Bad to Worse

Bill Edney, my landlord, died at King's College Hospital, Camberwell on Monday the 26th of June, 2006. He'd been admitted for treatment the previous week following a fall in which he broke his hip. I'd grown close to the old bugger since moving into his basement flat ten years earlier so I was going to miss him, and above all I knew I was screwed. I had paid fifty pounds a week for the flat when I first moved in, and since that time it had gone up by a mere tenner because Bill owned the house and hadn't really needed the money. Even if I could find something in the same price range, I already knew it would be about the size of a cigar box. London was getting expensive.

'Immigrants?' someone once asked with lurid anticipation as I related the story, although it was really more of a proposal than a question, made in anticipation of my nodding my head sadly, thus allowing him to expand further on the subject of not being a racist but...

The real problem was gentrification, white people with too much money driving up the cost of living, forcing the rest of us out of the places which had been our homes all of our lives, or most of our lives, or long enough for it to feel that way.

Resigning myself to the fact that I would have to pay more to live somewhere which wasn't as nice, I started looking even as those remembered in the will did their best to extract me like a bad tooth. Whilst alive, Bill had explained how his will stipulated that I would continue living in the basement flat, but people always find a way when there's an inheritance to be had.

One day in October I came home to find a sign nailed to a post in the front garden announcing that the entire house would be up for auction at the end of the month. This was followed a few days later by a letter from John Buckley, a solicitor who told me that as I had no written rent agreement, I had two weeks in which to fuck off elsewhere. Strangers began to knock on my door asking to come in and have a look around my flat in preface to bidding. They referred to my dwelling as the property and spoke to me as though we were equal partners, somehow working together to have my ass turfed out on the street. Unfortunately for John Buckley, I actually did have a written, signed and dated rent agreement, which he would have known had he bothered to ask.

I sought advice from the housing department at my local council. They told me that it was all highly illegal and that I should stay put for the moment.

I hadn't sought advice from Marian, my girlfriend at the time, but she had taken to dispensing it regardless. She seemed to think it a bit of an adventure, perhaps seeing herself as an older, stumpier Ally McBeal. She had been born to wealth and privilege in Twickenham and had accordingly spent most of her life in active rebellion against these aspects of her own existence. She would often tell me about the time she'd lived in a squat in Camberwell. She knew all about housing problems. She'd helped her fellow squatters fill in forms. She knew all about it. She'd lived on the front line. She'd helped those people because - oh dear - well, they had been a bit thick, some of them, truth be told - dreadfully naive; lovely people but not awfully bright, it has to be said.

Since September of the previous year, I'd been Marian's latest project. She was saving me from myself, and this would simply expand her work into other areas of my existence.

'Who signed this?' she asks me with storm clouds gathering as she studies my rent agreement. She has bad news but she requires that I play along so it can be delivered with full dramatic impact.

I look at the signatures - my own and that of Florence Edney, my landlady. I've spent most of this week in a state of shock. I'm a rabbit caught in headlights.

'That's Flo's signature.'

'What about Bill's signature?' she asks in the tone of someone who just can't get the staff, her impatience with me growing to boiling point.

I realise he didn't sign the rent agreement. It was ten years ago and Flo looked after that side of things when she was alive.

'Oh Lawrence!' Marian screeches.

How could I be so fucking stupid? She is furious with me for reasons I don't even understand. It's almost as though I've been actively trying to have myself evicted.

Isn't she supposed to be on my side? Isn't that what she said?

The next time I visit the housing office, I tell them I know I'm screwed because Marian told me so. I explain the deal with someone other than Bill having signed my rent agreement, and the person who actually understands this shit tells me that my girlfriend is mistaken and has probably had no relevant experience of housing law.

Marian's next recommendation is that I move myself and all my worldly possessions into her house, or specifically the house given to her by her mother. She's going to rent her spare room to me, which will work out well for everyone. The room is fairly small. I have too much stuff but she tells me that some of it can be binned, given to Oxfam, or stored in the loft.

I keep looking.

The auction is postponed.

Mrs. Patel who runs the corner shop tells me she has a flat in which I might be interested. It's occupied but she's trying to get the tenants out for non-payment of rent, so I have a look. She takes me up there, even though the three guys are all at home, sat around smoking and drinking tea. They don't speak much English, but Mrs. Patel tells me I should pretend that I'm there to fix something. She doesn't want her tenants to know they're on borrowed time.

