A Day in the Life of the Global Pandemic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the Cheese Cave to the End of Days

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

'We need to go to Dallas?'

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

'He has a one man show?'

'Yes, and it's in Dallas.'

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

'It is?'

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

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

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

'Well, we need to go to Dallas.'

'For a one man show?'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'We need to go there.'

Traffic slows as we come into Waco.

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

'I'm tempted.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'It looks okay up ahead,' I suggest.

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

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

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

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

Life During Rainfall

It doesn't seem to rain much in Texas, so when it does rain it seems all the more dramatic. It's been raining for three days solid. There have been breaks during which I've zipped out on the bike and ridden the usual twenty miles. I kept the waterproof jacket and trousers which came with the job at Royal Mail, and they're enough to make the ride bearable under conditions of light to moderate rainfall.

Life has gone on as normal for everyone except the cats. Where most of them go out to attend to cat business during the hours of darkness, they've been stuck inside these past few nights. I am greeted first thing by a front room full of irritable felines, and usually a couple of protest turds strategically laid at the traditional locations. Nibbler is the worst, marching up and down, hissing and swiping at everyone and everything as though a couple of hours in the company of other cats has been too much for him; so I let him out, although it's not like he's going anywhere given that it's still raining.

Our internet connection fizzles out on the third day, just as it always does. Rainfall destroys our internet every time, and I still don't understand why. We jump through the same hoops over and over, and it's always due to some junction box a few blocks away. My theory is that our internet is beamed directly to this junction box, and that the signal is quickly baked into tiny pies by magic pixies so small as to be effectively invisible. The pixies then convey these pies across a small lake the size of a penny, to a receiver. The pies are fed into the receiver, and from that point on the internet comes directly to our house, enabling us to watch Wheel of Fortune without it resembling a Nine Inch Nails video. When it rains, either conditions on the small lake become so treacherous as to prevent the magic pixies crossing, or else causing the pie crusts to dissolve in transit.

Nevertheless, we phone the help desk.

'You need to turn the modem off and then back on again,' the lady suggests.

'Why not?' I say. 'We've already done that three or four times, but maybe the fourth will be the one which effects a magical transformation.'

'She can hear you,' Bess hisses, indicating that she has her smartphone set to speaker.

'I know,' I smile. 'That's why I said it.'

We turn the modem off, and then back on again. We remain without internet, and I imagine losing a limb to a chainsaw, phoning the hospital in agony.

Before I submit the ticket, could you first try walking around the room for me?

Then, did that fix the problem?

They're going to send someone out tomorrow morning. There will be a phone call first thing asking me to confirm that the internet hasn't just grown back of its own accord, and that I still require assistance.

No Wheel of Fortune for us tonight.

We watch a couple of episodes of Kenneth Clark's Civilisation on DVD. It's interesting, but two hours of Kenneth Clark is more than enough for one night, and besides neither Bess nor myself fully agree with his definition of what constitutes civilisation. Also, I'm disappointed at the free pass he's given to certain fucking awful examples of overly sentimental eighteenth century painting, given the opprobrium he heaped upon significantly less offensive works in the previous episode.

I look through cupboards full of DVDs and notice Mamma Mia! 'How about this?' I ask.

'I hate that movie,' Bess tells me.

'I know. We could watch it and take the piss. I've never seen it.'

'Well, I guess…'

We wait for the thing to load.

Her first husband gave my wife the DVD for Christmas, despite her having told him that she had hated the film. He also gave a copy to his friend Karen Eliot* that same Christmas, so it was probably some kind of two for the price of one deal. It later emerged that he'd been knobbing Karen Eliot on the quiet, all of which partially accounts for why he is no longer married to my wife.

We watch about twenty minutes.

It's basically Four Weddings and a Funeral with more exotic locations, all floppy haired Englishmen exclaiming gosh and laying on the self-deprecation with a silver-plated trowel. It's the story of a girl whose father could be any one of four mysterious photogenic men - Colin Firth and Piers Brosnan amongst them - seemingly implying that her mother was pulling a train at the time of conception; and every couple of minutes they all foghorn and bluster through a song by Abba so as to illustrate some point or other.

I've never felt particularly protective of Abba, but I liked them when I was a kid.

'This is awful,' I announce. 'I don't think I can watch any more.'

We switch to Kath & Kim DVDs and I let another cat out, this time Kirby who pads onto the back porch and concludes that yes, it is indeed still fucking raining. She looks back at me.

'I don't know what you think I can do,' I tell her. 'My powers are limited.'

Every time I open the door I hear the white noise of rain and the constant drip as it sluices from the roof into puddles. It's been three days and it's getting a bit much.

Next morning, I'm still at home. I can't ride the bike even though it isn't raining.

The guy turns up at eleven, fiddles around for a while, then concludes that the problem is indeed with the junction box and those magic pixies - or however it works. He's going to call the people who fixed the same problem last time, and the umpteen times before, and they'll get it done just as soon as they can. It should take an hour.

Four hours later, we still have no internet connection.

