Full of Prostitutes

It's about 7.15AM and I'm wheeling my bike down our driveway, about to go out.

'Yo!' It's Shooty the Drug Dealer walking along our road at this time of morning for some reason. 'Whose car is that?'

I ignore him because he's a knob.

'Yo!' again, 'whose car is that?'

I look at him. He's looking at me, and at the car right behind me. He's looking at the car which is parked in our driveway. He's looking at our car, which is parked in our driveway, and has been parked in our driveway more or less all day, every day for at least the last few years.

'It's our car,' I tell him, seemingly somewhat redundantly.

'What?'

'It's my wife's car.'

'Oh. I thought it was Kimberley's car.'

I have no fucking clue who he's talking about. 'No,' I confirm. 'It's our car.'

He wanders off mumbling about something being full of prostitutes, which is the actual expression he uses, in case anyone thinks I'm making this up. It sounds as though he means that Kimberley's notional car is full of prostitutes.

Who fucking knows?

A week later it's more or less the same encounter, except this time he wants to know have I seen a six-year old boy running around. This would be his son. Apparently he's mislaid the kid. You know how those things just run off and who can tell what the fuck they get up to? The question is put to me at 7AM as I step out of the front door to call the cats in for breakfast. I'm still in my pants. The weird thing is that I get the distinct impression of Shooty having emerged from behind the small lemon tree in our front yard, as though he's been waiting, or was lurking.

'No, I haven't seen a six-year old boy,' I tell him. 'I've only just got up.'

Weeks pass and then he turns up on our porch one evening. He doesn't actually knock at the door, instead being content to shout at it.

'You been calling up my grandmother, bitch?' he enquires. 'You better not be saying shit about my grandma, puta.'

All of this is recorded on our Ring, which is a door bell with a built-in camera activated by movement. Following the recording of Shooty proposing that we refrain from discussing his grandmother in scurrilous terms, we have a video of him sat on our porch for an hour between two and three in the morning.

He's back again the next evening, this time at 8PM as we're awake and still watching telly. His arrival is heralded by a loud bang which we later realise was him kicking over our wheelie bin in protest. He doesn't actually knock or ring, and perhaps doesn't understand the latest doorbell technology, again preferring instead to stand a foot or so away from our door and shout at it. Mostly it's about his missing son, the six-year old, the one presently in the care of Shooty's mother and grandmother. They all moved out about a month ago, unable to deal with him, and are still waiting for him to be carted off before they come back.

I catch Shooty's eye through the window and do the what the fuck, dude? gesture. The thing is, I'm somehow not actually scared of him even though I probably should be. Face to face he seems idiotic, even pathetic, regardless of the reputation.

'Fuck you!' he screams with real feeling and gives me the finger before wandering off. He thinks we've kidnapped his kid, or we've been badmouthing his kid, or we've given his kid to aliens who are probing the child even as we speak. Nobody knows.

We call the cops, because when we called them this morning, they said to call them if it happened again, and it has happened again. They arrive after about fifteen minutes and explain to us how Shooty is not a well man and may be feeling confused and upset right now, and we should definitely call them next time it happens.

Neighbours come out of their houses to share notes with us. Shooty has been dropping in for a loud one-way chat with everyone on the block, so it turns out. Someone actually saw him carrying an axe the previous night.

I've identified our boy as Shooty on the understanding that he shot and killed someone in his house five or six years ago but was never convicted because the cops were somehow unable to prove anything; or maybe they decided that they would definitely act if it happened again. However, it turns out that I am in error and he merely stabbed someone and should therefore probably be identified as Stabby the Drug Dealer, but I'm sticking with Shooty, having thought of him as Shooty for most of his time in the stripey hole.

He was in the stripey hole for abuse of a senior, whatever that means. His rap sheet can be viewed online. No actual murder, and nothing sexual, but otherwise he's pretty much done the lot. Also interesting is that the rap sheet logs calls made every couple of days for the last two months, ever since Shooty came home - mostly nuisance and disturbances, but one of them involving a knife. I guess maybe the cops were waiting for a nice even number, like fifty.

Anyway, he's now binned up, presumably medicated, and his goldfish memory will hopefully have forgotten whatever he imagined we did by the time he comes back, which he hopefully won't.

Perhaps oddly, the detail I've found most depressing is his moronic territorial yapping because I've heard it too many times.

You'd better not be saying shit about this person or that person somehow associated with my good self, because you'll be amazed at the vigour of my righteous fury. You better not be saying shit about my hood. Don't you know I be from the southside?

This is drivel you come out with when you have nothing else going for you, when the sum total of your personality is an address and the fact of your continued existence; and so you have to jab your existence at other people like it's a stick with a cowpat on the end, and keep jabbing until they notice, because when they notice you, you become real.

It's exhausting.

Doctor, No

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'I would have killed myself by then.'

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

Gosh.

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

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

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

'I was 194lbs this morning.'

'Well, you're 205lbs now.'

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

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

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

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

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

Do you smoke?

How much do you drink?

How many fingers am I holding up?

Can you tell me the name of the president?

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

The doctor came in.

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

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

'Okay.'

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

'No.'

'You don't smoke?'

'No, I don't.'

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

'Is it really?'

'Yes, if I could—'

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

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

'Oh okay.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'That's good to know.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Fine.'

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

Can't Get No

There are those who understand the general deal with moving to a different country, and there are those who don't. An example of the latter would be the relative who spent ten minutes yacking away about some special cheap phone rate she'd arranged with British Telecom, then thoughtfully suggesting that I too might look into getting that same deal, seeing as how I was about to move away and everything.

'I don't think they have British Telecom in America,' I told her, because it was the only answer I could give.

'Oh! Do they not?' She seemed genuinely surprised. I don't know if she ever watched The Royle Family, but I have a feeling she would most likely have given it a miss. It's just people talking, she would probably argue. Who wants to see that?

This is the kind of person who has understood my migration to another country mainly in terms of what I'll miss about England, or rather what they think I'll miss, somehow imagining that the two of us are essentially the same and with the same tastes.

I wonder if they show Stars in Their Eyes over there.

I'll just have to take the chance.

I could be moving to a land where the President greets me in person at the airport, bequeathing me the equivalent of millions of pounds in local currency in advanced thanks for culturally enriching his nation, and he'll give me a house too. Beer will be free forever, and the national anthem is different each year, but always something from Machine Gun Etiquette by the Damned; yet if I want to eat Findus crispy pancakes, then I'm screwed.

Fuck that! Stop the plane! I'm staying put!

I'd be an idiot if I'd moved to a different country in the expectation of it being exactly the same as the one I'd just left, but nevertheless, there are aspects of living in England which I've missed, or at least things I've occasionally felt like eating; then again, missed is perhaps an overstatement. There's nothing of which the absence has given me a sleepless night, leaving me crying, why oh why oh why over and over as I sweat and claw at the spectral form of a can of Batchelors mushy peas I've hallucinated above my bed. That said, there are certain things I've made a point of stuffing into my face whilst visiting friends and family in England, making the most of them whilst I could.

Bread. I ate bread during my time in England, but it would be an exaggeration to say that I stuffed my face with it. I ate bread in the form of toast most mornings, and on Tuesday the 11th of April I ate a sort of smoked salmon and a fried egg on toast thing - as it is described in my diary - at a pub called the Forest in Dorridge, a small town on the outskirts of Birmingham, a few miles south-west of Solihull. I cycled to Dorridge as part of a pilgrimage, because it turns out that John Wyndham was born there. I found no blue plaque, and the waitress who took my order had never heard of him, or even of Day of the Triffids. The waitress who brought me the smoked salmon and a fried egg on toast thing actually had heard of Wyndham, and even recalled having read Chocky at school, but hadn't realised he'd been born there.

The reason bread makes the list is that it's mostly shite in America in so much as that it's difficult to get decent bread - decent bread being any bread which doesn't prompt an exclamation of what the fuck is this? when you put it into your mouth. Tortillas excepted, baking is not generally something which is done well in the States, and we seemingly take our cues from Mexico in this respect; and much as I love Mexico and all things Mexican, the use of flour in a recipe doesn't mean you additionally need a pound of fucking sugar.

I have surmounted this problem by limiting my purchases to the one brand of bread which doesn't taste like it wants to be a cake when it grows up.

Chocolate. We seem to be somewhat limited in our range of available sweeties here in America, possibly due to loaves of bread occupying the same ecological niche. Hershey bars are okay, but they're not Cadbury's. Butterfinger and Three Musketeers bars are decent, although cops have been known to mistake the silvery wrapper of the latter for a firearm and shoot the black man aspiring chocolate consumer to death just in case. We also have chocolate bars called Pay Day and Oh Henry!, one of which is okay, but I can't remember which one; and yes, the names are a bit weird. I have no idea what that's about. Still, it's not like I eat a lot of chocolate, so it's another thing I haven't really missed.