The flat seems great, the price is okay, and it's on Lordship Lane so it's in the same area. I can't afford to move too far away because I need to be able to get to work and I don't drive. I need to live near my job otherwise I won't be able to afford rent, but the average cost of renting in the area in which I live is beyond my means. Marian gets angrier with each passing day. She tells me I am stubborn. If I move into her place - which is just around the corner - and pay rent to her, I'll be helping her out. Why do I have to be so selfish?

Months pass.

Every few weeks I ask Mrs. Patel whether she has managed to evict her existing tenants. Eventually she tells me that they have been paying their rent on time and that she never had any intention of evicting them. In addition to this, something or other is my fault because she never said something I clearly believed she'd said, whatever it was. It's confusing and annoying, and then by chance I discover that the basement flat of 301, Lordship Lane is vacant and has been vacant for the past year, and that I can just about afford a monthly rent amounting to half of my wages. It's only five doors down from the haunted house in which I'm living on borrowed time, so moving will be just myself walking back and forth with boxes for a couple of weeks.

Marian isn't happy, but is for once unable to explain why this is the most stupid thing I've ever done because it would contradict her previous assertion of my being incapable of making decisions for myself. I get the impression she's allowing me to learn from my mistakes, or at least that this is how she rationalises it.

My new landlord is Ken, a brusque upper-management alcoholic. He dresses in pinstripe and embellishes a face of burst blood vessels with a tidily authoritative beard. He works in the city but I occasionally see him staggering back from the Castle - the Irish pub in Crystal Palace Road - almost too pissed to stand. I know him from delivering his mail and having been his neighbour for the last decade, but he doesn't remember me and even seems confused by the suggestion.

The flat is slightly smaller than the one I'm leaving, but it's clean. As landlord material, Ken seems a little inflexible, but I tell myself that this at least means he'll probably be on the ball when it comes to getting things fixed should they require fixing. I ask about a washing line because I notice there isn't one in the small paved quadrant which will constitute my back garden. He says no on the grounds that it will somehow lower the tone, so I guess my clothes will just have to dry inside on a clothes horse. He also says no to my supplementing the blinds with net curtains, because the flat is suitable for a young professional or some shit like that. I dislike blinds because they make the room appear cold, plus I like daylight, and if I have blinds open during the day this will mean everyone who passes will get a good look at me ensconced in my world of books and records and crap. It will be like living in a zoo enclosure but - fuck it - Ken's the boss. He also tells me he's going to have to wack the rent up at some point, but I've just spent nearly a whole year dreading the future and what it may hold, so I'm not even going to think about that one right now. Hopefully it's just something a landlord says so as to establish his superiority, a reminder of my lowly position.

I ferry all my shit across. Once my old front room at 311, Lordship Lane is sufficiently clear I briefly turn it into a workshop. I order a ton of wood from the yard down on Barry Road and make shelving for the new place. I buy a new bed, or at least I buy it second-hand for about eighty quid from the Oxfam place on the Walworth Road. I was initially going to hump my old bed along from the haunted house, but Marian complained. I suppose to be fair the old bed had seen better days. Finally I move my plants into the new garden, along with the bench I bought from Do It All a couple of years back, and then the frogs.

All the rear gardens along this stretch of Lordship Lane are full of frogs, many more than I ever saw as a child growing up in rural Warwickshire. Apparently someone up near the shops had a large pond which they filled in with concrete, causing a mass amphibian exodus. Because I like frogs, I made a small pond in Bill's garden and kept a re-purposed fish tank outside my back window which would regularly fill with spawn and then tadpoles each Spring. I relocate the tank next to the fence at the side of the house beneath a bush. The fence demarcates the communal path by which tenants of the flats above mine get to their sections of a garden neatly divided into four. I haven't bothered to tell Ken about the frogs, because I don't see why I should have to. They're wild animals rather than pets, and are in any case apparently native to the gardens along this way.

I move in, and eventually settle as much as I am able. On Sunday the 29th of July, 2007, in a letter to Janet Baldwin, I write:

I've been here about two months now. It's okay, a nice, largish place and very clean. The bedroom has French windows opening onto my own garden - a large patio with a good sized flower bed at one end. I've dug loads of stuff out from the old garden - lots of ferns - and have them here in the bed or in big pots. It looks very Mediterranean. The drawback, keeping in mind that this all could have turned out much, much worse, is that the landlord is something of an arse. The rent is extortionate. He won't let me have net curtains in the front window, and he still hasn't fixed the gas boiler after two months of nagging. The flat isn't as big as I had thought, and I still miss the old place and especially Bill, but what can you do?

