A Day in the Life of the Global Pandemic

Somewhere there will be a diary kept during the second world war in which the average entry reads, still no oranges in the shops, think I might go for a walk a bit later. The current coronavirus pandemic arguably constitutes the single event to have the greatest, most tangible impact on humanity since the second world war, and I've suddenly noticed how dull my own nightly diary entries seem, or at least how potentially dull they will most likely seem to future generations, assuming there are any; Thursday the 2nd of April, for example:

I managed to cycle twenty miles just before the rain set in. Apparently we have five or six days of rain, so that may be my cycling for the week. I guess we'll see. Bess sewed masks. I wrote and edited an MP3 of Bukowski*. We got a take out from Shake Shack yet again, but somehow it wasn't as good. Eddie of Little & Large snuffed it. This is the first pandemic where I've noticed celebrities dying. Having finished The Wire, we watched the first of season three of Ozark. I'm afraid I found it a bit incomprehensible.

Unfortunately for the sake of both dramatic tension and future warnings from history, our current global pandemic hasn't made a whole lot of difference to me. I was never particularly social, so the main points of adjustment have been 1) that my steady mail order supply of eighties comic books has temporarily dried up, 2) that Bess and myself are no longer able to dine out, as we would ordinarily do on Thursdays and Saturdays, and 3) that I have to wear a mask.

Additionally, Bess has been working from home since January, the company having decided to save money on costly office space; and the boy now attends virtual school conducted through the internet at his grandmother's house, and specifically at his grandmother's house because she used to be a school teacher and is as such qualified to apply scholastic pressure when necessary. Bess has also been making face masks, averaging around one-hundred a day, giving them away to whoever should need them, requests from hospitals and nursing homes, that sort of thing. I tried one but the elastic hurt my ears after a while, so instead I cover my face with a bandana, which is more comfortable and hopefully implies gang affiliation, or at least that I'm no stranger to narcocorrido music - anything to keep idiots at a distance, not due to any specific fear of coronavirus, but mostly because I dislike idiots. I'm surprised we haven't seen more convenience store robberies given that it's now possible to wear a mask in broad daylight without anyone giving you a second glance.

I've still been cycling to McAllister Park each day, at least during the week, a round trip of twenty miles which doesn't really bring me into close contact with anyone.

Shopping hasn't been much of a problem given that our household gets through toilet paper at a fairly average rate, and we've seen no need to stockpile four-million additional rolls in the garage. The boy, as he approaches seventeen, seems to be turning into Zippy the Pinhead, exhibiting a peculiar fixation with television advertising while favouring a diet of instant crap which the rest of us tend to avoid unless it's the end of the world and that's all we have left in our bunker - Ramen noodles, Kraft Mac & Cheese, and so on. These have been in short supply, but he's managed somehow. There was one strange week where no-one had any onions, but luckily I had a few already in the fridge. This is as close as I've come to hoarding.

There has so far been one day on which I had to queue for five minutes before being allowed into the local supermarket, allowing them to keep the numbers down so as to facilitate social distancing. The most annoying aspect of this came next day when there was no queue. I asked the security guard if he wanted me to start a new queue, and I had to ask five fucking times before he understood. This turns out to be because Americans don't recognise queue as a word, instead preferring the verb to stand in line.

Now I only stand in line to wait for an available cashier, a practice implemented by the supermarket so as to prevent us all squashed up and breathing on each other in the vicinity of the tills. It's hardly a massive inconvenience, aside from the awkward eventuality of finding myself directed to tills I would ordinarily avoid, specifically the two worked by members of staff whom I've found disagreeable in the past. I was herded to the till worked by the woman with Karl Malden's nose only two days ago, for example. I stood six feet away from the woman then being served. Once she'd paid up, she walked away and I took her place.

'Sir,' said Karl Malden's nose lady, 'you have to stand at the end of the conveyor belt when I'm serving a customer.'

'Yes,' I said, 'that's why I was standing over there,' - I pointed - 'at the end of the conveyor belt when you were serving that woman who just left.'

