Tra-la-la Tra-lala-la

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

How bad could it be?

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

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

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

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

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

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

'What brought you to San Antonio?'

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

Fleegle asks what we do, Bess and myself.

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

'Oh! What do you write?'

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

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

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

'Have you had anything published?'

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

'What was it called?'

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

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

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

'Where are you from?' Fleegle asks me.

Christ, I think, not this shit again?

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

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

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

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

'What's an enchilada?' asks Fleegle.

We all stare.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fuck.

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

'We meet at La Madeleine.'

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

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

'Lawrence.'

'Lawrence of Arabia!'

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

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

'Science-fiction,' I sigh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Me too.'

Art School Re-onion

The first one had been great against all expectation, but then it was all last moment with phone calls and people who also just happened to be in the vicinity. We met in some pub in Forest Hill - Adam, Gail, Mark, and two Carls respectively spelled with a K and a C. The pub was loud and brash as pubs tend to be, full of the traditional braying Saturday night wankers, but adversity sometimes forges magic of a kind. We all got hilariously pissed. I realised that I'd barely exchanged a word with Adam during the entire three years of the course we both attended at Maidstone College of Art, and thirty years later it proved impossible to work out why - just another one of those stupid things. Similarly it turned out that Carl and Mark had never actually had a conversation prior to that evening. Gail was still funny with a pleasingly dry wit but a different accent to the one I recall, and the other Karl was still massively entertaining. He didn't seem to remember having once made a codpiece of a red plastic utensil drainer nabbed from the kitchen sink for a performance of Cameo's Word Up, but never mind. We ended the evening stood outside freezing our bits off, swaying gently from side to side. It was a great night, and it really didn't seem like it had all been so long ago.

The second one results from a more intensive application of choreography, and my name has been announced on a facebook page as having come all the way from Texas, which I have. It's at some place called the Harp in Covent Garden, or roughly around that way. Central London wouldn't have been my choice, but it's easily accessible to all of the people who have said they will be coming. Carl and I walk across the city because one of the stations is out, although it feels a little like one of Carl's long walks, cheerily innocuous proposals which end up being thirty fucking miles. It feels like one of Carl's long walks most likely because I'm still limping. I arrived in London yesterday, walking from Victoria Station to my friend Rob's place at the rear of New Oxford Street because I'd reasoned that it probably wasn't that far on foot.

I turned up at Carl's place around midday and by six I have begun to suffer from conversational overload, being an otherwise fairly solitary sort of person. We walk across London - or limp in my case - and I feel pissy, whilst simultaneously resenting my own lack of endurance because how often do I actually see any of these people these days? How often do I see anyone?

They aren't upstairs at the Harp, whoever they are or will be. We check downstairs and they aren't there either. Carl and I buy beer and wait upstairs having found a table in a room with a bunch of rugby enthusiasts busily honking and hooting at each other as they do. Happily it's the room in which we are destined to meet the others. Upstairs at the Harp were the actual directions, and there's only this one room. We wait until nine and decide no-one is coming - two hours. On the way out, we find them crowded around the door, out on the pavement. Someone looked upstairs, poked their head into the room in which we'd agreed to meet and failed to recognise either Carl or myself. I'm wearing a stetson and a shirt of material in the pattern of the Lone Star flag, which you would think might have helped identify a person who had come all the way from Texas, as advertised on facebook.

We buy more drinks and go back upstairs, all seven of us this time. There's Sue and Kirsten, then three blokes I don't know. They look familiar in the same way as someone on a TV show can occasionally look familiar, but that's it.

I sit next to Sue. 'So how have you been?'

'Fine.' She regards me as a complete stranger; or worse than a complete stranger. It's that look of fear or even distrust in anticipation of the next question making everything horrible and awkward. Had I asked hey baby, what star-sign are you? her reaction probably wouldn't have been much different.

'You don't remember me, do you?'

'I'm afraid I don't.'

'I don't even look a little familiar?'

'Sorry.'

Sue is the person whom I was looking forward to seeing, knowing she would almost certainly be in attendance. We had been friends, and if not actually buddy-buddy, certainly more than merely acquainted.

'I used to live at the Square in Leeds village.'

'Right.'

'You remember Jane, your best friend for at least a year?'

'I remember Jane.'

'You used to come over to see us. I cooked a couple of times, or tried to cook. You sent me postcards from the Lake District that one summer.'

'I remember the Square in Leeds, but I don't remember you living there.' She pauses, uncomfortable. 'So what are you doing these days?'

Like you give a shit, I think, you don't even fucking know who I am. I mumble something which is reciprocated with a brief summary of her own life as a vaguely successful printmaker, and I am reminded of how little I ever had in common with most of those people at art college, people who stand in one room high street art galleries describing something or other as very interesting, people who go all misty-eyed over the shipping forecast on Radio 4, people who met this really amazing old guy on the side of a mountain in Baja California…

By the same token, I have no memory of the three middle-aged blokes on the other side of me. It turns out they were in the year below me and the painting department. I never really had much to do with anyone in the painting department.

Then there's Kirsten who remembers me well, which is gratifying because I remember her well. She's very funny, very dry, and a couple of the more sarcastic one liners and zingers in my arsenal probably came from her. It's a joy to see her again, as I suspected it would be. It doesn't really seem like a whole lot of time has passed. Inevitably we talk about Charlie, because he and Kirsten shared a house, and I seem to be the only one of us who kept in touch with him.

'He was the only student I ever met who turned up on the day he moved in with an ironing board - bless him.' She's laughing but it's an affectionate laugh.

'Who was this?' Sue asks.

'Charlie Adlard,' three of us chorus.

The name rings no bell, and of course she hasn't heard of the Walking Dead. Someone explains it to her, and why Charlie is now more famous than the rest of us put together, including Traci Emin, another Maidstone graduate.

Sue zips off to catch a train back to the south coast, and I begin to feel less irritable. The rest of us talk and drink for another hour, mostly like strangers who've only just met because that's mostly what we are. I manage to squeeze out another hour of conversation about our having shared the same geographical coordinates some three decades ago, and then I limp back to the tube station with Carl. The past couple of hours seem to have reproduced my experience of art college in microcosm with surprising fidelity.

Party Animal

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

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

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

We retire to the rock painting room.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'I don't mind.'

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

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

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

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

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

It's time for more beer.

Tonight I'm Gonna Party Like It's 1989

'It's an eighties party,' my wife tells me. 'It's Mari's husband's birthday.'

I know I've probably met Mari being as I've met quite a few people from the place where my wife works, but as usual I can't summon a face. The other two factors here are that I'm not really big on parties and I hated the eighties.

Okay, that's not entirely true, but given that when we say the eighties we usually mean either music or whatever music happened to be wearing, my eighties was characterised mostly by bands no-one had heard of or which were at least an acquired taste. If asked which names of that decade have left an enduring impression on me I'd have to say acts like the Apostles, Test Department, Einstürzende Neubauten, and whatever Jim Thirlwell was calling himself that particular week. Many persons whom I knew during the eighties now seem to spend a lot of time taking quizzes on facebook, particularly quizzes resting on whether or not one is able to recall that Spandau Ballet existed. I actually do recall that Spandau Ballet existed and if forced to say something nice I'd have to admit that Instinction was a decent song, but let's not go crazy. It was a decade like any other, no better, no worse, and all the really, stupid stuff only appears significant when it's your childhood and you haven't had much going on since. Personally I think the seventies were funnier with marginally better music, or at least the rubbish wasn't quite so bad, as illustrated by Bros making the Bay City Rollers sound like the Sex Pistols; but then it's all subjective.