On the subject of Bill, one year later and I'm still the only person who has visited the place where they scattered his ashes. So much for those fucking relatives who turned up out of nowhere.

Things with Marian seem to be going okay at the moment, although I'm not sure I'm cut out for coupledom. Our future aspirations don't seem particularly compatible, mine being to move to Mexico, to continue smoking, and to continue getting out of bed before midday.

Going okay is something of an overstatement, because I don't want to seem like a moaning cunt. If I'm honest, the relationship is joyless, one exercise in damage control after another, and it's killing me. I want to be left alone but I'm trapped within my own fear of being alone at this stage of my life. I'm not getting any younger, and I'm pinned to an exhausting job which isn't getting any better, and I can barely afford the cheapest rent I've been able to find.

I meet the neighbours when they use the path at the side of the house. The second and third floor are occupied by people I never see, young professionals. The top floor is occupied by a couple, a black guy and his Polish girlfriend. He has a cream-coffee complexion and dreads. He resembles Noah Tannenbaum from The Sopranos, polite, excruciatingly middle class, and - fuck it - the guy is whiter than I am. He's the archetypal honorary white guy by which Jake and Marcus and the rest of the media studies gang get to have a token black friend. He's like really cool, they tell anyone who will listen; and I tell myself I'm allowed to think such uncharitable, arguably racist thoughts through my hanging out with the black guys at work - real black people. They're sharper, funnier and significantly less full of shit than most of my fellow Caucasians.

It's summer so I sit outside on the bench I bought from Do It All a few years back and I smoke, because I'm not allowed to smoke in my own flat for which I'm paying rent. This is when Noah Tannenbaum and his Polish girlfriend pass, off to water the pretentious herbs they grow in their quadrant of the garden. I must seem like an old man to them. They've probably never met a manual labourer, at least not unless they've paid him to do something.

We talk because it would be strange not to do so, but it's mostly horseshit of the kind you expect from people who live lives in orbit of whatever is listed in that week's issue of Time Out. They think East Dulwich is really cool. They seem cautious and guarded. Had I turned up on their doorstep in uniform with a clip board rather than the key to the front door which we all share, they would probably address me in much shorter sentences as though talking to someone a bit stupid, like a security guard or a cab driver.

Marian naturally thinks they are amazing, the sort of friends I should be cultivating. This comes as no great surprise, and seems to confirm some of my estimates regarding the width and depth of the gulf between us. She is delighted when Noah Tannenbaum and his Polish girlfriend go on holiday to Poland for a couple of weeks, leaving me in charge of watering their plants. I guess she sees this as cementing the friendship, and no doubt we'll all be inviting each other to dinner within the next couple of months. The couple return from Poland with a bottle of Bison Grass vodka as thanks for my horticultural service. Marian drinks most of it because I've never been particularly keen on vodka.

The proposed friendship falters when Noah Tannenbaum tells me that he would appreciate it if I could get rid of the fish tank I have beneath the bush. His Polish girlfriend passed by on the way to tend their pretentious herbs the other evening and a frog jumped out at her. She was so traumatised as to have been unable to sleep for the past few days.

'I feel kind of bad having to ask.' He smiles the smile of one of those strangers who used to knock on my door because they wanted to have a look at the flat upon which they would soon be bidding. 'She hates frogs, so I'd really appreciate it.'

'Right,' I say, smoking my fag and waiting for him to fuck off. Later I have a look in the tank and find it is empty of frogs. There's just water weed. They tend to move around a lot, from one garden to another, so I suppose the problem - if we're really going to call it a problem - has sorted itself out.

The next evening I get the same from the Polish girlfriend who tells me some story about how she was terrorised by a frog when she was a child. I suppose batrachophobia is a real thing, but so far as I'm concerned she can go fuck herself. I pay my rent, the frogs were here in this area before I provided a body of water for their occasional use, and it's not like I'm practising my fucking tuba at three in the morning; but of course I don't say any of this. God - I hate my life.

