Fireworks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We see people and we park.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This gets a laugh for some reason.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's already 2019 in England.

An Englishman in Texas in England

Mary grins and chortles, gleefully poking me in the gut like I've just been rumbled. 'Hoo hoo - what's that?' she cackles. 'You take after your dad.'

I have a paunch because I'm middle-aged. I've been middle-aged for a while, and I'm surprised that this is the first time she's noticed how I bulge around the middle, particularly as I'm pretty sure I bulge slightly less than I did when I last visited.

It seems an inane observation.

I'm back in the old country, and it's getting harder each year; although on the positive side I'm still surprised and pleased to have found myself living a life from which I can issue such a sentence, because it means that I escaped, and I would much rather visit this country than still be living here. It gets harder each year because I get older each year, I suppose, and I become more and more acclimated to life in a hot country. I like to see my parents and people I know, but at the same time I dislike disruptions to my routine, and I dislike the process of travelling, twenty hours spent in constant motion from one door to another with all of the waiting around and headaches it will inevitably entail, then the jetlag amounting to a four-day hangover.

Last time I came back was the first since the people had spoken in favour of Brexit, and there was something unpleasant in the air. The country felt meaner in spirit, more insular than ever, more suspicious of anything slightly different. This time, the background noise of ambient xenophobia seems less pronounced, although to be fair it may only ever have been my imagination, a result of my being unable to shut out certain conversations occurring across social media. I've possibly just had more time in which to notice how many people now regard Brexit as a terrible idea. Either they're coming to their senses, or else it simply looks that way from where I'm stood.

In any case, it's strange being back, and I have an irrational fear of being stuck, somehow forced to resume my former mostly miserable existence. I'm presently a tourist in a life I've left behind.

My wife's friend Heather was back in San Antonio at Christmas, staying at her parent's house for the sake of convenience. Heather's father shook my hand and said, 'Well, at least you'll soon be out of the European Union,' as though this was something which would have been playing on my mind. I didn't bother to answer. It had been a peculiar announcement, because I hadn't said anything, let alone anything inviting consolation.

I've been trying to maintain an equivalent silence today, because I'm in the car with my dad and we're driving to some village on the outskirts of Leicester. Mary is sat in the back and we're dropping her off at her sister's house in the aforementioned village.

Typically I speak to my dad on the phone once a month. This time last year it had become something of a chore, with the first minute of conversational formalities usually giving way to his views on immigrants and how they were ruining the country, and how I wouldn't recognise Coventry any more. I usually shut up, hoping he'd run out of foreigners upon which to heap blame. Raising the obvious objections was a waste of time because I had the impression that for him, living a relatively comfortable life unimpeded by either immigration or immigrants in any tangible sense, it was really just like talking about the weather. His casual xenophobia was purely conversational and didn't seem to run very deep because it had no real reason to do so. Then in recent months our phone conversations became less contentious, focussing rather on whatever was going on in our respective gardens. It felt as though my dad might have come to his senses, so that was what I told myself.

I phoned him before I flew, and was thusly informed of his most recent holiday on the Costa Brava. Neither himself nor Mary had enjoyed it, because the Costa Brava has been ruined by foreigners - mostly from eastern Europe, very rude people apparently.

'It's not like it used to be,' he told me sadly.

This was an unambiguous return to the theme of what's wrong with foreigners, but I told myself it was different in at least being born of direct experience rather than some alarmist crap picked up from a tabloid newspaper.

Now we're in the car, heading towards Leicester, and I'm looking out of the window as my dad once again explains how I wouldn't recognise Coventry.

Mary offers a chorus from the back seat, explaining about all those jobs which would have gone to good Coventry lads but for something or other to do with Somalia. 'I'll tell you what the problem is, Lawrence,' she adds thoughtfully, 'some of them, they just don't want to work.'

I'm completely fucking lost by this point. I look at my watch. The case for the prosecution has been running for fifteen minutes.

'Do you think we could change the subject?' I say it loudly and forcefully, although my voice squeaks a bit because I'm trying not to sound as pissy as I feel. 'I hear it all the time and I'm sick of it - all the problems of the world blamed on the poor fuckers who have nothing and are the easiest to blame,' and I go on to give parallels and examples, notably fruit now rotting on Californian trees because migrant workers suddenly feel somehow unwelcome in the United States, and white people won't work for the shitty sub-minimum wages the farmers insist is the best they can do. I talk about the proposed wall and take some pleasure in pointing out that its main function is to appease angry morons who don't understand things, because it's not like it will actually keep anyone out. My speech wails and wavers and is peppered with awkward grammatical conjunctions because I'm improvising, but given the quality of the argument I'm attempting to counter, I probably sound like Carl Sagan.

I finish and take a deep breath and feel a little embarrassed.

Thankfully it seems it hasn't been taken as an outburst, because the conversation resumes normally and naturally; although Mary has just remembered some other things she doesn't like about immigrants.

I may as well have been talking about my favourite cheese.