Every time I've been to the till of Karl Malden's nose lady, there's always a problem. It's hard to not take it personally. On one occasion she kept all of my purchases at her end of the belt after scanning, with me stood at the other end twiddling my thumbs, unable to pack anything into my bag. I could only assume she thought I was going to do a runner.

Try telling that to those people who lived through the Holocaust.

The inconvenience of life during the global pandemic has been, to me, so barely significant as to be hardly worth mentioning - aside from here in the context of illustrating how little point there would be in mentioning it. Social distancing is easily achieved in our part of Texas. The death toll for Bexar county stands at twenty-four at the time of writing, more than half of those from the same nursing home on the south side. This is after a month of this thing, nearly a month of masks and closed diners and all the other measures, a month during which other counties and other states have been hit much, much worse. Prophets of online doom inevitably predict that one morning we'll wake up in a scene from 28 Days Later which will somehow serve us right, but I'm so accustomed to the barrage of fear that I've stopped noticing it, and have instead continued to worry about more immediately tangible problems such as how long it will be before I can resume buying up all those back issues of Alpha Flight.

I know this thing is terrible, and that it's real, and yes I'm taking it absolutely seriously; but at the end of the day - as the footballing cliché goes - it's not actually bubonic plague. For once I'm lucky enough to be in a position where a global catastrophe isn't having much direct or immediate effect on me; and having once spent at least twenty years of my life at the mercy of Darwinian economics and accordingly shitting myself as to what tomorrow might bring on an at least weekly basis, it's quite nice to have nothing much worth writing about in my dairy. I'm fairly sure there were plenty of people already leading miserable existences before we all had to start wearing masks, but apparently it's only the end of the world when it impacts upon people who've worked hard, paid their mortgages, and who therefore deserve better.

*: For the sake of clarity, this sentence aspires to report that I engaged in writing in addition to editing a sound file of a reading by the poet, Charles Bukowski rather than describing a single undertaking.

From the Cheese Cave to the End of Days

'My friend Jeremy will be in Dallas,' Bess said. 'We need to go.'

'We need to go to Dallas?'

'Yes. He has a one man show. The cats will be okay for one night and I haven't seen him in ages.'

'He has a one man show?'

'Yes, and it's in Dallas.'

'Despite our having been married for eight years, this is the first time you've ever mentioned anyone called Jeremy.'

'It is?'

'Yes, and that's why I have certain reservations as to the urgency of this proposed visit to Dallas even before we get to your use of the term one man show.'

'We've been friends for ages, since we were at school. I can't believe I've never mentioned him.'

'Well, maybe you have, but I already have a friend called Jeremy and it's not a very common name in my experience so I'm sure I would have noticed your mention of this additional Jeremy.'

'Well, we need to go to Dallas.'

'For a one man show?'

'Yeah. I don't know. It could be awful, but I have to see him. Even if it's really bad, it will still be exciting to go. We can visit Dealey Plaza.'

'Can't I just stay here? That way we won't have to worry about the cats. I hate leaving them on their own overnight. You should go and meet your friend and have fun.'

In the end we reach a compromise because Bess is similarly uncomfortable with the thought of leaving the cats unattended. We're going to set out early in the car, see Jeremy's one man show, then drive back the same day. It will be a long time spent on the highway, but we did it back in 2013 when we drove to Fort Worth to see a baby elephant then recently born at the local zoo. It's a bit of a hike, but we've done it before.

We leave at around nine. By ten we're already passing through Austin, which seems weird. Austin is usually to be found at the conclusion of a long road trip, but the travel time has passed more quickly on this occasion with Austin now marking off just one segment of a greater distance.

Bess explains how she first encountered Jeremy during a school trip to Washington DC. The trip brought together kids from all across the country rather than from any one specific school, and she and Jeremy were in the same hotel. They hit it off immediately and have kept in touch ever since.