Ken whines about my frogs when I pay the rent at the end of the month, because of course Noah Tannenbaum had to mention it like the good little soldier that he is. Eventually he fixes my gas boiler after eight months of nagging, then announces a rent increase, as promised. He works in the city, and by my estimate nets close to an additional three thousand pounds a month in rent from the tenants of 301, Lordship Lane, but I guess there's no such thing as too much fucking money. There being no other option left so far as I can tell, I admit defeat and move into Marian's spare room. I am fairly certain it will prove to be a mistake, but there doesn't seem to be anything else I can do; and logically I have to concede the slim possibility of it not being quite such a terrible move as anticipated.

It's worse than I could ever have imagined.

...and Ten Things Which America Does Just Fine

Art. Before anyone starts, I'm not referring to Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko - both of whom are probably more interesting in terms of art history than what they actually painted; and I'm definitely not talking about Andy bloody Warhol. After many years of study I've concluded that fine art should be divided into two main categories, specifically landscape art, and everything which isn't landscape art. Even a century later, the first and foremost of these two categories is still dominated by the work of Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, and others of the Hudson River School - if you ask me, which admittedly you didn't, which is why I'm telling you. José María Velasco should probably also be included here on the grounds of his having been the greatest landscape artist of all time. He was Mexican of course, but it's the same continental land mass. Landscape doesn't really get any better than the three aforementioned so far as I'm concerned. Some of that European stuff was okay, but hanging one next to a Bierstadt is like having the Venga Boys open for Led Zeppelin, quite frankly.

I've failed to take any non-landscape based art into account in this argument because it's mostly shite and doesn't matter.

Dangerous Arseholes. Sadly this isn't really a boast, but it cannot be denied that we lead the world in the field of dangerous arseholes, and despite stiff competition from the United Kingdom, Russia and the Islamic State, we've recently leapt ahead quite some way. Many of the world's leading trigger-happy fundamentalist shitheads now regard us with awe and envy, having found themselves suddenly seeming about as dangerous as characters from Harry Potter. I'm not sure why this should be, particularly as we have a constitution which is supposed to prevent the sort of situation in which we now find ourselves. Part of the problem may result from people who've never been under any pressure to grow up or to think adult thoughts. We seem to have a few of those, and once they get into any kind of position of authority, it's always trouble. Whilst I'm sure the Republican party was founded on at least some honourable principles - providing we don't look too hard at how capitalism actually works, and is actually shown to work by the last two centuries of history - it seems very difficult to find a Republican who appears significantly informed by those principles, whatever they are or were. Mostly Republicans just seem to be guys who like money and authority, because authority is the thing which means they get to keep their money. Online Republicans tend to spend a lot of time going on about freedom, freedom from government interference, freedom from taxation, being oneself, being an individual, being a rugged cowboy out on the lonesome trail answering to no man, no how, no siree; and yet in person, send a man in uniform into the room and they can't bend over backwards fast enough to kiss his ass, call him a real American hero, and loudly address him as Sir, Yes Sir! Also, for lovers of freedom, they sure have a lot to say about what the rest of us get up to in the privacy of our own homes. It wouldn't be so bad if there was some kind of organised opposition to this tendency, but instead there's the Democrat party which stands for the same thing whilst feeling a bit guilty about it. Almost all of our dangerous arseholes conform to some quality detailed here, with minor variations being in ratios of gun ownership and fear of anything different to oneself.
 

Healthy Geographical Distance from the Following: Timothy Griffiths, Shaun Robert, Theresa May, David Yeomans, Nigel Farage, Benedict Cumberbatch, Jeremy Clarkson, James Delingpole, Razorlight, Boris Johnson, James Whitaker, Hugh Grant, Harry Potter, that pair of fucking twats who opened up a café specialising in cornflakes in Hackney or wherever it was, Hamilton Bohannon*, Tony Wakeford, Chris Evans, Steven Moffat, David Gibson, Bob of Bulkington near Coventry, anyone who ever won or was nominated for the Turner Prize, Radiohead, Paul Mercer, Miriam Rahim, Tunstall Asaf, Juliet Prouse, Dennis Landers, Franklin from The Sun, Jimmy Savile, Billie Piper, Richard Callaghan, Supergrass, The One Show, Margaret Thatcher, General Pinochet, Marcus Brigstocke, Dennis Cattell, Marian Galton, Ludwig the mechanical cartoon egg thing from the seventies, Jamie Oliver, James Nesbitt, Stephen Frost, Alexis Petridis, Alexander McCall Smith, Electric Light Orchestra, Hamilton Bohannon*, Hamilton Bohannon*, Hamilton Bohannon*, Matt Smith, Harley Richardson, The Archers, anyone who ever observed that the shipping forecast sounds a bit like poetry...