'That's enough politics now, Mary.' My dad sounds firm, yet somehow not even slightly disgruntled. It really is as though we've been discussing the weather.

They talk about their ruined holiday on the Costa Brava, with reduced emphasis on lack of manners as an inherently east European trait. They talk about a holiday in Amsterdam.

The roads are amazing in Holland, brand spanking new and not a pothole to be seen. My dad explains that these wonderful highways are paid for entirely with British money stolen from us by the European Union, but I suppose that one won't be a problem much longer, so he doesn't dwell on it.

The Dutch will soon have to pay for their own roads.

Having dispensed with the customary scowling at foreigners, the rest of the day is fine, without incident or anything too awkward. Mary mentions the wedding of a grandson, specifically a grandson who has married another man. There's no talk of backs to the wall or which one is the woman or any of the stuff I might have expected five years before. There isn't even any comment deployed in service of demonstrating how progressive we have all become, how we're fine with those people, just so long as they're happy...

It feels as though something is better than it used to be, at least on some level.

Eyewitness News

Our local news programme is broadcast by KENS5 and is called Eyewitness News, or at least I think that's how it works in so much as that I assume KENS5 is the name of the station. It seems to alternate with CBS. We get the CBS national news before six, and then the local stuff afterwards on the same channel, up until half past - at which point the immeasurably more informative Wheel of Fortune comes on. Our anchorman is usually Jeff Brady, distinguished by his eyebrows being a different colour to the rest of his hair, like Max Clifford; and like Max Clifford, he's a white guy. All of the news team are white, apart from a few unusually pallid Latinos. It still strikes me as odd that here in San Antonio, a city wherein a mere 40% of the populace are anything other than Hispanic, a city wherein most kitchen sinks have three taps - or faucets if you really must - hot, cold, and Cholula sauce - and yet our news is brought to us by the whitest people you've ever seen. Last week we had a light brown guy vaguely resembling Barack Obama sitting in for Jeff, who was presumably otherwise indisposed, but today we're back with Jeff.

Except I'm not because I've missed the first minute, so I turn on in the middle of a news report brought to us by Henry Ramos. Some kid has been shot. We focus on the boy's father for a little longer than seems comfortable. He is distraught, in tears and rocking back and forth saying that his boy was amazing, over and over.

'He was amazing,' he says. 'He was amazing. He was amazing.'

The police are claiming that there is some discrepancy between the evidence and the father's statement. In the house they have found three handguns, an AR15 - which by the way stands for army rifle - a shotgun, and more than fifty live rounds of ammunition. Maybe the guy was protecting this innocent weaponry from liberals and other people who hate America.

The next minute, we're into the weather. Bill Taylor seems to be on the television all the time. He may even be his own channel by this point. He's one of those big grinning wardrobe shaped men who walks like a crab and seems to have been modelled on John Wayne. His grin reveals a large gap dividing his two front teeth, and his speech is often peppered with cornball jokes of the kind you see in old shows such as Leave it to Beaver. The weather has been record breaking, although which record it has broken this time is left unstated so maybe it's a figure of speech. Anyway, there was a storm last night and it's been raining a lot. Bill warns us that the water level of the San Antonio river is rising, which is what tends to happen when it rains around here. Bill shows us footage of rainfall and pictures of water. He grins and flaps his arms and cracks jokes, but he really could have just left it at it's been raining a lot.

We return to the main desk. Jeff talks about his experience of it having rained a lot, and then we go to Sharon Ko for a traffic report. It's been raining a lot so there's a lot of water on the roads and highways, and Sharon shows us footage of what that looks like in the hope that it will inspire us to take care when driving. It doesn't rain much in our part of Texas, but when it rains, it rains a lot and so the rivers fill up and there is water on the roads and we all have to drive carefully. That's how it works.

Three minutes in and we inevitably go to the subject of the Final Four, with the guy who resembles Barack Obama now relegated to reporting from somewhere downtown. The Final Four is some kind of major basketball event which has taken over the city. Everyone is coming to San Antonio to see it, and everyone is excited apart from me. There will be live bands and everything. The Obama guy asks Dan Gavitt what makes San Antonio such a great city in which to host the Final Four. I don't actually know who Dan Gavitt is, but here's his answer:

'Some of it is the history of the tournament here. Some of it is the culture of this great place. I mean certainly, you know, the river walk, proximity to the Alamo Dome, hotels… It's such a convenient place for everyone to attend the Final Four. It's special.'

So there you have it. While Dan explains, text runs along the bottom edge of the television screen, briefly referring to news items either less important or less local: President Trump has done something or other, there have been shootings, something about a mosque in Canada, then cures for cancer, and a claim made that social media is making America look bad in the eyes of the rest of the world.

Regardless, we're still concerned with sport sport sport sport sport, and now specifically the news that Trevone Boykin has been arrested, and that's really his name. He's some big cheese football player and he was born in Mesquite, Texas. To further establish the theme of local boy made good then more recently less good, we are told that he was arrested right here in San Antonio back in 2015 for assaulting one of our very own cops. This time he has tried to choke his girlfriend and has broken her jaw, which we can see from the footage of her trying to speak through a swollen face.

