppose. We don't really have any equivalent of the plastic bobby's helmet so far as I'm aware. Most of the old buildings are closed up now because it's early evening, excepting those serving as either eating or drinking places. One road is lined with small scale fairground stuff, stalls in which you throw things in order to win underwhelming prizes, but otherwise it's food and booze.

We enter a Germanic tent, acknowledging the significant Texan presence of settlers from old Deutschland. There is an oompah band, and men in lederhosen and frauleins drinking from biersteins until they can't stand whilst stuffing their faces with bratwurst and schnitzel and all of that good stuff. We have something to eat and sit for a short while, pacing ourselves - basically saving room for tacos.

We rejoin the crowds and shuffle along the narrow streets, eventually finding ourselves in a sort of Gaelic appendix, a few stone steps off the main track leading down to the river where three verdantly attired persons play Irish music, one of them banging a spoon against a bodhran. Everyone wears green and clover-based imagery is in abundance. They're drinking the Guiness, in all in all in all, until they can't stand whilst stuffing their faces with potatoes, so they are. I'm beginning to feel uncomfortable because I know actual Irish people and I feel like I've stumbled into the equivalent of the Black and White Minstrel Show.

We're quite near some Irish-themed pub. I can't remember what the place is called but it's surely only a little way further along the riverwalk. There's a menu outside from which my wife and myself read out the names of self-consciously Irish sounding drinks to each other until the prospect of a refreshing pint of Black & Tan stunned me into silence. I knew the term only as the nickname of the notoriously brutal Royal Irish Constabulary Special Reserve, which is probably through my having had grandparents of vaguely Northern Irish heritage. I never realised that the Black & Tan was also an unrelated drink, so it initially struck me as kind of stupid and tasteless, like something with which you would wash down that delicious Sinn Féin pizza with a side of H-Block fries; and a top o' the mornin' to you too, pardner.

Having had our fill of the Emerald Isle, we visit one of the few shops which is still open. The place is run by Marisol Deluna, a friend of my wife. Marisol designs textiles, makes clothes, and is apparently quite a big deal in her field. I can see why, because the clothes and the fabrics look classy even to me; but the woman herself is in New York right now so we don't get to see her.

We wander further, and I have a drink to pass the time, which isn't so enjoyable as it should be. Drinking at events such as this tends to be more enjoyable if you're already drunk, in my experience. We watch people drinking until they can't stand whilst stuffing their faces. We have some tacos filled with beef cooked right there before us on massive grills big enough to accommodate several humans should the need arise, although thankfully it doesn't. The air is full of smoke, which is not unusual for San Antonio, and there is a live band playing in a sort of courtyard. They're very energetic, but unfortunately they're playing hits from Grease, Beatles numbers and that sort of thing. The crowd seem to like it, and I suppose the band are good at what they do.

The taco is stuffed with peppers and onions and I have to tip my head backwards to form a chute in order to eat it, which isn't very dignified but I don't suppose it matters. Three little girls are performing Call Me Maybe by Katy Perry at a karaoke booth on the corner of the street lined with all the fairground attractions. We watch them for a minute mainly because they're obviously having serious fun singing the song, and will remember this moment for a long time to come; and it's better than watching persons even older and fatter than I am singing You're the One That I Want. Then Bess throws a few foam balls at wooden boards in which holes have been cut, failing to win any of the prizes on offer; and we go home because we've already covered the ground twice and feel we've had all the fun there is to be had.

A couple of mornings later we watch the Pooch Parade, a less formal Fiesta event held in the suburbs. Everyone with a dog comes along and walks a set route for a couple of hours, and about half of the dogs are dressed as Batman, or Barack Obama, or some other public figure. This is the fourth Pooch Parade we've attended in the same number of years, and it's always fun. My personal favourite is the sausage dog who usuallys comes as the Red Baron in a scarf and occasionally with flying goggles, pulled along in a cart customised so as to resemble a blood red German triplane of the 1920s; but for some reason he's not here this year.

Maybe next time.

The Big, Fat Working Class Sunrise

I'd seen Gary around Dulwich since the mid 1990s, although I didn't know his name at the time. He was a grown man with a paper round and was always walking his dog - something big like an Alsatian, like him in fact. He wasn't really fat, just a great looming lump, like a dole queue Bernard Bresslaw and always a bit scruffy because once a month down the launderette probably wasn't quite often enough; a bit red faced and slightly balding. He looked as though he could probably demolish brick walls with his bare hands if someone paid him to do it, which was a possibility given that he seemed to be an odd-job man. I passed him every morning, usually at the same time, same place, the corner of Friern Road as I snapped rubber bands from the bundle of mail for all the old age pensioners down Rycott Path. I said good morning a couple of times, because when a face has achieved a certain familiarity, it's embarrassing to pass by without some kind of acknowledgement; but he never replied, just stared back with those boiled egg eyes, seeming almost afraid.