History. One of my favourite examples of online sneering is the Britsplanation of American history which runs that we don't have any because the country is only two-hundred years old, whilst simultaneously lambasting our supposed assumption of there having been nothing much to speak of before white people turned up. I've always found American history fascinating, particularly all the stuff predating Christopher Colombus colonising a completely different and much smaller landmass whilst simultaneously wiping out the sum total of its indigenous population; and while it would be an exaggeration to suggest that this interest is why I ended up in Texas, it is at least why my gaze was already trained upon this part of the globe. I never found English or European history particularly exciting, and most of it seems to have been heavy metal wrestling mascots fighting over different kinds of mud in the pissing rain, parallel to which Mexico was engaged in building an elegant, philosophically sophisticated, and criminally misunderstood civilisation; and the people here in the northern continental blob were no less worthy of note. The Tuzigoot ruins in Arizona, for example, are at least as impressive as anything built by the Normans, and they were at the northern end of a trade route stretching all the way down into South America without anyone having bothered to invent the wheel, but you know - wurgh wurgh wurgh two-hundred years old wurgh wurgh wurgh Egbert of Wessex Magna Carta boring churches blah blah blah...

Hope. My life in England was often about getting by, making do, holding out and hoping the check would come before the bailiffs as everything became steadily worse, wetter, harder, and an ever more steely shade of battleship grey. English society had become, in my experience, a treadmill designed to keep me alive and generating just enough money to pay for the things which it told me had to be paid. Under circumstances other than those in which I happily find myself, America would probably be the same, but it feels like a country which is at least trying. We have our problems, not least being dangerous arseholes, but it at least feels like this place has the potential for improvement, like it wants the best for its people on some level, even when the actions fail to match the words. It is a land in which we still have possibilities beyond the crushing promise of the future being the present but with more security checkpoints. I thought this was just me until a couple of similarly transplanted online individuals expressed more or less the same sentiment on facebook, and one of them was Wreckless Eric so fuck you.

Kiss. One thing about America is that we do big and stupid really well, as I'm sure even our harshest critics would agree. Of course, it's important to remember that sometimes big and stupid is good - great even, and for evidence of this one need listen no further than the recorded oeuvre of Kiss. Whatever argument you may wish to draw against the excellence of Kiss vanishes as unto dew upon a summer's morn once you actually listen to Kiss. No-one really understands how this works. It just does.

Mexican Food. You really need to be here to appreciate Mexican food, either in Mexico itself or a little way from the border. That stuff you eat in London in some overpriced glass box named Zapata and served by an eighteen-year old wearing luminous orange tights and with the beard of W.G. Grace - it isn't Mexican food. It's probably just salad with a shake of Tabasco sauce, which is something else, and will remain something else regardless of how many traditional Aztec rocker-stamp animals are printed down the margin on the menu. Mexican food isn't about slopping four gallons of sour cream and guacamole over a bag of Doritos. I've seen counter arguments amounting to huh - can't see what's so difficult about chopping up a few tomatoes, but you really have to eat the genuine article to appreciate the difference. I don't even know what informs this difference given that the ingredients are all fairly straightforward, and yet what you eat over here in the Mexican equivalent of a greasy spoon - formica tables, plastic forks, radio tuned to some horrible Tejano station - makes most allegedly Mexican food I've eaten in England seem fussy, ridiculous, overpriced, and most likely prepared by someone who never actually ate Mexican food. You'll just have to trust me on this one. I don't understand it either.

Nature. I grew up on a farm in Warwickshire, in the very bosom of nature, you might say, and I grew up as part of a generation which spent most of its time outside in wellies. I saw rabbits and foxes, but not very often. I don't recall seeing frogs until I moved to London in my late twenties. I never saw a snake, and the only badgers I have ever encountered have been the lifeless two-dimensional kind found at the side of major roads. I've had this sort of conversation with overly defensive English people on a number of occasions. I'll mention the millions of bats I watched swarming from beneath the Congress Avenue Bridge in Austin at sunset, and Timothy will be reminded of the bat he once saw at a Happy Eater just outside Daventry and will thus dominate the rest of the conversation with discourse on the same. 'Of course, they're mostly pipistrelle bats around our way,' he'll inform me at pornographic length, apparently having forgotten that I lived in England up until five years ago. 'Pippies, we call them.'