My wife has chosen to approximate Madonna with big hair, lace, and a ton of jewellery. Following Halloween, I'm reluctant to let fancy dress become a way of life. Maybe I could go as Paul Mex or one of Opera For Infantry. In the end I just wear the suit and tie I wore for Noah's Bar mitzvah. It's a skinny tie like Joe Jackson favoured - or if that doesn't work, I'm one of those guys who wore a suit and tie in the eighties. Let's just pretend I was in a synth band who had a hit single about androids or something.

We drive out to Cibolo, a town about half the way between San Antonio and New Braunfels. Mari lives in the suburbs, so it takes us a few minutes to find the place.

I remember her immediately, a Latina with a face which makes it appear as though she's always excited about something. She doesn't quite look old enough to remember the eighties; and she is apparently married to Slash from Guns 'n' Roses. Also present are a number of goths as distinguished by backcombing, black clothes, and t-shirts of bands I didn't like even then. Introductions are effected.

Yes, I'm from England.

'Dude,' bellows Slash jovially, 'the eighties in England, man - punk rock and the Clash...' His point is that I don't seem to have made much of an effort in the wardrobe department, which is true.

This is the juncture at which I remember I'm in America, and everyone else's eighties was different to mine. Once past the brief splash of colour provided by Prince, Madonna, and the occasional British artist, the American eighties seems to have been mostly hair metal and related bands I've customarily spent my life crossing the road to avoid. Heavy metal, and specifically the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, was pretty much the village idiot of the musical landscape of my youth, and everyone in the town where I grew up fucking loved that shit except for me. Of course there are exceptions - Motorhead, Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath and a few others managed to crank out a few decent tunes without falling over - but the rest...

Unemployed pipe-fitters from Studley pretending to be Vikings, a weird sort of pride taken in being a bit of a cunt, and a shitty sludge of widdly-widdly-guitar-solo music which never fucking realised that Spinal Tap was supposed to be funny: it's not that rock 'n' roll really needs 'O' levels as such, but it's nice when it can at least tie its own shoelaces. The Ramones managed it fine, and no-one ever accused them of talking down to their audience. Heavy metal is a man who realises he's pissed himself, and continues to piss himself even as it's pointed out to him, and instead of shuffling off to make use of what facilities are available, he roars with laughter and calls for more ale; and somehow they loved all that cartoon crap over here - Judas Priest, Saxon, Def Leppard, Cinderella, Mötley Crüe, Ratt, Twisted Sister...

I help myself to food, then head into the garage in search of beer. The garage doubles up as a man cave. There's a fridge full of beer, a flat screen television, weight lifting paraphernalia, and a humourous information poster listing the rules of the man cave as a series of bullet points. I'm too scared to read it because I don't want to think ill of anyone, although in any case the light is not good, flashing red and green and provided by some piece of disco equipment.

I take a Bud Light, which tastes about as interesting as I thought it would but gets the ball rolling. I have a second can back in the kitchen as more guests arrive and I study the posters on the wall - mostly films in which Michael J. Fox taught the adults a lesson about what it means to be young. Hopefully the posters have been put up for the sake of the party.

We stand out in the back garden for a while because it's now cold and dark, which is a novelty in Texas, and Slash's brother has built a small wood fire which blazes and spits and smells good. It makes me think of bonfire night back in England, back on the farm - the bonfires we built at the back of Rex Harding's house with dead conifers dragged all the way from the spinney.

Bess is having a great time but I'm still feeling awkward and slightly out of it. I need more drink. Slash's brother is telling us how many important people and big knobs were once in the scouts. He seems to think this is a good thing but to me it makes the scouts sound like the Freemasons.

I try jello shots which either Slash or Mari have made. I've never had them before. In fact I'd never heard of them until I saw Parks and Recreation, but I gather it's jelly made with vodka or similar, or jello as it's termed over here. There's a tray of them, red and orange in little plastic cups. Slash demonstrates, holding one up to his mouth, his head tipped back. 'You squeeze it at the sides, then like flip it out onto your tongue,' - he swallows - 'and back like an oyster.'

I've never eaten an oyster either. I try, but it doesn't go smoothly. I'm stood in a stranger's kitchen apparently giving a demonstration of cunnilingus to a little plastic cup of orange flavoured jelly. It tastes alcoholic but not so strong as I expected, so I have another.

Fuck it.

Back in the man cave, Slash is playing Kiss, which is okay as they're one of the few bands who got this sort of thing right. I Love it Loud comes on, which is one of my favourites.

'You're from England, ain't you? Judas Priest, man...'

Again, I am unable to grasp the thrust of his thesis but I nod anyway, which seems to be the right answer. Slash grabs me a beer from the fridge, from his special collection. It's in a bottle and I've never heard of it, but I notice that it was next to a bottle of Flat Tire in the fridge. This seems ominous because I don't like Flat Tire, and sure enough this one has a bit of an unpleasant tang too it - like barley wine or Special Brew, one of those things designed to get teenagers as hideously pissed as possible thus alleviating their boredom.

Bess and I talk to one of the goths, and it turns out that she grew up in Suffolk back in England. Her family are American but they lived in England for a while. She remembers the day Channel Four first went on air, but not Brookside.

Never mind.

She works at San Antonio zoo, which is sort of interesting because Bess and I are regular visitors. Slash continues to ply me with whisky in shot glasses whilst howling things from time to time. He's one happy guy.

A black dude arrives with his wife. He's gone for the metal look, whilst his wife is something in the general direction of Madonna. Our host changes the music to rap, specifically the Beastie Boys and LL Cool J. Bess and I exchange an uncomfortable glance, but I suppose it's no more weird than people cueing up to relate their anecdotes of the time they went to England, or the English guy they met fifteen years ago, or the eighties in England, man - punk rock and the Clash...

I somehow impress my wife by immediately recognising the voice of Ice-T and knowing the words to Public Enemy's Bring the Noise.

Doesn't everyone?

I'm drunk, but not drunk enough and I guess I never will be, so we leave. We've managed three hours which seems like plenty to me. I've had a good time whilst nevertheless feeling awkward for most of it. I never have been a party guy, and I don't really like getting drunk, and as for the music...

Three nights later, Bess has one of her semi-regular Mom's Night Out meet-ups. She gets together with Andrea and Jana and a few of the others for food and drink and to talk about mom stuff. For the first time ever, I am invited along because the numbers are down what with everybody having gone away for Thanksgiving, so I go along as a sort of honorary Mom.

I fit right in.

Stepfatherhood

My marriage came with a free child, which wasn't a problem, but was not a scenario I'd foreseen. I'd just have to do my best and play it by ear, I decided.

It hasn't all been easy, although to be fair neither has it been anything like so difficult as I might have anticipated had I given it more thought. He was seven when Bess and I got married and is now thirteen. Sometimes he's a pain in the arse, other times he's fine - as you might expect, so you just have to get on with it.

Possibly more aggravating was the distant susurrus of expectation from newly acquired relatives for whom Junior was our precious boy. Even before I'd crossed the Atlantic, one opined that I might be a paedophile eager to get my clammy hands on the child; because were I some sort of kiddy-fiddler, that's obviously what I would do - marry an unsuspecting American so I can bag me one of those green cards and get my Jimmy Savile on in the land of the free. Another newly acquired relative took demonstrative issue when I failed to show at some screeching kid-filled event at the local country club, a birthday with our precious boy in attendance. I'd been in America for a week. I was about to get married and I had left behind everything I had known since birth. I was knocked sideways by the intense Texas heat, felt ill and still shell-shocked, and I didn't feel like hanging out with small, screaming children on that one particular occasion so I stayed home.