I walk to the supermarket to pick up some cat food. I've been using my Sony Walkman again, now that I have all of my cassette tapes back. I'm listening to something Andrew taped for me back in the late nineties, a mix of Dinosaur Jr., Tad, Eleventh Dream Day, Pavement - all of those American guitar bands he used to like so much. Andrew died in 2009, and here I am listening to his tape of American music whilst actually in America. Not for the first time, it feels as though I'm in a film, and the sun is out at long last.

*: Name changed so as to protect the not even remotely innocent.

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.

Rockport after Harvey

I'm about to leave the house as I catch the last moments of some feature on the local radio station. People are steering clear of Rockport in the wake of Hurricane Harvey, believing they will only get in the way of the clean-up operation. The woman speaks of coastal businesses trying to get back on their feet but finding it difficult with the usually steady flow of visitors having dried up. 'If ever you felt like driving down to Rockport, maybe stopping by for something to eat,' she concludes, 'they would really, really appreciate it right now.'

I've seen photos of the coastal towns since the hurricane hit back in August, and the devastation has been profound. Byron's family have a couple of houses down there. He drove down to assess the damage on the Monday following, despite radio announcements stating that anyone not local would be ordered to turn their vehicles around. He got through somehow. The damage to the places owned by his family - who seem to have second, third and fourth homes all across the state - was minimal, at least compared to some.

'Let's go to Rockport,' I told Bess. 'This woman on the radio said they need our business, and I've never been to a disaster area.'

I'd kept an eye open for Angela working the tills at HEB, our local supermarket. Her family used to live across the road from us until the landlord sold the place. Angela, her mother, and all their cats moved to another place about a mile away; but Damean, Angela's younger brother, went to live in Rockport with his dad. Damean was a decent kid. He was friends with my stepson and a good influence. He would come over and shake his head at the state of Junior's room.

'You gotta clean this up, dude. No-one can live like this.'

Angela still works in HEB but I haven't seen her in a month or so and I want to find out how things are with Damean down in Rockport. I ask Jennifer, who also works the tills. She tells me she hasn't seen Angela in a while, although she knows that her colleague has to work her hours around school. I suddenly notice that I'm a fifty-year old man enquiring after the private lives of significantly younger - and not unattractive - Latinas who work in my local supermarket.

The weekend comes around and we drive down to Corpus Christi, a few miles from Rockport but more direct for us, being at the other end of a major highway running south from San Antonio. The trip is a little under two hours, and as we approach the coast we keep our eyes peeled for signs of storm damage. There are a few telephone poles which seem to be at a bit of an angle, but it's hard to say whether this means anything; and as we hit Corpus Christi, it really doesn't look like there has been any recent occurrence of anything of meteorological significance. Then we pass the local supermarket, now reduced to a branch of EB. More and more signs are missing letters, but it falls some way short of the carnage we expected. We stop to buy used books at a branch of Half Price, then drive across the water to Padre Island, taking the scenic route.

Actually, it's probably the surreal route more than it is scenic. To my eyes, Padre Island is one of the strangest places I've ever been. Coastal Texas is flat and bordered by a thin strip of barrier island about a mile out to sea, also flat, forming a similarly slender strip of inland salt water extending all the way up to Galveston. The inland waters are calm and expansive, some of them seeming to reach the horizon. Also they are shallow so it's not uncommon to see a lone fisherman in wading boots somehow stood several miles from the shore. The vegetation is of the kind found in flat, hot, windy places; and one of the most distinctive birds is the brown pelican, which is enormous and prehistoric in appearance; and of what dwellings there are, half of them are raised up on stilts. It makes me think of J.G. Ballard's Vermilion Sands.

We cross the inland waters and drive towards the shore. As we pass the Best Western motel we are pleased to note that the giant concrete Mermaids, starfish, and related Neptunian figures of the theme park opposite have sustained no obvious signs of damage. Driving further, then taking the road which follows the coast up towards Rockport, we begin to see Harvey's signature. We follow a long straight road, a geological demonstration of perspective and vanishing points with inland waters to the left, dunes to the right, and very few trees. The leaning telephone poles have now become too much of a thing to be anything other than storm damage, and we begin to pass a few houses, with here and there patches of blue stretched across rooftops where tiles and even beams have been ripped away in the tempest.

Eventually we come to Port Aransas, which is marginally more populous, and here the road is lined with piles of trash and detritus. It takes us a few minutes to work out quite why this should be, and we guess this is the ruined contents of flooded homes and dwellings moved outside to await collection. The realisation is chilling because there's so much of it, and because most of these homes are raised up in the air on thick stilts, ten or twelve feet above ground level. Given that we're less than a hundred yards from the sea front, its hard to imagine the Biblical deluge it would have taken to flood these dwellings on such a scale. There are boats and yachts upside down in the middle of parking lots, but strangely, aside from the occasional blue roof, most of the buildings appear structurally intact.

Bess had been hoping we might get something to eat at the Restaurant San Juan in Port Aransas, because we went there before. The food was good and the owner addressed everyone as boss. We pull up and see that the door is open but the lights are off. Buckets,  stepladders, trestle tables, and an empty parking lot suggest the place is not yet quite back on its feet. We're getting closer to where Hurricane Harvey made landfall, having attained Category 4 intensity.

