Big School

My final year of junior school ran from September 1976 through to the summer of 1977, during which I assume I must have been the oldest kid in the whole place. There were only ten children in my year, including myself, and my birthday was in September. Having taken up half of my entire life by that point, it felt as though junior school had lasted forever, and it felt like it had been a long, hard journey getting to the age of eleven; but it had been worth it, now that my bunch were Lords of the playground. We'd done the time. We'd put in the hours. We had the experience. The only cloud on our horizon was big school. Big school would send us all back to square one, reducing us to the smallest fish in a bigger, more violent pond.

Actually, it wasn't the only cloud. There was also the end of the world to consider, or to do one's best to avoid considering. Old Mother Shipton had predicted that it would come in 1980, just three years hence. Paul Moorman told me this and I absolutely believed him, having heard of Old Mother Shipton and her predictions. She had been a sixteenth century witch who had foreseen all sorts of stuff according to something or other which had been on the telly. Our school was Ilmington C of E Junior and Infants, Warwickshire, at the edge of the Cotswolds, a locale with a rich history of witchcraft and the like, and none of us were entirely sure of that epoch having fully passed. There had been a witchcraft related murder in the fifties over in Quinton, and I never quite summoned the courage to climb Meon Hill, which is where it had happened. It was said that one could only cross Meon Hill from east to west, or possibly west to east. If you attempted it the wrong way around, whichever way that was, you just wouldn't be able to do it, or you would die, or you would meet the devil. All of that stuff was still pretty close to the surface, so I spent the last three years of the seventies really, really wishing that Paul had never told me about Old Mother Shipton.

I tried to dispel his sponsorship of the prophecy by inventing a load of other events she'd predicted which hadn't happened, predictions which Paul could hardly refute, not having heard of them.

'What about the flying saucer invasion that she predicted would happen in 1975?' I scoffed, but my laughter rang hollow. I was fooling no-one but myself.

Still, a year - September to July or thereabouts - was one hell of a long time, so there didn't seem much point in worrying about the end of our era. My friend Matthew had gone to the big school in the nearby town of Shipston, and Mark McFarland had gone to the one in Stratford-upon-Avon. I spoke to Matthew and he seemed to be getting on okay, although it nevertheless sounded terrifying to me. There were hard kids at Shipston High School, like you saw on the news. They got into fights. Shipston was a town, and towns had gangs. Worse still, Old Mother Shipton was buried under the drinking trough at the end of Telegraph Street, although I much later discovered that not only was this untrue but that she had lived in Yorkshire and had no actual association with Shipston aside from a similar name.

We went swimming at the big school every Wednesday morning, all piling onto a coach which took us the three and a half miles to Shipston. I was crap at swimming, but eventually mastered a version of the breast stroke which was mostly just floating, for which I was duly awarded a swimming certificate dated to the 9th of March, 1977. I didn't actually see any fighting in the vicinity of the swimming pool, so maybe it was going to be okay.

We had an American boy in our class during that final year, Jamie Keating. He had an older brother, Sean, and an American father who lived in the village for no reason I was able to discern. More recently I learned that Jamie and Sean's father was Charles Keating, an English rather than American actor who had moved back, having grown up on the other side of the Atlantic, and who presumably chose Ilmington because it was handy for the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. Stranger still, when I moved to America I discovered that he was fairly well known over here, and had played my wife's favourite character in a long-running soap opera called Another World.

I didn't know Sean or Jamie too well, but recall Sean as being pleasant, funny and laid back. This was in contrast to Jamie who was kind of lively, as I suppose younger brothers tend to be. He always seemed to be getting into confrontational situations with other kids who took exception to his being American, or with one other kid who was a bit of an all round pain in the arse, If I'm to be honest. The confrontations mostly took the form of red-faced yelling with heavy emphasis on the terms yank and limey as pejoratives. I don't think anyone really won, and Sean seemed thankfully too elevated to involve himself with such foolishness.

I gave Jamie a wide berth, mainly because I was a bit withdrawn and he was fairly loud, or so it seemed to me. The only conversation I recall having with him was on the way back from a book fair at the big school. We were back on the coach and somehow ended up sitting together.

'Did you see the life-sized Doctor Who cut-out?' he asked me.

'No,' I said bewildered, because I definitely would have noticed something like that.

'Oh man,' he said, wide-eyed. 'I can't believe you didn't see it.'

'Where was it? I was only in the big hall.'

'Yeah, that's where it was. There was a competition too.'

'A competition?'

'Yeah, if you won you could be in Doctor Who. I can't believe you missed out.'

He invented a whole load of other non-existent Doctor Who things which I really should have seen. He'd really honed in on my weakness and kept on pushing that button all the way back to Ilmington. I knew that his testimony couldn't be true, but at the same time I understood that he wouldn't tell a lie or make something up, so whatever he'd seen must have inhabited some sort of potential reality, perhaps the same one in which Dan Dare had lived as an actual historical figure, possibly. I was trying to get my head around it but not doing very well.

On the other hand, we'd been right inside the school and still hadn't seen any shootings or stabbings or however it usually went down.

I took the eleven plus, failed, and didn't get to go to Stratford-upon-Avon like Mark McFarland. Only after taking the test did I understand that this had apparently been desirable. I was therefore destined to attend big school in Shipston with all the other farmhands and labourers of tomorrow, but Matthew insisted that it would probably be okay, and that he himself hadn't been in a single fight that whole year. I wasn't reassured because Matthew was more worldly than me, and knew, by way of example, where his older brother kept his stash of bathroom magazines. Also I suspected I was probably a bit more punchable and would have to keep my head down. Nevertheless I tried to keep myself from worrying over what was still an unknown.

My final idyllic year at Ilmington came to an end, opening onto a long hot summer of garish pop music and mucking about on bikes. It was the last good thing for a while.

On the other hand, it turned out that Old Mother Shipton had got her dates wrong, so swings and roundabouts...

Tra-la-la Tra-lala-la

There are six of us, and we've met at La Fonda. It's been organised through a website called Meetup which allows you to find persons who share your interests living in the same area, and so Bess and myself are meeting persons who share our love of cats living in the same area. I had my usual reservations on the grounds that I'm not especially sociable and I don't experience any particular excitement at the possibility of meetings with strangers, but I went along anyway.

How bad could it be?

'I thought there would be more of us,' I say, noting how we're around a table with seating for sixteen.

'This is about average for a Meetup group,' explains Fleegle, because I'm naming those in attendance after the Banana Splits so as to preserve anonymity and reduce the possibility of anyone getting pissy. 'There were only the four of us at the Barn Door last month.'

'We were both ill,' says Bess. 'I wanted to come but it was a really rough weekend.'

'I went to this writers' group a couple of times,' I say. 'It was a few years ago and that was through Meetup, but it was always oversubscribed. There were usually about twenty of us, which seemed like too many to me.'

Nevertheless here we are, two men and four women, although one of the women isn't yet here so we're presently five in number. I'm seated next to Drooper, who is a little older than I am with a sort of mullet and as such resembles Ben Dover, the famed auteur producer of independent art cinema. He's very quiet and I don't think he likes me. He introduces himself as a former mailman from Virginia, or one of those states. I tell him I did the same job in England but he doesn't seem to find this interesting.

'I was doing it since 1975,' he says. 'Now I'm mostly a cat sitter. I retired a couple of years ago.'

'What brought you to San Antonio?'

'They were cutting back and they said there was an opening down here so I followed the job.'

Fleegle asks what we do, Bess and myself.

'I work in healthcare,' Bess says, 'and he's a writer.'

'Oh! What do you write?'

I hate this question. 'I write science-fiction,' because it's as good an answer as any.

'That's great! I love Robert Heinlein, and Asimov too!'