What did I know?

What was my game?

Then suddenly he is my neighbour. The house next door has been divided into four flats, one to each floor. The basement flat has been broken into a couple of times, our part of Dulwich being particularly susceptible to burglary, and I myself have been similarly hit twice. The previous tenant has moved out, taking her horrible kid and criminal boyfriend; and now here he is, adult paper round man grinning over the top of the wall, and it's the first time I've ever seen him smile. 'You're the postman, aincha?'

'That's me.' I'm a little surprised that he remembers me from those mornings as we passed each other on the corner of Friern Road.

'I fort so. I seen you around.'

The council have placed him in the flat. He introduces himself as Gary and tells me a little of his story, but it's difficult to follow and is annotated with testy defences of alleged crimes at which he will only hint, and which in any case weren't crimes 'cuz he weren't doing nuffink wrong and you can arse anyone. He'd been living, so I gather, in one of the tower blocks up Friern Road with an ambiguous tally of pets - cats, dogs, budgerigars, fish, and possibly a squirrel. There had been complaints but he remains unspecific and anyway he hadn't done nuffink wrong and he was always doing little fings like putting the wheelie bins out for people or getting you a pint of milk from the shops or bringing in your mail from the boxes down at the bottom when the postman couldn't be bovvered to climb all them steps because the lift was bust, and he never even arsed for fanks or nuffink and it just went to show how two-faced some people could be dunnit. All that can now be said for sure is that Gary is gunna behave himself. He ain't gunna be doing nuffink silly again. He ain't gunna be writing on no walls or nuffink silly. He has learned his lesson.

So have I, namely that asking for specific details of the occurrence to which Gary occasionally alludes is more trouble than it's worth, and seems to upset him. Sometimes he'll arrive there under his own steam, in which case it's best to shut up and let him get it out of his system, and most of all to avoid the temptation to dig further no matter how darkly intriguing the testimony.

'You know women, right?'

I could answer well, not all of them, but it will only complicate things so I just say, 'yes.'

'Always arseing questions ain't they?' He scowls as though finding himself once again let down by half of the entire human race. I have a brief, horrible image of this particular train of thought leading to bodies uncovered from beneath an unevenly laid patio, and so I keep my mouth shut.

He seemed like an ordinary bloke, I will have to lie. Always kept himself to himself, except he never does.

'Funny bloke, ain't he?' Bill, my ageing Landlord, stands on the doorstep. I am paying the week's rent and our eyes have been drawn across the top of the wall to next door's garden and Gary labouring away on the latest of what he refers to as his projects.

'I can't figure him out. What does he do exactly?'

Bill belongs to the generation raised upon a solid work ethic. He doesn't really understand concepts of either unemployment or disability, and Gary seems to fall somewhere between the two.

'He works up at the flower shop on the corner,' I report, seeing no harm in telling just Bill. Gary has sworn me to silence, but so far as I can tell, most of our neighbours already know him as Gary from the flower shop on the corner. I'm not quite sure what the work entails, besides lifting and carrying anything which is too large or heavy for regular humans.

Bill sighs. 'He delivers the bleedin' newspapers and all, you know. I seen him in the mornings.'

I nod, uncertain of why we're having this conversation. Gary is an odd one for sure, but it doesn't seem like there's much to be done about it.

Over the next few months we watch Gary's projects come to fruition. The garden of the house was intended by the owner to be shared by the residents of all four flats - an intention formed from a fairly basic misunderstanding of human nature, particularly in London. Gary has taken over the entire garden, not a passive-aggressive occupation of territory but simply because he doesn't know when to stop, and none of those living above him care enough to complain. In addition to the flower shop and the paper round, he sometimes undertakes gardening jobs, often returning with plants or even small trees discarded by some client, now transplanted to his own garden.

He's a human magpie, transposing anything bright, shiny, or even just available to what has become his garden, which now includes all manner of plaster features and figurines, dry fountains shaped like sea shells, pink flamingoes, ornamental wooden arches and trellises, chunks of rotting wood that looked kind of interesting, and even a gravestone. It's not really a gravestone, although it's roughly the same shape, and I'm staring over the wall trying to work out what the hell he's doing now.