That man had better get his priorities straightened out, the relative testily informed my wife, apparently so as to showcase the extent of her devotion to our precious boy. These days I get on fine with the woman, but I haven't forgotten. People tend to reveal their true colours before they know you.

I always imagined one major difficulty with being a stepfather would be my apparently replacing an existing father, which I haven't attempted on the grounds that his dad is still very much around, in the picture, and we all get on just fine. The scene where the child slams the door and screams you're not even my real dad is yet to happen. Strangest of all, he seems to think I'm great, which is partially because I'm exotic - coming from England and all that - and because I know about Doctor Who - although I'm doing my best to discourage him on that score - and he appreciates the sense of security I apparently bring. I qualify all of this as strange, because the information derives from conversations with his mother as she brings him back from school. It's taken him a couple of years to get into the habit of communicating directly with me, not because he's rude so much as that he is burdened with a combination of shyness and extraordinarily narrow focus. Bess has pointed out how I'm the one person in his life who doesn't dote upon him, or regard him as our precious boy by sheer dint of familial genetics, or necessarily at all. My favour therefore has some currency and he knows it. When he's rude or he screws up, I'm generally quite happy to tell him so in as much detail as seems necessary, addressing him as I would an adult because I don't do baby-talk; and on some level he responds to this.

Children need boundaries, as they say.

Over the years we've had rough patches, mainly characterised by uneaten food left to go off in his room, toilets full of poo either unflushed, or flushed by a method entailing operation of the handle followed by running away as quickly as possible without checking whether the disturbingly verdant ten-inch floater has held its ground. Other misdemeanours mostly come down to basic manners and continued failure to do something which he has been asked to do over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.

'Look, it's not even like we ask you to mow the lawn or take out the trash, or even to do anything at all,' I'll begin in preface to the usual speech about full glasses of tea left perched precariously above electrical sockets. He will stare at me as I state my case, usually with the look of a rabbit caught in headlights, and even as I speak I wonder whether he's taking any of it in or whether it's more like a dog reacting to a harsh tone of voice when it's been caught taking a dump on the rug.

As the years have passed, it seems he has begun to take at least some of it in, and his communication has developed sufficiently for me to be able to tell that he at least doesn't mean to piss me off; which is nice because I like to be able to think well of him, and I don't enjoy pointing out that he's screwed up any more than he enjoys it. These days, we can almost have something that sounds a bit like a conversation, even laughing at each other's jokes, or some of them; and while I doubt I'll ever regard him as our precious boy because I'm just not that much of a walking Hallmark card, I feel protective towards him and I want him to be happy.

Now it's the weekend and Bess and I are taking him to the cinema to see Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children. He's read the books and has been gagging to see the big screen adaptation. It's a Tim Burton film, but stepfatherhood is sometimes about making sacrifices, about meeting others half way. Junior has a reputation of talking through films. It's worse when they're on television because he gets to move around, jumping up and down, describing what we've all just seen on the screen with our own eyes.

'It's like,' he yelps, completing the sentence with dramatic gestures so as to illustrate Loki fighting the Incredible Hulk, and we know that this is exactly what it's like because we're still trying to watch the fucking film.

'If you're going to talk through this,' I tell him as we enter the cinema, 'and explain everything that's about to happen or has just happened, could you sit on the other side of your mother and do it quietly?' I ask him.

'Sure,' he says, then barely utters a word for the next couple of hours; and surprisingly I find myself enjoying the film even though it's by Tim Burton.

The boy lets loose in the car on the way home, going into ludicrous and slightly sniffy detail regarding all the changes which have been made during transition from page to screen. He obviously enjoyed the film, but it was different to the books. Much of his communication takes the form of lists prefaced with let me see, then whatever he wants to share reeled off with the verbal equivalent of bullet points, and he's really going to town this time.

I find myself feeling strangely proud, which is almost a first, because not only has he recognised a book as the more authoritative form of a story but, as I realise, he has actually read the thing and taken it in. This has been a bone of minor contention, specifically how much I hear about the kid's supposed love of reading contrasting with my own experience, which is mostly him in his room laying on his back tapping the screen of his iPad with a finger all evening, occasionally calling out to have a bowl of chips conveyed to him. His supposed reading - I have noted with some suspicion - always seems to occur off-screen; but now I'm at last hearing him talk about a book, and in the sort of detail which suggests it's something he actively enjoys rather than being just a chore.

He's been with his father for most of the weekend, during which time I've made a six-foot bookcase with seven shelves for his room. We picked him up from his father's house and took him straight to the cinema, so the bookcase is a surprise.

His mother has asked me to make him a bookcase on and off for the last couple of years, but I've never quite got around to it, partially wanting first to see some evidence that he's capable of putting stuff on a shelf rather than just dropping things on the floor then stepping over them for the next two years; but I've eventually caved in because carpentry is good exercise and what harm can it do? Bess and I have collected what we can from the rubbish tip that is his room, set it all on the shelving, and now we can see the floor.

Junior sits on the bed staring at the book case.

'One thing,' I say.

'Yes?' He sounds nervous.

'It's your room and it's your bookcase, but if for whatever reason I see bits of wood carved out of it because you were bored, I will become unhappy.'

'Okay.'

This is a karaoke version of an exchange from about a year ago. Large plastic cereal containers, which should never have found their way into his room in the first place, had sections of the red plastic tab by which one removes the lid snipped off for no reason at all. Even as vandalism it seemed so weird and pointless that I felt ridiculous having to bring it up.

'Do you think he likes the bookcase?' I ask my wife, because I can't tell. Sometimes the boy is too inscrutable for his own good.

'Oh yes,' she tells me. 'He's very pleased with it.'

It feels like we've turned a corner.

Drinking Until You Can't Stand Whilst Stuffing Your Face

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe next time.

The Halloween Party

The storm woke me at three in the morning, and of course my first thought was that some of the cats were still outside. Being cats they would have found shelter, and would most likely all be huddled together on the porch, staring wide-eyed into the torrential darkness. We're in the city, but you could be fooled into thinking otherwise after sun has set. We have street lighting, but not much of it, and our houses are all built some way apart because if Texas has anything in abundance, then it's room in which to sprawl. The darkness can sometimes seem profound, a somehow more fundamental prospect than the harsh sodium orange of English cities after dark.

Anyway, I got out of bed to let them all in. The rain was briefly deafening as I held the porch door, something approaching Biblical volume. This was not of itself unusual. South Texas rainfall is either a misty drip or chapters six and seven of the Book of Genesis.

This brief rising was enough to disrupt my sleep, and so I wake late on the morning of October the 31st - Halloween. It's Saturday so I do my usual stuff, just a little later than is my general habit. I head out on my bike for the sake of exercise but some of the trail is underwater, as it tends to be for a day or so in the wake of a storm. Towards the end of the afternoon we get ourselves ready for Byron's Halloween party. Ordinarily we would have taken Junior out trick or treating - a tradition which makes a lot more sense to me now that I live in the US - but it seems pretty clear that trick or treat will be most likely rained off this year.

In England I recall the conspicuously imported tradition as either pitiful or annoying, depending on whether you're the kid scouring street after freezing street looking for just one house where it doesn't look like they'll tell you to piss off, or whether you're the disgruntled resident either ignoring the knock at the door or else telling the caller to piss off. It doesn't really make sense unless nearly everyone is involved, and so we usually take Junior over to Alamo Heights where entire streets become the sets for Universal horror pictures of the thirties for just one night, lawns covered with fake tombstones, inflatable zombies, life-size plastic skeletons dangling from every branch, and usually the resident family of witches, werewolves, and Frankensteins sat waiting on the porch, ready to dish out the sweeties. The tradition is frankly ludicrous, and that's kind of the point, and what makes it so enjoyable, weather permitting.