Go Seahawks!

At six minutes past, we return to the traffic. A woman stands blue-screened over footage of traffic crawling along our major highways, one scene of the same thing after another. We can see an ambulance on the hard shoulder in the final scene, lights flashing.

'There's been another accident on I-35,' our woman tells us, presumably having just noticed it on the monitor, off camera.

So that's what those flashing light van things are for.

Jeff promises that we'll be curing diabetes right after these messages. The screen is a montage of burgers, fries, tacos, and all manner of greasy food. My guess is that someone will be telling us how this sort of food is bad for us, particularly if we don't want to catch diabetes.

The messages are a trailer for Wheel of Fortune, then one for Neighborhood Eats, a morning show in which some guy checks out different diners and eating places right here in San Antonio. All the trailers I've seen for the show seem to feature him eating burgers.

There's a facebook group dedicated to this same thing called Eat in SA, but I got tired of the discussion about burgers.

Hey! I had a really great burger at this place the other night.

San Antonio has many great restaurants and eating places with cuisine from all over the world, and as you might expect given the cultural composition of the general populace, some of the Mexican places are so good that I'd happily bear arms for them should it ever be required; and yet there's somehow still people seeking that elusive perfect lump of ground beef in a fucking bun. My position on this is that whilst a decent burger can be nice every once in a while, it's basically children's food and is as such fairly limited. In a city where you could be eating the mole poblano served at Guajillos on the corner of 410 and Blanco, if you're still looking for the perfect burger, then frankly you're a fucking idiot, to my way of thinking.

The Neighborhood Eats trailer is followed by commercials for Champion AC, World Car Nissan, Conn's Home Plus, and Chevrolet. We're nine minutes in.

Next up is Real Men Wear Gowns, a regular feature of Eyewitness News dedicated to men's health, although usually covering health issues which apply to more or less everyone. Tonight we're looking at men's diabetes, or diabetes as it is also known.

'We know there is no cure for diabetes,' Jeff tells us, 'but researchers right here in San Antonio are working to change that,' and so follows the report from Jeremy Baker, who reminds me a lot of Kenny, Earl's gay friend in My Name is Earl. Kenny - or rather Jeremy - introduces footage of Mr. Rodriguez who presently suffers from men's diabetes. We learn that it's good to eat fresh vegetables and to engage in regular exercise, but it's bad to sit on your arse stuffing your face with the sort of crap beloved of the guy on Neighborhood Eats; so that's another one of life's eternal mysteries well and truly cleared up. Mr. Rodriguez says that he is going to try to get more exercise in future, and the rest of Real Men Wear Gowns looks suspiciously like an advertisement for Forxiga, a pharmaceutical product which already has its own advert and which some medical dude just happens to be studying.

At eleven minutes past the hour we go back to more commercials, beginning with a particularly weird one for Aramendia Plumbing, a local company working to a presumably tight budget. The adverts feature horrific CGI gremlins knackering someone's bathroom, as discovered by horrified overacting children. It's followed by a commercial for Rooms to Go, then a trailer for yet more of Bill Taylor's weather - coming up later on Eyewitness News - then Popeye's fried chicken with that irritating bloody woman, Ram trucks, then Chevrolet, yet again.

At fourteen minutes past, we learn of a question which will be included in the 2020 census. The question is are you a US citizen? The State Representative for El Paso has been campaigning against the inclusion of this question in the census, rightly suggesting that it will skew the results by leaving those who aren't citizens reluctant to fill in the census for fear of being rumbled, then personally loaded into a cannon by the president and fired back over that wall he keeps saying he's definitely going to start building any day now. The question seems to have been included because Ted Cruz, who was born in Canada, asked for it to be included. Ted Cruz, for the benefit of anyone unfamiliar with this wonderful man, is essentially an unfriendly version of Grandpa Munster.

Sixteen minutes in and Jeff tells us about how recent weather conditions may have impacted upon local agriculture, specifically those with strawberry farms whose livelihoods may be left in tatters by the winter we've just had, which has been a really weird and screwy one by Texas standards, but that's just one of those things rather than anything to do with climate change because climate change was invented by lefties who never learned to drive and are jealous of the rest of us with our cool sports cars.

Anyway, the point is that certain farmers are probably fucked.

'The weather we've had could be berry bad for business,' Jeff quips.

'Oh no you didn't,' we hear Bill Taylor chortle in response.

Hilarious.

Enjoy your new jobs at McDonalds, farmers! Ha ha!

At seventeen minutes past we join Bill Taylor for the weather yet again. I've lost count of how many times we've had the weather so far, but it feels like this is the third or fourth instalment.

It's been raining a lot.