The next major conurbation through which we pass following Austin is Temple. I look at the map and deduce that we should be in Dallas shortly after midday. We've been on the road since nine, it's now eleven, and Temple isn't far short of Waco which looks like two thirds of the total distance to me. We've been listening to a CD of a lecture by Howard Zinn entitled Stories Hollywood Never Tells, about political bias in the movie industry. Andy Martin gave me the CD many years ago and I recall having once found it interesting and enlightening. We tend to listen to either spoken word or stand up comedy on our road trips, and Howard Zinn seemed like a good choice as I hadn't heard the thing in a long, long time. Unfortunately, whilst I continue to sympathise with Zinn's general position, he pauses and mutters and doesn't seem to speak well in public, and there are a whole string of movies conveying anti-establishment, anti-war, or otherwise left-leaning messages to refute his theory; which leaves him sounding like your archetypal whining snowflake - as I believe is the current nominative - and this is a realisation which places me in the company of your archetypal whining Trumpanzee, which is awkward. Bess feels the same so we eject the disc.

Approaching Waco, we begin to notice billboards advertising the Cheese Cave.

'The what?' Bess asks, having missed the billboard.

'It's a cave, probably one of the old mine shafts where they used to dig for cheese,' I propose.

'We need to go there.'

Traffic slows as we come into Waco.

'We could just go to the Cheese Cave and tell Jeremy the traffic was too bad,' I suggest.

'I'm tempted.'

We crawl along, idly making an assessment of the city of Waco based on what can be seen from the highway. We already know they have a Cheese Cave. They also seem to have something to do with a mammoth. Inevitably we get onto the subject of David Koresh and whether or not the city has chosen to remember him with a statue, or at least a blue plaque. Realistically we both know that a theme park would be expecting too much.

By now, we're both hungry. We make several attempts to dine at branches of Cracker Barrel, an eating establishment dedicated to the dining requirements of crackers such as ourselves, but it's Father's Day so the parking lots are all crammed and with lines of customers trailing out of the entrance awaiting seating. We settle for Heitmiller Steakhouse, and Bess takes the opportunity to learn more of the Cheese Cave by reading about it through the agency of her phone. Apparently it's a store selling all sorts of cheese, so we definitely need to go there at some point.

Duly fed and watered, we return to the road. Dallas, when we arrive about an hour later, reminds me of Austin. At least the city centre has the same look about it, which I didn't expect. I think of this as being my third trip to this locality, but the two previous visits were actually to Fort Worth, the neighbouring conurbation which I've tended to regard as being simply west Dallas, at least up until now.

Dallas, the TV show, was pretty big when I was a kid growing up in England. Its influence was such as to have impacted upon the language of myself and my peers, specifically in the coining of a verb, to do a Dallas. Holding two slats of a window blind apart with one's fingers whilst peering out at an approaching visitor, perhaps with a look of suspicion forming upon one's face, was doing a Dallas. I seem to recall that Sue Ellen Ewing spent quite a lot of screen time doing a Dallas, and presume that's where it came from. It seems that I must have watched Dallas, and enough so as to negate the need for anyone to have explained the verb to me, but it was a long time ago and all I can otherwise remember are grassy plains, skyscrapers, and big hats. So this is, after all, a new thing for me.

We pass what curiously resembles a British pub, then find ourselves at Theatre Three. Jeremy's one man show will be performed in the basement, in a subsidiary venue wittily named Theatre Too, and we're here with twenty minutes to spare, which seems like good timing. We purchase drinks in special theatrical sippy cups from a goth wearing a Church of Satan pendant, then head downstairs.

Jeremy sees us in the queue - which isn't too surprising given that the queue comprises just Bess and myself - and is overjoyed that we've made it. Introductions are effected, breeze is shot, and I am relieved to realise that he's a nice guy. This is because my wife is disinclined to befriend arseholes.

The show, which is called Keeping Up With the Jorgensons, isn't well attended, just five or six of us for whatever reason, but is nevertheless an exceptional performance of a wonderful piece of writing. Jeremy spends an hour talking us through the events of a road trip taken with his father when he was a kid. It's both hilarious and horrifying, and most impressive is that I somehow forget I'm watching one man playing all of the parts - himself as a kid, his father, grandfather, neighbours and others; all are brought to life in detail so agonisingly plausible that you can almost smell the booze and the foot odour. It's exhausting to watch, but in a good way.