Junior isn't his actual name, but it's what I call him on the internet for the usual reasons. Byron is his father, or my wife's first husband if you prefer. I never imagined that we would get on, but Byron is one of those people whom it's very difficult to dislike, no matter how hard you try. Were the two of us to find ourselves trapped in a lift for a couple of hours, we might struggle for conversation after thirty minutes or so, but this is only to acknowledge our differences and should not be taken as a judgement of character. I've never been a party animal, and Byron tends to throw parties with some frequency simply because he's a naturally generous guy. He likes to be surrounded by people, and he likes to see that everyone is enjoying themselves; and so once again I am forcing myself to move in the general direction of a party. It seems like the right thing to do.

Junior has decided he is going as an empty child from Doctor Who, essentially a sinister schoolboy in a gas mask from wartime London. The three of us are also chalked up to attend a comic book convention in Durham, North Carolina later in the month, so Junior's Halloween costume will get several outings. Bess ordered a gas mask through the mail and we were able to cobble together just enough of the right sort of clothing to pass him off as a schoolboy of fifty years past from a different country. He looks pretty good.

We get into the car and drive to Byron's house, a journey of a mile or so through Alamo Heights. Junior sits in the back, gas mask pushed up to his forehead, building on his empty child routine - variations on are you my mummy?, which the creature asks over and over in the television show. I've find the most recent era of Doctor Who irritating and so have to walk a fine conversational line, engaging with the boy without succumbing to my customary sarcasm.

'You know, that costume could probably work just as well if you'd decided to go as Harry Potter,' I suggest.

There is a pause of the usual length as Junior's gears grind out some fresh observation. They're not all gems, or anything like as funny as he thinks they are, but he's on top of his game this time.

'Then I'm going as the Empty Harry Potter.'

We chuckle for the rest of the journey as the boy overeggs this latest pudding, hammering the joke into the ground - despite which it remains funny.

The rain is coming down again, and we are the first to arrive at Byron's house.

'Are you my mummy?' Junior enquires in greeting.

'Come in,' says his father, sighing.

Each table, ledge and mantle piece, every surface but for the one on which the food is arranged is home to some horror novelty. Plastic spiders hang from the ceiling, and an entire town of tiny Lovecraftian dwellings runs along the sideboard, each one sheltering some gruesome animatronic scenario within its illuminated interior, like Insane Clown Posse versions of the nativity. Plastic skulls sit on top of cabinets and cupboards, motion sensors prompting each to its own gruesome pre-recorded promise from beyond the grave as we pass. We load our plates with cheese, sausage, olives and the like, and stand munching at the hatch while Byron labours within the kitchen, preparing more for his guests to eat when they arrive. It turns out that we are actually a little early.

Mickey and Minnie Mouse arrive. Minnie is very convincing, although Mickey seems more like some guy Byron might know from either rodeos or barbecue tournaments who just happens to be out in mouse ears on this one occasion. Byron runs a barbecue team. They have a couple of trailers and turn up to cook at all sorts of public events. His cooking is impressive and he's won a string of awards.

Next to arrive are Duffman, the beer-themed superhero from The Simpsons, and a day of the dead Muertita, apparently also a local television newsreader, although I probably wouldn't recognise her even without the skeletal face paint.

Bess, Minnie, and myself sit at the hatch on tall stools as the kitchen fills with barbecue experts. There is a large flat-screen television mounted high up on the kitchen wall and it's tuned to a barbecue programme with some guy making a pit out of an old propane tank. The men assembled in the kitchen have all fallen silent, as they watch the propane tank being sawn in half. I realised that I too am transfixed by this, and have even begun to consider the practicalities of making culinary equipment out of an old propane tank. I think this means I've gone native, which I suppose isn't too surprising given that I've been here nearly five years.

Minnie rolls her eyes as the guy on the screen works his retractable tape measure and goes into unnecessary detail.

'That's so anal,' she observes.

'You like what?' Mickey deadpans his comic concern with perfect timing.

At least three of us burst out laughing.

Crash. Crash. Crash.

A skeletal Halloween version of the toy monkey who bashes a couple of cymbals together does its thing at the far end of the lounge, possibly activated by the sudden laughter. We are all momentarily startled.

'You made the monkey clap!' Minnie scolds her husband.

Bruce and Lori are next to arrive. They have come as characters from The Maltese Falcon. The next few guests are people to whom I've almost certainly been introduced at some point or another but can't quite remember in detail, even were I able to recognise them behind the face paint. They are a vampire accompanied by the Black Widow from the Avengers, and then it all becomes confusing and crowded. We leave, feeling a little more stuffed than seems healthy, but happy to at least have made the effort. A flood warning is issued on the news channel, and we are home just before nine.

DVDs, Novelties, Men's Underwear

All the time I lived in London I never attended Gay Pride. I had no objection to Gay Pride. I simply dislike public spectacle, the noise, the hullabaloo, the taking four hours to get anywhere. London is a lot of people crammed into a relatively small space, and I never saw the appeal of seeking out pockets of even stronger concentration, regardless of whose flag had been run up the pole this time.

My friend Rob and I both went along to a Latino festival in Burgess Park, Camberwell, drawn by our mutual interest in the culture. He'd lived in Cuba and I had visited Mexico a couple of times. Research undertaken by the University of London back in 2011 reported a figure of around 113,000 Latinos living in the capital, more than enough for a decent festival and the park was accordingly packed. We wandered around for a bit, drank beer, watched a few reggaeton acts, and ate bowls of what was probably sudado, a sort of fishy tomato soup thing Rob had enjoyed in Cuba and which was as delicious as he had promised. It was a nice afternoon, but as usual I always felt I should probably be having more fun than I actually was, and I found myself irritated by the presence of the ubiquitous Time Out subscribers whose presence would always turn any public event into a sea of yapping sandal-footed wankers in felt festival hats and ironic T-shirts.

The same people would have spent the week getting paid far too much, mooning around their absurdly priced glass dwelling boxes in Hoxton or wherever, and just thinking about website design for a living. In the evening they meet up to drink beer with wedges of lime plugging up the necks of their bottles, and they talk about how great it is to live in London, and the richness of their shared cultural experience, and then they all look in the latest issue of Time Out to see which fresh cultural experiences are to be had this coming weekend. I've never understood this need to find events with which to fill one's time. I've never had a problem working out what I want to do, because I'm already interested in things.

The Latino festival was okay, but as I say I've never been a fan of crowds gathered for public spectacle; and yet having said that, public spectacle is a different animal here in San Antonio, possibly because I'm older and less inherently cantankerous than was once the case, but also because Texan population density is a fraction of what it is in London. The crowds are less aggravating, happily bereft of Time Out subscribers, and for most of the year it's too hot for anyone to make a serious nuisance of themselves. It isn't that America doesn't have its own representatives of the annoying community, but thankfully most of them seem to be concentrated in New York.

Anyway, it was the 4th of July and we had already wandered around Alamo Heights waving flags, or else watching neighbours pushing flag waving children along in carts. I wore my Lone Star shirt, sewn from material patterned like the state flag, purchased second hand and almost certainly originating from either a gas station or some restaurant chain. We ate free tacos, petted baby goats, and it was fun. Afternoon rolled around and we decided to go and take a look at the Gay Pride event going on at Crockett Park down on Main.