This is the section of the news which feels like some sort of CGI showreel. Bill talks and grins us through seven or eight variations on the same basic bit of information, utilising a bewildering series of maps, graphs and imagineered forecasts. It takes a full three minutes to get through the lot, during which the text running along the foot of the screen announces the advent of a pinball machine themed to the songs of hard rock group, Iron Maiden. The pinball machine will be called The Legacy of the Beast, and definitely no more storms tonight, even though it has been raining a lot.

Now we see Bill wander across the studio to meet with Joe Reinagel, the sports guy and another one of those big grinning wardrobe shaped men who walks like a crab and seems to have been modelled on John Wayne.

A couple of weeks ago my wife and I got a new kitten. She just turned up on our doorstep so we took her in. She seems to have bonded with Jello, a slightly older cat who now seems to regard her as his kitten and occasionally grooms and bathes her with his tongue. Daisy, which is what we've called her, is not yet allowed outside. When Jello comes in, she always perks up, running to meet him, tail aloft and meowing happily.

This is kind of what happens when Bill and Joe meet, and I think we're supposed to find it cute by some definition. They joke, but their humour is tedious, mostly upper arm punches and how 'bout those Cowboys! Tonight they're talking about the Final Four. We see footage of sports dudes arriving by coach from Chicago right here in our city! Then we see footage of a plane landing.

'It's an exciting time for all of us,' some guy declares. As a news item, this amounts to the event which is going to happen soon is still going to happen soon.

Next we learn that the San Antonio Spurs lost, or they won but in a bad way, or something happened, or maybe it was a draw. Joe describes some aspect of this as crucial, and we go to footage of Gregg Popovich, the Spurs head coach, mumbling something in relation to whatever Joe just told us.

'It doesn't mean crap. None of that stuff matters. It's kind of cool and we did that for a long time; and other than that, it's worth a cup of coffee or something.'

That's what he actually says, so I have no idea what any of this could be about beyond that it seems to devalue Joe Reinagel's assignation of anything being crucial. More interesting to me is that the coach's name is Gregg, spelt the same way as that of the bakery.

Anyway, we're onto the subject of whether or not there will be a ban regarding sports persons kneeling for the national anthem, or possibly failing to kneel for the national anthem, whichever is worse. This doesn't actually seem to be a news item so much as a rhetorical question.

The final commercial break advertises the upcoming Selena festival celebrating the life and music of Selena, who was a big deal here in San Antonio. This is followed by something about wheelie bins, then Alamo Toyota, and finally the Texas State Aquarium.

We're back to Eyewitness News for the Final Play, as Joe calls the feature, usually with a grin or a wink to signal that we're in for a real treat right after these messages.

Better hold onto your hats, kids. This one's a real doozy, yes sir.

This time he's dispensed with the usual chortling preface to what is almost always YouTube footage of some sports person falling over or failing to catch a ball. Instead we see a baseball player at the edge of the field exchanging his bat for a hot dog with some supporter. This occurred during a game.

Ordinarily we would pan across to Jeff, Joe, Bill and whatever the lady newsreader is called all chuckling away.

Have you ever in your life seen anything like that!?

We pan across tonight, but just for a few seconds. Usually we get half a minute of banter as they describe people falling over or recall previous side-splitting instances of sports persons failing to catch balls.

We must have run out of time.

It's over.

I can't remember much beyond more weather than we could possibly need and sport sport sport sport sport…

Six hours later, thunder splits the heavens and I am woken by brilliant flashes of lightning.

Airport

Here's how a modern airport works. Far beyond the end of the runway, beyond all those fairy lights, off in the long grass stands a little man with a pair of binoculars and a notebook. He spends the day looking up into the sky, looking at all the planes that come and go and noting down their number plates. Sometimes there are too many planes, and in such cases he'll count them all a couple of times over just to be sure, then mount his bicycle and get back to the control tower as quick as he can.

'Too many planes,' he'll shout up at the window, and providing someone up there hears him, they'll talk to the men flying the planes by means of a special two-way radio, just to make sure they don't all try to land at the same time. Sometimes there are only a few planes, but on other days there might be a lot of planes, especially when one of those new countries has been discovered - like Valeria or Lexavia to name but two of the most recent; so that's a sudden increase in tourism and, by association, air traffic, and before you know it, there are just too many planes up there. Worse is that we have no way of telling just how many planes there might be. There is simply no way to be sure. It's something we shall never understand. It's a mystery.

I'd spent three weeks back in England. I'd had quite a time. I'd met up with family, friends, and old friends I hadn't expected to see. I'd packed a suitcase full of ancient cassette tapes - obscure and mostly noisy bands from the eighties and nineties whose work I intend to digitise and make available on the internet - and this time I took the trouble to check what luggage restrictions would apply.

Back in 2015, I turned up at Heathrow with as much crap as I could physically carry, materials which never made it into the shipping container when I first moved and which were subsequently marooned at my mother's house. I had an earlier suitcase full of ancient cassette tapes, an acoustic guitar, a large portable art portfolio, and three or four additional bags all bursting at the zippers. I knew there might be some kind of excess baggage fee, but I didn't mind paying another twenty quid or so. Unfortunately the anticipated twenty quid fee turned out to be closer to four-hundred, so I wasn't going to make that mistake again.