The hour is up. Jeremy comes out to take a bow, seemingly unconcerned by the poor turnout, and Bess and I get back on the road. The woman who sold us our tickets said something about a tornado warning, which is worrying. Back upstairs, we stare from the theatre doors at a Biblical deluge where before there was sun. We were going to take a look at Dealey Plaza, but this changes things; and Jeremy was supposed to be heading off to the airport to catch his flight immediately after the performance, so it probably changes things for him too. We run for the car, having reasoned that it may get worse, and maybe we can get ourselves out of Dallas before it hits.

It takes less than a minute to get to the car but we are both soaked by heavy blobs of rainfall sluicing from the heavens. We drive cautiously around Dallas, back onto the highway. The streets empty as everyone else takes cover. The sky darkens and we hear thunder. Visibility drops and the vehicle in front reduces to red lights in the dark grey haze of noisy water.

Back at Theatre Too, the woman selling tickets showed us the animated weather forecast, horizontal waves moving west across Dallas and Fort Worth. It looked as though we would be okay south of the city, with the storm proposed to hit Waco no sooner than 6.30PM, and it's only just gone four. I try hard to keep from visualising our car sucked up into the sky.

The rain eases a little and the sky brightens, but the roads are still slick with water and the car hydroplanes across the highway from time to time. Bess grips the wheel and drives slowly.

'It looks okay up ahead,' I suggest.

'Yes,' she says, 'once we're clear of the city…'

The sky darkens, thunder cracks, the rain renews its efforts, and this happens over and over for the next hundred miles or so. Sometimes we even see a thin stretch of blue running along the horizon or hit a dry patch of highway allowing us to go a little faster, but then I look away and when I turn back the storm has somehow revived itself. Lightning flashes, our wheels lose traction, and golfball hailstones batter the car, on and off for the next couple of hours, all the way through Waco, and then Temple. At one point a lightning bolt strikes a light pole about fifty feet away, so quick and loud it makes us both jump. The light at the top of the pole seems to explode and it resembles a special effect.

It's after six as we approach Austin, with more and more blue sky somewhere ahead of us. We're hungry so we stop in at a Cracker Barrel, reasonably confident that it will have cleared by the time we've eaten. We eat and the rain is harder than ever as we once again run for the car.

We drive slow, and eventually it no longer feels as though we're driving through the Biblical end of days, and it's after nine by the time we get home. We survived, and next time we'll go looking for that Cheese Cave.

Holi

It's Saturday afternoon and we're heading for something called Holi. This was Bess's idea. Holi is a traditional Hindu festival celebrating the arrival of spring, amongst other things. Bess has a number of co-workers from India and Nepal, and one of them told her about it. Having previously lived in Coventry - which enjoys a substantial Asian presence - I'm a little surprised that I myself have never heard of it.

'They throw paint at each other,' Bess explains.

I called my mother earlier in the day, it being her birthday. I told her we would be going to a Holi celebration.

'That's the one where they throw paint at each other,' she said.

We leave around two, taking the kid along because it sounds messy and therefore the sort of thing he will probably enjoy; plus it will be good to scrape him off the screen for a couple of hours.

Bess follows directions on her smartphone, leading us to what resembles a scout hut lost somewhere in the leisurely tangle of San Antonio's suburbs. There is a stall set up next to the hut, although we can't tell what goods are on offer, and there are just three other people here, one of whom is of either Indian or Latino ancestry. Our source seemed to think it would all be kicking off around two, but this was apparently an optimistic estimate.

We go home, then return around four. This time the roads are crammed, and there's a cop waving vehicles on towards the associated parking lot. We're at a crawl, so Bess drives off elsewhere, two, three streets away until we find a place to park. It's outside someone's home but hopefully they won't mind seeing as all their neighbours also have stranger's cars lined up along their stretch of road. We get out and walk.

Figures approach from the other end of the street. The first is a guy covered from head to foot in bright primary colours. It's a peculiar sight and he smiles because it's funny.

Once, as a student, I was on the way to some house party in a neighbouring village with my friend Carl, who began to describe a scenario in which bewildered figures emerge from the fog ahead of us, blackened faces with their clothes still smoking. This, he explained, would indicate that we were about to attend the greatest house party of all time. I've honestly never been wild about house parties, but the image has stayed with me and I am reminded of it right now. Rainbow coloured survivors stagger towards us and we can hear twangy Indian pop music in the distance. This is not what you expect to see in some average urban street. It's like the polychromatic Bollywood version of that zombie apocalypse you always hear about.