Reading that paragraph back to myself, I wonder what differentiates me from the overmoneyed London culturevores taking holiday after holiday in other people's life experience, and I suppose nothing at all is the honest answer; but on the other hand I live here, so I have a vested interest in the general level of tolerance and diversity occurring in my adopted city. I like to believe that I live in a place where people are customarily good to each other, regardless of whatever factors may appear to divide them. So far I have found this to be generally true, with those persons to the contrary numbering amongst an unfortunately vocal but thankfully tiny minority. So, having moved to the sort of urban space in which public events aren't always a complete headache, and in some cases may even deliver the sort of fun promised on the flyers, Bess and myself decided to go and see what was happening with Gay Pride.

Just past Hogwild Records, Main Avenue seems to be the gay district - if that's quite the right term - at least in so much as it has a couple of gay clubs identified with rainbow decor. Also there is at least one adult entertainment store selling DVDs, novelties, and mens' underwear. It actually has the words mens' underwear painted on the side of the building, and each time we drive past I hear the words in my mind's ear as though read aloud with a certain lurid intonation by Vic Reeves; and I still can't help but think of novelties as hand-buzzers, whoopee cushions, squirt-flowers and the like. I suppose mens' underwear must refers to studded leather pants as probably sported by that cop from the Village People.

We drove down Main and two muscular young men waved at us from outside another store selling mens' underwear, which by coincidence is all that the young men were wearing. They seemed pretty happy, and so we waved back. Then we couldn't find a parking space and had to return the way we came and retrace our footsteps - or at least our tyre tracks - passing the waving underwear men a second time but now on foot. They still seemed happy, despite the heat, and it dawned on me that they were engaged in drumming up trade for the store. I hoped they were being paid well for it, given the intense heat.

The crowds became more fulsome and more flamboyant as we approached Crockett Park, though mostly sticking to the shade of the buildings on the west side of Main. The Supreme Court had ruled to legalise same-sex marriage across the entire country on Friday, June the 26th, just two weeks earlier. I hadn't really been following either the news or that specific aspect closely, but I had the impression it came somewhat out of the blue. When all you've heard on the subject is a few months of fuckwitted windbags weighing in on how something which affects them in no sense whatsoever is somehow a violation of their human rights, a government body actually doing the right thing can come as quite a shock. It felt like a victory for common sense, specifically a victory against the prevailing expectation of all future news following a downwards and increasingly conservative curve. So there seemed to be an elevated sense of excitement in the air, like we now knew that the fuckers could be beaten, and more importantly that we could once again be considered a valid collective term. We were maybe not so divided after all.

The park was cordoned off behind chain-link fencing with a long queue outside. There was an entrance fee. This initially struck me as surely contrary to the spirit of the enterprise, but we took our place in the line. An old guy in a Stetson stood on the opposite side of the road, squinting at us in the scorching sunlight and holding a placard informing us that homosexual marriage is evil. I looked around, realising I had been expecting worse, truckloads of Westboro Baptist level nutters with megaphones and buckets of human piss ferried in to fight the good fight against basic intelligence, but there was just the one guy. I hoped this was closer to the reality of the opposition than that which is regularly communicated by a hysterical media, but it's sometimes difficult to tell. Some people ducked out of the queue, crossing the street to engage with our token protester, either to see if they could talk some sense into him, or else to take a look at what happens when a person grows up unable to tell the difference between opinion and fact. He smiled and chatted but seemed a little ill at ease, which was nice.

Paying to get in struck me as odd, at least until we were inside and I realised that an entrance fee would at least serve to deter anyone turning up for the sake of causing trouble. The atmosphere in the park was happy and relaxed, with no-one really giving too much of a shit about guys kissing or the more extreme examples of wardrobe surrealism. Stalls were arranged all around the periphery, but most of them seemed to be dull financial concerns, insurance and the like. This is something I have come to expect here in America, where money is much more of a thing than it was on the other side of the Atlantic, at least in my experience. Food and drinks were to be had, both entailing a peculiar system of purchasing vouchers at one stall then exchanging these for beer or tacos at another. I have no idea how this worked or who was to benefit, but I suppose maybe it kept all of the festival cash in one place.

Anyway, not having any great need of specifically homosexual life insurance, we purchased refreshments and found some shade from which to watch what was going on with the stage. It wasn't really anything spectacular - a couple of drag acts lip syncing to hi-energy songs under the scorching midday heat. They weren't even pretending hard enough to come equipped with a fake microphone, and may as well have just been people in the crowd for all the difference it made. Call me conservative, but I tend to think a drag act really has to do something beyond just showing up in a dress, and I am disinclined to applaud anything quite so peripheral as skilled application of eyeliner.

The drag acts were followed by a rap duo - a man and a butch woman. Bass pounded across the stage, slow and low with skittery bounce hi-hats and the two of them prowling back and forth, trading lines, throwing up the signs, and generally they were pretty tight. Unfortunately the crowd didn't quite seem to know what to make of them, but I went to the front regardless and dutifully stood nodding my head like an indulgent uncle. I've been listening to southern rap for nearly two decades, but this was the first time I'd stood in front of it, and it did not disappoint. It was nice to see so many unfortunate stereotypes demolished in the space of a minute. The duo did a couple of numbers, and I failed to catch their names, and next thing they were off the stage.

Now there was to be a mass wedding with numerous couples filling the stage to be conjoined in holy matrimony, or just matrimony if you're either a pronounced atheist or a religious extremist. These were same-sex couples, in case that needs stating. It was a spectacle, and that was the point, to show that despite everything it was really happening. However, regardless of blows struck or flags waved, none of this felt like a deeply political act, at least not to me, which is probably a good thing. Of course, being heterosexual, it might be pointed out that I'd never really had a horse in this particular race, so whatever Gay Pride means to me will probably be negligible if not actually irrelevant. On the other hand, living my daily life in a largely heterosexual world, Gay Pride should seem weird and astonishing, and yet it doesn't because it's really just people, whichever way you look at it. It almost felt ordinary, just as it should.

I'm not sure whether this means I've personally got over some lurking nugget of inner prejudice, or whether society in general has finally grown up, at least in our corner of Texas.

As the wedding wrapped up, Bess and I decided we had seen as much as we needed given how hot the day was turning out, even in the shade. We left the site and walked back up Main with those others who had also had enough of the sun.

'Turn away from your sin,' suggested an old coot perched on a seat outside some eating place, although he suggested it quietly in case anyone heard. It was almost funny to realise that he was the weirdo now, this guy and his ideological ally with the placard. He was the one who had failed to understand the working of our world and human society. He was out of step with the rest of us.

It felt really good to know that.

The Day My Wife Was Born

My birthday was approaching and I had asked my mother if I could have a party. I was going to be six, or at least that's how I remember it. I'm not sure the sums quite add up, or even that it necessarily matters given that 1971 was over forty years ago, but for the sake of argument let's assume I have most of it roughly on the money.

I'd attended a couple of birthday parties by that point, which I suppose was how I came to decide that I'd like one of my own. Jeremy had most likely requested my presence at his party the previous October; and Paul Moorman - the kid who lived on the next farm along, the place with all the chickens - had invited me to one of his parties. It was a little odd because Paul's birthday fell on Christmas day, so he celebrated on an entirely different date just like the Queen. The guests had been just myself and Paul's elder sister - who kept her distance for most of the afternoon - and everything supervised by Paul's mum. We played a game, using drinking straws to remove hard frozen peas from a tea tray. The idea was to place one end of the drinking straw against the pea, then suck hard so as to secure the pea and lift it from the playing surface without directly touching it. I don't remember who won, but later we had jelly and cake and the like.