Doner Kebabs. I had a period of at least a year, possibly as many as twenty, during which I more or less lived on doner kebabs; and it's hardly a coincidence that these were also my most sociable years, an era in which I took great pleasure in getting shit-faced in the pub at least once a week. Not only is a doner kebab exactly what you need at two in the morning when you're full of beer and likely to burst into song*, but it's also a near foolproof hangover cure when eaten cold next day. We have doner kebabs in Texas but they're not the same. The pita bread is always strangely puffy and I can't get used to it, plus the thing needs to be drowned in chili sauce, which no-one observes on the grounds of everything else in Texas being drowned in chili sauce. The Texan doner kebab - which for all I know may well be closer to some Turkish original than its English equivalent - is pretty decent, but I nevertheless planned to eat five or six doner kebabs a day for the duration of my return to the old country. In the end I forgot, aside from one I had at the Istanbul Restaurant, at 17, The Butts, Coventry, the consumption of which came reasonably close to constituting a religious experience; and yes, The Butts is what the road is called, owing to the presence of the former residence of the man who invented arses.

Dunn's River Nurishment. Okay, I'll admit - I probably would have voted for Donald Trump had he promised to bring Dunn's River Nurishment to the shelves of our stores and supermarkets, or I would have done had I been registered to vote. Dunn's River Nurishment describes itself as a nutritionally enriched milk drink and may be considered the oil upon which south-east London runs. It comes in a can, tastes like heaven, cures hangovers, probably cures cancer, and the vanilla one turns your pee dayglo. Needless to say I was guzzling this elixir more or less non-stop for most of my visit.

Fish and Chips. I didn't really realise that I'd missed fish and chips. I ate fish and chips when I lived in London, but only if I was too knackered to cook and wanted a change from doner kebabs, and only because there was a decent fish and chip place on Underhill Road, decent fish and chip shops having more or less disappeared from London towards the end of my tenure, replaced by establishments such as the Sea Cow on Lordship Lane. The Sea Cow is fish and chips for people who don't actually like fish and chips, charging a couple of quid for a pizza box containing seven or eight hand crafted potato rhombusoids fried in oil sourced direct from the pores of this really amaaazing native woman we met when we went kite-surfing in Tunisia. I never had fish from the Sea Cow because it was too expensive, and Robert Elms used to big them up on his London radio show, if you're still not convinced. Anyway, fish and chips has been one of those things for which I might experience an occasional craving, and the craving usually disperses as soon as I start eating them, so it's not such a big deal.

'Do you make fish and chips for yourself?' one of my wife's friends once asked in an amusingly ostentatious display of what I'm sure she considered cultural sensitivity. I can't remember what answer I gave, but it's easy enough to get fish and chips in Texas providing you don't mind the chips being called fries, and there's an endearingly corny nautically themed restaurant chain called Long John Silver's which does fish and chips at least as good as most places in London, possibly excepting the one in Underhill Road.

All the same, I was in England for about three weeks, and I seemed to find myself up at Gabriel's chippie in Earlsdon High Street almost every other day. I guess I had missed fish and chips after all.

Fry's Turkish Delight. I scoffed one of these more or less every time I happened to pass through a supermarket, newsagent, or any other shop selling them. I'm sure I've seen them on sale over here in America, but I guess they never caught on and remain popular only amongst exiles and anglophiles. I don't suppose anyone has much room left after all that bread.

Marmite. Contrary to the mythology, Marmite is reasonably easy to procure in America, being sold in snooty stores such as Central Market, which is probably our Waitrose. That said, similarly contrary to the mythology, I'm one of those people who simply thinks Marmite is okay. I can take it or leave it, and at seven dollars a jar I usually leave it. I didn't think about Marmite at all whilst visiting England. Those who just can't live without Marmite probably have some obscure medical condition, and are to be pitied.

Old Jamaica Ginger Beer. See Dunn's River Nurishment, apart from the actual description, qualification as the oil upon which south-east London runs, and the bit about it turning your pee dayglo. America seems to be the home of disappointing beverages, at least when it comes to anything implying beer. We have root beer for the kids, which carries one of those flavours you'd associate with perfume and doesn't seem to refer to anything existing in nature; and the grown-up beer is similarly shite, requiring that we import the real thing from Mexico. We have ginger ale, which isn't even worth discussing, and admittedly you might occasionally find some designer label bottle of the good stuff for about a million fucking dollars, but it's never a patch on Old Jamaica.

Pork Pie. My dad introduced the family tradition of a pork pie on Christmas morning back when I was a kid. Apparently it had been a tradition in his family when he was growing up, although no-one else I've spoken to has heard of it. He later abandoned the tradition following a tour of a pork pie factory. I believe it was the vats full of eyelids, arseholes, foreskins, and ball bags which put him off. Still, I wasn't there, and his description wasn't so vivid as to bother me, so I still find myself hankering for a pork pie on Christmas morning. In Texas we traditionally have pork tamales on Christmas morning, which I suppose is the same but with a corn husk instead of a crust. Nevertheless I'd still rather have a pork pie, which is unfortunate because you can't get them in Texas. There's a mail order company selling individual pies at a decent price, but the refrigerated postage is something like seventy dollars, and whilst I like a pork pie, I don't like them quite that much. One a year usually does me. My mother got one in when I was staying, and it was nice, and it was enough.

Steak & Kidney Pie. When Don Maclean first sang American Pie on an episode of Crackerjack broadcast back in 1976, he was referring exclusively to baked goods with fruit-based fillings. It seems that to most Americans, introducing meat - or indeed anything savoury - into a pie makes about as much sense as pork and lamb ice cream would to any English person with the likely exception of Heston Blumenthal. There are anomalies such as chicken pot pie and Hot Pockets; but chicken pot pies are probably the American equivalent of tripe and onions or something, and Hot Pockets - which are actually quite nice in an artificial sort of way - are basically meaty versions of McDonalds apple pies aimed exclusively at skateboarders and people who like to do ordinary things prefixed as extreme so as to make themselves seem really, really peng and fire.

Growing up in England, I never really thought about steak and kidney pie, but the idea that there might ever be a time when I found myself circumstantially prevented from eating one would have filled me with horror. Texans are obviously big on the whole steak aspect, but the rest of the cow is apparently mysterious to them - excepting culturally Mexican Texans who curiously seem to maintain the dietary habits of folk in nineteenth century Lancashire, albeit with more chili and less rainfall. This means that should I require kidneys, then a Mexican butcher will be the man to sell them to me, which is a relief because I'm obviously going to have to make my own.

I'm sure it can't be that difficult.

*: Usually Who Gives a Damn by Sham 69.

Ripper

On Sunday the 8th of May, 2016, Simon Morris of the Ceramic Hobs left the following inspirational post on facebook:

Blackpool was worryingly quiet last Monday for bank holiday and a good table at Harry Ramsden's was too easy to get at teatime. But this weekend things have perked up - the most badly behaved conference attendees ever, the Young Farmers are in town. In my youth before cheap foreign travel became a reality the rampages of 'Scots Fortnight' were a thing feared by locals. Going back almost a century, the Wakes Weeks had whole mill towns like Wigan visiting en masse and hospitalising, infecting and impregnating each other under the piers. Not quite the sanitised version as portrayed by dear old Gracie Fields, there are remarkable stories in local history books surrounding the 1930s Blackpool Carnivals and why they were abandoned - too much carnival.

My first sight of the farmers tonight was a man urinating in broad daylight in full public view by North Pier. Magnificent. The bars, drug dealers, brothels, police cells and A&E cubicles will be doing a roaring trade tonight and glad of the farmers' custom. These people are very dangerous and absolute scumbags, the men and women both. I walk through it all unscathed always, I dress in a nondescript style and don't catch anyone's eyes and don't feel fear. I love bad behaviour from humans very much. The hell with laws and sense. The hell with morals and art and politics. Drink, Fight and Fuck!

As a sensitive child, I would have found such sentiments appalling, but at the age of fifty, the words just made me think of Ripper, a person with whom I never really had anything in common beyond a job, and whom I probably haven't even set eyes on this century, but who nevertheless made a huge impression; and he made a huge impression because he was terrifying, and could quite easily have been that magnificent man urinating in broad daylight in full public view by North Pier.

Ripper wasn't actually his name, but that's what everyone called him. I never found out why. I always assumed it to be because he was, as I said, terrifying, just as Peter Sutcliffe was terrifying. Having a nickname which attempts to make jovial association with dismembered prostitutes will strike many as extreme and possibly disgusting, but I'm setting the story down from memory rather than making it up, and that's just how it was.

Ripper was a couple of years older than me as I was in my twenties when I started work as a postman at Catford delivery office. He was tall, a little skinny, and with a ratty sort of face - which isn't supposed to be an insult. He wore his hair tied back in a ponytail, but otherwise bore a strong resemblance to the Nick Cotton character from EastEnders, in terms of both personality and appearance; or at least his face always seemed to be twisted into the devious leer of Nick Cotton cheerily asking cup o' tea, ma?, having just raided his long-suffering mother's savings account and spent the lot on nose candy. Maybe it's just me, but Nick Cotton was the only reason I ever watched EastEnders. He was great.