'I guess we missed it,' I say, basing this on our being the only people heading towards the noise. When we get there, it's obvious that I was wrong. Things are just beginning to get going.

There's a field behind the building I assumed to be a scout hut. The building is actually the center for the India Association of San Antonio, and the field is packed with people of all colours. By all colours I mean blue, green, purple, yellow, orange, red and so on, and the air is full of similarly hued dust clouds as everyone pelts each other with handfuls of powdered paint. The field is most likely additionally packed with people of all colours in terms of ethnicity, but it's no longer possible to tell with most of them, excepting a few in traditional Hindu dress.

There were many people of Indian descent around the places where I lived in England, and I found that I missed them when I moved to San Antonio. We have people from India in San Antonio, but they don't seem quite such a visible presence. Bess tells me that their numbers tend to be concentrated around the medical center and University of Texas campus in the north-east part of the city. Amongst her former colleagues was one Dr. Ramamurthy, mother of the actor Sendhil Ramamurthy, best known for his role in the television series Heroes.

There are a couple of decent Indian restaurants, notably the wonderful Tandoor Palace on the Wurzbach Road, but outside of such places, I no longer see Indian people in large groups; which is partially why it's so nice to be here at this festival. I'm not sure I even realised I'd missed this sort of thing, although that is perhaps an inevitable reaction for someone living in a different land to the one in which they were born.

Bess wanders off and finds the stall selling the bags of paint. She returns with four or five and hands a couple to the boy. I decline because I think I would feel weird chucking paint at strangers. Strangers, on the other hand, feel less reticent about chucking paint at me. My assailant grins and springs off to bombard someone else, and I'm trying not to laugh because it's funny and stupid, and there's something cheery about it; and I'm aware that my attempts to clear bright purple powder from my face duplicate those of Oliver Hardy as he blinks haplessly from the screen, his hair white with brick dust.

Another couple of minutes and none of us are the same colour as when we arrived, which is apparently the point. The paint sets everyone on an equal footing, and in the end we are all the same, equally ridiculous.

Junior goes off to buy more paint.

I'm tempted to dance, but I'm still a little fearful it will be the white guy dance, like I'm someone's dad at a wedding. The music is mostly what I think of as bhangra, or at least what I associate with Bollywood - modern beats rooted in Indian tradition. There's a group of young people dancing in a circle, some barefoot, and presumably Indian judging by the sandals, a couple of topknots and the raw energy of their moves. This clearly isn't their first rodeo, as we say around these parts and, reminded of just where I am - it's wonderful to be outside at some large celebration without the barbecue smoke or country & autotune wailing away in our ears.

I watch the dancers, envious.

We spend an hour or more, just soaking it all up, gradually changing colour as wave after wave of paint hits us. If the object of the celebration seems unclear, at least to me, it doesn't seem to matter. Eventually a bonfire is set alight  at the center of the field in reference to the burning of Holika, the sister of the demon king, from which comes the name of this part of the festival. We all watch the flames and savour the smoke, and it feels as though we've all come through something important together.

Craft Unfair

Okay, I say to myself in unconscious homage to Henry Rowland, this time for real. It's our second crack at selling stuff from a stall, and we're feeling confident. We're nothing if not prepared.

Two weeks ago my wife and myself did our first craft fair, which was at an old people's home in Boerne. No-one came and we didn't sell much. Now we're at a bimonthly farmers and artisans market on the southside, which seems more promising. It's a regular event, the weather is good, and there are already more people here than were at our previous outing, maybe three times the head count of vendors and mostly the real thing - no thrift store clowns painted dayglo to be seen, at least not yet.