'Yeah, I like some Heinlein.' This is a diplomatic concession to a couple of Heinlein books which I enjoyed. I hated his Stranger in a Strange Land possibly more than anything else I've ever read, and have come to associate his name with far-right conservatives on social media, those who genuinely seem to believe that white people are an oppressed minority

'Have you had anything published?'

'There was a novel. It didn't sell a whole lot but, you know, it did a job. People seemed to like it.'

'What was it called?'

I tell her and she spends the next ten minutes fiddling with her phone, trying to find my novel on Amazon. Eventually she tracks it down on the publisher's website. I'm trying to discourage a sale because I don't think she would enjoy it.

Snorky is saying something, but she's three seats away at the end of the table, and her voice is quiet so I can't hear. Her testimony is interrupted by the call of a gruffly voiced moose head mounted high on the wall behind us. 'Uh oh! Chongo! It's Danger Island next!'

Snorky has three cats, she explains. It's the same for the other two, which probably means that Bess and myself are more the sort of people one might expect to meet at a gathering of cat lovers. Neither of us can remember what it was like to have just three cats.

'Where are you from?' Fleegle asks me.

Christ, I think, not this shit again?

I tell her I was born on the farm upon which they eventually filmed Teletubbies, near Stratford-upon-Avon, but lived most of my life in London. I tell her this because I'm trying to keep myself entertained, but even I'm beginning to get bored of this story.

I wonder how long it will take for us to be served. Maybe the waiter doesn't realise we're all here, or as many of us as are likely to turn up. Glancing across to the parking lot I can see a colourful six-wheeled buggy draw up, spinning around in circles before coming to a juddering halt. It is driven by a smiling orange gorilla wearing sunglasses and a fireman's helmet. Minutes later, Bingo has joined us at our table. All of our people are now here.

I order a Dos Equis and we all examine the menu.

'The fish tacos are good,' I suggest to no-one in particular.

'What's an enchilada?' asks Fleegle.

We all stare.

'I've never eaten one.' She shrugs. 'I don't like Mexican food.'

'How long have you lived in San Antonio?' Bess asks.

'I moved here in 1985, but I like the Red Barn. They serve a good steak.'

Bess and I share a look amounting to, well, she came to the right place. La Fonda is okay, but it's Mexican food for people who don't like Mexican food, who would rather not be startled by anything too spicy or flavoursome while they're trying to eat. There's nothing terrible on the menu, but much of it is tailored towards the conservative palates of Alamo Heights and will seem underwhelming if you've eaten at almost any other notionally Mexican place. Thankfully it's fairly difficult to completely fuck up a fajita beyond edibility, and as I say, the fish tacos are decent.

We order, then we eat. The food is okay; not first choice, but okay. Let's imagine we're eating in silence as you all watch Micro Ventures. Professor Carter and the kids pile into their miniaturised dune buggy and spend an educational five minutes driving around beneath someone's fridge.

'He went to the writer's group,' Fleegle tells the newly arrived Bingo, meaning me.

'Are you a writer?' she asks. 'I don't remember you.'

Fuck.

I don't remember her either. 'It was a while ago,' I say. 'I only went twice. There were too many people.'

'We meet at La Madeleine.'

'Were you in the writer's group when they used to meet at La Taza?' Bess asks, apparently attempting to introduce clarity.

'We meet at La Madeleine. What was your name again?'

'Lawrence.'

'Lawrence of Arabia!'

'I meet at La Madeleine too,' Bess says. 'You know the rock painting group? We're there at the same time as the writers on the Sunday afternoon, but you're in the little room.'

Bingo comes over so as to avoid having to shout. 'What sort of thing do you write, Lawrence of Arabia?'

'Science-fiction,' I sigh.

She addresses my wife as Good Queen Bess and begins to describe some movie about Queen Anne which will be of obvious interest to myself seeing as how I'm from England and all.

'Is that the one with Margot Robbie?' I ask.

'No, I think that's a different one, Lawrence of Arabia.'

'You know, that's where my name came from? My parents went to see it at the cinema before I was born. I think that's where they got the idea.' I don't bother to mention that as a nickname Lawrence of Arabia was already getting old by the time I was fucking five, and I now find it quite irritating.

'You must come to our next writers' meeting at La Madeleine, Lawrence of Arabia.'

Later, as we drive home, Bess tells me about a guy who once hung out with her rock painting group at La Madeleine. He wasn't painting rocks but invited his granddaughter to do so, and to use everyone's paint to make the sort of mess you make when you're bored and don't really care what you're doing. He was condescending and an asshole, and he was hanging around because his wife was in the other room with the writers' group. Now we're wondering if his wife just happened to be an orange gorilla with sunglasses and a fireman's helmet.

'That was okay, I guess,' Bess admits, 'but I thought there would be more about cats.'

'Me too.'

Thirty-One Chickens

'That lady has thirty-one chickens!' the cashier tells me. She points and I look towards the exit, to where the automatic doors slide apart to release a woman pushing a trolley laden with planks. 'She's building a coop for them.'

'I thought that was illegal.'

'Anyone can build a coop for their chickens,' she tells me. 'I have chickens too.'

'I mean I thought it was illegal to have so many.' I try to remember how many chickens Byron has in his own back garden. 'I thought there was some city law preventing anyone keeping more than eight.'

'There is,' she says. 'That lady lives outside of the city, so she has thirty-one.'

'Wow,' I say, submitting my purchases to the cashier's scanner - a new air filter for the lawnmower and a bottle of oil for the chainsaw.

The farm on which I grew up, the one upon which they eventually built the set for Teletubbies, was next to a chicken farm, and Paul, who lived on that chicken farm was my best friend at school. There were seventy-five thousand chickens on his farm, and I recall the figure because he reminded us of it from time to time; and apparently he reminded Tom Mahon of the statistic with such frequency that Tom often referred to him as Seventy-Five Thousand Chickens by way of a nickname.

'Do you live on Corinne?' I ask the cashier. I notice that she's actually sort of foxy, an older Latina with beautiful grey hair, and I realise that my question probably sounds like a come on.

Maybe I could stop by a little later…

'I always used to go past this house with chickens out in the back garden,' I tell her with increased urgency. 'I just meant that I wondered if that was you, as you have chickens.'

'I know that house,' she tells me with some caution, although maybe it's my imagination. 'I live over that way. Is it Sumner? On the corner?'

'Yes, on the corner. I think it's the last one before you get to Eisenhauer. Anyway, the chickens haven't been there recently,' I add, now wondering why the hell I mentioned it in the first place.

'I know the house you mean. That will be $17.82.'

I try to remember whether I insert my card into the slot or slide it down the thing at the side. Whichever one I do, the display always seems to tell me I should have done the other one.

'A lot of people keep chickens,' the cashier adds. 'My neighbour - he had chickens too.'

Do I want cash, yes or no…

'Well, they were all males so they weren't chickens. They were roosters.'

'Ouch,' I say. 'I hope he enjoyed getting up early in the morning.'

'Isn't that funny,' the woman says thoughtfully.

'I guess he didn't need the eggs,' I say, noticing how I now remind myself of some old boy, one lame observation after another.

'Only one reason a man keeps just roosters,' the woman says. She scowls lightly.

'Ewww,' I say as the penny drops.

I leave with my air filter and my oil in a grey polythene bag. I think of the dead bull terrier I once found in a cardboard box on the Holbrook Road. I called animal control. They said it was probably the collateral from some illegal dog fight, probably dumped.

So that turned dark pretty quickly, as the saying goes.