This time, I'd weighed the suitcase on my mother's bathroom scales, then taken out one cassette after another until the weight crept below the permitted limit. This left me with a surplus of twenty-six cassettes which I posted to myself. I spent about a hundred quid posting stuff to myself because it wouldn't fit in my luggage, and thankfully it all arrived at the other end in one piece.

My mother drops me off at the coach station in Coventry, and this time I manage not to cry. I give her a hug and a kiss on the cheek, which represents a gaudy demonstration of affection in our family because we're civilised and not inclined to ostentatious sentiment. The coach trip is boring, but it gets me there in plenty of time. I bum around Terminal Five looking for things to do, smoking my last ciggies for a while and eating bland sandwiches before getting into a fight with a machine. It's the check-in machine, one of those features installed for our increased comfort and convenience so as to dispense with human inefficiency.

I press an icon on the screen and it asks to see my passport, face down in the scanner.

It asks to see my green card.

This unit cannot process your request at this time, it tells me. Please seek assistance.

I get the same response from a second machine.

I find a human and she suggests that I simply go straight to the check-in desk, which I would have had to do anyway even if the machine had worked. I suppose it's okay for me to go straight to the check-in desk because at least I made the effort to use the machine. The human at the check-in desk tells me that my possession of both a passport and a green card probably confused his mechanical colleague. I hump my permitted twenty-three kilo suitcase of industrial noise onto the scales and begin to sweat, waiting to be told how many thousands of pounds I've just incurred in excess baggage charges.

'Is it okay? ' I ask after a silent minute. 'Not too heavy?'

'It's fine,' he tells me.

The flight is long, cramped, and boring, and I'm stuck right in the middle. I watch Rowan Atkinson in Maigret Sets a Trap, which I find soothing because I've spent the last three weeks watching relaxing crime dramas - Midsomer Murders, Lewis and the like, these constituting my mother's preferred viewing these days. Then I watch Doctor Strange - which is okay despite the presence of Cucumber, Arrival - which is excellent, and finally a sappy American made music documentary which compensates for minutes wasted on boring Fatboy Slim by showcasing the altogether more entertaining Virus Syndicate. Once I've watched all the in-flight telly I can stand to watch, I fill in a customs form, declaring that I'm not bringing anything naughty into the country. I value my precious suitcase of noisy tapes at five quid, because there's really no point in trying to work out what they're all worth. It's not like I'm going to sell my rare Opera for Infantry cassettes and use the money to fund the downfall of the dangerous orange shitgibbon.

Eight hours after take off, we land at Chicago. We land at Chicago later than anticipated because there were too many planes at Heathrow. Apparently they had all turned up at once, completely unexpected, not even a phone call or anything; and so we were unable to leave on schedule. As I shuffle from the plane, I consider asking a stewardess whether she thinks I'm really going to be able to make it across the airport in time to catch my connecting flight to San Antonio, but I already know the answer. I already know the answer because when travelling in the US, I always miss the connecting flight. Every single occasion of my coming back across the Atlantic, I've ended up stranded in Philadelphia or Charlotte or New York because they can't find the plane, or they've found the plane but some kids have drawn cocks on the side, or they've run out of fuel, or it might rain, or there's poo on the fucking runway. It has happened every single time, and tonight I get an unscheduled stay in the windy city. I've been in transit for thirteen hours and somehow I'm still thousands of miles away from home.

As I squirt from the connecting tunnel into the womb of O'Hare international, I raise a finger to catch the attention of a stewardess, but before I've even finished my question she directs my attention to the wall upon which an array of envelopes are affixed with tape. I see that my surname is written on one of the envelopes, but my thoughts are momentarily elsewhere, flustered by the blandly efficient tone of the stewardess telling me that I'm screwed, albeit not in those specific terms. I thought they had been trained to sound like they at least give a shit.

Amazingly, I don't lose it. I was expecting this eventuality. In fact, I would have been more surprised had I made my connecting flight without disruption. The envelope contains a letter telling me how deeply everyone regrets everything, along with tickets which will secure a room and breakfast at some local hotel.

I am swept through baggage claim by tidal crowds exiting the plane, then on through to customs and Homeland Security. Every few minutes I have another piece of paper shoved at me. They all go into different pockets as I try to concentrate on what the hell is going on and where I need to go. I ask directions of a woman who turns out to have a near impenetrable Swedish accent, and who helpfully barks at me whilst pointing at a line of machines, features installed for our increased comfort and convenience so as to dispense with human inefficiency. I can't even get to the machines because there are too many people and the crowd is chaotic, and I don't even know what the fuck I'm expected to do once I get there. After some wrestling, the robot asks for my passport and I answer a series of questions. It prints out my forty-seventh piece of paper to add to all the others I will eventually be expected to hand over to someone or other. Eventually I am through to passport control, or whatever it is. I am asked a couple of questions by a guy who doesn't care, and I'm subsequently waved through. My pockets are still very much stuffed with pointless forms, tickets, declarations, dockets and bits of paper. At no point has anyone asked to see any of them, and yet I've already entered the United States. Almost an hour has passed since I stepped from the plane.