I started work at Catford delivery office in August 1990 and immediately understood Ripper to be my natural enemy. I was trying to grow a moustache and beard at the time, but my efforts were straggling and pitiful, and Ripper gave me the nickname Catweazle based on my resemblance to a similarly unkempt character from a children's television show of that name. The problem wasn't just that he only ever referred to me as Catweazle, or that it annoyed me; it was the raw delight he took from my displeasure, and his peculiarly creative use of the nickname. He was a van driver, whilst I was a postman, and our duties were such that we had no real reason to interact; so to circumnavigate this obstacle he'd stand behind me and just repeat it in a peculiarly squeaky voice.

Catweazle. Catweazle.

This meant that the nickname never lay fallow or neglected, and he applied the same delivery system to other victims, Ralph being one. Ralph had picked up Big Bag as a nickname owing to how much mail he'd managed to stuff into a single delivery sack on one particular morning.

Big Bag, Big Bag, Big Bag, in that weird squeaky voice like an obsessive-compulsive chaffinch or someone operating the Pop-O-Matic dice bubble from a seventies board game; and then somebody else would usually chip in with the inevitable variation on Burt Bacharach and Hal David's song, what's it all about... Ralphie?

Ralph always looked ready to kill someone.

Being a bit of a knob, I attempted to engage with Ripper, to decommission his campaign against me with both logic and an appeal to his better nature, but he wasn't interested in the first and didn't possess the second; although my efforts weren't entirely wasted in that they clearly brought him further satisfaction, sometimes inspiring him to elaborate on the theme by asking me questions, whether I had a toad called Touchwood, or when I called in sick if I did so by means of a telling bone.

My role was as a source of amusement by which he might tolerate the indignity of being at work. In fact that's how he saw most of us. He didn't really do communication in any conventional sense.

Being a van driver, it was his role to deliver packets which were too big for the postmen to carry; so if anything too humongous erroneously found its way into your packet bag, you just took it over to your driver - Joe or Robby or whoever it was that week.

Unfortunately Carl's driver was Ripper. He shuffled over, politely setting forth the proposal in his nasal John Major voice. 'Here - are you doing Boundfield Road this week because—'

'Fuck off,' Ripper suggested, kicking the parcel out of Carl's hand so that it sailed upwards in an arc to the far side of the sorting office. He had a bit of a hangover that morning, and was in no mood for idiocy, or people asking him to do things.

I worked at Catford for two or three years, eventually getting to know everyone fairly well, as well as you can know anyone at work, eventually fitting in as much as any of us ever fit in. Ripper would still take time out of his busy schedule to taunt me by meaninglessly repeating my nickname in a high voice, but was no longer quite the enemy, if he had ever been. I was invited to the fairly regular piss-ups down the pub, and outside of work I got to see a different side of Ripper, although it was actually more or less identical to the first side. I was still Catweazle, but the difference was that we were now buying each other drinks; and only drinks. I took Zammo's advice and just said no when it came to the nose candy. It wasn't just me who said no.

'Have it your way,' Ripper growled bitterly at the other one who had declined the offer, 'but don't come crying to me at two in the morning when I'm sat there with a big red hooter!'

When I announced that I had put in for a transfer to another sorting office, I was surprised at Ripper's response. It actually seemed like he was going to miss me, as though we were friends by some definition.

'What you want to go there for?' he asked philosophically. 'That's a fucking rent boy's office, that place.'

Nevertheless I transferred, and the last I'd heard of Ripper was that he'd got married, and the presiding vicar had supposedly asked are you really sure about this? during the ceremony.

I've no idea where Ripper is now. He might be dead or in prison for all I know; and this isn't really a story with any sort of moral or point, just an assemblage of stupid annoying shit which passed the time, and which had nothing to do with art, or a better world, or people being nice to each other. The point of this - if we're going to pretend that there is one for the sake of closure - is that sometimes it's healthy to find oneself surrounded by dangerous arseholes, or failing that, people who aren't necessarily going to agree with everything you say, or even care whether you say anything. The contrast is good for the development of a healthy sense of perspective. Like Simon Morris, I too love bad behaviour from humans very much - which on closer inspection probably isn't strictly true; which therefore conversely proves it to be a wonderful thing specifically because it makes my inner Lord Longford squirm with horror.

Ripper was a monster, but just like that man urinating in broad daylight in full public view by North Pier, he was also magnificent - maybe still is, for all I know - and not least because he was right about me. That beard I tried to grow really was ridiculous.

I suspect this is one of the things we, as a society, often dislike about bullies, or a certain kind of bully: sometimes they're right.

Lawn

The yard at the back of the house was a desert when we first moved here; or maybe I mean semi-desert - our own private Trans-Pecos to the tune of about half a football pitch, lacking only groups of wandering Coahuiltecs to complete the picture. The soil was fine black dust with some plant life dried blonde by the Texas summer and a generous smattering of bottle caps - mostly Bud Lite and related children's drinks. The bottle caps were at their greatest concentration around the dead trunk of a pecan tree, just a jagged pole left jutting upwards into the sky, no branches to speak of. A gas-burning barbecue grill had come to die against the trunk of the tree, rusted and with one shitty plastic wheel broken at an awkward angle.

The idiot who first showed us around the house tried to suggest it was some sort of feature, that maybe we could get the thing fired up and have parties out there once we were settled. A few minutes earlier he'd pointed to the crappy tubular plastic frame of a circular garden table, or what would have been a table if there had been any glass in it.

'You could probably get some glass cut for that,' he told us.

This was a full size table, albeit one of a kind I'd seen on sale at Walmart or one of those places for about fifteen dollars, which I correlate with it costing me a little more than that to have a square foot of glass specially cut at a Thad Ziegler outlet, therefore concluding that the guy who first showed us around the house was a massive competition-level knob.

We moved the broken barbecue grill around the side of the garage, unsure as to whether or not it was really supposed to be a feature, but reluctant to give it to one of those Mexican guys who drives around looking for scrap in case it was. I suppose it at least reinforces the impression I'm trying to foster of our having nothing worth taking in the event of burglary, in case it isn't obvious from the blinds at all angles and half-eaten by cats.

The house had been empty for a while, and before us there had been young guys whose main interests were apparently partying and drinking beer - possibly also pouring said beer over each other's heads whilst yelling awesome. The yard had not been watered in some time, thus leaving only seasonal rainfall and the local water table to tend the prehistory of my garden.

First I dug the entire thing over to a depth of about a foot, turning the earth and getting out the larger rocks, which I used to make a drystone border. This took a little over six months, bringing me around to spring. I tried Bermuda grass seed in some areas with mixed results, but kept on watering as I noticed a few patches of the naturally growing grass - seemingly a variation on Bermuda grass - making a return. I worked at this for a couple of hours a day and it still took two years to get it looking like something which had come about by means of human agency.

I started the Bermuda grass off from seed sown beneath a protective netting which retained moisture. The grass did well and came up quite thick using this method, but unfortunately so did a specific kind of broad-leaf weed which I will term arsehole daisy because I am yet to achieve formal identification. The problem got worse as I began to seed the northern side of the garden, the part which gets the most sun. Just three days after laying down the grass seed, the netting, pinned down at the edges, would be puffed up and stretched taut across great cabbage-like blooms of arsehole daisy. I felt like the monkey in the child's joke vainly attempting to return the cork to the pig's bottom, and even without the arsehole daisies, my established patches of bermuda grass were beginning to thin and fail.

I took an arsehole daisy to the local hardware store, but they didn't know what it was either. I bought a sack of supergrass to cheer myself up. It wasn't called supergrass, but it was some name like that, and it was cheap and absolutely guaranteed to be the most amazing grass you've ever seen, and it would definitely grow and everything, and you would be so happy with how fanfuckingtastic this grass was going to turn out that you'd probably shit yourself. Nevertheless it struck me as odd that the packaging made no reference to what actual species of seed I was about to chuck all across my yard.

The supergrass grew quickly into huge clumps of a tough, fat bladed plant which clogged our newly purchased lawnmower, and it was October and the weather was cooling again, too cool for Bermuda grass. I had the entire yard neatly defined by borders marked out with rows of stone, which helped somehow, but it still felt like I wasn't really getting anywhere. I switched to rye grass on the grounds that it reputedly does well in the winter. Local lore seemed to recommend a mix of Bermuda - which grows during the hot part of the year and then goes dormant as winter approaches - and rye, which will grow when the Bermuda is beginning to turn brown.

So I carried on, just doing what I could and trying not to get too pissed off with any of it. I'd read plenty of science-fiction novels wherein plucky colonists attempt to scrape a living from the harsh Martian soil, and I knew I had at least one advantage over those guys in so much as that I was still on Earth. I kept on watering, and between the Bermuda and the rye and whatever the wild stuff was that looked a lot like Bermuda, the yard at the back eventually developed a lawn, albeit a lawn with a couple of patches depending on the time of year. It became a garden.