I helped prepare some of the food for my own party in so much as I made bowls of a desert involving lime jelly, whipped cream, half a peach and some kind of wafer. The peach half was supposed to represent a yacht afloat on a sea of green, with whipped cream as waves and the wafer for a sail; and I recall having made these following a recipe in Ursula Sedgewick's My Learn to Cook Book - probably with my mother doing most of the actual work - although rooting around on the internet I have found that the book in question contains no such recipe.

I sent out invitations to kids from school, although we were still enjoying the final stretch of our summer holidays. Someone who could have been either Tom or Matthew wrote a reply roughly equating to:

Thank you for inviting me to your birthday party. I would like to come but I can't because I don't like Andrew Brown. He pushes.

Andrew Brown was a skinny child resembling the espionage-prone television puppet Joe 90, due mainly to his spectacles. He derived amusement from all sorts of unorthodox sources. My mother once asked if we wanted some Treets - this being the brand name of a chocolate coated peanut confection which was eventually replaced by Minstrels. Andrew wheezed with laughter, insisting that she had asked us if we wanted some trees. On another occasion, as Paul Moorman told me, Andrew had greeted some stranger in the village with the words hello bloke, which must have sounded pretty odd coming from a small child. I'd been to Andrew's house in Ilmington just once, and remember this because his family had a colour television - the first I'd ever seen - upon which they were watching an episode of Lost in Space; and even as I was still reeling from this sensory overload, I was flashed by Andrew's little sister just out of the bath and wearing only a towel, although I was far too young to know what I was supposed to do with the information.

I knew Andrew to be strange and yet entertaining, and that his family were more financially blessed than mine, and that his sister was some sort of naturist, but I had no experience of his pushing. Maybe he just didn't like Tom or Matthew or whoever it had been on the alleged receiving end of his motive force. In any case, after a brief year or so at Ilmington C of E Junior and Infants he was moved to a fancier school, which at least reduces the likelihood of the birthday party to which I had invited him having been my seventh.

Anyway, Andrew didn't show and neither did Tom or Matthew or whoever it was. There was Paul, Jeremy, and Michelle from my class, and also Owen, a child from the year below. I didn't know Owen particularly well but had decided to invite him anyway. He was one of the five children - myself included - regularly ferried from surrounding farms and villages to the school by Mr. Collett, the owner of both the local garage and taxi cab service. Four of Mr. Collett's regular passengers had working parents who were otherwise occupied doing things to cows or sheep from before dawn to just after dusk, and then there was Owen who appeared to live with just his mother, and I don't think she owned a car. Nor did she own a television set, which unfortunately meant the rest of us were to Owen as was Andrew Brown to ourselves in terms of television hierarchy. His family had apparently stalled around 1940 or thereabouts, at least in respect of technology, dress sense, and spectacles of a kind once popularised by Arthur Askey and Harold Lloyd. This made him something of a target at school, his lagging behind the rest of us in terms of the industrial revolution, and seemingly belonging more to the era of Dick Barton than that of Doctor Who; at least I always assumed this to be the main reason that other children seemed to take against him. I suppose it might equally have been his somewhat lively personality which my mother generously described as boisterous, and which eventually began to get on even my tits. The crucial realisation - at least for me - came as Matthew and I stood in line patiently waiting to be let onto the playing field at the rear of the school. Owen, standing in front, turned to us, already lost in some bizarre routine of his own.

'Knock yourself into the ground,' he explained loudly, grinning and hammering himself on the head with one fist whilst bending incrementally at the knee so as to effect the illusion; and having knocked himself into the ground as far as seemed practical, he presented us with the culmination of the tableau, jumping up into the sky as though having manually powered himself through the centre of the Earth and out the other side.

'Wheeee! Australia!'

What the fuck? was still a few years away from taking its rightful place in my vocabulary, but that would have been my reaction were it not so. Owen just seemed to rub people up the wrong way, and by the time we made it to secondary school, the two of us may as well have been strangers. This could have been either because Owen was noisy and abrasive, or because I was essentially a dick and terrified of associating with conspicuously unpopular kids in case whatever it was they had rubbed off on me.

Meanwhile back in September 1971, Owen was yet to knock himself into the ground and thus incur my disdain, and so I invited him to my birthday party, probably enjoying the idea of myself as the great philanthropist, welcoming the weird, bouncy kid into the fold.

Come inside, friend, and partake of the iced gems. We shall not cast you away, not like those others, for we are a more noble breed of child...

Owen gave me a toy racing car for my birthday, a pleasantly solid model made of die-cast metal with a spoiler at the rear. The body was white with decals spelling out the names of Castrol GTX, STP and other sponsors. It was sturdy and felt a good weight in one's hand. I opened the other presents and then we ate, I suppose.

Then, during a moment of untempered bounciness, Owen bust my plane. It was a toy plastic airliner my grandmother had given me, one with a transparent upper fuselage allowing one to view all the little rows of seats within. Truthfully I had found the thing a bit weird. The transparent fuselage seemed far-fetched, and I wasn't sure why anyone had made a toy from such a design, plus it seemed kind of cheap and crappy, although I knew better than to mention this to anyone. Within my personal toy hierarchy, the plastic airliner was some way down, but I was nevertheless outraged when Owen broke it. What the fuck? would have come in handy at that moment, but as I said, I was still a few years short of picking up that particular expression.

'But I bought you a racing car,' Owen wailed in his own defence, clearly regretting his reckless act of aeroplane destruction. I wrestled with the thought, weighing what was undoubtedly a quality piece of engineering up against my somewhat crappy former plane, but I still couldn't talk myself out of wishing I'd never invited Owen.

Over the next hour or so, my resentment grew until it came to a head in a field to one side of the road running past Mr. Harding's house. We were playing on a flatbed trailer - the sort which had only recently been piled high with bales of hay. We climbed on and off, doubtless yelping and screeching with all the excitement. Someone proposed the imposition of a narrative upon the activity whereby everyone stood upon the trailer had certain admirable qualities, whilst those still down on the ground were deemed in possession of less admirable qualities most likely pertaining to poo and related substances. Owen yelped and set one foot on the tow bar, leaping up onto the side of the trailer.

'You're not coming up here,' I told him with some venom, and pushed, my hand square against the centre of his chest. He fell backwards through the air, three or four feet to the ground and landed on his back. I immediately understood I had become the school bully, one of those kids I myself hated. Owen had probably broken his spine in two and would never walk again, and I was responsible. I had done that. I felt awful then, and don't feel particularly great about the incident even now, more than forty years later. I don't remember much else of the day, aside from that Owen clearly survived the fall, and cried as we trudged back to the house, fully sobered by what had happened.

Back at school, I guess we were friends again because I remember Owen coming over to the farm to play at least a couple of times, just as I went over to his house for tea. He probably should have told me to piss off, but I suppose children are fairly resilient, and he'd probably grown used to those he considered friends acting like complete wankers from time to time. Then eventually of course he knocked himself into the ground...

I was six years old on Friday 17th September 1971, and this has more recently achieved additional significance because my wife and I share the same birthday, although she is six years younger. If I'm right about the only birthday party I can recall having hosted being my sixth by virtue of how Owen and Andrew figure in its dating, this means I am able to recall the actual day on which my wife was born. As the sequence of events ran, first Owen broke my aeroplane, then I took a leaf out of Andrew Brown's book and hurled him bodily from the flatbed trailer as though I were an enraged gorilla, and about an hour later - five thousand miles away - the woman I would eventually marry was born in the town of Pearsall, Texas.