Anyway, I now encounter snakes, turtles, lizards, deer, possums, vultures, wild turkeys, roadrunners, coyotes, stick insects, and raccoons, and half of those on a near daily basis. Some of the snakes are of a kind which could kill me should I be bitten and unable to reach a hospital. I've encountered at least one turtle which could have bitten off my fingers had I got too close; so these days I even know which turtles are safe to pick up and how to do so without having them piss all over me - which they tend to do. I have more nature than I know what to do with. I have nature coming out of my ass, if you'll pardon the expression.

Proximity to Mexico. We're right next to Mexico, and England really isn't. If you don't believe me you can look it up on a map. Here in Texas we're so right next to Mexico that we can drive for about an hour and then look directly at it from across the other side of the river. Of course, this might change if our new President gets to build his wall, despite that it won't make much difference to immigration - if we're going to keep on pretending that that's really a problem for the sake of argument. Personally I'm hoping he'll get confused and build the wall along the top of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, thus making our part of America Mexico again. He can keep California though. I'm not too bothered about that one.

Sunshine. When I say America, I suppose I actually mean Texas - or Mexico Norteño as I like to think of it; and Texas has a lot of sunshine. That half a week of the English August during which it only rains in the morning doesn't really compare.

*: Names withheld because I can't be bothered to argue with the fuckers should any of them ever resurface from the netherworld of perception.

Stripy

I acquired a more than passing interest in the Nahuatl speaking cultures of Precolombian Mexico sometime around 1994, and by 1996 I had learned enough to realise that this was something I would have to start taking seriously in order to achieve a more thorough understanding. I drew up a contemporary continuation of the Mexican Tonalpohualli calendar, and began to conduct my daily life with some consideration of Nahua Gods and related sacred forces. To be absolutely clear here, I don't mean to imply that I had chosen to believe in something which, one might rightly point out, would seem a little lost in the context of 1990s south-east London; but then nor do I wish to suggest I would ever engage in anything quite so dry and cynical as a mere thought-experiment. A better way of putting it is to perhaps say that I made an effort to regard my environment and the world in general in terms that would have made sense to a fifteenth century Nahua, principally in order to gain a better understanding of Precolombian thought by treating it as something which had existed for a reason, rather than mumbo jumbo to be pinned out on the dissecting table of objectivity.

Whilst I have a lot of time for Richard Dawkins, his general dismissive view of religious systems isn't always either helpful or interesting, often amounting to a set of one-size-fits-all refutations which, whilst perfectly logical and effective for his purposes, amount to what may as well be an attack on traditional Inuit clothing based on how it looks terrible on the catwalk and proves uncomfortable when traversing the Sahara desert.

Anyway, to return to the point, there I was in south-east London at the end of the twentieth century trying to think myself into the world of someone born in Tenochtitlan five-hundred years earlier. In practical terms, this amounted to eating Mexican food, following the calendar already mentioned, keeping an eye out for coincidences, and painting the Gods, characters and concepts upon which I had fixated as though they were real, rather than mere subjects of anthropological study. I say as though they were real, and should probably qualify this by stating that I came to believe that the Gods and spirits of Mexico are real in all senses that matter, by which I mean that as ideas they are real, and the ideas are the most important element. I don't for a second believe in anything that contradicts the established laws of physics, or in disembodied superhuman intelligences sat in judgement upon the more comfortable clouds, but I do think that a helpful religious system is one that provides a useful way of thinking about things, or of seeing the world, and a way that can under certain possibly subjective circumstances be considerable more useful than the rigorously and sometimes puritanically rational. For example, one might dismiss the First Nations view of respecting the Earth as superstitious anthropomorphism, and suggest that sacrificing valuables to the land in hope of an abundant crop is obviously ridiculous. The same land reduced to mere material commodity might just as well be turned into a huge toxic waste dump gratuitously formed into the profile of Margaret Thatcher when seen from above, unless long term ecological consequences are taken into consideration; but humanity doesn't have a particularly good track record where long term consequences are concerned, and therefore the superstitious theological view, for whatever reason, happens to represent a particularly useful way of thinking about the land in question regardless of whether or not the earth is genuinely grateful for all those human hearts buried earlier in some corner of the field.