It was a conscious act of claiming my territory whilst engaging directly with the physical substance of the land - which seemed important given that I'm new to these parts. Additionally I would suggest that gardening is good for the soul, or at least for the intellect, as D.H. Lawrence almost certainly observed at some point or other. In claiming my territory, I've taken it back from the previous resident morons with their shitty knackered barbecue grill; and tellingly this seems to have had an actual physical effect on the house itself, specifically the kitchen door which once had a tendency to stick during damp weather, and to stick so tight that on bad days it could only be opened by a hefty run taken at it with one shoulder to the fore. Yet after that first year the problem just went away. My theory is that the ground beneath the house had become so desiccated that the entire structure had begun to split in half, as suggested by a crack running across the living room ceiling and down the wall; so my keeping the garden watered seems to have at least fixed one aspect of the problem. We've had no trouble with the kitchen door since.

These days it's mostly just weeding and mowing, although there are still not quite enough hours in the day to keep on top of such an expanse, and I have to mow by hand with a reel mower, having apparently bust the electric mower on a particularly tough clump of supergrass. I've divided the entire patch up into six parts - two out front, four at the back - and I mow one each day so that it never becomes too gargantuan a task. So for two days out of every six I get to mow and nod or exchange grunting noises with passing neighbours. There's a hillbilly woman who lives down the road who always grins and shares some incomprehensible observation, for one example. I only know her because of Gary, her cat.

Gary has been spending a lot of time at our house, joining in when I feed the local strays. He's enormous, and we initially mistook him for our own Fluffy. At one point he turned up wearing a green collar with a little bell, which I found abandoned a couple of days later. I walked down the road and knocked on the door where I thought I'd seen him hanging around. The hillbilly woman looked momentarily terrified, then understood when I explained that her cat had taken to hanging around in my garden and I was just returning his collar.

'You mean Fat Cat,' she chuckled and yee-hawed toothlessly.

I can't bring myself to call him Fat Cat. It seems rude, and in any case he reminds me of Gary, my former similarly big-boned neighbour who always seemed to be there just hanging around whenever I went out into the back garden.

If it isn't the Hillbilly woman, it's Dee Dee or Angela or John, sometimes Frasier or Donna, and occasionally Shooty the drug dealer - which probably isn't his actual name. I smile and nod and look quickly away because he's rumoured to have certain mental health issues, and he's been inside the stripey hole, and there was something in the papers about a firearm which may or may not have been discharged into somebody. I'm not even certain that it's him, but he lives in that house, and I'm not going to ask, 'are you that crack dealer who shot his buddy a few months back?' He seems polite enough, whoever he is. His presence on our street means that I get to watch young men in basketball gear drinking their forties from brown paper bags, just like in the films.

Last week I was mowing the lawn and Shooty walked across.

'Hey, you want your lawn mowed?' he asked.

It took me a moment to confirm for the sake of my own peace of mind that yes, here I was mowing my lawn whilst a neighbour asked me if I would like my lawn mowed. Logically I suppose he wanted to know whether I would like him to mow it for ten dollars, or twenty or whatever the going rate was.

'I'm fine,' I said.

I had established my territory.

This is my lawn, I thought to myself as he walked back to his stoop in defeat.

Bad Day

The bad day began online, as is often the case, specifically with an email notification pertaining to a new post on Next Door - a social networking site designed to fill in for the role of neighbours actually talking to one another as they once did. Most of the time Next Door will be someone looking for a new home for some bit of old furniture, or offering a lawn mowing service, but recent postings have been rendered increasingly exhausting by our local gun nut whining about liberals, or Obama's plan to take away our guns, or the hypothetical presence of ISIS cells in the neighbourhood. So, having signed up I've tended to ignore the actual website, relying on either email notifications or my wife - who is now also a member - to keep me informed in the event of there being anything I really need to know. The email notification which heralded the approach of my bad day pertained to a thread headed Cat Killed in Wilshire Terrace, and which opened with the suggestion that I probably shouldn't read what followed if easily upset, and so I didn't.

I've been down that road before with the kind of email notifications you receive on a daily basis if you've ever signed an online petition to ban this, stop that, or to bring an end to such and such. This petition called for the prosecution of individuals who had posted a video clip of animal cruelty undertaken for kicks on YouTube. I won't describe what had been filmed, but the email provided a link to the offending YouTube clip, and by association an image and a description of what I would see should I follow the link. The act of cruelty had involved a cat and had been filmed for the purpose of entertaining the sort of cunts who would find such a thing entertaining; and given that the reason such cunts would even bother posting such a thing on YouTube seemed most likely be so as to upset people such as myself, then it bothered me how the petition site had effectively done their job for them, even without my watching the thing. Hence I do my best to avoid anything I'm likely to find upsetting beyond the limits of my distress serving some purpose.

We have a number of cats, and as I work from home I spend more time amongst cats than amongst humans, so it would be fair to say that I have a lot of time for cats. Unfortunately this often seems to place me in opposition to a certain section of the online community, namely those who use facebook principally to mount a protest against people posting pictures of cats on facebook. I can understand up to a point in so much as that I find the children's television show Doctor Who annoying and headachey, and there tends to be a lot of Doctor Who in my daily facebook feed; but being an adult I am able to reason that if something brings happiness to a person without involving others being marched off to the gas chambers, then that has to be a good thing. Generally I would hope others might be able to take the same view of those who, like myself, happen to like cats. Most do, but then there are persons like the facebook connection I made on the grounds of my having enjoyed his novel and that we know a load of the same people. His posts hilariously described facebook as catbook and suggested that the love of cats demonstrated by others was quite literally ruining his life. Our love of cats was making his existence a living hell!

Stuck in Guantanamo Bay, blindfolded and having a lamb korma pumped up your arse, or noticing that a facebook acquaintance has shared a photograph of their cat - same fucking thing, my friend, same fucking thing.

Then, on the day that Kirby - one of our own cats - went missing, an unrelated Google search brought me the appalling news of domestic cats having been found dead following probable torture by a psychopath three or four miles from our house; and this was immediately followed by the important novelist's side-splitting facebook post proposing swimming lessons for cats using the brick and sack method.

Ha ha.

I defriended the shit BBC medical-drama scriptwriting cunt, and have done my best to try to learn something from the experience, which is why I now chose not to read Cat Killed in Wilshire Terrace.

The day was okay for the most part. I cycled twenty miles as part of my new daily exercise regime, wrote the usual bollocks, and then mowed some lawn. Our garden at the back is enormous and so I tend to mow it in sections, one quarter of the whole area each day using a reel mower - that is to say one powered by myself - because I knackered the electric one last year. The temperature differential between Texas summer and winter is such as to necessitate two kinds of grass grown on a lawn. Bermuda grass thrives during the hottest time of the year, then dies away around November to be replaced by rye grass, which itself dies away when the Bermuda grass returns in spring. The cycle more or less looks after itself, the only significant problem being just how thick rye grass will grow in a very short space of time, even after what is only a light rain. It was rye grass with which I knackered our electric lawnmower, because when it gets thick, I may as well be trying to mow a lawn of rubber tubing.

My day began to turn bad as I now attempted to mow another quarter of lawn in the back garden. Rain the previous week had set my regular schedule behind by a couple of days in addition to bringing the rye grass up thicker than ever. I pushed the mower into the growth, then brought it back, then forward again, over and over across the same patch. It was like hacking away, like cutting someone's hair with a kitchen knife. The blades clogged with thick green wads, the wheels seized up, and the grass didn't even seem cut so much as crudely levelled; and although I'd opted for the reel mower on the grounds of its use constituting exercise, this was exhausting and far more work than seemed fair. It took me about forty minutes to make a lousy job of what would have taken ten minutes in summer. The work left me pissed off and rudely aware of our garden growing faster than my ability to keep it all in check. I'd finished weeding the cactus patch a week before, and it had returned to its overgrown state even before I could get back to work on borders I hadn't touched in over a year.

I could feel depression settling over me as it does from time to time, without warning, often even without any coherent reason. The term depression may be misleading, but it's the best I have. I've suffered on previous occasions, and have been given a medical diagnosis of my thankfully infrequent darker moods as something other than just feeling a bit pissed off. I once wondered if it might be hereditary given my grandfather's episodes of clinical depression, although being realistic, he was almost certainly suffering from post-traumatic stress following service in the second world war.

To get things in perspective, my circumstances were once substantially more miserable than they are at present. Specifically there's nothing about my present circumstances which could be described as miserable, or even unfortunate. I have no real cause for complaint, and so I suppose I must have some perverse subconscious need to arrange for my own discomfort from time to time. I find myself pissed off by things which don't matter and which have no long term consequences, unfortunate or otherwise.