There's probably not much joy to be had looking for cosmic significance in any of this, and so I don't; and yet, aside from my terrible treatment of poor Owen, it's hard not to regard this simple concurrence as a small but wonderful thing.

Florence la Petite Goth Français Gênante

It was Autumn 1993 and Mandy and I were renting a flat in Derwent Grove in East Dulwich. The street comprised mainly Victorian terraces which had been divided into flats. We shared our front door with the couple who lived on the uppermost floor, and adjacent to the steps leading up to our shared front door were a set of steps leading down to the basement flat, situated below street level. I had moved from a single room in a house in Lewisham, and Mandy had previously occupied a bedsit on the corner of Melbourne Grove.

Our relationship was heavily seasoned with crossed wires and misunderstandings, but with hindsight it was probably exactly what both of us needed at the time. Our union was hardly a match made in heaven, but it beat the alternative. Cautiously approaching thirty, I had become increasingly cranky and terminally single, developing a mournful nostalgia for my previous girlfriend of ten years earlier. Sarah had been my first and was at that point my only, but for a hugely depressing one night stand in the summer of 1987. I had not known the tender touch of a woman in a decade, five drunken minutes of 1987 excepted, so I was wearing black clothes, listening to Death In June records and taking them far too seriously - having not yet realised that there could be anything more sinister to their frowning misery than a simple neoclassical aesthetic. Mandy on the other hand had been interred within a secretarial job which she insisted had been driving her mental, and she had most recently been involved with some guy who sounded less than wonderful from what little she told me. This was to be a new start for the both of us, not least because neither of us had tried living with a partner.

Leaving school, Mandy had spent three years studying at the Cheshire School of Art and Design but became disillusioned and moved to London, ending up in a secretarial job. Eventually she realised that she had somewhat lost her way and would have done better to pursue some more artistic calling. I suspect this was part of my appeal in that I had already done a fine art degree and come out of the other side. When we first met she had already begun to shrug off the somewhat drab persona demanded by her initial career choice, ditching a bubble perm resembling that of a Liverpudlian footballer, dying her hair, buying music, going to gigs, dressing with more flair, and generally making an effort to have the sort of fun she probably should have had in her teenage years. In some respects this was where we contrasted in that I'd never been a party animal, and never would be, and Mandy was always much more of an extrovert than myself; but it was nevertheless good to see her enjoying life, having a blast after so many years in a windowless nine to five.

'Is he a goth?' her friends would ask when they phoned to hear all about the flat and the new boyfriend.

'He has a gothic soul,' Mandy explained, probably in reference to my taking Death In June far too seriously. I'd begun to wear more extravagant shirts, and we had dyed my hair but it had gone wrong and come out navy blue rather than the desired black, which had made life interesting at Royal Mail for a couple of weeks; but I'd never really wanted to be a goth, and I wasn't very good at it.

Mandy on the other hand was now giving it her best shot. She had packed in the secretarial job and signed up for an art foundation course at one of the local colleges. She dressed well and always looked very striking when we went out together, but more than anything she needed goth buddies, a group with which she could compare notes and acquire definition; and this was how she met Florence.

Mandy and I went to gigs and to clubs, but I think she would have liked to go to a great many more gigs and clubs whilst I could have happily lived with fewer. Her appetite for entertainment being greater than mine, it seemed only right that she should branch out on her own, and branch out she did, and specifically to Paris. She went there on holiday with a friend, but investigated Parisian goth clubs under her own steam, and in one such place she had struck up a friendship with a slightly younger, endlessly enthusiastic goth girl called Florence. Florence had an apparently encyclopedic knowledge of the scene, of wearing black clothes, and presumably of doing that dance where you make funny shapes with your fingers and wave your hands across the front of your face. She was small, theatrical, and cheery, the sort of person with whom it was easy to imagine yourself making friends.

Mandy and Florence wrote to each other from time to time - these being the days before widespread internet access - and met on at least one other occasion prior to my first encountering Florence. I wasn't really keeping track, it being more Mandy's business than mine. In January 1993 Florence sent a letter written on the reverse of a large colour photocopy assemblage of assorted photographs of Nina Hagen. The letter read as follows:

I hope you're fine and that the new year has begun good for you. I have pictures of Niall Murphy but they're not very nice 'cause he has red eyes on instead of having two beautiful blue eyes! I hope to see when I'll be to London on February. I'll certainly pass my Birthday in London. Do you want I send you Mephisto Walz album?

Have you received my photos and my postal card? Rachel - my penfriend whom you had spoken with by phone - has written me a card in which it was written Merry Christmas & Happy New Year. I'm waiting for your photo and another letters and cards.

Alien Sex Fiend will come in France for a concert on June and Nosferatu on April. Will you come during Easter holidays? I'll be go and see The Addam's Family II to the cinema with friends. I hope is better than the first. I didn't really enjoy it.

Do you like your new flat? Is it comfortable? What is look like? Big flat, with or without a balcony, small kitchen? I have a chinchilla but it bite. I prefer my rabbit which is nice and sweet. The kittens run in all the house. It's a really hell!

I'll come February 13th to February 26th to London but I'm afraid of being put in a family in Heathrow. It's far to your home, but I think I'll go to Slimelight and Electric Ballroom discos. I haven't your new number-phone. I don't know when I'll tell you that I arrived in London or I'll go to pub or something else. This is a problem.

I'm going to do my homeworks now ' cause I have an exam in one week.

The letter is signed love from Florence and French Goths, with a large-eyed biro drawing of Nina Hagen as postscript to illustrate the additional observation of Nina Hagen is wonderful, isn't she?

Niall Murphy was then the singer of Nosferatu, a band for which Florence expressed an unusual level of devotion. She would refer to individual members as though she knew them personally, but then maybe she did know them personally. She was young, tending towards a certain intensity typical of her age group, and as I eventually began to appreciate, she seemed to make more sense in a club environment with the distraction of music, lights, and spectacle where communication was reduced to basic expressions of approval or otherwise. Anyway, this was the impression I got from what Mandy told me of subsequent encounters with Florence. The tribal bond and the sense of belonging to something, the unity of black pointy shoes - these were fine up to a point, but beyond that point was daylight and conversation, and even without any appreciable language barrier, Florence didn't really seem to be interested in much beyond goth clubs, Nina Hagen, and the beautiful blue eyes of Nosferatu's Niall Murphy.

The evening she came to stay was peculiar - this small, flappy Gallic pixie wrapped in ten miles of lace turning up at our home like some exotically twittering bird. She and Mandy were heading out to one of the clubs mentioned in the letter, a place Florence had been meaning to visit for some time. Somehow I had been delegated the task of coming up with an address, despite my having no knowledge of any club scene, goth or otherwise. In the absence of Google or any better ideas, I phoned the offices of the Melody Maker - the music weekly of which I was a regular reader.

'My girlfriend has some random French penfriend over to visit,' I explained to the journalist to whom the switchboard had connected my call. 'She wants to go to a club called the Slimelight, and apparently it's my job to find out where it is, but I've never heard of the place.'

'I haven't heard of it either,' the journalist told me.

I read Melody Maker with enough attention paid to recall that it was usually Simon Price who covered the more conspicuously back-combed artists.

'How about Simon Price? Maybe he would know?'

'Yes, it sounds like his sort of thing,' the journalist admitted, but the man in question was not available to answer my question, and I didn't really care enough to push it further..