So with this in mind, I painted pictures and paid attention to my daily calendar, noting with some pleasure those minor coincidences such as the cold, wet, miserable day when my friend Paul came over to record DIY techno on my somewhat coal-fired studio set-up, which turned out to be a day theologically distinguished by the patronage of Tlaloc and Huehuecoyotl, respectively the Mexican Gods of Rain and Dance. That isn't to say that these coincidences necessarily meant anything in the real world, but they were fun all the same.

Along similar lines, I sometimes wondered what my Nagual or companion animal spirit might be, suspecting it was probably a frog as there were always a ton of frogs in the garden who, from what I could tell, seemed to think I was okay. Of course, the idea that I might have an animal spirit, or even that there could really be such a thing, as the Nahua believed and continue to believe, was essentially either ludicrous or at least not to be mistaken for anything belonging to the real world, but still it seemed an appealing idea on some level.

My fascination with Mexico led to my visiting the country first in September 1999, and then again on four more yearly occasions. By the time I met my wife, my gaze was already set firmly upon the Americas, albeit the Americas a little way south of Texas, and so it took about three seconds to decide whether or not I wished to move over here.

We were married in July 2011, and I began the process of settling and acclimatising to a country and environment which, despite all of my preparation, was nevertheless very different to anything I had known before. The heat was phenomenal compared to that which I was used to, the shops were all different, the food was unfamiliar, all of the punk records, science-fiction novels, and Mesoamerican textbooks which had defined my growth into whatever the hell I am today were five-thousand miles away along with all of my friends and family. Additionally, I had never been married before, and neither had I been a parent nor a stepfather, and whilst Junior was lively, imaginative, and essentially likeable, he was often hard work, and - as with many children - very rarely ever so cute or funny as he believed himself to be.

I had made a huge leap entirely on the possibly insane anticipation of it somehow, against all odds, working out. The most sensible thing to do seemed to be to throw myself into work, and so I got started on the garden, or more accurately the back yard - a desiccated football pitch of scorched earth with chain link fence surrounding containing rusting barbecue equipment. Physical labour, as I had already discovered on a number of previous occasions, tends to be more philosophically productive than sitting around thinking about things, and I felt I needed to get my hands into the soil, to symbolically root myself to this corner of Texas and mark out my territory. This was to be my building something upon which I could stand steady, and so I began to work on a lawn.

I dug every square foot of soil which had reduced to grey dust and limestone rocks in the August heat, collecting in the process a mountain of stones by which I eventually marked out the borders of my projected garden. The work was tough, but helped by the fact that every waking minute had become something akin to an adventure in this new and unfamiliar land. Amongst the first of many, many surprises was the discovery of grub worms, fat, white insect larvae about an inch long living under the soil and generally regarded as a menace hereabouts for their voracious consumption of plant roots. I was startled to realise that these insects were larval to a bright orange and largely nocturnal beetle resembling what the Precolombian Nahua had described in Bernardino de Sahagún's sixteenth century Florentine Codex as the pinauiztli beetle.

The pinauiztli beetle is listed specifically as a creature of ill omen, and I had discussed its identification in correspondence with English Mesoamericanist Dr. Eleanor Wake some years earlier. The elusive identity of this insect had been of sufficient mystery and appeal as to make it into at least one draft of my novel, Against Nature; and  having wondered about the creature at some length, it seemed I now had a garden full of the bloody things.

Another resident of the yard was a lizard, specifically a Texas spiny lizard of the species Sceloporus olivaceus whom I had first noticed as a swiftly moving shape out of the corner of my eye. In traditional Nahua terms, the lizard - or cuetzpallin - is a fairly important symbol of plenty and as such stands as one of the twenty pictographic stars of the Tonalpohualli calendar. As with many of these Mesoamerican symbols, the important detail is that which they represent, and so a lizard seems well chosen as an avatar of plenty. As I have seen since living here, lizards come out in their numbers in Spring as the air warms and crops begin to grow; and if this seems too simplistic a parallel, it might also be noted that abundant crops will attract abundant pests, which in turn draw the lizards out of hiding. Agriculture was roughly how I came to meet my own particular little four-legged friend who, as I started to notice, would emerge each day as I began to dig up another patch of yard, and wait for what grub worms I tossed aside. My hope was that they would perish under the punishing heat of the midday sun, but it turned out that I was serving dinner.