I've mowed the lawn and now Bess comes home in something of a state. She too has received the email notification for Cat Killed in Wilshire Terrace, but she's read it and is upset. I tell her I don't want to know, and try not to think of what I read when Kirby went missing, what was done to those cats over by Windcrest, or wherever it was.

'The signs are all around on the trees and telephone polls,' Bess tells me.

Cats being mutilated in this area, they read. Beware!

I've already tried to rationalise some of the horrible possibilities. The cat was found on Bradshaw, about a mile away from us, maybe a little more. That places it in the vicinity of Catman's house. Catman is either the local crazy guy, or the local guy who just happens to live on welfare, likes cats and could maybe stand to take more care of his yard, depending on how you look at it. I would guess him to be about late fifties. He's tall and scrawny with straggly hair and a huge white beard. His clothes seem lived in and he pongs a little, but I've spoken to him in the local supermarket from time to time, and he's a nice if slightly intense guy. His yard on the other hand is a mess. It isn't that it's full of rubbish so much as that it is left wild and untended even by the variable standards of our slightly crappy neighbourhood, and there's a six-foot pyramid of discarded cat food tins at the back of the house accounting for why the garden is always full of cats. We don't know if they're his cats or just local strays that he feeds. Each time we pass either Bess or myself will submit an involuntary wave at the place and coo, 'Hey, Catman!' in the vein of Earl Hickey greeting Darnell Turner in an episode of My Name is Earl.

Catman lives one block down from the street on which the mutilated body of a cat was found. I know not everyone likes cats. I can easily imagine that a person who doesn't like cats might be prone to dark thoughts if they lived near Catman, within view of the pyramid. Additionally, it's presently spring break which is historically a time when retarded deeds tend to be done with greater frequency due to those responsible being at liberty rather than at school. Given the presence within our neighbourhood of at least one gun nut who worries he might be sharing his road with an ISIS cell, I can easily imagine someone young and morally stunted electing to take a stand against Catman by hurting one of his cats with the added bonus of terrifying the shit out of the rest of us. This is what I've been telling myself, that it might be a vendetta waged against one particular person rather than cats as a species. I tell Bess, but it doesn't really bring much comfort.

It's six in the evening so I cook the dinner - chicken in walnut sauce. I usually serve it with potatoes done in a certain Mexican style with bacon and coriander, but as we're both trying to cut down on the carbohydrates, I've done cauliflower as well as potatoes; but there's too much material for the one pan, and cauliflower florets fall to the floor as I mix in the seasoning. The pans, of which there are three presently on the cooker, have become too hot to pick up without an oven glove, and somehow I now have too little space in which to put anything down. I'm getting more and more stressed as food I've prepared spills from pans onto the tiled work surface and down into the cracks.

'Fuck!' I pick a stray cauliflower floret from the floor, step outside and hurl it against the frame of the porch to teach it a lesson.

Dinner is eventually served but somehow it doesn't taste so great to me, despite which I eat too much, or at least enough to leave myself in some discomfort. Bess thinks it tastes fine, so I suppose that's something.

After dinner we drive to the Methodist Hospital to visit Myra. She fell at the weekend, fracturing the bone down the left side of her face and jaw. They've operated and she has four metal plates and twenty screws in her skull. She looks a state. We're all relieved, but I can't stop thinking on what a shitty world it is that such a thing as this could have happened to the woman.

We return home, and more and more I feel like buying cigarettes, when I haven't smoked or even felt the urge in a long time. I feel numb. I feel like going to sleep for a year or two. The world seems cold and cruel and joyless. There is no prospect for anything good ever again.

Of course I recognise the feelings for what they are, none of which makes any difference to the fact of my experiencing them.

The signs are still up. Cats being mutilated in this area. Beware!

Bess and I bring all of the cats inside, except we can't find either Snowy or Kirby and have to hope they will remain in some place where a roving nocturnal lunatic is unlikely to find them. Keep your cats in at night, was the thrust of Cat Killed in Wilshire Terrace on Next Door, so we're doing what we can, not least because further dismembered bodies have been found in the same area. A few of our cats tend to remain inside at night anyway, but the others are accustomed to staying outside and are clearly pissed off with this change to the established routine.

Holly is in our bedroom. Ordinarily I would put her out in the hall and wedge the door shut with the doorstop so as to prevent her waking us up in the middle of the night, but tonight I can't be bothered. I'm past caring and I feel protective towards all of them because they're my family.

I just want it to stop.

I pop an Oxycodone I have left over from harrowing dental treatment some years earlier and look forward to the cotton wool effect. It's not something I'm in the habit of doing but tonight feels like dangerous, unexplored territory.

After I turn out the light, Nibbler or one of the others manages to get our bedroom door open because the lock has never worked and the doorstop I purchased from Lowes a couple of years ago - the only one they had in stock - is crap; much like everything. In the darkness I can feel a tidal wave of cats washing into our room and taking their places on the bed with us.

I don't quite sleep, and both Nibbler and Holly wake me from whatever state of slumber I almost attain with kitty headbutts at different intervals. Enoch wanders around the house meowing his arse off like a little velvet fire alarm every thirty minutes or so, just as we knew he would, which is why he otherwise usually goes outside at night. I can't even be mad at them. I love these cats and would do almost anything to keep them safe. I just hope Snowy and Kirby are okay out there.

They are, and are at the door waiting to come in when I get up to feed them all around seven. So far as I can see there are no mutilated feline bodies on the front lawn.

Even before she is out of bed, Bess looks at Next Door on her iPhone. The police report is in, because this kind of animal cruelty is now a felony. The police report is adamant that the Bradshaw cats were killed by a coyote. It's horrible, but it's at least preferable to that which we've been fearing for the previous twelve hours. Coyotes are a rare sight within the city limits, but not unknown. I myself saw one down on Holbrook over a year ago.

The whole day suddenly looks different. In fact the whole world looks different, and somehow we came through. I can live with acts of God or nature or whatever you prefer to call it.

I, Fatso

I experienced a medical condition during the winter of 2010, a certain itch brought on by a surfeit of the body's natural yeast. It was a condition I recognised as having affected at least two human females of my formerly close acquaintance, but no-one ever told me that a male might also suffer with the same embarrassing condition. I went to see the doctor, specifically asking to see a male doctor just as I would were I a character with a sensitive problem in a seventies situation comedy. He explained that it was common - much to my astonishment - probably resulting from either too much sugar in my system, or not enough exercise of a sort which would ordinarily convert that sugar into the energy by which I might open up a packet of crisps or wobble along to the chippy in Earlsdon High Street. He said that my condition was probably nothing, but recommended that I eat less shite, get more exercise, and have a blood test.

I wasn't aware of my diet being particularly poor, and ignored the associated segments of advice on the grounds of my having reached the age of forty-five without ever having eaten either a deep fried Mars Bar or anything purchased from Taco Bell; although I realised that he probably had a point about the exercise. When employed full-time by Royal Mail I'd never really had to think about exercise as an activity in its own right because the job was physically very demanding. Since leaving Royal Mail I had taken agency work with Parcel Force, but the work was intermittent - three days a week, sometimes two, and sometimes nothing at all. When there was no work to be had I spent my time engaged in selling off many years of accumulated crap on eBay, but would usually try to get in some cycling each morning for the sake of exercise and getting out of the house. Ordinarily I would follow a fifteen mile circuit of rural back roads through Kenilworth, the villages of Leek Wootton and Stoneleigh, and then back into Coventry; but this was winter.

I'd spent twenty years trudging around in the freezing cold and pouring rain of English winter, fingers numb to the bone, and with the midday sun barely risen above the rooftops of the houses on the other side of the street for most of November through to January. Just the thought of outside was bad enough, and with no wage-related incentive to propel me forward each morning, I had fallen to the habit of putting off the daily bike ride for later in the week when it might hopefully be a bit less miserable out there. Following the initial visit to the doctor, I coaxed myself back onto two wheels a couple of times, but it was hard to find the motivation.

I'd had a blood test and was called back to the medical centre now that the results had come though. This time I saw a female doctor but I didn't let it bother me seeing as this visit was not directly concerned with the previously mentioned sensitive problem and it therefore didn't seem likely that I would be required to slap it out on the table. She told me that I was overweight for my height and age, and that my blood pressure was through the roof, as was my cholesterol, and I would probably be dead before the end of the week. Okay, she didn't actually say that I would probably be dead before the end of the week, but given the severity of her report I expect she was thinking it.

'What can I do?' I asked, terrified.

She muttered something about reducing my daily quota of visits to McDonalds, something about exercise, and then wrote out a prescription for a course of simvastatins.

This seemed more shocking than any implied coronary resulting from my chip-scoffing ways. 'Is that really necessary?' I asked.

She seemed to think it was.

'Look,' I said. 'I've been sat on my arse eating crisps for most of the last six weeks, or may as well have been. How about if I get back to my daily routine of fifteen miles? I mean, that should make a difference, shouldn't it?'