Fireworks

We're driving along, out in the Texas countryside heading towards Castroville. The sky is absolutely dark, spattered with stars, and as usual I find myself looking for the one which is following us. This is because the Target Books edition of Larry Kettelkamp's Investigating UFOs had a massive impact on me when I was a kid, seven or eight-years old and living on a farm in rural England. Being a kid I was fascinated by anything weird. I'd heard of flying saucers, but Kettelkamp's book was where I first read about their notional occupants, specifically in relation to the notorious case of Betty and Barney Hill. Oddly, the detail of the story which has stayed with me is that of Betty idly gazing from the window of their vehicle as they drove along and noticing how a star appeared to be following them.

So that's what I always think about under such circumstances, and possibly because it's very rare that I'm ever inside a car driving upon a country road after dark. The reason for this is that I've lived in cities since I was roughly twenty, which is fine because I don't like the countryside once the sun has gone down. It reminds me of being a kid, and of all the things I thought were real when I was a kid; and whilst I no longer believe those things to be real, I state this with greater confidence when the sun is shining, or at least when illuminated by the lights of town and city.

We're heading for Castroville because it's New Year's Eve, the last evening of 2018, and we've been invited to celebrate with Margot, one of my wife's co-workers whom I've yet to meet.

There will be fireworks. We were going to bring some to add to the pyrotechnics, but all of the places selling fireworks along our route - because no-one in Texas is allowed to sell fireworks within city limits - are tonight crammed with customers, truck after truck backed up onto the highway.

We drive for forty or fifty minutes, maybe an hour, following smaller and smaller roads until we're on a dirt track. I'm looking for names and numbers upon the mailboxes we occasionally pass because Bess is concentrating on driving.

'What was the name on that one?' she asks.

'It wasn't a name. It was some pro-life thing.'

'Well, that won't be Margot's place but we must be near.'

We're there within a few more minutes. There are lights up ahead, and as we approach I see a house and a barn - nothing else because it's darkness all around. It's now about eight in the evening.

We see people and we park.

Out of the car, I look up and realise I've probably never seen so many stars in my life. The sky looked nothing like this when I was growing up in England.

The people we see are Margot and other members of her family. They're stood around a bonfire. It's cold so we crowd in, watching cinders sail up into the black sky, warming ourselves by an orange glow from within the logs.

My first bonfires were Guy Fawkes night on the farm where I grew up. Being the only two kids on the farm, myself and Alan would get started on the bonfire about half way through October, dragging dead conifers from the spinney at the back of the cottages to a corner of the orchard at the foot of the hill, then stacking them against each other like the bones of a wigwam. I recall the conifers as having been some twenty or thirty feet high, but then I was myself much smaller so they probably weren't much taller than a clothes pole. Guy Fawkes night came and we all gathered around to light fireworks from little cardboard boxes and bake potatoes wrapped in tinfoil in the embers at the foot of the bonfire; and naturally this is what I'm thinking about right now as we stand around in the dark at Margot's place.

I've bought a few cans of Boddingtons so I get started on one. Bess introduces me to Steve and Lupe, both of whom work with her and Margot. Junior runs off to see the critters - cattle, horses and a donkey, amongst other things.

Lupe is not only from Mexico, but once lived in Toluca, a city I've visited many times. She only recently became a US citizen, so we get to talking about her citizenship seeing as it's something I've been considering. The process sounds complicated, with laboriously completed applications prone to disappear for no obvious reason, and without any apparent consequences for the government department that lost them. Maybe this is an example of America having become great again.

I tell her I had a similar, albeit less politically suspicious experience when applying for the visa which allowed me to travel to the United States and get married. It took me many months to fill in the application owing to the level of detail required. Eventually it was done and I sent it to the US Embassy in London from which I subsequently received an interview date. The interview began with an officious woman telling me that I had failed to fill in an application form and would therefore have to do it all over again.

'I actually did fill in an application form,' I said, 'and I posted it to you, so you must have received it.'

'We never received it, so you clearly didn't post it.' She told me this as a fact established by her having stated it.

'Had I not posted it,' I pointed out, 'you wouldn't have received it, and logically you must have received it because otherwise you wouldn't have sent me the letter asking me to come here for an interview.'

Despite the impeccable logic of my defence, I was nevertheless somehow in the wrong and had to fill in the same application form again, right there at the embassy, based on what I could remember of the month it had taken me to fill it all in first time around. This meant I had to take vague guesses at otherwise long forgotten details of employment history and the like.

Lupe sighs at the inevitability of the forces of officialdom which take the piss with a big smile because they know there's nothing you can do, regardless of your having gone through the supposed proper channels. We talk about the government for a little while. We're not very impressed with them.

We meet Kyle, who is already a little drunk. I have an impression of his being in his late twenties, but he tells us that his son is twenty-three. He describes himself as a skater. He and my wife know a few of the same people from high school, but not each other.

'Where you come from?' he asks me as others crowd around to savour the answer.

'England,' I tell them, prompting in response the usual anecdotes about either visits to England or having met some English dude at some point or other.

'No, I don't mind being asked,' I say in response to another question. 'I was asked the same question only today in HEB as it happens, same place I've been shopping since 2011. I guess the cashier never noticed my accent before today.'

This gets a laugh for some reason.

'I'm just going to start telling people I'm from San Antonio,' I add, which gets another, bigger laugh.

Trays of sausage, brisket and tortillas appear, freshly cooked and steaming. We fill our plates as Margot heads off towards a speaker sat in the grass connected to someone's smartphone and blasting out rock music, Smashing Pumpkins and a few things I actually recognise. 'I got me some ELO,' she announces ominously.

Kyle is engaged in an impersonation of what a Japanese gentleman says upon encountering a transgendered individual, a ladyboy by Kyle's terminology. He squints and grimaces causing his upper front teeth to protrude. His hand reaches down to tickle an imaginary penis as he delivers the punchline, four or five syllables which all seem to rhyme, one of them being dong with the hilarity pivoted upon long mispronounced as wrong - because it's an oriental person saying it. The joke, whatever it may be, is rendered incomprehensible by Kyle's delivery. It's difficult to tell where this one came from. Nothing within the conversation up to that point seemed to be heading towards either the Japanese, gender identity issues, or the phonetic disparity between certain languages.

Welcome to 1973, I think to myself, wandering back over to the bonfire as we get started on the fireworks. Margot's husband does the honours, taking fireworks across to the designated patch of ground and setting them off. The rockets are stood upright in the well of a couple of cinder blocks, one on top of the other. The fireworks look military grade, and when they go off, it's the sort of thing I'm used to seeing at huge public firework displays on Blackheath in London. We've come a long way since I was a kid with that dinky little cereal box of Roman candles and Catherine wheels.

Ooh, we all say, then ahh as we watch the sky light up with pops, bangs, and vastly spreading flowers of briefly electric colour.

Kyle jumps through a fountain of cinders flaming up from some giant landlocked sparkler. 'Yeehaw,' he accordingly whoops.

We watch, and then we go into the house to meet Margot's dogs, and other members of her family.

Her mother extends a hand in greeting and launches into a bewildering monologue cribbed from either Dick Van Dyke or one of those bloody awful Austin Powers movies. With hindsight, I'd say it was something along the lines of cups of tea with the jolly old Queen and blinky blonky blimey what weather we are having, but I'm unable to take in any of the specific details and receive only a general impression of cartoon cultural stereotypes. I'm on my third tin of Boddingtons and am approaching refreshed, plus it's difficult to believe that this woman is actually saying this crap in an apparent hope that I will respond, that I will recognise myself somewhere in there amongst the litany of Britface cliches.

I walk away because I don't know how to respond, and maybe because I feel sorry for the woman.

Bess and I pet the dogs, four or five of them including a collie, and also a cat.

'Good choice,' I say, giving Margot the thumbs up as I spot a Devo title amongst the DVDs just behind where the cat is lounging.