The place is outside, a drive-in cinema during the evening, thus necessitating some sort of canopy beneath which Bess and myself can set up shop. Luckily it turned out that we already had one, bought five or six years before when I found it cheap in the local supermarket. The original idea was that I could set it up and weed the garden in the shade on particularly hot days, but the setting up was more laborious than I'd anticipated, so I put it all together, took it down, then shoved it in the garage and forgot about it. Earlier in the week, I had a look for the thing, then set it up in our garden once more by way of a dry run for today. The canopy is a sheet of something artificial stretched over a lightweight frame of tubular struts. I spent about forty-five minutes failing to assemble the frame. Each time I poked the end of one tube into another, the whole thing shifted and a tube at the other end popped out. There was quite a lot of swearing, until - following my finally bothering to look at the instructions - it dawned on me that one is supposed to construct the roof support, then pull the covering over it so as to hold everything in place before attempting to attach the legs. Armed with this new information, I was able to erect the thing in about fifteen minutes without too much difficulty. One of the tubes now had a kink in it but seemed to hold up okay. The kink came from when I hurled it across the garden whilst shouting bollocks following the millionth occurrence of it having disconnected itself from a neighbour, so the struts are probably made from aluminium foil, or maybe the wrappers of 1970s chocolate bars.

I left the canopy standing overnight. The guy ropes had come out next morning, causing the whole structure to lean. I replaced the original tent pegs - or whatever the fuck you call those things - with gardening staples, which are U-shaped and much tougher, after which the canopy stayed up for another two nights without giving any indication of being about to explode, catch fire, collapse or whatever. I took this all to be a good omen, despite my having invented at least three new swear words during my initial attempt to raise the thing. I also chose to ignore the omen of Grace, one of our cats, peeing on the  sheet of covering material as I was engaged with slotting the tubes together. She backed up, raised her tail, and just let rip. The plastic material yielded quite a lot of noise when hit by this jet of liquid and Grace looked pleased. That's what I think of your shit canopy, she seemed to be saying.

Once again I've made sandwiches, a ton of pasta salad and filled a couple of flasks with iced tea, and here we are. We unload the car and dump it all next to the pitch of a guy selling wares in patriotic red, white and blue, wooden letters spelling out the word mom and so on. It's kind of windy, which you only really notice when trying to assemble what is effectively a massive kite, but we get there, albeit with some swearing; and then come to mooring it all down with garden staples, simultaneous to my gaining new insight into just how hard Texas soil can be after baking under a hot sun month after month. I hurt my fingers trying to push the things into the earth. I may as well be attempting to push nails into concrete, so it necessitates some swearing.

'Fuck this,' I hear myself saying. 'Let's go home.'

'Here.' Our neighbour comes over. He's taken pity on us because I expect it's obvious that we're new to this game. He has a couple of bright red saddle bags and he ties one to each of the guy ropes I've been unable to secure. 'These bags were cheap at the dollar store,' he tells us. 'I fill them with sand. You can get the sand at Lowes.'

I pick up one of the bags then place it back down. It's pretty heavy, so I get to work on my display frames. I've made them myself, and it took a few weeks - wooden beams no longer than four foot so as to fit in the car, holes drilled so I can bolt them all together like Meccano. Usually each would stand seven foot tall, but the canopy won't allow for such height, so instead of one frame upon which I would display twelve canvases, I have two four foot frames holding six canvases each, one set up at either side of our pitch. Each frame has holes in the feet through which I can drive tent pegs so as to keep them from blowing over, except I have the same problem with the guy ropes, and I can't ask our neighbour for more sandbags. In the end, each frame gets two pegs each, one front, one back, and even these I haven't been able to drive all of the way in. The frames rock back and forth in the wind every so often.

Between the frames we have the table upon which Bess sets up her stones and other things she has painted. We also have a couple of folding chairs. At length we're sort of ready and all we have to do is wait for the crowds. Some vendors are still arriving and setting up, so I guess we've done all right.

We sit and wait, watching the shadow of the canopy creep across the grass at the front of our pitch. We realise we're sat in full Texas sun, and that we should have set up facing south. It's going to be a hot fucking day. The wind keeps us sort of cool, and if things are flapping a little in the breeze, we should be okay.

'Did you see the other guy's paintings?' Bess asks. She points down the line, past our helpful neighbour to another pitch selling canvases.

'I'm going to have a look around,' I tell her.