'I'm more worried about getting those triglycerides down right now,' she said, whatever the hell that meant. Her face suggested this was a life or death situation.

I argued some more, then relented and picked up a box of the prescribed tablets from the chemist in Earlsdon High Street.

I started taking them, having read about the possible side effects on the side of the packet. As the warning predicted I was unable to sleep and began to feel somewhat depressed. By the third day I had been awake for seventy-two hours, and awake meaning wide awake, and I felt like killing myself. My existence had turned cold and grey and joyless. I hadn't seen the sun in weeks. There was nothing to look forward to. There was no good in the world. My life was pointless and a complete waste of time. I had never felt so profoundly bereft of hope as on that third day. I spoke to the woman at the chemists and she told me that it generally takes a couple of weeks before you get used to simvastatins. The urge to commit suicide would pass.

Fuck that, I said to myself, and stopped taking the things.

I returned to the medical centre. My doctor was seriously pissed off. 'You should have spoken to me. You don't just decide to withdraw from a prescribed course of medicine as you've done. You can't just stop like that. You're very lucky that nothing terrible happened.'

'Well it was either stop,' I explained, 'or hope I could make it another two weeks without slashing my wrists. I'm sure simvastatins are wonderful once they start working properly, but unless I'm actually at death's door, I'd really just like to see how I get on with a bit more regular exercise.'

She wasn't happy, which was too bad. I myself hadn't been particularly delighted by our initial encounter in which she had started on my prescription before I'd even finished speaking. It had felt somewhat as though she'd been considering what course of drugs would be best for me before I'd even walked through the door.

Anyway, as promised I'd been getting out on the bike every day, and accordingly when she took my blood pressure it was normal. Nevertheless she didn't seem convinced, but I refused to take any more drugs when the side effects seemed far worse than whatever good the stuff might be doing.

Six months later I visited a doctor in Knightsbridge for a medical assessment in accordance with the conditions of my applying for the K1 visa by which I would emigrate to the United States. My blood pressure was fine. My cholesterol was fine. I was in perfect health, despite the doom which had been foretold back in Coventry just before Christmas.

Five years later I am subject to another medical examination, this time at my wife's place of work conducted in accordance with the wishes of whoever it is that supplies our medical insurance. I take off my shoes and stand on the scales. I am fourteen stone, which is the heaviest I remember ever having been. A nurse takes blood from my fingertip, and then I sit and await the results. After about five minutes another nurse takes me to a different room. I sit in front of a laptop, and a young woman appears on the screen. She wears a headset and has the results of my blood test in front of her. I am mystified as to why this part of the consultation can't be done right here with another human present just like in the good old days.

The woman speaks. Her voice sounds autotuned, and the words suggest a script with the customary quota of phrases deemed conducive to customer satisfaction by some focus group. She smiles far too much and talks about the two of us like we're a partnership, how we might consider refraining from emptying an entire shaker of salt over our platter every time we sit down to our daily triple-cheese lardburger.

My cholesterol is high.

My blood pressure is high.

What a fat bastard I am, and so on and so forth.

I might like to consider engaging in daily exercise, which I suppose means that the fifteen miles I've been cycling more or less every day, five days a week for the last five or six years isn't actually exercise. I should also cut down on processed food, and I have trouble working out what she even means by this given that I haven't eaten a Dairylea cheese triangle since I lived in England. I need to stop eating all those naughty but nice things which I'm not actually eating anyway, unless you count chicken fried steak at Jim's diner once every couple of months.

Screw you, Lady, I think resentfully whilst smiling and thanking her for her competitively priced time. I'm already looking forward to the online customer satisfaction survey.

It's true that I'm fourteen stone, which is the heaviest I've been; but then I'm fifty and I no longer smoke. I'm no stranger to carbohydrates, it's true; but at the same time I exercise regularly and it's not like I'm chugging Big Macs all day long, or at all for that matter. This annoys me somewhat, although I suppose my own personal call centre healthcare professional failing to suggest a course of simvastatins must count for something. I suppose I could cut down on mashed potato and pasta, but I'm reminded of my mother being advised by her doctor to avoid cheese.

'Then what would be the point in being alive?' she asked.

I could cut down on mashed potato and pasta, but I'm not going to because that's why I cycle fifteen miles a day.

As a concession I've now upped my daily ride to twenty miles, mainly because it's weird being fourteen stone and I have trousers and shirts I would like to wear again before I die; but this is as much as I'm doing because if a daily twenty mile bike ride isn't enough, then maybe I'm simply destined to be fat and there's nothing I can do about it, short of switching to a diet of food I don't want to eat.

Somehow it transpires that fifteen miles a day wasn't exercise, and yet twenty is, because I've already lost a couple of pounds

I suppose that's a good thing.

When Marian Fell over and It Was My Fault

The day is here, Saturday the 26th of November and I'm beginning to wish I hadn't mentioned this to Marian. I might have come along just with Rob, or with someone else more attuned to this kind of deal; and we would have had a great time, probably - but then Marian would want to know why I hadn't mentioned it to her, and I'm not going to tell lies, saying oh I just stayed in or whatever, not this early on. It's November, 2005 and we've been seeing each other since September. She would have torn me a new one had I kept this to myself, so I suppose it's not like I had a lot of choice.

You need to take me places to keep me interested, she'd told me as though this sort of ultimatum delivered in the unambiguous tone of a threat were a normal, healthy component of a loving relationship, as she terms our union. I get bored very easily, you see.

Also it turned out that she knew Nigel of the group Nocturnal Emissions. She had lived in the same row of squats in Lilford Road back in the eighties, back when I first started writing to him and getting my mum to make out cheques so I could buy his records. It was twenty or more years ago, and here we are now in the twenty-first century. What a small world it is.

I say she knew Nigel, although what I mean is that she apparently knew him very, very well - you might say - for a short while. At least that was what she told me with peculiar relish. I think she was trying to make me jealous, but I just found it weird. She hasn't seen him since before I left school. I on the other hand have stayed in touch with the guy, and so he told me about tonight's gig here at the Slimelight, as it's called.

It looks like it was once a factory of some kind before it was a club and music venue. I would describe it as a converted factory, except there hasn't really been much conversion. The walls and floors are brick and concrete and there's no heating, and the next day clean-up is probably performed by hose, with a broom to catch the broken glass. The place is full of dry ice and the lighting is poor. It doesn't feel at all like a place in which you would experience anything musical, and I suppose it could be argued that we don't, at least not until Nigel emerges from the fog to take the stage, but that comes later. In the meantime we are stumbling from one room to the next in search of Rob. He said he would be here. The place is full of skinheads in combat fatigues and knockery goth women of varying vintages strapped into military issue lingerie. Everyone looks stern, faces twisted with dark, industrial thoughts. It's a little intimidating.

Mentally I am attempting to assess whether Marian has grounds for complaint, because I know she's probably going to kick off quite soon. I'm not exactly sure what tells me this being as her mouth puckers like a dog's arse even when she's happy. It's like a sixth sense. I will remind her that she told me I would need to take her places in order to keep her interested without expressly stating any specific type of place; and I will remind her that we are here to see Nigel and how excited she has been at the prospect of this meeting by her own testimony; and I will make some attempt to appeal to her Bohemian tendencies. She's always going on about how great it was squatting in Camberwell, hanging out with performance artists on the front line and all that, and how we are about to experience the exact cultural opposite of The X-Factor and Stars in Their Eyes. This will be, by some definition, the real deal. Just look at that cracked concrete.

Years later I discover that she dropped out of the Slade after about six weeks, and she can't actually draw at all. She is without genuine artistic or even creative credentials beyond having briefly hung out with artists. Her native environment would probably be making tutting noises over the profiteroles at garden parties in Twickenham, which is I suppose why she's been rebelling ever since and why squatting seemed so exciting. Twenty fucking years - you would have thought that it would be time enough in which to perfect your schtick, but I guess whilst one may take the girl out of Twickers, it's another thing taking Twickers out of the girl.

We queue with the Judge Dredd extras, then we pay and go in and furnish ourselves with crap beer in plastic glasses which distort as you hold them, forcing the pissesque liquid up over the rim and onto the increasingly sticky concrete floor.

I love a party with an atmosphere.

The performers are Z'ev, Fckn'Bstrds, and Sektion B. Z'ev is doing his thing as we enter, rolling large metal objects around on the floor. The noise is terrific. I bought my first Z'ev record when I was still at school, and as I say Marian has led me to believe that she studied fine art at the Slade, so it doesn't occur to me that we, as a couple, are at any state of remove from what constitutes our comfort zone. That the first musical performance of the evening is a bloke throwing bits of metal around the room doesn't even seem worth commenting upon. Fckn'Bstrds - if they even played, and I'm not entirely sure that they did - make an electronic noise from the stage, fiddling with all of their little boxes and deafening us from behind the dry ice. Sektion B do the same but look more evil - camouflage gear and shaven heads.