I wait outside with other disgruntled passengers. It's dark and hot, a temperature differential which confirms that I'm back on American soil, accordingly bringing me the only twinge of pleasure I am able to experience under the circumstances. We wait forty minutes until a minibus bearing the name of our hotel appears. It fills to capacity before I can get a seat. The driver tells us that his colleague will be along in another half hour.

We continue to wait. I compare disgruntled notes with a fellow traveller, a German. He is unsure as to the departure time of our replacement San Antonio flight in the morning. I empty my pockets of all the slips of paper I've accrued, but somehow I've mislaid my boarding pass, the one piece of paper which actually does useful shit, the ticket which will eventually get me home.

Fanfuckingtastic.

A second minibus eventually shows. It's after nine. We landed a couple of hours ago. I talk to an old couple who take up the seat in front of me. They tell me that they very much enjoyed England. I tell them that I'm glad to be back in America, despite this evening.

I phone my wife once I'm at the hotel. She already knows what has happened, and knows not to wait for me at the airport. I think she's more distressed by it all than I am. I consider phoning Joe, my friend who lives in Chicago. About a month back I told him that my connection would occur in his city, and that it almost certainly wouldn't be happening given my previous experience of trying to catch a fucking plane in America. I may be giving you a call if I end up in some hotel, I told him, but now that I'm here I realise my mood is best kept in quarantine, and that I will make for terrible company this evening. I don't know Joe very well, but from what I do know, I already respect the guy too much to ask him to babysit some pissed off English dude.

Next morning, I have breakfast at the hotel. It's free, as it should be. I kill time, watch some television, then eventually make my way back to the airport. The missing boarding pass turns out to be no big deal after all.

Yesterday I wore my Lone Star shirt and stetson. I wear the stetson as a matter of course, but I figured that wearing it in combination with the shirt would give me a notionally patriotic appearance, reducing my potential significance to those factions within the Department of Homeland Security who now - so I am informed - make it their business to check your social media to see if you've referred to the current president as a dangerous orange shitgibbon, an identification you might imagine would be covered by that whole deal with freedom of speech, that thing which is supposed to make America great. I had already deleted all references to the dangerous orange shitgibbon from my facebook page, and also any links which might expose me as one of those bleeding heart liberal faggot types; but still, I'm reluctant to take chances, hence the shirt and the stetson. However, I'm now behind schedule and I'm not going to wear the Lone Star shirt a second day running because I have standards. Instead I opt for my Henry Rollins for President t-shirt because it at least suggests patriotism in some form.

I make it through customs and security just fine, aside from one officer having a rummage through my backpack, seemingly intrigued by all the funny looking shit which showed up on the x-ray machine. He scowls at my ancient tapes of industrial noise, but thankfully doesn't find my pornography - a 1993 issue of Knave which I own because I'm in it. Specifically the magazine features an article about A Reflection, an unpublished comic strip written by myself and drawn by Charlie Adlard way back at the beginning of his career. Ignoring the bongo periodical, the security officer finds a set square once owned by my grandfather. I guess maybe it looked like a weapon on the x-ray. Once it's obvious that I'm not about to blow anything up, I'm through. Weeks later I discover that my friend Jane, another English citizen living in the US on a green card, experienced just the sort of difficulties I had anticipated. She was detained at length, and interviewed twice before being allowed to re-enter the country. I'm inclined to wonder whether it was the stetson which helped, which eased the process for me.

I head for my departure gate and an old coot similarly kitted out with a stetson squints at my t-shirt. 'Who do you want for president?'

'Henry Rollins,' I tell him. 'It's a long story.'

My estimation of his voting habits thankfully turn out to be entirely wrong. 'Well, I ain't got no idea who that is,' he sighs, 'but he can't be no worse than that dang fool we got ourselves right now.'

My flight back to Texas runs without incident.

Finally I am back in San Antonio.

Heading for baggage claim I see Daisy Bee hamming it up on the concourse before a bunch of school kids. She is my first familiar face, our famous local clown. She is our equivalent of Krusty because, as I've noticed, there are certain peculiar parallels between life in San Antonio and what you see on a typical episode of The Simpsons. We have a clown. We almost certainly have a guy in a bee costume. We even have our own version of Kent Brockman. I've watched him on the news and I've shaken him by the hand.

Baggage claim echoes traditional song from a marginally less traditional trio of female Mariachi musicians - violin, guitar, and guitarrón. It feels like a personal welcome, as though they're playing just for me, and it makes me think of Michoacan, which makes me happy. The air is hot and the music is sweet.

I am home.