'I'm painting it Chelsea colours, ain't I. Whatchu fink?' He steps back to allow for an inspection, clearly proud of his work.

'I see.' I don't really see at all.

'You into football?'

'It's not really my thing, Gary.'

He indicates the letters he's begun to paint across the gravestone. The paint comes from half empty tins of emulsion which someone or other was throwing out, red, white and navy blue. There's a name which I can't read followed by a date in fat, uneven letters.

'She was my dog,' he explains. He is silent for a moment, almost thoughtful. 'I always fink when I die, they'll all be waiting for me up in heaven, all jumping up and down and pleased to see me like dogs are, you know?'

I grunt because it's a moment of unusually tender understanding. Gary's vision is comical, but it is absolutely sincere.

'They'll all be up there, all me dogs, me rabbits and me cats, all being friends.'

When Gary first moved in I promised myself I would keep my distance, that I would avoid encouraging him. I have no need of a new best friend, but Gary has other plans. He begins to call around to have a lend of my bicycle pump or to use my phone to make a call which sounds like an emergency. I'm knackered. I've had a hard day. I'm trying to watch the box, but Gary is stood directly between my eyes and the screen. He fumbles with a scrap of paper, dialing the number scribbled in blue biro. He considers the television then turns to me and grins. 'I was watching the football.'

I was watching a DVD of The Sopranos, but obviously I'm not doing that right now. It doesn't seem worth mentioning, because the call is clearly something important. I hear a faint crackle as the call is answered.

'Hello. Have you still got a budgerigar I can buy?'

Crackle. Crackle.

'I just want one. How much is it?'

Crackle.

'Yeah. Is it a boy budgerigar or a girl budgerigar?'

During the winter of 2004, I go to work on Bill's neglected garden, attempting to restore it to horticultural capacity following the destruction wrought by another tenant, George Marshall. George  offered to look after the garden a year or so before as it had become obvious that Bill was no longer physically up to the task, but George's efforts were weird and cranky and borne of no apparent gardening experience, more like a child playing in the mud. Having spent many years in the army, George rationalised the garden by digging the whole thing up to a depth of about three feet, then sifting all but the tiniest of stones from the soil. This resulted in a lifeless crater of clay with a mountain of stones at the far end, at which point he lost interest. I have taken it upon myself to reverse the damage.

My first task, as I see it, is to restore the soil by mixing all the stones back in. I have a wheelbarrow and a spade, and it's fucking cold with frost still on the ground at four in the afternoon, and my breath hangs in the air. After a couple of hours I'm knackered, and haven't really got anywhere. I realise that this will take months.

'Whatchu doing?' Gary's face has appeared over the crumbling garden wall like a big, fat working class sunrise, like the solar baby from Teletubbies in later years. I explain what I'm doing, and before I can finish the first sentence, he's over the wall and shovelling away like a steam engine. I race backwards and forwards with the wheel barrow, bringing clumps of damp soil then taking Gary's blend back to fill in the craters. I have the easy job and I can barely keep up, and I hadn't even arsed for his help. The mountain of stones is gone in about forty minutes; no more weird craters, just ground waiting to become a garden.

'That's better,' Gary observes happily, leaning on the handle of the spade and not even short of breath so far as I can tell. 'That should be nice now. Get some flowers and that.'

'Yes,' I croak feebly, hoping he'll go home, that he won't volunteer for anything else which might need doing and thus oblige me to help. I already feel like the weakest link in my own chain.

Over the following weeks I begin to stick in a few plants and to lay down grass seed. A regular flow of rescued shrubs still finds its way into Gary's garden, and inevitably he begins to run out of room.

Bang bang bang like the Incredible Hulk doing home visits.

I open my front door.

Gary stands there grinning, the stem of a newly rescued shrub clenched in a mighty paw, held forth like a prize snatched from the jaws of a dragon in a distant and mystic realm. 'E'are!, which means here you are, in case you were wondering.

'Thanks, Gary.' I've told him how I like to sleep afternoons because I start work around five in the morning, but he doesn't seem to get it. I leave the shrub by the kitchen door for later and go back to bed.

The years pass, and each day I am out in the garden at some point, weeding, planting or watering; and each day there is a big, fat working class sunrise over a garden wall which is still crumbling but has been recently fortified with old doors and sheets of hardboard found at the roadside as another of Gary's projects.