'This is all a bit macho,' Marian observes during a break between screaming walls of feedback. She wrinkles her nose as though having noticed that Jonty has once again tracked dirt in from the stables.

'Yes,' I say, because I don't know what she expected. I told her it would be noisy and most likely involve a certain degree of frowning. I can recall no detail of my description which could have been misinterpreted so as to give rise to expectations of dinner jazz with a glass of white and some jolly old sandwiches.

'It's just that it's different for me,' she adds pointedly without actually referring directly to her own height. I myself am not tall, but the top of her head isn't even level with my shoulder. I guess she finds the fact of most people being taller than herself potentially intimidating, or at least this seems to have been the thrust of previous objections jabbed in the general direction of everyone else on the planet.

We encounter Rob at last, and - weirder still - Mark whom I knew at Maidstone College of Art, also twenty years earlier. Mark and I never really kept in touch, but we've run into each other at noisy events such as this gathering on a number of occasions. We can't really talk because Sektion B are deafening. I feel a little guilty seeing as Rob turned up on my invitation, and we hardly get to exchange three words during the course of the evening.

It's okay, he'll tell me a couple of days later, I knew you were with Marian and I didn't want to get in the way.

I will feel terrible, just some cunt abandoning his mates at the first sniff of anything in a skirt; but the truth is that I would rather speak to Rob or Mark. In fact I would rather not be here at all. I couldn't really care less about this noise. I couldn't really care less about seeing bands full stop. It's great when you're a teenager, but these days it's all two hour bus journeys crawling across London in the pissing rain to drink horrible overpriced beer and listen to music which sounded better on the record, ending with the horror of the night bus when it eventually turns up with its crew of angry drunken psychopaths.

Now Nocturnal Emissions are on - essentially just Nigel on stage with his laptop. The music is mostly from Collateral Salvage so it's approximately tuneful, and there are even a few people dancing. Against the odds, this small part of the club slowly begins to cheer the fuck up despite sticky concrete and freezing cold. We're standing on a packed dance floor in our coats, with gloves and woolly hats even, but at least the music is decent.

Nigel plays for about an hour, maybe a bit longer, and then  vanishes from the stage into a room at the side. Marian wants me to introduce her to Nigel.

'I thought you knew him?'

'I did, but it was a long time ago.'

Now I'm her PA, her personal assistant. We shuffle to the side of the stage, to a second doorway leading into the room containing Nigel and assorted noise musicians doubtless all busily snorting cocaine off photographs of Adolf Hitler. This second doorway is divided into two parts, upper and lower like that of a stable. I lean over and attract the attention of a passing skinhead.

'Mate, is Nigel back there?'

He effects a vague gesture, forming an excuse of some kind.

'No no,' I say. 'It's okay. He'll know who I am. Can you tell him Lawrence is here?' I'm aware that I sound like an arsehole, but I spoke to Nigel on the phone a few days ago so it seems justified. A moment later he emerges. Given that we haven't actually met in person since 1986 or whenever it was, it takes him a moment before he realises who I am; same with Marian, but the surprise is greater, a more unexpected pleasure. They stand yacking away for five or ten minutes, and I realise that I now really am just Marian's personal assistant.

How is Danny?

How is this person?

Whatever happened to so and so?

Nigel lives in Cornwall and has to leave because he's sleeping on somebody's sofa tonight. We also have to go, but first Marian needs to pee.

'Will you come with me?'

'What for?'

'Well, you know - this place...' She glances around. She is nervous. Some of these people are probably common labourers or the unemployed. Some of them might even be into drugs, and not the kind which put you in touch with the cosmos. I don't know if this is what she's thinking, but I expect it's a version of these thoughts shorn of anything directly contradicting her Bohemian self-image as being down with the working classes, black people, and the kids from the street.

'Okay,' I confirm without any trace of a sigh, at least none which could be used against me in a court of law. To be frank, I just want to get out of here. The longer we stay, the more something or other is going to be my fault. I already know that, Nigel excepted, she has hated most of the evening and is presently building up the case for the prosecution.

The toilets are suitably terrifying, more cracked concrete and splintered wood. I have to wonder if the place is legal as a venue, or whether somebody just broke in and set it up as one, except it seems unlikely given that the club has been around since at least 1994. Marian disappears into an empty cubicle and closes the door, holding it closed with her foot. I stand guard as specifically directed, watching the goths and the skinheads, reading the graffiti. I am a man hanging around in a toilet for no clear reason. I'm just following orders. I continue to admire the graffiti.

Behind me I hear the sound of Marian emerging. I begin to make some observation about that which has been written across the walls in colourful paint, but Marian is suddenly on the floor apparently having launched herself through the air. The fall looked painful. She's picking up her glasses and one of the lenses is broken. She has cut her leg and there is blood. I notice a crater in the cracked concrete just outside the cubicle from which Marian emerged, two or three inches deep and it's immediately obvious why she fell. She is spitting like a cat, violently shooing people away, goth girls stepping in to help should it be required. It isn't. She's screeching at me as though this is something I have done. I kneel down to help her up, to make sure that she is okay, and she is screaming at me. I am seriously fucking confused.

She's getting up telling me how stupid I am and how she doesn't need my help thank you very much. I have done quite enough already. I'm mentally replaying my inner CCTV footage over and over, trying to work out what I've done this time, but it's difficult to concentrate over the screeching presentation of the prosecution. I say nothing because I know any utterance of mine will now be wrong.

We get a taxi because there is no way I am standing at a bus stop for an hour in the freezing cold listening to the seemingly endless testimony of how shit I am. Why didn't I tell her that the Slimelight was a venue with massive craters in the floor? If I did not know this, then why did it not occur to me to call in advance and find out as to what sort of condition the building was in from a health and safety perspective? Why am I so stupid and selfish and why does she have to do everything herself?

Hello, I'm just calling to enquire as to whether there are any large holes in the floor of your venue. You see I'm very concerned about my girlfriend falling over.

Marian fell because I was in the way when she opened the lavatory door to effect her exit. She couldn't see and I was in the way, and she was distracted because I was talking, burbling on and on about nothing as I always do. She fell and in that moment she felt as though I didn't care, as though I was not protecting her.

I still give no answer because there is nothing I can say other than pointing out the obvious, that she is full of shit, and no way am I going there. I sit in silence in the back of the cab and take my punishment like a man. From time to time I say sorry because that seems to be what she wants to hear, although I'm pretty sure I haven't actually done anything wrong.

I am insensitive.

Marian was having the worst night anyone has ever had, and there she was pouring out her heart to me, and I said nothing for the duration of the cab ride because, as she points out, I am insensitive and selfish. Why did I not rush immediately to her aid after effectively pushing her over, causing her to fall? Where was I?

I point out that she was screaming about what an idiot I was and how it was all my fault before I even knew what was happening. I add that I am unconvinced of it being my fault, given my inabilty to control either matter or gravity in the immediate vicinity of my person by the power of mind alone. She doesn't even dignify this with a reply, and the fare costs me thirty quid.

Two hours later, she eventually concedes that she may have contributed in some small way to her own falling over in the bogs at a horrible club, and agrees that there is a lesson here, and that we could both have handled the situation better than we did.

Arse

It was Monday evening and I'd been struggling with a pain in my lower gut for most of the day. To be specific, pain should here be regarded as an overstatement, discomfort being the more accurate term. A month or so before, I'd experienced something which could be more securely identified as pain - and quite severe pain at that - in the same spot, and it was so bad that I'd ended up at the emergency medical clinic on Broadway. The doctor told me I had something called diverticulitis, prescribed codeine and antibiotics, and then sent me on my way. I stuck to the recommended diet, low fibre switching to high fibre after a few weeks. I took my medicine and everything seemed fine; and yet here I was again.

Diverticulitis results from tiny pockets developing in the wall of the lower intestine. Small items of food can become trapped in these pockets and go bad, leading to infection or worse. This was what I had, and the doctor warned me off eating anything containing small seeds. Sesame seeds seemed to be the worst. I had eaten beans on toast on Sunday evening in response to a craving, and couldn't understand why suddenly I felt unwell again after more or less a month without any trouble. One stipulation of the recommended initial low fibre diet had been the avoidance of the skin of certain vegetables, requiring for example that I peel my potatoes before boiling them. Baked beans had skins, I realised, so maybe it was that. In any case, the discomfort wasn't anything like so bad as it had been on the previous occasion, so I figured it would probably be okay. Maybe it was just good old honest indigestion.

At about eight in the evening we went back to the emergency medical clinic just in case. I would see a doctor, get another prescription for codeine and antibiotics, and everything would be fine. We sat in the waiting room for a while, my wife and myself, and then were ushered into a small room. A nurse asked me questions, took my blood pressure, and took me to have a CT scan, which was kind of unexpected. Even more unexpected was when we returned to the first room and she jabbed a massive hypodermic needle into the crook of my elbow, hooking me up to a drip of saline solution and morphine. This was something new. I was now attached to an IV buddy, a mobile stand with the bags of fluid, the tubes and so on, and I wasn't entirely sure why. This wasn't how it had happened last time.