'That belongs to my husband,' she smiles. 'He's crazy about them. Myself, I like Cheap Trick…'

Margot's husband has been a peripheral figure at the edge of our gathering. Apparently he isn't much of a people person. I haven't even spoken to him but I already like him more than at least two of those assembled here today.

Everyone is inside, so I go back out, walking across to the still blazing bonfire and into the field beyond. The darkness is such that I can't see my own feet, so I'm treading carefully. I come to a halt as I approach what might be a fence, although it's hard to tell, and I look directly up.

I've honestly never seen so many stars. It's as though someone has taken a spray can to the sky. It's a little cold and absolutely quiet but for the distant buzz of the speaker relaying the hits of Green Day to an audience of no-one. The reason I could never go back to life in the country is that this kind of spectacle is simply too intense, and will never become anything familiar. I prefer illuminated spaces in which everything will occur within certain established parameters.

Out here, I'm right at the edge where lines blur, where stories such as the one related by Betty and Barney Hill don't seem quite so unreasonable. It's too much to take in, although it's beautiful beyond description.

I return to the house, happy to know that we'll be leaving in a few minutes. It's nowhere near midnight, but neither Bess nor myself are particularly bothered about the countdown, the ceremony, or the arbitrary division of one point in time from the next.

It's already 2019 in England.

How Shipston Has Changed

My family moved to Shipston-on-Stour in 1977, the year I turned twelve. Shipston is a small market town in Warwickshire roughly equidistant between Oxford and Coventry, and it felt like a small market town. I left in 1984 with memories of having grown up there, not terrible memories, but not particularly rosy either. It felt like a place from which you escape.

I'm not sure how often I've been back since, but it may not yet be into double figures. My parents separated around the time that I moved away, and both ended up living elsewhere so I never had much reason to go back beyond simple curiosity.

This time, it's because my dad and I were going to have a couple of days in his caravan up near Skegness, but the plan fell through, so instead we've chosen to visit his sister, my Aunt Pat, in the village of Ilmington. With Shipston being just down the road, it seemed like we should at least stop by and have a look.

Prior to moving to Shipston in 1977, I attended the junior school in Ilmington, so I have a lot of history spattered around this whole area even if it isn't anything I'm able to recall in detail. Aunt Pat is lovely, one of those people who somehow twinkles, and it's always a pleasure visiting her. She is married to Steve, who - by funny coincidence - is the older brother of Neil, one of the few kids I can remember from the class above mine at Ilmington Juniors. I remember Neil because I didn't like many of the kids in the class above mine, but Neil was okay and he was funny.

One day I took a couple of passenger carriages from my train set into school to show around. Neil picked up the OO/HO gauge Pullman buffet car and grinned. 'This is the best one.'

'Why?' I asked.

'It's got all the nosh in it.'

This made me laugh a lot, but perhaps you had to be there.

Several decades later, I tell Steve the story, such as it is. His younger brother now runs the Eight Bells, Chipping Campden's oldest pub, and has built up something of a reputation for the food served therein. I like to think that it was my OO/HO gauge Pullman buffet car which first set him on that course. I ask Steve to pass my regards on to Neil, adding that I realise he probably won't remember me. Weirdly it turns out that Neil does remember me, or he did the last time Steve passed on my regards, which is impressive.

Around noon, my dad and I head off for Shipston. We park in the West Street car park, adjacent to the police station, which is itself adjacent to number fourteen - which was our house. It's changed a lot. Somebody has added an extension since we lived there. Also, the police station is no longer a police station, although it's hard to tell what it has become.

'It's still a police station,' my dad insists.

We stand and look at the row of houses on the opposite side of West Street. It was an orchard when we first moved in, and we both remember the new houses being built. One of them was occupied by Pete Emberer, a typically flared seventies character halfway between George Best and the Yorkshire Ripper. He was friends with my dad up to a point. They bought each other pints in the George or helped start each other's cars on frosty mornings in this very same car park - or at least they did until someone borrowed the battery from my dad's vehicle without even leaving a note. A few months later, our other neighbours - the cops - invited my dad to have a look at some of the things they'd found in Pete Emberer's garden, and there was the missing car battery. Pete Emberer therefore ended up in the cells at the rear of the police station, prior to trial at Sheep Street magistrate's court, just over the back. Everything pertaining to the crime - scene, victim, perpetrator, arrest, detention, and sentencing - was therefore to be found within a single area of about fifty square yards.

My dad and I take the alley to Sheep Street, noting that the bread shop has vanished. We wander down to the town square in search of refreshment. The choices are the George or the White Bear, but the George looks as though their food will be served on square plates or even lumps of slate. The White Bear doesn't appear to serve food, but on the other hand you can still tell that it's a pub so in we go. I was last in this pub for a school reunion about ten years ago, and it's changed a lot since then.

Talking of school, I'm pretty sure the bloke sat at the bar right in front of me is Paul Boulton. I've spent the last half hour staring at every passing stranger and wondering whether they might be the old and fat version of someone I knew; but when you actually see someone you did know, you can tell immediately, no matter how much they've changed.

Paul and I were sort of friends, or at least sufficiently close for me to have taped a couple of singles from him - Bowie's Ashes to Ashes and This World of Water by New Musik - and we almost started a band. He had a guitar and was definitely going to learn how to play it, but more importantly he had a name and we were going to be called the Suburbans.

Then thirty years later, he completely ignored me at the school reunion, looked right through me when I said hello Paul, remember me? Perhaps he blamed me for the Suburbans having failed to take off as he'd hoped, or even to exist in any form.

Anyway, I'm not going to bother this time. He's seen me, and once again there's that uncomfortable flicker of recognition followed by nothing. In any case, he's in a conversation with the bloke at the next stool, who looks similarly familiar but it may just be that everyone seems familiar if you look hard enough. He has the demeanour of a fifties rockabilly who smokes too much, slightly gaunt in the face, but wearing an immaculate white suit, shirt, tie, trousers, jacket - all white, like a band leader.

All the service seems to be in the saloon bar, so my dad and I go out into the street then return through the other door, and thus we too are served. We have pints and a table from which I can no longer watch Paul Boulton looking uncomfortable at the public bar. The barmaid seems familiar, but she only moved to Shipston in the nineties, so she can't be. The other couple also seem familiar. In fact I'd swear the guy is Richard Benfield. I ask, and he tells me that his name is Trevor in a Birmingham accent, although his wife is from Shipston. Typically, I don't recognise her at all.

My dad is the gregarious type and we all get to talking - where we live, where we used to live, how it's all changed and so on. The police station - which is adjacent to where we used to live - is no longer a police station because they're cutting back. Crime is therefore a growth industry in Shipston, not that the place was ever what you would call crime free. We all share happy memories - albeit some more recent than others - of local cops dedicated mainly to tackling the scourge of after hours drinking, occasionally being so dedicated as to investigate scenes of the crime in an undercover capacity, even getting too pissed to stand so as to avert suspicion.

Trevor shares a vivid memory of Constable Beard and a colleague attempting to find their way back to the station through fog at two in the morning by following the line in the middle of the road with a flashlight subsequent to a particularly heavy bout of investigation.

'I never liked him,' my dad says. 'He had it in for me.'

'Wasn't he the one who found your car battery in wossisname's garden?' I ask.

'That's true,' my dad admits. 'He always had some problem though, whenever I came home on me motorbike. There was always summat. He didn't like my bike being up on the pavement.'

'Maybe he wanted you to lift it up and carry it into our front yard.'