He always wants to know what do I fink of this or that.

Who's the best - U2 or the Rolling Stones?

Have I got a hat he can have a lend of for the U2 concert?

He wants to buy anuvver dog - a girl dog in fact. I ask him what kind, and he tells me a white one so he can name her Snow.

He arse for my help lifting up a fish tank. He just found it. They was chucking it out. He's gunna put it inside and put stones in it. He's gunna paint the stones all Chelsea colours. I can't really say no because it's Gary and, as the cliché goes, he'd do anything to help you out, and often does.

He lifts one end. The fish tank is like a motorway support of thick green glass. I can't lift my end. I can't even budge it to one side, and I realise that I have no reference point for what it must be like to be as strong as Gary. He's practically superhuman.

The big, fat working class sunrise is worse in the summer because he never seems to wear a shirt, and he has these great big sweaty man tits, and he pongs a bit now that the weather is warm.

Eventually, due to circumstances beyond my control I have to move out. Gary gives me a leaving present, a handful of old CDs he is chucking out and don't want no more.

'You can have them if you like. I ain't bovvered.'

Two of them are Sex Pistols live CDs, which surprises me. Gary explains that he saw them a couple of times when he was a kid. Johnny Rotten walked past him after one of the gigs.

'That was brilliant,' Gary told him.

'You weren't supposed to enjoy it,' Rotten gurned, laughing.

I move out, but eventually I make my way back to the old place, mainly just to see what has become of it, and once or twice I run into Gary, and I am astonished at how glad I am to see him. He once drove me up the wall to the point that I would often pretend to be out when I heard that distinctive bang bang bang on the door, but it's been a good couple of years and I've had some time to reflect, and I've come to realise that despite all his flaws, the worrying allusions to past misdemeanours, this gentle and slightly aromatic giant with a personality somewhere between that of a twelve-year old boy and a big happy dog, Gary is still one of the nicest people I've ever met. He has no hidden agenda, and no propensity for bullshit or delusion - least of all self-delusion. Of all the writers, artists, and musicians I have ever met, you would need to combine a good sixty or seventy of them to come up with someone even half as decent as Gary.

So it's Thursday the 19th of May, 2011, and Gary and I stand in the street talking for about an hour, stood outside the house in which I lived five years ago. He often wondered what happened to me, and how it all worked out in Texas, and he's so unconditionally happy for me that it's embarrassing. He still has his little projects, and the latest has apparently been the transformation of his garden into a zoo with dogs, cats, rabbits, guinea-pigs, and a not unimpressive aviary full of small birds. He's made the aviary out of things found laying at the side of the road. He tells me a little about his weekends. He goes fishing out in the country quite a lot. His dad used to take him when he was a kid, growing up in Camberwell, and he always loved it; and where once I regarded him as a well-meaning pain in the arse, now I realise just how lucky I am to have known this bloke.

Elephants Will Eat Anything!

Mark began at our Royal Mail sorting office in East Dulwich in much the same way as the Nazis began at Poland in 1939. He was hard to miss. Wherever you went, there was Mark. Whatever you had done, wherever you had been, Mark had either been there, done it, or had a mate who knew someone.

'He's a good lad, that Mark,' Geoff observed sagely one morning in the canteen. 'He's got character.'

No-one said anything. Mark had just left the room, having spent half an hour telling us about how his dog once regularly caught a train to the nearest town and came back with a newspaper. On a good day the dog would even bring the correct change. We were all still trying to digest this information as we ate our beans on toast in silence.

'Mark's a fucking cock,' I suggested to Snowy as we sat drinking in the pub one afternoon after work.

'Mark's all right,' Snowy told me, clearly understanding that he was arguing against a massive body of evidence to the contrary. 'He's got a good heart.'

This was true, although it wasn't really the issue. Mark had gone from walking postman to the vans fairly quickly, and it was fair to say that he was generally one of the better drivers. If you were amongst the postmen or postwomen for whom he was obliged to provide transport to the first point of delivery, he was nearly always on time. He rarely kept anyone waiting, and he never turned up early to whine about you making him late as you tore around like a blue-arsed fly doing twelve things at once in the rush to be ready. If it was Mark's week to drop off your pouching bags, there was never much cause to worry about finding yourself stood around waiting at the designated box, or for bags to have been left in the wrong boxes.

'He'd do anything to help you out,' Snowy observed.