Ever since I was a dinosaur-obsessed child I have liked reptiles and amphibians, and when I kept the garden in London, it had been gratifying to read in an issue of New Scientist that, contrary to the received wisdom, the higher cold-blooded animals were entirely capable of both affection and recognising those humans who bought them food or who kept the tank at just the right temperature. This seemed to be borne out by the larger frogs who gathered around the small pond I had made and who, after several weeks of my bringing them whatever worms I had found whilst digging, could no longer be bothered to hop away, but rather sat regarding me, waiting for my exit before pouncing upon whatever I had bought. This peculiar bonding repeated itself now in Texas as the lizard grew accustomed to my presence, becoming a little bolder each day. Of course, it may have been that I was visited by more than one lizard, but it seemed unlikely, for if that was so then they would all have to have been the exact same size, and worked in shifts with never more than one of them turning up at the same time.

I'd never seen lizards in the wild in England, although my friend Lucia told me that some had been seen on her allotment in Forest Hill, thus happily putting the dampers on Lewisham Council's plans to build yet another complex of overpriced luxury rabbit hutches for the benefit of overmoneyed Time Out subscribers and people who care about Damien Hirst. I had seen lizards in Mexico, but never at close range like this, and I was fascinated.

My guy was full grown, and about six inches in length, and he became so accustomed to me that I was almost able to feed him from my hand, as is apparently not uncommon. What astonished me most, aside from his obvious intelligence, was how birdlike his movements seemed, and how adorable I found him. Cold blood is generally painted in at least the school textbooks of my youth as representing the short straw in the metabolism draw, but this, I suggest, is a conclusion that only makes sense if you have no direct experience of reptiles.

I took photographs of my lizard, and told my wife about him. We wondered whether to tell Junior, then going through a slightly unfortunate phase during which he tried to make everything into a pet, worst of these being hermit crabs brought back from the beach at Corpus Christi. Thankfully he's since grown out of it, and has even developed a healthy and prescient degree of concern for animal welfare, but it was touch and go for a while, and my heart would cloud over with dark thoughts each time he ran off into the bushes after some defenceless critter yelling who wants to help me catch it?

'Let's not tell him,' I said. 'I don't think I could stand to come back from the store and find that lizard stuck in a tank in his room for no good reason.'

Bess sighed in concurrence.

'Besides,' I added, fitfully scratching at the rash of my own mild irritation, 'he'll only give it one of those names.'

At least a few years of the boy's development had been characterised by his bestowing bluntly descriptive names on any animal he encountered, followed by testy behaviour when the rest of us failed to fall into line with the identification of Swimmy the fish, Chirpy the bird, Jumpy the rabbit, Fuzzy Larry the hairy caterpillar and so on.

I thought of the lizard, recalling the dominant pattern of the scales on his back. 'Junior would probably call him Stripy.'

I sighed at the idea, but next day as an increasingly rotund Stripy waddled back to where I'd been digging for the day's grub worms, I realised I quite liked the name. It was cute, and I had begun to feel protective towards the little fellow. I had even begun to worry about whether my supply of excavated grub worms represented too generous a cornucopia, whether he might explode; but online research disabused me off this notion.

Eventually many months later, I'd finished the digging, and although I still saw Stripy - or a lizard which was probably Stripy - from time to time, Winter was on the way, and it was clear that we shared similarly dim views of the colder months of the year and were responding accordingly. I'm not saying that I had at last found my Nagual, or my animal spirit in Stripy, but my reclaiming the yard, turning the Earth back into something in which plants would grow, could be argued to have had a ritual purpose, and so it seemed useful, or at least entertaining to believe that I had; and the important detail is that it worked, and this place has become my home.

Today, after two weeks of grey skies and biting wind which could be quite adequately equated to the fourth level of the Mesoamerican underworld - Itzeheyacan or Where the Wind is Like Knives, the air is suddenly and dramatically warm, so warm that, having grown up in England I half expect to hear the steady buzz of bees and a distant lawnmower. Out on the trail, cycling my usual fifteen miles a day, I find that my limbs are much stronger, newly energised by not having to fight against the cold. I've not yet seen the first lizards of spring, signifying the harvest, plenty, cups which runneth over and all that good stuff, but I expect it's only a matter of time before I do.