I remember Constable Beard mainly because he rather helpfully had a beard, and I knew his daughter, Janice. She and a couple of her friends had showbiz aspirations and had written songs, vocal arrangements for which they invited me to score music. Their influences seemed to be mostly Andrew Lloyd Weber, Abba, and show tunes, where mine were Joy Division and Throbbing Gristle, so the results were a bit cranky; but the undertaking meant that girls spoke to me, so I couldn't really say no, and Rebecca Jacques was sort of foxy.

We talk about all the famous people now flooding to Shipston. It used to be just Roy Dotrice, father to Betty from Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em, but now there are apparently all sorts knocking around, Tim Henman, sporty types, actors... I wonder if the man in the white suit is somebody famous.

Eventually my dad and I reach saturation point. We purchase sandwiches from the Co-Op and walk down to the river to eat them. Then we come back through the square. My dad goes into a junk shop to have a look around, and I head for the public bogs in the Telegraph Street car park because I need to take a leak. As I pass, there's a girl stood on the corner of Sheep Street with an iguana at rest on her forearm. I take a piss, and she's still there as I come back the other way. She's no-one I recognise. She wears black clothes with bare arms revealing elaborate tattoos and she has the iguana - a bearded dragon, I realise.

'Hello,' I say because I'm too pissed to care. 'Is that a bearded dragon?'

'Yes.' She smiles. 'I just bought him out for a bit of sun. He likes the sun.'

'He's great.' I can't take my eyes off the lizard. 'My wife used to have one, so I thought it was probably a bearded dragon.'

There's nothing more to be said beyond the grinning, so I go off to find my dad. Between the man in white and the lizard lady, it's all gone a bit David Lynch.

Shipston has changed a lot since my day. For one thing, it's a lot fucking weirder.

London Calling

I'm never sure what to say when people ask me where I'm from. Generally, I tell them England, but if they're after anything more specific - usually on the off chance of their having spent a holiday there - it's tricky. I grew up in Warwickshire, specifically on the farm which eventually became home to the Teletubbies, which sounds a bit insane when offered as a response to enquiries regarding my origin; so more often than not I'll say London. I'm not from London, but I lived there from 1990 to 2009, nineteen uninterrupted years, which is the longest I've lived anywhere. My personality was probably in flux for most of the years prior to my moving to London, so I'm not convinced I was properly myself when living in Shipston, Maidstone, Chatham, or Coventry, at least not by any terms I still recognise; so it feels as though I'm from London.

London was the first place I felt I belonged, and is therefore high on the list of places I need to visit whenever I return to England to stay with my mother in Coventry. Unfortunately though, it can be difficult. Sat at the PC in San Antonio, it's easy to fire off emails announcing my proposed arrival and reiterating the awful hey, we really must meet up for a drink - awful because it's usually the mantra of people I haven't seen in decades, despite my best efforts to prise open a window in their busy schedules, which always seem to be at least as dense as the crust of stuff you find stuck to the event horizon of a black hole.

Then when I arrive in England, I remember that the train fare from London to Coventry is usually about a million pounds return, and we're talking off-peak; and that I can't afford hotels or bed and breakfast and that I'm far too old to sleep on the floor; and that I haven't actually told anyone I'm coming because I didn't want to be pinned down to an itinerary I might not be able to keep, or in which I might feel trapped; and that I've just spent eighteen hours on planes so I don't feel well disposed towards further travel; and that I hate crowds; and that I hate having to squeeze onto public transport, and how long it takes to even get anywhere in the city; and that I fucking hate London…

I don't hate London, but the circumstances of my last couple of years in the capital were somewhat shitty, which has left a lasting and unfavourable impression; but the bottom line is that I actually have mentioned my being back in the country to a couple of people, so I'll look like a twat if I fail to make the effort.

I've already reeled in my travel plans. Sat at the PC in San Antonio, I had all sorts of grand ideas about taking a bike on the train, then having a couple of days in London, cycling down to the Medway towns and Maidstone, seeing all those people I've been meaning to see for years and years. It would have taken up most of the second of my three weeks in England, and I've now whittled it down to a single afternoon in London, conditional to the existence of a train ticket costing less than a million pounds, and I might stay overnight on someone's floor or sofa, but probably not as I'm already depressed by the idea.

Amazingly, there's a return ticket costing just thirty quid, travelling at specific times with a rail operator no-one has heard of, and stopping at every station, siding, and signal box on the way. The comparative cheapness of the ticket means I'll probably be sharing a carriage with people who've been on the Jeremy Kyle Show, but the price is right.

I arrive at Euston around noon. The promised stopping at every station, siding, and signal box on the way has turned out to be just Watford Junction, Rugby, and the usual places, just like in the good old days when I could afford any old train fare. Not being a regular on the railways, I forget that those ordinary extortionate fares tend to be for journeys at the speed of light stopping at no stations other than the one at the end of the line.

Euston isn't too bad in terms of crowds, and I seem to be on a roll, so I think fuck it, I'll get the tube. I have an Oyster card from the last time I was here, and amazingly it still works and even has a couple of quid on it, so I top up at a newsagent and head for the underground. My memory of travel in London is mostly buses, because I dislike crowds and ended up with a hatred of tube trains. I've been left with a falsely distended impression of how easy it is to get anywhere, and find it weird that I'm stood on Tottenham Court Road in just a couple of minutes. I can't work out if the crowds are less congested than once they were, or whether it's all been so long that it seems like a new thing and I haven't had time to get sick of it.

I head to Forbidden Planet because I'm after the latest issue of Interzone magazine, and Forbidden Planet seems like the sort of place which might stock it. The latest issue of Interzone features a story by Erica Satifka, author of the novel Stay Crazy; and Stay Crazy is wonderful, so I'm trying to support both a new writer and the general concept of visiting shops in order to buy things which have been printed. Amazingly, they actually have the copy of Interzone I'm after, which is probably a first, and so I read it on the train to Greenwich - a trip of about ten minutes.

I left London in 2009, at which point I vaguely recall the first of the new, funny-shaped skyscrapers going up somewhere in the vicinity of Elephant & Castle. At the time I was spunking away three-quarters of my weekly wage on renting a rabbit hutch in Camberwell, despite holding down a reasonably paid, if back-breaking, full-time job; so I felt more than a little resentful as my city went all Blade Runner whilst overmoneyed tosspots banged on about posterity and capital and investment and growth and ways forward. Returning as a foreigner of sorts, carnivorous progress no longer directly affects me beyond that I can't afford to stay in a hotel, so it no longer feels personal; and I sort of enjoy the spectacle of what is to be seen from the window of the train. They're everywhere now, gleaming prongs thrust miles into the sky above London like the city seen on the cover of David Louis Edelman's Infoquake, and not a single one of them is regular skyscraper shape. It's as though the architects have been in competition with each other to come up with the strangest, most ostentatiously surprising design. There's the Gherkin, the Shard, the Cheese, the Sex Aid, the Pokémon…

'Computers,' Carl tells me. It's due to the development of certain architectural software that we are now able to throw up any shape of building we fancy.

I'm at Carl's house in Greenwich.

I arrived twenty minutes ago.

He lives in a square with a small central garden, or at least a barbecue pit and a bench surrounded by bushes. Upon arrival, I sat on the bench and had a fag in preparation for ringing the doorbell of my friend whom I'd not seen in at least a year. As I sat smoking, I heard the sound of a door, then approaching footsteps, then an indistinct verbal address which sounded like Carl's voice. In my mind, it already was Carl, and I imagined him calling out Loz in the usual way, so I went to reply even though I was replying to a call I had only anticipated, and somehow I myself called out, 'Loz!', having mixed up the two components of the predicted exchange.

It wasn't Carl. It was some elderly woman who regarded me suspiciously, possibly because I had just emerged from behind a bush to yell my own nickname at a stranger.