The problem was Mark's having been assembled during a transporter accident involving David Brent, Alan Partridge, Dennis Waterman's character from Minder, and both Mike Reads - singers of Ugly Duckling and UKIP Calypso respectively. He was always ready with some not-quite-funny quip, those wide blue-eyes and the grin of a seventies disc jockey.

'Yeah,' his voiced boomed through from the other side of the canteen, the room with the television set, 'that's right. You see a shark is actually a mammal.'

I knew this to be wrong and felt an almost sexual drive to set the stupid fucker right, so I poked my head around the corner of the door. The room was more or less empty, just Mark and Jackie - reading the paper and obviously not even remotely interested - and some nature programme on the box. I took a deep breath and had a quick rummage around in my memory.

'Actually sharks are technically cartilaginous fish,' I reported. 'They're quite primitive because they evolved way back at the beginning, and they give birth to live young, which is probably what you're thinking of.' I may have suffixed this with I rather think you will find, and I had a hunch that what I had said was only generally rather than scientifically true, but it wasn't like Mark would be able to tell the difference. Mammal, my arse.

'That's right,' he confirmed, making us those two blokes who know about sharks and stuff, somewhat robbing me of my victory.

Eventually I found a comrade in Jason Aslett. Jason was in a band called Orange Can who, if memory serves, briefly became NME Best New Band or something of the sort. They had a record label and tours arranged, and they had CDs coming out. Nevertheless Jason needed a day job, something by which to pay the rent, and so he signed on with Royal Mail. We became friends fairly quickly, sharing some music industry common ground and pulling similarly perplexed expressions each time Mark opened his mouth and formed words.

'I'm going to tell him that I'm into shagging small boys or something,' Jason said one day. 'Just to see if he's done it as well.'

Sadly he never fulfilled this promise.

Christmas came around and we were in the canteen, taking the early morning tea break. The television was on as usual, a wonky image of a zoo on the broken set, some feature shown as part of Good Morning Britain or whatever it was. In the background an elephant is stood shovelling hay into his mouth with his trunk. There is a keeper in the foreground talking to the camera. Well Christmas is coming up, so - you know - we'll probably be giving him a bit of turkey and sprouts and all that, followed by the inevitable chuckle of a man enjoying his own unambitious joke.

'Yeah!' Mark turns from the screen to face Jason and myself, both sat in the corner with our cups of tea and plates of buttered toast. 'Elephants will eat anything!'

His eyes are wide because the time for joking around is over. We are beyond the looking glass now, people. He is absolutely serious. He has never been more serious in his life. Elephants will eat anything! and he looks back to the TV set as the weather comes on. It's going to be fucking freezing.

My God, I think to myself, he's about to tell us that he used to have an elephant. He's speaking from experience. He knows that elephants really will eat anything because he had one living in his mum's garden in fucking Sydenham.

I turn to Jason. He is sat with toast stalled before his open mouth. He regards me with something that could be either disbelief or horror. He too has had exactly the same thought. He too knows that Mark is about to tell us that he once owned an elephant.

We are trying hard to not laugh out loud.

Mark watches the weather and swears. If he ever owned an elephant, he is now distracted by thoughts of van tires skidding across icy tarmac, engines refusing to start in the cold. He will just have to tell us about his elephant some other time.

In that moment, I feel terrible for regarding Mark as a fucking cock. I recall all the times he's helped me out, dropped off certain difficult packets, or given me a lift back to the sorting office when I've forgotten something. He's a fucking cock, but he's our fucking cock, and we wouldn't change him for anything. He's one of a kind.

The Very Important Story

'He shalt be clad,' the voice hissed yet again in portentous close up revealing blackened bone beneath receding necrotic gums, 'in women's knickers.' The final syllables washed away on echoes of pseudo-Shakespearian eternity, fading, becoming one with the great ocean of the very important story arc. Then a blue square box appeared. It was not a box at all. It was TARDIS! The mysterious traveller in time and space known only as Doctor Who comes out and looks around. He frowns on his face and looked thoughtful.

'What is the matter, Doctor Who?' asked Amy. She was his friend and she had ginger hair. Just then Rory came out of the TARDIS. He imagined for himself a woman running, a woman with curly hair who looked like Dirty Den's second wife in the Eastenders show on television. The woman ran and roared, a great cricket bat held aloft ready for the killing swing, a great cricket bat just like the kind Tristan Farnam would have been into but with six inch nails driven through the end, become a weapon of death and harm. Tristan Farnam probably would not have liked that part, Rory thought to himself.