I cross the field to the screen of the drive-in, a peculiar deco construct painted sky blue on the far side. This side is a curved wall with a raised concrete stage at its base. It reminds me of the sound mirrors along the Kentish coast, back in England. Facing the screen is our semicircle of pitches, thirty or forty stalls selling all manner of stuff. There are houseplants and cacti, and the homegrown vegetables - potatoes, squashes, and peppers - look pretty good. Then there's the usual jewellery, the obligatory and puzzling presence of an insurance company, or possibly someone selling double-glazing, and of course wooden toys, some hardware. Two other stalls sell painted canvases. One features mostly views of the Alamo, technically competent but probably reliant upon how much you like the Alamo. One of their pictures is on sale for $200, which makes me feel good because my paintings are cheaper and - I would like to think - more interesting.

The next stall features canvas renderings of Harley Quinn, the Joker, Batman, various superheroes and cartoon characters, and nebulously identified Aztec rulers copied from what were probably illustrated children's books. The colours are bold, but otherwise it's ugly and amateurish, and is as such a further boost to my confidence in the worth of my own work.

Having walked the full circle, I'm back at our pitch.

'How was it?'

'Mostly pretty good,' I say. 'Better than Boerne.'

'I'll have a look around in a bit.'

'You should.'

The punters begin to arrive, hardly a tsunami, but we nevertheless experience more interest during the first thirty minutes than we had for the entire day at the retirement home. This seems encouraging. Bess sells two painted rocks, and everyone seems to like my canvases. One woman additionally notes that, ranging from $60 to $40 based on how much I'd personally be prepared to pay, they seem reasonably priced; although she isn't buying.

We sit. We wait. My pictures sway in the wind.

An old guy with a soft voice and the biggest ears I've ever seen tells us how he himself was once a painter. He likes my work. We both know he's not buying but we don't mind because he seems such a nice guy.

'Did you see those ears?'

'I couldn't really miss them,' Bess says.

'What did he say anyway? I was trying to listen to his story but I kept thinking about his ears. You know that your ears supposedly never stop growing for as long as you live?'

'It was distracting,' she agrees.

'He must have been about three-hundred.'

The wind steps it up a notch. Out tablecloth flaps but is kept in place by the weight of the painted rocks. The sun is really punishing on our backs and the tops of our heads, but the piped music coming from a speaker set up near the stage is mostly old blues records,  some bluegrass and Tejano - an improvement on the autotuned stadium country we had piped all day at the old folks' home.

'This is still preferable to Boerne,' I say, and the wind gets a little stronger. We watch the canopy shift restlessly for another half hour, interspersed by conversations with people who don't buy anything.

Suddenly the canopy is leaning. One of the guy ropes has popped out, the one at my back. Its opposite sags accordingly.

'Fuck's sake.'

I stand and another gust hits my canvases on the frame to the right, twisting them forward and snapping the wooden beam to which they are secured. The whole structure seems suddenly drunk.

'Bloody hell!'

'It'll be okay!' Bess rushes forward in an attempt to set things right, but there's really nothing she can do.

'I think I've just about had enough.'

I loosen the clamps holding my paintings to the broken wood, because I'm going to take these canvases back to the car, having nothing on which to display them. I find I am also stacking up the paintings from the undamaged frame without having consciously decided to do so. I can't sit in the blistering heat wondering whether the wind is going to screw it all up for us, not all afternoon, not for another three hours. A great deal of preparation went into this and it seems as though it has been in vain. This undertaking has felt like one of those dreams in which you're back at school without trousers.

'It's okay,' I tell Bess. 'I'm just packing up my stuff. We don't have to leave.'

She's already wrapping up her rocks and placing them back in the travel bag. I feel awkward, as though I've ruined it.

We're giving up, even though it's only noon.

'This was only forty dollars,' our helpful neighbour tells us as we cast envious glances at his canopy, a sturdier affair than ours, steel bars and springs which collapse down to something that fits in the trunk, and which can be assembled in minutes - as we've seen because everyone else has the same type of canopy.

It turns out that Grace was right.

Next time will be better, we tell ourselves as we drive home to our air conditioning.

Home School

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where do you even start?

What the fuck is wrong with people?

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

As I arrive home, I hear from my wife.

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

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

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

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

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