London as a Foreign Country

I left England in 2011. I've since returned a few times, mainly to see family and friends, but also to collect bits and pieces still at my mother's house, things which hadn't made it into the forty boxes of crap I had shipped. The climate came as a shock when I returned in April, 2015. I landed at Heathrow's Terminal Five in a t-shirt and a jacket because I'd forgotten how cold England could get. I somehow recalled spring and summer as temperate, but there was an icy wind howling around all that glass and steel; and it came as a shock. The cold was something I hadn't been obliged to think about for a while.

Another couple of years have passed but I have the air fare. This time the weather systems of Texas and the United Kingdom have roughly synchronised, but everything else is different. My habit of visits lasting a couple of weeks has left me with no strong impression of progress or of anything having changed. I've continued to think of England as it was back in June, 2011, which may as well have been a life time ago. I'm no longer even sure who was prime minister at the time without checking. It may have been Blair.

So April in England is warm, or at least bearable. It doesn't matter that I haven't brought a coat, although there's the damp and the humidity to consider. I'd forgotten about how it's possible to stand beneath one of those slate grey skies and become damp with just moisture in the air despite that it isn't actually raining; and England doesn't quite have the heat to dry you off; and when the heat comes, it hangs in the air and you sweat without feeling hot. I'd forgotten all of this.

Of course, England has voted to withdraw from the European Union since I was here. I've seen facebook and read of a great divide, eyes which look away and fail to meet your gaze. Steve - whom I meet in a gastropub at the centre of Coventry - told me about the morning after the vote, how he went in to work and it felt like someone had died. No-one wanted to admit to having voted leave. The people had spoken, but they had done it once the rest of us went to bed, and they spoke quietly in case anyone heard.

I couldn't work out whether the streets of London felt different. I could barely remember what they had felt like before. Racist attacks had apparently increased thanks to lone nutters feeling newly emboldened in expressing their xenophobia, but I personally didn't see anything. Mostly I took pleasure in hearing accents I hadn't heard for a long time, voices which once seemed common - young men ending every sentence with innit, or north Africa via south-east London with an endearing equal emphasis given to each syllable. It takes work to excavate anything worth a genuine smile from my time life in London, but it's nice to know that there's something. The typically right-wing clamour to make stuff great again always seems to entail getting rid of the elements I liked.

In London, I visit old friends, and amongst them there is Andy Martin. He's lost his means of employment since I last saw him, a job which was rationalised away into thin air as part of a government initiative to make everything better by making it worse. He was also told he would have to vacate his flat in order to provide housing for more photogenic persons, families, the sort they want to encourage in the nation's capital; but it turns out that the threat of eviction was nearly five years ago and he's heard nothing since. It seems the council realised they just couldn't do it, because even Andy Martin still has some rights.

We've kept in touch, and I have a feeling he may have gone off the deep end since I left, but I have to see him. I feel I owe it to him, and ultimately I'm glad I make the effort. Blank text on a screen rarely reveals anyone at their best, and even though he's still patently mad, he's still patently mad in a good way, and it's a great pleasure to know that this country has not yet finished him off; although it's obviously had a fucking good try.

I make my way to Bow on the Docklands Light Railway, catching the train in Lewisham. I lived in Lewisham for a couple of years and the place has changed beyond recognition. The roundabout has gone. The waste ground bordered by a wall upon which a single ceramic tile representing all that was left of the cinema has gone. The White Horse, in which the late Andrew Cox and myself used to drink has miraculously reverted to the White Horse, but as a pizza-based gastropub, still not quite back to being the White Horse I remember. It isn't even as though it's simply metal and glass ruthlessly sprouting up along the old roads, because even the roads are changed and their replacements lead to different places. I can't see how it's an improvement, or how all the new development fixes anything which needed fixing.

As I approach Bow, I enter a hellish landscape of towering glass, a civic mechanism in which humanity is reduced to a component fluid. Andrew Cox worked in Canary Wharf. He didn't like it much, but apparently that was just the beginning, merely the seed of what we have now. It goes on forever, and each time I glance at the reflective surface of some mile high block, I realise I'm expecting a sleek Star Wars pod to float around the edge of the building. Variety is provided by instances of designer eccentricity breaking up the pattern - glass blocks resembling a shard, a gherkin, even a fucking pint glass because why the hell not? These things win awards, much to the delight of those whose lives are so bereft of meaning as to allow for space in which to give a shit about such crap. I could have sworn those books by J.G. Ballard were written as a warning against this kind of thing. We seem to be doing that a lot of late, mistaking our dystopian science-fiction for a blueprint.

It's better once I get out of the city.

I manage another couple of weeks, and the best of it turns out to be watching detective shows with my mother, and then eventually getting on a plane and coming home. Nostalgia may be all well and good, but no-one should have to live there, and the worst of all is that the old place actually hasn't changed.

I can remember every consideration of why it was so easy to leave in near pornographic detail.