'Er um,' he said and shrugged.

The Doctor made his eyes go narrow as though he were suspicious of some fact. 'Very strange,' he commented quietly.

'I er...,' said Rory. 'I think...'

There was a noise, the noise of bells. It was the theme music from Are You being Served? mixed in with the grinding of gears and the wrench of a handbrake as the ice cream van drew to a halt. It had scary clown faces drawn on the side like in a Tim Burton film or an old video of a pop song by the Cure. The music sounded sinister as it tinkled away.

Rory pointed at the Doctor's head upon which was worn a girl's hat. The girl's hat was green.

'I wear girl's hats now,' beamed the Doctor. 'Girl's hats are cool.'

Amy stuck her chin out and made her eyes appear large and defiant. When she spoke it sounded like a person from Scotland or maybe from Edinburgh or one of those places. She sounded feisty and defiant. No man would tame this foxy yet independent wench.

'I would like an ice cream, if it's not too much trouble.'

'An ice cream,' the Doctor said wonderingly and his voice went up and down. He looked around then and saw the ice cream van. 'Well that is handy, and unusual.'

In the ice cream van there was Davros, but this was Davros from the future, a reformed Davros who had climbed over the great obstacle of genital confusion and was now secure in his sexuality and therefore no longer angry. He no longer wanted to get the Daleks to exterminate Doctor Who. 'Yoo hoo, Doctor,' he called out in his grating electronic voice waving his single claw-like hand. 'I must say, I do like your hat.'

Rory coughed and fell over, but no-one noticed.

Amy studied the display at the side of the window, allowing her feisty Scottish eyes to linger upon the representation of a Fab lolly with all hundreds and thousands on the end. 'I'll take one of those.'

'I'll have a vanilla cone please,' the Doctor beamed grinningly as he pulled some psychic space money out of his magic pocket.

The red electronic eye set into the forehead of Davros glowed faintly. 'Can I interest you in my nuts, Doctor?'

'No thank you.' The mysterious traveller in time and space known only as the Doctor winked at Rory to show that he had fully understood the joke and that it wasn't prejudiced or nothing. The joke referred to the nuts Davros might sometimes sprinkle over the ice creams he sold, although of course it sounded a little like he might be referring to male testicles. That had been deliberate. It was a joke.

'And what would you like,' - the Doctor Who Man paused to remember correctly the name of his friend - 'Dave?'

'I'll have a raspberry ripple, please.' Rory sadly shook his head and there was a sad trombone sound. What a loser! Ha ha!

'Och! Do ye remember those?' Amy laughed defiantly. 'I used tae love me a raspberry ripple, me! Do ye remember Spangles too?'

Everyone laughed nostalgically.

Rory laughed too, but his laughter was tinged with sadness.

'No!,' Mrs. River Song shouted as she came running out of nowhere in slow motion, but it was a long no with a lot of Os - more like noooooooooooooooo like in a film with Matt Damon. She swung the cricket bat with nails that Tristan Farnam would have regarded as blasphemous. She swung the bat and went through the air but you could see all the detail like it was one of those games or something. It was awesome. Doctor Who looked around in slow motion just as the wizened claw of Davros thrust forward from the ice cream van clutching a raspberry ripple. Amy was feistily diving to save Doctor Who with her arms but she accidentally got hold of his trousers and pulled them down instead of simply pushing him out of the way of the cricket bat that Mrs. River Song was swinging at his head and as they all fell over it was revealed that the Doctor Who was clad in women's knickers.

'I wear women's knickers now. Women's knickers are cool.'

'Um,' said Rory apologetically.

'Hello Sweetie,' said the annoying woman with the cricket bat.

'You will not move,' ordered the grating metallic voice. 'Woof. Woof.'

The robot was low to the ground, almost like an iron dog but with technological bumps on its side. It was not a Dalek, because all of the Daleks had been destroyed forever in Pagga of the Daleks. It was more like a dog version. It was a Doglek.

'Dogsterminate!' chanted the growing group of Dogleks all spinning around sniffing each other's computer interface bottoms. 'Woof. Woof. Woof.'

'He shalt be clad,' the voice hissed yet again in portentous close up revealing blackened bone beneath receding necrotic gums, 'in women's knickers.' The final syllables washed away on echoes of pseudo-Shakespearian eternity, fading, becoming one with the great ocean of the very important story arc.