Now I'm within Carl's house watching him finish up and save what he was doing on the computer, specifically retouching photographs of REM for some book or other. He's a designer, and he's also working on a book about Japan.

We discuss this for three or four minutes before I realise he's referring to the band rather than the country. I forget that he knows a couple of them, and he tells me they were originally from Catford - which is one of the places I worked for a couple of years. It feels as though Carl and I have been transported into a weird future, a world we never made - whatever the hell that means.

He places the cherry boldly on the futurity cake by informing me that another mutual acquaintance is now working as a prostitute, specifically a BBW prostitute specialising in bondage, domination and the like. This is another eventuality I could never have foreseen, but apparently she makes eight-hundred quid a session and enjoys the work, so why not? I'm somewhat out of my depth with the profession, but I always imagined that dominating people for money would probably be one of the better sex work options providing one could find the right clientele - for example, a frustrated bank manager who would happily clean your toilet and then pay for the privilege, thus avoiding the necessity of finding oneself penetrated by anything too ghastly.

The subject resumes later as we approach Herne Hill station. We've had a wander around Greenwich park, a bit of lunch and then caught a series of trains to Herne Hill. The conversation resumes because I'm reminded that I've recently read Stupid Baby by New Juche, an autobiographical account of life amongst prostitutes in one of the rougher bits of Thailand. It's one of the best books I've read in a while and is written with a refreshing honesty and none of the hysteria one might expect, given the subject. The funny thing is that it's published by Philip Best, formerly of Whitehouse, who now lives in Austin and is therefore almost a neighbour. I consider this funny because Carl and I are on our way to visit Pete.

I was at school with Pete many years ago, back in Shipston, and we were both friends with Graham, who may or may not be turning up tonight. Graham and I saw Whitehouse live in Birmingham back in the eighties, during which Graham was injured by an object casually launched from the stage by Philip Best, who was probably the most hated man in underground music for much of that year.

I've been wondering how to broach the subject.

You remember that time we saw Whitehouse, and you remember the bloke who was chucking stuff into the audience, and how you got hit? Well, he lives down the road from me and we seem to be pals these days, sort of. I think he's calmed down a bit in recent years. Anyway, he seems like a decent guy.

I tell all of this to Carl, and so we talk about Glenn, because somehow we'd both forgotten that Glenn was also in Whitehouse. Carl and I recorded music with Glenn at one point. Glenn left a keyboard at Carl's flat for a couple of months, apparently on loan from William Bennett - also of Whitehouse - who was living in Spain at the time. When you switched the keyboard on, the name Susan Lawly would scroll across the LCD display in greeting, that being the name of Bennett's record label. The connections form a peculiar imaginary cat's cradle in my thoughts. I'm beginning to think that current estimates regarding human population are grossly exaggerated, and that there are actually only about twenty of us.

We arrive at Herne Hill and walk to Pete's house.

I'm hoping Carl and Pete will get on okay, given that neither of them have been in the same room since about 1987, and were never conspicuously close in the first place.

Here's how it works: I was at school in Shipston, Warwickshire, with Pete and Graham back in the eighties. Pete's family had moved to Shipston from somewhere down south a couple of years before, and once Pete left school, they moved again, to Eastbourne down on the south coast. I left school and did an art foundation course, at the end of which I was told I should have a look at Maidstone College of Art if I wanted to take it further. I didn't actually have the faintest idea of what I wanted to do, but it seemed like as good a plan as any, so I went for an interview at Maidstone and was accepted, thus dispensing with the need to bother looking around any other colleges. By sheer coincidence, it turned out that Pete had already been at Maidstone a year, studying graphic design. Carl was also at Maidstone, a former graphics student by that point serving as president of the Student Union, so that's how I met him, and how he and Pete came to know each other.

Back at school, Pete, Graham, and myself had been in a band, calling ourselves the Pre-War Busconductors amongst a variety of other interchangable, wilfully ludicrous names. We barely had any instruments, couldn't really play, but nevertheless churned out tape after tape of scatological songs about people at school whom we regarded as twats. Having spent the last couple of years digitising these tapes, I now have our entire body of work saved on memory sticks, one for Pete and one for Graham. This is partially the purpose of our meeting tonight, so I can hand over the sound files and we'll all have copies.

Carl, Pete and myself walk to the Half Moon. Pete tells me it seems unlikely that Graham will be along after all, presently being in Devon with his girlfriend. We buy drinks and sit outside. Most of the talk is between Pete and Carl, because they're simply chattier individuals than I am, and somehow we get onto the subject of how Pete came to move to Shipston in the first place. I recall that he had lived somewhere down south prior to Shipston, and that somewhere turns out to have been the Medway towns - which is where Carl grew up. Furthermore it turns out that Carl and Pete both attended the same junior school, the Hundred of Hoo as it was known, without having been aware of each other at the time, or having been aware of this fact until right now in the year 2018; and I've a feeling this may also be the school attended by Jayne, Glenn's first wife.

The cat's cradle seems to be approaching critical mass.

Eddy and Neil turn up, which is wonderful as I haven't seen either of them in years. It's also wonderful because I have to ask Eddy whether it will be okay for me to kip on his floor. The latest specific time I can return to Coventry on the ticket purchased from a rail operator no-one has heard of is nine this evening, which would leave thirty minutes in which to have a drink with my old pals. The thing is that I feel awkward asking Eddy because I haven't actually spoken to him since his mother passed away. He's one of my favourite people in the universe, but somehow he only makes sense in person. We've communicated on facebook, but you're either hanging out with him, or arranging to hang out with him which, combined with my not being much of a fan of the telephone, means we haven't spoken for a while and it will feel a bit fucking cheeky when I ask if I can kip on his floor for the night; but like a true friend, he doesn't give a shit and is simply glad to see me, and of course I can sleep on his floor.

So we all catch up, getting cautiously drunk in the way middle-aged men get cautiously drunk. Everyone gets on fine, even though Pete is from a different shard of my existence to the others. Neil is, as ever, darkly entertaining with his tales of dealings with showbiz types, recent clients including Helen Mirren and Idris Elba. He doesn't seem to have a particularly high opinion of Idris Elba.

Eventually it's time to go and Eddy drives, being the one of us with a car and sobriety. His flat, which I've never seen before as he moved in just over a year ago, is small but functional. Money is tight, but he's getting by. Money is tight for everyone I know still living in London. I wouldn't have stood a chance.

Eddy assembles a camp bed purchased from some hardware place. It comprises canvas stretched across tubes of steel and works like a hammock. Two of the steel tubes are missing, but it doesn't matter because I'm not seven foot tall. We have a cup of tea, watch an episode of Urban Myths - which dramatises the true story of a regular dude giving Public Enemy a lift to one of their shows in his Ford Focus - and then go to sleep; and against my expectations, I sleep well because the camp bed is very comfortable.

Next morning we have a walk to the caff along by the Thames. Eddy points to a house over on the other side of the river.

'That's where Helen Mirren lives.'

I have two sausages, egg, and chips in the caff and it tastes fucking amazing. I realise how much I've missed this place and its people. I can still feel my roots here, reaching down into the tarmac and cracked paving, in the newsagents and pound shops and the bite of cold far too early in the morning. I'm quite happy to live a long way away, but I'm glad I came back, just for a day.

After Five Decades of Christmas...

The earliest Christmas I can remember would have been on the farm in rural Warwickshire, the house heated by just one open fireplace. I came down the stairs, into the front room, and my parents were both sat on the couch awaiting my arrival with a little stack of presents.

'This is Huckleberry,' said my mother by way of introduction to a triangular dog. He was covered in orange felt, with eyes, nose, and freckles picked out in black and white patches of material. He had long flappy ears hung from the apex of his peculiar triangular body and a tail sewn on at the back. I thought he was wonderful. I recall him as being about three or four feet in height, most likely because I was small at the time. He probably wasn't that big, and I may have been as young as four. It's strange to realise I can recall something which probably happened in the sixties, and a time when my parents were still in their twenties.