The address was found by some other means in any case, and so Mandy and Florence got ready to go out on the town - doing their make-up, getting togged up in their most ostentatiously gothic clothing, and discussing Nina Hagen and Niall Murphy's dreamy blue eyes - at least that was what Florence seemed to be talking about. I was beginning to get the impression of Mandy having bitten off a lot more than she really felt like chewing. It was as though Mandy had mentioned in passing her once having enjoyed an episode of Star Trek, then found herself sat down and forced to watch all seventy-nine episodes back to back whilst being served Star Trek themed snacks by someone dressed as Spock. The whole goth deal was fun for sure, but Jesus Christ...

After an hour or maybe two during which I'm fairly certain I could hear Florence dishing out tough-love suggestions to my girlfriend, encouraging her to become ever more gothic in appearance, they emerged, ready at last to call a cab and head off for a night of doing that dance. They came into the kitchen so that I could take a photograph. In the photograph they stand poorly lit in front of a shelf of my comic books. Florence looks ready to go. Mandy wears the startled expression of someone recently informed of having been adopted, like she's doing her best to adjust to this new information. It isn't that she looks unhappy so much as that she's trying to work out what the fuck just happened.

Their night out at the Slimelight was, so I gather, okay, but not something Mandy wished to repeat too soon. Florence had in the meantime gone off to stay with either a relative or some other friend. She would be returning to us in a couple of nights.

'Really?'

Mandy nodded. She wore the same look of restrained panic as in the photograph, so I left it at that.

The evening arrived without fate intervening to inform us that Florence had regrettably been called back to Paris, perhaps for some last minute expert inspection of a monument dedicated to the striking blue eyes of Niall Murphy prior to its official unveiling. The door bell rang, and we immediately knew that Florence had returned just as she had promised despite our refusing to think about it.

Mandy wasn't moving.

'Aren't you going to answer the door?'

She said nothing and we both looked along the hall towards the front room. The curtains were drawn and the lights were out. The hall light was also off. From outside it would appear as though we were not home. We turned off the kitchen light just in case and sat in darkness.

The bell rang again and footsteps thumped across our ceiling, down the steps and into the shared hallway. Florence was now inside the building knocking upon our inner door. The footsteps of our neighbour thumped back up to his or her own domain, then back down again in response to further knocking. Florence's twittering explanation fluttered around the gaps in the wood towards our darkened kitchen. She had come from France and she did have not our number-phone, but our neighbour had no advice to impart. Only Mandy and myself could say for sure that we were at home, and we were both as quiet and still as statues.

'We're really doing this?'

There was no need for Mandy to whisper an answer. For once we were thinking approximately the same thoughts.

Everything went quiet, and we resumed breathing. We had almost certainly heard the front door close as Florence gave up and went on her way. We tiptoed into the front room and drew back the edge of the curtain just enough to see the girl stood upon our doorstep, not going anywhere.

Shit, I either thought or said very, very quietly. I settled back into a chair from which I intended to discreetly observe Florence's departure before announcing the all clear, when the time came. She remained as she was, thankfully unable to see into our front room, patiently waiting for our return - five minutes, ten, then fifteen...

'Why doesn't she just go?'

'I don't know,' I hissed. 'I suppose she thinks you got delayed and will probably be back soon. She's your friend, not mine.'

'Yes. I'm well aware of that, thanks very much.'

After about half an hour, I realised that our visitor was nowhere to be seen. I cautiously moved around so as to be able to see through the gap between the edge of the curtain and the window frame, looking out onto the street. 'I think she's gone.'

We sighed a mutual sigh of relief and crept back to the kitchen to boil the kettle and make tea. It still seemed too soon to turn the light back on even though it was getting dark. I tried to imagine what it would be like to find oneself alone in a foreign city, and to have the people with whom you were staying turn out the lights and pretend they were out. I'm pretty sure Mandy was thinking the same thing. We were terrible people, but this understanding of our dreadful behaviour was not in itself more painful than listening to Florence talk about Nina Hagen and Niall Murphy's beautiful blue eyes.

We heard more knocking, but different.

'She's gone downstairs.'

'Oh fuck.'

We listened as whoever lived in the basement answered their door, then Florence's twittering explanation, then a door closing but we could still hear the conversation. We returned to our front room on tiptoe and listened. We could hear most of the conversation as Florence explained her dilemma to our downstairs neighbour, then after a while - maybe ten or twenty minutes - we realised she was telling our downstairs neighbour about Nina Hagen and about Niall Murphy and his beautiful blue eyes. This was worse than simply refusing to answer the door. We had forced innocents to take part in our suffering. Florence would not go away. She would sleep on the sofa of our neighbours, twittering on until someone finally called the police. We knew that we had to end this charade and face the music.

We sneaked out of the house, taking minutes to carefully open then close each of the two doors without a sound, and then once we had both crept to the lowest step outside, we made the big, loud show of stamp stamp stamp and well, here we are home at last, and where can my friend Florence be? Perhaps we have missed her...

Bizarrely, it didn't work, further obliging us to wait what we considered a likely time before going down to the basement to ask neighbours with whom we had never before spoken if they had by any chance seen an eccentrically dressed French girl hanging around and looking lost.

'She is here with us.'

Oh really? Well, that's a relief. We were so late and we were worried we might not be back in time blah blah blah...

It seemed to work in so much as our collective conscience wasn't going to be kicking us in the ass for the rest of the evening, although the downside was another endless night of observations on Nina Hagen and the beautiful blue eyes of Niall Murphy. Mandy was knackered and really didn't want to go out clubbing, but was now doomed to do just that by the mighty force of Florence. Neither of us understood how we had been overpowered by something so small and tweety with such an imprecise grasp of the English language, but by now we knew that we had only one option - to do as Florence said and wait for it all to be over. Admittedly I had it easier in this respect. Florence understood that whilst I might have a gothic soul, at thirty I was just a little too old and fat to be bullied into dressing up as a vampire and dancing to Christian Death records. Mandy gritted her teeth, pulled on the lace, and out they went. I guess she had an okay time, or at least as good a time as someone who would rather have stayed at home was going to have.

The next morning was a Sunday, and it was weird to wake with a twittering stranger in our flat greeting the dawn with fluting discourse on the subject of Nina Hagen and just how blue that guy's eyes looked in a certain light. I tried to make conversation that wasn't about either Nina Hagen or Niall Murphy, digging out my copy of the Ronsard album by Déficit Des Années Antérieures, or DDAA as their name is usually rendered.

'They're French,' I explained helpfully, immediately recognising myself as the old man getting down with the kids by digging out his Herman's Hermits collection.

Florence regarded me as though I had just suggested a threesome, then remembered something she had forgotten to tell Mandy about Nina Hagen. It being Sunday, I began to make breakfast, specifically a huge passive-aggressive fry-up. Mandy had introduced me to vegetarian bacon, as sold by the excellent SMBS delicatessen in Lordship Lane, and although It did a poor job of replicating bacon, it was nevertheless delicious in its own right. I supplemented my soya rashers with beans, fried potatoes, fried eggs, fried bread probably. I didn't even like fried bread, but I was really getting into my theme. Florence was the opposite of anything or anyone you would find in a transport café as the sun rose to dissolve all those pasty-faced Bauhaus fans, and so my artery-clogging breakfast assemblage came together as a sort of invocation of whichever forces would send our tweety intruder on her way.

'Mmmm - delicious,' she observed without obvious sincerity as she headed for the door. Within an hour she had gone from our lives, presumably heading back to Paris to spend her fluttery enthusiasm on those who better deserved it.