They all looked at the Doctor turning red-faced in his women's knickers. Everyone moved his or her head up and down just a little bit then looked at each other with their eyes narrow as though to suggest that something hitherto regarded as confusing had begun to make sense.

'They're comfortable.' The Doctor shrugged like a small child with eyes full of wonderment and magic.

It started to snow. It was cold. It was really serious like in a song by Fields of the Nephilim. It was seriousness like when no-one understands you and you have a frozen soul and that.

Davros grunted like a grunting electronic machine as he reached forward from the rectangular serving orifice set into the flank of his ice cream van. He tried to reach forward but his one arm was not up to the task. It was much too short for what he was trying to do. There on the ground was his Dalek - Time Lord English translation dictionary, laying open as it had fallen at the page for the Dalek words Dav meaning Doctor and Ros meaning Who.

'My God!' Rory stared with his accusing eyes at Mrs. Song. 'You're him! You are the Master!'

Madge

On Monday evening as I chopped bratwurst and potatoes my phone rang. It was my wife.

'You need to call your dad right now.'

'What I—'

'Your dad called my phone. I don't know what's wrong, but you need to call him right now.'

My father lives in Coventry, England whilst I live in San Antonio, Texas. We speak fairly regularly but this seemed like something out of the ordinary, a moment I'd been dreading. Apparently unable to phone me at home, he had called my wife at work and wanted me to call him back seemingly regardless of it being near midnight in England. I felt ill.

My father sounded sleepy but not unusually distraught, which I immediately noticed with some relief. He told me that Madge had died in hospital. I suppose Madge would be my step-grandmother, if there is such a thing. She was ninety-three and had recently suffered a fall so it wasn't entirely unexpected.

Approximately forty years earlier, a knock on our front door had brought similarly grave tidings. We lived on a farm in rural Warwickshire with just one telephone connecting us to the outside world, and this was kept in the main office and shared by everyone. One of the other workers, or possibly even Mr. Harding himself had come to our door with a message. Being winter and early evening it was already cold and dark outside, and the news was that my grandmother had been involved in a car accident. My dad grabbed his coat and rushed out whilst I commended him on his haste, helpfully explaining that old people were frail and therefore less likely to recover from  accidents of this sort. I was probably about eight and I think it was the only time my mother delivered unto my person one of those clips around the ear you always hear about.

When I was growing up we tended to see more of my mother's parents than the Burton side of the family, which is simply the way it was. Arthur Burton, my grandfather, was herdsman on a dairy farm near Witney in Oxfordshire. Like my dad, he was the guy who milked the cows.

I remember my grandmother, the first Marjorie Burton, and I remember her well enough to recall her voice and her face without the need of a photograph, but sadly that's about as far as I get. I remember their budgerigar, their bungalow, woodlands full of bluebells behind the farm; and I remember that whenever we visited I would usually end up behind their sofa, chuckling at cartoons in the twelve collected volumes of Punch magazine dating from 1936 to 1941 which my grandfather had purchased after the war.

Regrettably the first Marjorie Burton didn't survive the accident, which quite naturally left my grandfather somewhat rudderless, and there was one year in which he joined us for Christmas dinner at the house of my other grandparents which, if not exactly awkward, seemed a little odd, like Batman turning up in an episode of Star Trek. I was too young to recall much beyond the usual seasonal haze of the annual toy frenzy, and I have difficulty imagining what they all could have talked about. Both grandfathers had served during the war, one in Egypt, the other interned in a POW camp in Poland. One was a dairy farmer, the other a structural engineer for Coventry City Council.

Saturday 26th March 1977 is marked in my Letts Schoolboys Diary as the day Grandad married Madge, short for Marjorie and  recently widowed. Madge became the second Marjorie Burton, and because none of us knew if there really was such a thing as a step-grandmother, she remained Madge. They were married at St. Stephen's Church in Clanfield situated at the end of Busby's Close where Madge lived with Cindy, her corgi. It was a fun day, although I don't remember much beyond that my uncle George refused to enter the church on the grounds of being an atheist, which struck everyone as both characteristically disrespectful and idiotic, because it was. Arthur took a job at a dairy farm in  Clanfield, a job which came with a farm cottage, although Madge kept her bungalow knowing they would have need of it when Arthur retired. We visited from time to time once they had settled into their cottage and Madge would serve up the most incredible Sunday roasts, although I only recall going to stay on one occasion, a week in January 1978 before the school holiday came to an end. I stayed with my other set of grandparents in Kenilworth every other weekend, but I didn't know Grandad and Madge quite so well, so it seemed initially strange to me. Nevertheless I had a fine time, pestering my grandfather as he milked cows, certainly eating well, going for walks, and finding myself shepherded around the cottage with Cindy snapping at my heels, unable to shake off her herding instincts or the suspicion that I was probably a sheep. Waking with a temperature one morning, Madge prepared hot fortifying drinks involving milk and whisky, then brought me something to read from the mobile library, a book I recall as being Neutron Star by Larry Niven. There was a spacecraft on the cover so it had struck her as being something I might like, which it was. Whilst staying at their house, I watched the first broadcast episode of Blake's 7 - which meant a great deal more to me then than it does now - and pleaded to be allowed to stay up late to watch Spike Milligan's Q8. By the time it came on, my grandfather had fallen asleep in his armchair but Madge continued to watch bemused as Spike grinned on the television screen in response to a series of boob jokes conveyed through the medium of women in lingerie. It seemed to go on forever. I pretended I was asleep, watching through half closed eyes and struggling not to laugh.