'What do you think?'

'I don't know,' my wife told me.

The discomfort wasn't anything like so bad as it had been on the previous occasion, and yet the treatment I was receiving suggested something more serious. Furthermore, I had just discovered how much I hated hypodermic needles. I'd been inoculated plenty of times, and had of course received injections at the dentist. I imagined myself more or less without fear where needles were concerned. I now realised that this was because I'd never before been pierced by one of the big military issue fuckers tooled from sharpened lengths of steel pipe, just little pinpricks which can be ignored if you think about something else hard enough for a second or two. By way of compensation, the morphine was really beginning to kick in. I felt enveloped in psychic cotton wool, moderately euphoric, and with a renewed insight into the writing of William S. Burroughs.

'Man, this be some good shit right here,' I told Bess without any of the irony which would ordinarily have underlined such an observation. I knew the morphine and the drip meant there was a possibility of my being in serious trouble, but for the moment I didn't really mind too much.

We waited.

Eventually, as the my body metabolised the morphine - or however it works - I began to mind.

Another member of staff arrived, a woman whose name I forget played by Judith Furse who had given such a memorable performance as the evil Doctor Crow in Carry On Spying. Oddly, she was still in character. She asked me to describe my symptoms.

I began to describe my symptoms, and she started talking over me before I'd even reached the halfway point of the first sentence.

'You have diverticulitis, Mr. Burton,' she told me frostily. 'It's not just going to go away. You have it whether you like it or not, and you're going to have to take it seriously.'

I continued my statement regardless. I wasn't going to be interrupted, and certainly not by someone who had actually asked me to answer her question in the first place. Marian used to do that all the time, prompting you to speech and then speaking over you as part of some sort of passive-aggressive pissing contest. It was annoying, and I had learned to simply continue my monologue with greater force despite the interruption. Now I considered Doctor Crow's ominous warning.

You have it whether you like it or not, and you're going to have to take it seriously.

I thought back to the previous visit to the emergency medical clinic, that poor egg-headed physician stuttering his useless brainiac advice as Bess and I piled back into our hotrod.

'Whatever you say, Poindexter!' I had laughed, slamming a cassette of Link Wray's Rumble into the tape deck and spitting out a demonstrative mouthful of Wild Turkey. I turned to my wife. 'Hit the gas, baby. Let's go get us some sesame seeds and 'tater skins.'

But now I would have to take my diverticulitis seriously.

'Maybe if someone would actually tell me what the problem is,' I suggested pointedly. No-one had yet delivered anything resembling a verdict on why I should require a saline drip, morphine, or CT scan, much less whether anything had been revealed by the same.

Doctor Crow responded with further bewildering admonishments regarding the severity of my condition, whilst leaving said condition still entirely unquantified, and then she left the room. As the door was briefly opened I caught a snatch of conversation between two other members of staff, one of them being the man who had talked me through the CT scan. It sounded like something had popped, and I picked up the words trailing fat. My mind's eye formed a picture of a diverticule resembling a tiny burst balloon leaking blobs of liquefied bacon rind into the surrounding region of my abdomen.

Thankfully this wasn't what had happened, as the next nurse to arrive explained, but it was something which might happen in which case I would be in serious trouble. She began to discuss hospitals.

'I'm not going home tonight?' I still couldn't square this - whatever it was that was happening - with the fact of my not actually being in any serious amount of pain, as I had been on the previous occasion.

'You're fine at the moment,' she told me, 'but you should probably go into hospital as a precaution in case it gets any worse.'

Shit.

I'd never been in hospital, not as a patient, and certainly not staying overnight. This was all very unexpected, and it was difficult to know what to think.

'The ambulance will be about forty minutes. Do you need to get anything from home?'

'Ambulance?' Bloody hell. I shared a look with my wife. 'Can't we just drive there.'

The nurse went back out to consult with Doctor Crow, then returned to tell us that it would be okay. She removed my drip, and I sat in the waiting room as my wife went home to pick up a few things - my diary, toothbrush, and something to read during my stay. As we left, Doctor Crow looked up from securing Kenneth Williams to a conveyor belt, bisected at halfway along its length by a huge circular saw. She smiled. 'You will be seeing Doctor Narvaez,' she told me. 'He is a great doctor. You will like him.'

'Okay,' I said, trying to work out whether she had failed to understand that we were enemies, or whether she understood it very well, and this new, friendlier tone was simply part of some strategy.

What a strange woman. How the hell did she know whether or not I was going to like the guy? How did she know that Narvaez and myself would not both perish, locked together in a fight to the death with lasers on the airless surface of some distant asteroid, our dying moments shared like dancers in some fatal ballet? Could she claim to see the future?

We drove to North East Methodist, and then spent ten minutes looking for signs of life. It was approaching midnight, and only the emergency admissions desk was still manned. After the traditional round of filling in yet more forms with the same information I had already submitted five or six times - the sort of thing you might imagine would have become unnecessary since the advent of information technology - I was dressed in one of those gowns which leaves one's arse exposed, and settled into a room. There were two beds in the room, but the other remained unoccupied during my stay, so I took the bed next to the window and was afforded a good view of the most spectacular storms to hit Texas since I moved here. A succession of different nurses came and went, asking more of the same questions, probing an agonising succession of major veins and arteries before eventually finding one in my hand which would be good for the drip.

Next day I was back on the clear liquid diet I'd been obliged to endure back in March. Bess brought her laptop in and worked at my bedside. I dozed, failed to enjoy a collection of Graham Greene short stories, and watched crap television - mostly peoples' court shows in which network appointed judges arbitrate disagreements between different groups of tattooed losers who either owe each other money or want their cars back; but I also found time to catch up with El Chavo, an eye-watering Mexican sitcom in which tiny argumentative children are played by adults in kinderwear with freckles drawn on their faces. The humour is based mainly on the premise of it being funny when people fall over or are hit in the face with a frying pan. It's like a more nightmarish version of the Benny Hill show, but all in screeching Spanish.

Eventually the fabled Doctor Narvaez turned up, and uncannily I found that I really did like him. I told him about my previous bout of diverticulitis, the low fibre diet and so on.

He pulled a face and waved a dismissive hand. 'I have my doubts as to whether any of that makes any difference,' he said. 'The jury is still out on much of this. It seems better just to remember what foods give you trouble, and then don't eat them.'

I recalled a recent indigestive flare-up immediately following the consumption of a burger bun from which I couldn't be bothered to scrape the sesame seeds. I decided that the Narvaez version rang more true than the previous advice I had been given.

Next day I was on solid but bland food, extended even to overcooked brisket and broccoli - a terrible choice for someone suffering from diverticulitis according to my earlier understanding. I ate with pleasure, having previously resigned myself to nothing but apple juice and broth for at least three days; and I experienced no ill effects.

The second evening came, and the head nurse returned to admonish me about my failure to follow her directive. She had showed me a pair of sleeves made of some material. These were to be fitted over my lower legs before I went to sleep in order to prevent blood clots.

'Blood clots!?'

'Yes, blood clots,' and she began to describe the clotting process as though I had never heard of such a thing.

'Wait. Am I at any serious risk of having blood clots form in my legs? Is this something associated with diverticulitis?'

She didn't seem to understand the question, only that I should do as told. She began to tell me about circulation.

'I'm forty-nine,' I said. 'I cycle fifteen miles a day. I think my circulation is probably okay, unless you know something that I don't.'

She didn't seem to understand this either.

I had spent the night either sweating or shivering because I found the bed uncomfortable and the air conditioning never seemed to be quite as I would have wanted. It was difficult to sleep as it was, even without nurses waking me up at 4.00AM so as to make sure I'd been sleeping properly, or to take a blood sample, or to ask whether I'd done a poo yet. I wasn't going to swathe my legs in something hot and uncomfortable as preventative to something which wasn't going to happen anyway.

Next evening, the same head nurse made an indulgent tutting noise. 'We've been a naughty boy,' she said, explaining that I would not be able to wriggle out of it for a second evening. No-one was dying of poor circulation on her watch.

I said nothing, but apparently projected a field of ambient hostility of such strength as to prevent her from further pushing the issue.

By Thursday I was deemed out of risk and well enough to return home. An orderly conveyed me to the exit in a wheelchair because patients aren't allowed to make the trip from bed to parking lot under their own steam.

'This is for legal reasons, right?'

He chuckled. 'Once you've made it outside, whatever happens to you out there is your problem.'

That seemed to be the end of it, barring a colonoscopy about a month later, the duration of which I spent under general anaesthetic. Nothing was found beyond a single small polyp - which I should probably have looked at in another five years - and that the offending diverticule is very small, and that my colon is otherwise so clean that you could probably eat your dinner off it.

So there you go.