The New World

Thursday the 23rd of June, 2011 was my last day in England; not my last ever day in England, although it felt like it might be. On Friday  morning I was up at three for the sake of catching a flight, an undertaking which I found weird with a touch of death sentence to it. There would be no going back. I was moving to America. It was the thing towards which I'd been working for a long time, the thing on which everything had been pinned, and yet on some level I'd never really expected the day to come because I'd been lost in forward motion. I hadn't even been up at three when working for Royal Mail, and the sky was still frozen black. My dad turned up in the car around four. He was driving me to the airport because neither coach nor train would have got me there in time.

The city was silent. It was still cold. I hugged my mother, then kissed her on the cheek and tried not to cry - and we've never been one of those touchy-feely families. It seemed like I would never see her again. I think I noticed a tear in her eye.

I'd been living in my mother's place whilst selling off a load of my accumulated crap and applying for the K1 fiancé visa. The K1 would grant me three months in which to get married and apply for a green card, and now it was happening - an eventuality I had somehow not quite foreseen. It was terrifying, but I kept moving because the  alternative would have been much worse. I told myself it would all make sense at some point in the future, and hopefully the none too distant future.

I was flying from Gatwick, because when I bought the ticket I hadn't considered that it made much difference. I was still thinking of airports in terms of having lived in London, but Gatwick is a shitload further than Heathrow if you're travelling down from the north on the M6. My dad and I talked about whatever we usually talked about as  dawn broke and the motorway began to fill with early traffic, and eventually we were at the airport. I loaded my crap onto a baggage trolley and we wheeled off to the departure lounge. I hugged my dad, which I'm not sure I'd ever done before because, as I say, we've never really been that sort of family; and like a wanker, I started to cry.

He understood. 'That's a proper Burty trait,' he told me, and I remembered him describing how tough it had been working on a farm all those years, getting upset over the deaths of calves and cows.

Then followed about nine hours on a plane, landing at Charlotte, North Carolina for my date with Immigration which, after the previous two years worth of headaches accrued in preparation, took all of half an hour. I handed over my envelope of documents and they took me to a room where I sat with a bored teenager in a uniform with a massive gun. He wasn't so intimidating as the bored teenager in a uniform with a massive gun who had once cadged cigarettes from me in Calixtlahuaca, but it was obvious that we were never going to be friends. It wasn't so much an interview as a conversation with someone who clearly wanted to be somewhere else, following which I was left with four hours to burn. My six o'clock connecting flight was pushed back to seven due to a surfeit of lightning, then to eight because there was something wrong with the aircraft, and then it was cancelled because apparently US Airways only had one plane, which was about what I expected. They'd done it before. My previous visit to America had briefly marooned me in Philadelphia. It was getting to be a habit.

The airline put me up in a hotel and I caught a flight to Houston early next morning. It was that or three further connections which wouldn't arrive in San Antonio until eight on Saturday evening. Bess picked me up from Houston with a two hour drive back to San Antonio. I spent the car journey and most of that first month in something of a daze. A foreign country looks very different to a holiday when it's supposed to be for the rest of your life.

I moved into Bess's apartment, a second floor flat in a place on Sunset Ridge. Sunset Ridge was a subdivision - as they are called - a complex of architecturally similar houses and flats on a hillside behind a large ritzy sign. The buildings were two storeys, stone clad with shallow roofing and a sort of alpine look. The lawns were neat, without fencing, and were tended by someone working from a main office which looked after the affairs of the subdivision. Neither trees nor bushes nor bedding plants were of any kind I recognised, and the Texas heat seemed phenomenal. I felt a little as though I had moved into a J.G. Ballard novel, and I could only wait for familiarity to set in so I could feel normal again.

The flat was a reasonable size, but too small for three of us, the third being the inscrutable kid who was seven and would eventually be my stepson. In my absence, Bess had found a house and we would be moving there in a month or so. Everything was in transition. An email I sent to my mother on Monday the 27th of June concluded:

Sorry about the sombre tone, there have been the inevitable couple of occasions where I've wondered if I haven't made a huge mistake, but I'm sure it will all look very different in a few weeks time.

Beyond such details, all that remains is a blur of images which seem alien even now, six years later: picking up a ton of Lego from the floor, and the child who barely seems to know what to say to me, instead addressing everything to his mother; smoking the last of my tobacco outside on the step of the building as colourful tropical birds hop about in the tree, unaware of how exotic they appear; dive bombed by sparrowhawks at Sunset Ridge's outdoor pool; taking shelter from the crippling heat of midday, inside with the AC up full and the lights off watching the new version of Battlestar Galactica; nothing I quite recognise in the stores and supermarkets, no kebab shop and no Asian-owned corner store; lightning flashing across the city in the evening like in a film, the city as a vista of treetops with the occasional water tower; dishes in the sink and a fridge containing only spray cheese and ice cubes...

It got better and it got easier, but it's still hard to think about those first months even now, because the shock was so profound; and this was immigration willingly undertaken as a matter more closely resembling choice than necessity, so I've been lucky.

It was probably the best decision I ever made.