I understood Christmas as the day of getting free stuff, possibly because, birthdays aside, we didn't get free stuff at other times of year. Childhood as a couple of decades spent happily beneath an avalanche of consumer goods seems to be a more recent development. Of course, I also understood the true meaning of Christmas as it's sometimes known, because I'd been raised to understand that not being an arsehole was a year-round deal, not just an act to be trotted out when you wanted something. I never bought into Father Christmas or the currency of any lists he supposedly kept. I appreciated the ceremony and the build up, everyone generally being a bit less miserable than usual and Slade on the radio. At school we sang carols - none of your happy clappy rubbish, and certainly no having yourself a merry little Christmas or any of that pish - and we made Christmas trees, Santas or snowmen from cones of coloured paper and tinsel like they'd done on Blue Peter, and all in preface to a wonderful day of good food, rampant acquisition, and usually something which you wouldn't ordinarily get to see on the telly. It was a simple, uncomplicated pleasure and served as an axis around which the rest of the year revolved.

The next decade was much the same, only with central heating in a different house and Micronaut toys giving way to albums by David Bowie or the Ramones; then an acoustic guitar and books about art, the great painters of the twentieth century.

The two decades after that saw a steady decline in my enthusiasm for the day of getting free stuff. This was because I had a job. I was a postman. People in England complain that Christmas starts too early, usually about half way through September, which is when its approach is first heralded in the larger department stores. For those delivering mail, it begins earlier, usually around June, that being when we'd be inundated with the first mail order catalogues directed at people spreading their Christmas budget across the second half of the year. The junk mail was horrendous in both its quantity and its banality, as customarily printed in garish colour on the outside of each A4 envelope and targetted at those with the least money to spend. Trudging about in the wind and rain with those same shitty envelopes, day after day, week after week, became really depressing. The most hateful were sent by a company imaginatively named Studio as though to invoke things of great artistic beauty which might come your way if you just kept up the payments. Each year, Studio decorated its envelopes with a different cast of characters designed to coerce you into buying their cheap tat, and worst of all were the Santa Babes, basically Care Bears in Christmassy hats, frolicking and trowelling on the corporate saccharine with the sort of abandon that makes Frozen look like cinéma vérité. The Santa Babes made me feel bad for everyone involved. There was something faintly disgusting about older and probably not that bright people screwed out of their meagre savings by directed application of cartoons from a nursery wall. It reminded me of the old biologists reduced to animals in tiny cages with just a bit of straw, renamed Big Ears and Tigger and fed on slops in Troy Kennedy Martin's harrowing television adaptation of The Old Men at the Zoo.

The Christmas advertising really kicked in at the close of August, and the volume of mail began to build around November, becoming a back-breaking deluge by the end of the month. Overtime would be dished out whether we wanted it or not, and an eight hour day of hard physical labour would stretch to eleven or twelve, leaving for work at five in the morning, getting home hours after sunset, six days a week, sometimes seven for that final week; and working on Christmas Eve, finishing around one or two then spending the rest of the day crammed onto buses and trains slowly crawling across London, making my way to Coventry, to the house of one parent or another when I'd much rather have been home in bed and sleeping through the whole fucking thing.

It was hard to keep up the Christmas spirit after all those Santa Babes, all those weeks of ending each day feeling as though I'd been run over by a truck; and Christmas with the parents felt stranger and stranger as I turned thirty, then forty. Nevertheless, it was nice to see my parents, albeit seperately, and it was nice to just not be at work, and to have someone else serve up a roast dinner; and those are the aspects of Christmas I like.

Now fifty-two, married, and no longer breaking my back for a living, there are still aspects of the whole deal which seem uneccessary and tiresome. We'll spend three hours watching the boy open presents he probably isn't actually that excited to receive, novelties and nick-nacks and crap mostly representing a faintly dippy adult's idea of what a fourteen-year old boy might want, when mostly he just wants non-physical things he can play on one of his games systems; and some of the novelties and nick-nacks will be more the sort of thing you'd give him if he were still about four, but we all smile and no-one says anything because we're just happy to have dispensed with the letter from Santa and the fake bootprints across the carpet using flour to simulate snow. He was getting a bit old for it at least seven years prior to the custom's discontinuation.

Then there'll be the novelty corn holders my wife recieves each year as part of a running joke she no longer entirely gets or remembers, and all that stuff for which we'll say oh you shouldn't have, because we quite literally wish that you hadn't - a set of novelty pint glasses featuring scenes from A Christmas Story and other items which lack any context beyond that of gifthood, all destined for some corner of the garage so we don't have to think about them or feel bad for the rest of our curmudgeonly, ungrateful lives.

We've all agreed to participate in the gift exchange through the agency of Elfster, a website which takes our names, shakes them up, then assigns each of us the person upon whom we will each spend one hundred dollars, selecting presents from their online list. It's not a bad idea, all things considered, although I can't help feel it sucks the spontaneity out of the occasion, reducing it to just acquisition, the model to which I subscribed when I was four and didn't know better.

Christmas is mostly greed and flashing lights, and in Texas it doesn't even come with a guarantee of the parts I recognise. Thanksgiving steals the emphasis from anything I'd identify as Christmas dinner, and without equivalent gastronomic pleasure, it being a plate of mostly soft brown food - turkey served with mashed potato for God's sake - which screams nursing home, at least to me; and then we get to see what Elfster brought us on a day which usually isn't Christmas, because it isn't convenient.

Regardless of all of this, I'll open a few presents on Christmas morning and watch my wife open whatever I've given her. I'll eat some of the pork pie I had to make myself because you can't get it in Texas unless you want to pay $70 for refrigerated postage. The Christmas morning pork pie is either an English tradition, or just something my dad thought up, but I like to keep it going and I make a pretty decent pork pie. Then we'll maybe go for a walk or a drive, and in the evening I'll cook a roast dinner with Christmas pudding and brandy butter to follow - more stuff I had to order online because you can't get it over here.

After fifty-one reiterations of the allegedly happiest day of the year, these basic things are all that I require, and none of the rest matters too much.

Giraffe

Unlike Ayn Rand, I endorse the general concept of charity, even though I'm never quite sure where I, as an individual, stand relative to public acts performed so as to raise money in its name. Several decades ago, Mandy - my girlfriend at the time - recruited me to a sponsored walk in aid of an organisation called Respect for Animals. Naturally I was opposed to animal cruelty, and was therefore happy to walk a couple of miles along the bank of the River Thames knowing that the money I raised would buy much needed Nicorette® patches for Beagles, or something; but the thing which bothered me was that the organisation benefitting from my legwork was called Respect for Animals. It sounded wanky and right on as though named by some condescending tofu-scoffing middle class twat keen to present something which working class thickies wouldn't need explaining to them, and which wouldn't terrify those Daily Mail readers perpetually on the defensive at the thought of anything having rights, particularly scrounging benefit cheats of the four-legged variety; and I was going to have to go into work with my silly little forms to screw some sponsorship out of my colleagues.

What's it for? they would ask, and I would have to tell them, and as I explained it would feel as though the organisation may as well have named itself Hey kids, let's not be fascists because that's like a real downer, yeah? Let's show some respect for animals, because like some of them are like really amaaazing, you know? Hey, anybody want any more taramasalata? Melissa Jane bought plenty at Waitrose so, you know, like help yourselves, yeah?