After a few more days, I was struck by a crushing combination of homesickness and guilt regarding the same, wishing for familiar surroundings whilst worrying I might appear ungrateful. I was probably a fairly cranky child, but Grandad and Madge both seemed to understand. Whilst nothing about Madge suggested that she suffered fools gladly, she was nevertheless a kind and thoughtful woman.

Many years later I went to stay with them a second time. It was summer 2001, Arthur had retired, and they had moved to Madge's bungalow in Busby's Close. I was in my late thirties and conscious of the fact that I hadn't seen my grandparents in at least a decade in conjunction with Arthur now approaching ninety. They were both significantly older and slower and more prone to spontaneous napping, but it was otherwise comforting to find that little had changed in their world. On a slow walk with my grandfather, himself moving at snail's pace with the aid of a stick, he casually pointed out the three enormous and adjacent allotments from which he continued to harvest a tidal wave of carrots, potatoes, beans, onions, and other vegetables, expressing regret that he no longer had the energy to maintain the fourth plot. He was as self-contained as ever, and I recalled that our previous meeting had been at a wedding in 1990 during which he'd regaled myself and two friends with a lengthy treatise on the cultivation of onions. It lasted at least twenty minutes and came in response to my asking how things were going with his allotment. He naturally assumed your interests to be the same as his own, a traditionally obnoxious trait which nevertheless came across as quite endearing when Arthur did it.

'Well, he certainly knows his onions,' my friend Carl observed, slightly dazed as my grandad trundled off to bestow his horticultural wisdom upon other unsuspecting guests.

Meanwhile in the summer of 2001, Madge was a little surprised when I explained that I could only stay for a few days, somehow having missed the detail of my staying at all; but she didn't seem to mind, her main concern being that I might be bored, possibly being more accustomed to the breakneck pace of life in that London. All I had really intended to do was enjoy their company, so that was what I did. In the evening we would watch Emmerdale as Arthur intermittently slept in his chair, or we would discuss the rest of the family, cousins I had not seen in decades and so on. At one point my grandad talked about when he would visit the cinema in Rugby during his youth, and it took me a minute or two to realise that he was referring to silent films starring Tom Mix and the like. It was a window into an older, quieter world, another detail of which was revealed in the framed photograph hung upon the wall - Madge in her twenties bearing a more than passing resemblance to Rita Hayworth and just as beautiful.

Although we weren't related by the usual definition of the term, Madge seemed like the perfect grandmother, warm but strong, and with a good head on her shoulders as the saying goes. Her voice alone, softly accented with rural Gloucestershire, seemed to offer the assurance of all being as it should be at least in her corner of the world.

Sadly the next time I saw her was at Arthur's funeral in 2007. I had attempted to get to Clanfield to see the two of them again a few years earlier, but Marian had derailed the visit with her characteristic penchant for making everything complicated, thus denying me the last occasion upon which I would have seen my grandfather alive. Madge being Madge seemed to understand, or at least didn't hold it against me.

The last time I saw her was just before I moved to Texas. She still lived in Busby's Close, soldiering on regardless in the absence of her beloved Arthur. 'I don't suppose I shall be seeing you again, Lawrence,' she told me, and I had a horrible feeling she was right, as indeed she was.

As I stood in a kitchen in Texas speaking to my father that Monday evening, I felt a sense of relief that at least nothing unfortunate had happened to either him or my mother. The world hadn't come to an end, but one small corner of it had lost someone that could not be replaced.

So it goes.