Back in the present day, its October, traditionally the time of year when my wife and myself undertake a charity walk in aid of fragile X awareness, and hopefully also some research given the cost of the tickets. This is the third year we've done it, although it should probably be taken into account that the first two were both rained off. It doesn't rain much in Texas but when it does, it really fucking rains. The walk usually takes place at Raymond Rimkus Park in Leon Valley, which was under five or six feet of water this time last year so it wasn't simply a case of remembering to take a brolly. One might think these cancellations would be a bit of a pisser for the charity in question, but surprisingly it wasn't so. The deal, so I am told, is that we all buy advance tickets which entitle us to take part in the event, and that's where the money comes from. Then all that is required of us is that we turn up, collect a free t-shirt, take part in the walk, and the job is done. It sounds a bit Kafka-esque to me, but it's a day out and it's a good cause, and all I have to do is hang out, walk around a park, then eat a few complementary tacos.

This year, the weather has turned cold, but there's been no sign of rain, so it seems like it's actually going to happen. While Texas enjoys an autumn in terms of leaves turning brown and falling from trees, where temperature is concerned, we wake up one September morning and find that it's winter. Last night we were still frying eggs on the pavement at eleven, two hours after sunset; but today we will need woolly jumpers, hats and gloves. It's like someone flipped a switch and turned off the summer.

Anyway, it's Saturday morning, and we're all awake and wrapped up warm. Junior has been obliged to rise five uncivilised hours prior to his customary weekend réveille. We drive over to Myra's place with the kid whinging and whining for most of the journey. It's too early and it's cold. It's colder than it's ever been before. It's probably not even this cold on Pluto, he suggests.

I spent the first ten years of my life in a farmhouse in England, a farmhouse heated by just a single log fire in the front room, no double glazing or insulation, and a farmhouse which was in such a poor state of repair as to have cracks in the walls through which wind, rain, and even snowflakes would occasionally enter. Sometimes I tell the kid that he's never experienced real cold, but I bore even myself just saying it.

Myra is the mother of Andrea, who is my wife's best pal; and Andrea is the mother of Tommy, who is our boy's best pal. Sometimes we go over to Myra's house for Thanksgiving. She's always interesting and tells us of her school days in a class of children in a school of just one room in what sounds like the old west. She doesn't seem that old, and her testimony probably reflects on how this is still a young country when it comes to the descendants of the more recent waves of settlers.

We are standing around outside Myra's place, flapping our arms to keep warm when Andrea arrives with Tommy, then the six of us walk to the park. We find other volunteers gathered around a covered pavilion with tables, benches, and the barbecue pits you always find in Texan public parks. Crappy music is playing from speakers wired up to a laptop - vintage hair metal for the oldies, autotuned idoru for the kiddies; but there's food and coffee. There are a couple of folks milling around with clipboards but nothing seems to be happening so we help ourselves to tacos. The tacos are wrapped in foil and kept in insulated styrofoam boxes, so they're still hot. They've been ordered in from Las Palapas, so we're eating the real thing as made by human hand with not a blob of bright orange cheese style snack product to be seen, which is nice.

'It's the least they could do,' Bess explains, before telling me how much the tickets cost - a figure so inflated that I've since forgotten it on the grounds that it couldn't possibly have been that much.

'Can we go to the park park?' Tommy asks.

I don't understand the question.

'Sure,' says Andrea, and the boys run off towards the trees just past where we came in. My enquiry reveals that we're in the park, therefore a smaller play area which I didn't notice when we arrived is the park park. Nothing is happening yet, so it doesn't seem to matter.

Beyond the pavilion are football fields as I would think of them, as distinct from handegg fields. There are a couple of small groups having a kick about in the distance, some taking it seriously with track suits and rules, others just passing the time and staying warm.

'Look!' I point to a family with a couple of small children, making their way over from the football field. The smallest child shuffles along dressed in a one-piece animal costume complete with ears. It's very cute. Maybe she's a bear or something.

Bess responds with her customary awww, and we try to work out what the animal could be.

Eventually it seems like something is happening so I go to fetch the boys from the park park, even though I'm not actually sure where it's supposed to be. It doesn't matter because they've heard the call and are coming to meet me.

We assemble and then walk around the circumference of the park, following the path. Volunteers are situated along the way dispensing free candy and similarly artificial treats to the younger walkers, who have been given buckets in which to collect their candy and treats because it's so close to Halloween as to make no difference. We share out the treats between us. I initially decline, then cave in and take a bag of Cheetos, mainly out of curiosity. They're bright orange, salty, and taste more like actual food than I thought they would. As I munch, we pass the family of the little girl in the animal costume. Her fluffy suit is a bit saggy, tan with large dark patches and small knobby horns on the head.

She's a giraffe, we realise.

The route we follow is punctuated with volunteers dishing out candy and informative signs stuck in the grass at the side of the path, reminders of why we're doing this. The US National Library of Medicine describes fragile X thus:

Fragile X syndrome is a genetic condition that causes a range of developmental problems including learning disabilities and cognitive impairment. Usually, males are more severely affected by this disorder than females.

Affected individuals usually have delayed development of speech and language by age two. Most males with fragile X syndrome have mild to moderate intellectual disability, while about one-third of affected females are intellectually disabled. Children with fragile X syndrome may also have anxiety and hyperactive behavior such as fidgeting or impulsive actions. They may have attention deficit disorder (ADD), which includes an impaired ability to maintain attention and difficulty focusing on specific tasks. About one-third of individuals with fragile X syndrome have features of autism spectrum disorders that affect communication and social interaction. Seizures occur in about 15% of males and about 5% of females with fragile X syndrome.

This information is reiterated in simplified form on the signs we pass, one of which lists associated physical characteristics. One associated physical characteristic is large, sticky-out ears. This gives me some pause for consideration given that more or less the entire population of my school had large sticky-out ears.

After fifteen minutes, we're back at the pavilion. We eat more tacos and wait, although I can't tell what for. The boys have once again ran off to the park park.

A rope is thrown over the branch of a tree and a piñata is hauled aloft. Suddenly the place is full of children. I take another walk across to the park park to find Junior and his friend. This time I'm all the way there before I see them. It's mostly swings, roundabouts, and climbing frames of colourful toughened plastic. I would have thought the boys were a bit old for it, but then what do I know?

'There's a piñata if you're interested.'

'Okay!' They come along, jabbering away in what may as well be their own shared language for all the sense I can make of it.

We get back to the tree and I see that they're attacking the piñata in shifts, small kids first, older ones later. The smallest don't seem to fully grasp what is expected of them as an adult gives them the stick with which they are expected to get bashing. Most of them just tap the piñata a couple of times and look confused. The giraffe steps up to the plate, as they say, but she doesn't have much upper arm strength either. It looks as though we could be here all day. Eventually someone finds one of those small, violent kids from somewhere, all beetle brows and an evil grin. He smashes the papier-mâché with a high pitched yelp of triumph and makes it rain candy. The kids pile in like a pack of dogs. It's a feeding frenzy.

Then there's a prize draw. We find out how much money we've raised and it seems like a lot. We hang around and eat more tacos until it seems like time to go.

Once again I wander off to the park park to fetch the boys. They're on the swings, yelping and laughing and repeating meme-derived catchphrases to one another, and stood at the third swing is the giraffe. She seems upset and confused and she's calling Mommy over and over like its a spell which will summon her mother from the ether.

Oh fuck, I think, mind spinning with all sorts of unfamiliar, protective instincts. I look around and believe I recognise the giraffe's mother over the other side of the park park. We pass her as we go to join Bess, Andrea, and Myra.

'I think your giraffe wants you,' I tell the woman, pointing to the forlorn little figure still stood alone at the swing.

'Oh yes - she wants me to help her up,' the woman explains, amused, informing me of something I had genuinely failed to realise. I feel a great sense of relief, and we all go home.

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.

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.