We drive on, taking the ferry across the inland waters to Harbor Island, then heading north towards Rockport. We begin to see ruined buildings, just piles of bricks, and a fifteen minute tailback on the highway turns out to result from the clean-up operation as a swarm of trucks migrate slowly south, absorbing the disgorged contents of homes. The mountains of trash are the highest we've yet seen, and the local supermarket is reduced to a branch of HE. The strangest thing is that the devastation is far from uniform, with some homes standing untouched amongst neighbours lacking a roof or a couple of walls. Certain stores are open for business, while others barely seem to have anything left worth saving. Each intersection has become a forest of makeshift signs stuck in the ground - roof repair, or we will buy what's left of your home. Something about the signs bothers me.

We make it to the sea front.

The aquarium is a pile of rubble. It's upsetting as we both loved the place, but Bess tells me all of the fish were released or otherwise ferried to safety before the storm hit, which is some comfort, I guess. There's an art gallery near the ruined aquarium where we once made a failed attempt to use the restroom. We had no idea it was an art gallery, there being no signage to that effect, but we took it to be open to the public due to crowds milling around guzzling wine - maybe a bar or something; but it was an art gallery and there was a private view in progress, and no we couldn't use the facilities being as they were reserved for a better standard of person; and now the place was quite clearly screwed, boarded up and not coming back any time soon; therefore boo hoo.

Reminded of our original mission, we continue our search for somewhere to eat. The fast food chains mostly seem to be back on their feet, and McDonald's is even hiring, but the smaller places are clearly struggling, and the first we find is cash only. We pass a collapsed barn which had been a used book store only six months before, and then we are out the other side of Rockport. We turn around, deciding to take a second look at a place we'd passed back on the highway just before the edge of town. It's called the Original Vallarta, acknowledging either a similarly named rival or possibly a fraternal establishment further up the road, and it is bright orange - always a good sign. Menus are painted directly onto the wall, and families are sat within watching sports or telenovelas.

The food is great.

Mission accomplished, we hit the road and return home, wiser and slightly fatter.

Crazy Snot

We drove up Olney to North Vandiver, then along as far as Urban Crest. At Urban Crest we took a left to Crandall, then a sort of shimmy along to Greenwich at the end, and then again at Harmon, back down to North Vandiver and home. These are streets, lanes, roads, drives and places in Alamo Heights but no-one here seems to use suffixes which don't always even appear on the street signs. I'm in the habit of saying I live on Timberlane rather than Timberlane Drive because it would seem weird to me, as though I were trying to make a point; which is something different to my continued English pronunciation of the words banana and aluminium. Were I to go native with those two it would feel like the kind of impersonation which could lead to descriptions of things as real swell,  purty, or mighty fine. Yet I'll say gas rather than petrol station because it's easier. I don't know what the rules are.

We drove up Olney to North Vandiver, all around and then back down again for the sake of measuring the distance, which came to five and a half miles. Today I'm taking the same route on foot in the name of exercise because my bike is still at the repair shop. If I can be arsed, I tell myself, I might do a couple of circuits of the block demarcated by Urban Crest, Greenwich, and Harmon, and I've worked out that if I do that five times it will add up to the twenty miles I might have cycled on my bike; except of course I know full well that I'm not going to walk twenty bloody miles, so I'm just walking until I get bored.

Hailstones the size of golf balls and even larger fell on San Antonio last night. It was terrifying, not to mention deafening, and I've never experienced that sort of weather before. Thankfully, neither had my wife, so I'm hoping it won't happen again in my lifetime - it isn't one of those Texas things I'm just going to have to get used to, like incorrect pronunciation of banana or ambiguity as to whether such and such an address amounts to a road, a street, or a drive. This morning as I take my walk I'm also taking stock of the damage, because peculiarly ours seems to be the only house which didn't have one of those meteorite sized chunks of ice come through the roof. My wife's car is similarly undamaged. Walking up Morningside I pass a few vehicles with smashed wind shields, and plenty with hood or roof pitted by impact dents.

The first damage of which I take stock is my own knee as I miss a step and fall whilst walking across the parking lot at the dentists' office. This is Dr. Yarborough's surgery, so it's probably some sort of curse they've put on me because I got pissed off by the expensive and unnecessary treatment they attempted to con me into signing up for. I awkwardly get to my feet, direct dark thoughts towards the building, and then continue on roads strewn with the leaves of palms and yucca, plant detritus from gardens smashed up by last night's hail.

Eventually I reach the point at which North Vandiver crosses the Austin Highway, and I'm beginning to feel hungry. I suppose that's a couple of miles so far.

Fuck it, I decide, and enter the L&L Hawaiian Grill situated on the corner. Bess and I have been fascinated by the place for some time, wondering what the hell it is they actually serve. We have no idea what Hawaiian cuisine might look like and have assumed that the place is probably just a burger joint wherein a chef in a grass skirt sticks a slice of pineapple in your bun; but we don't know this for sure because neither of us have ever quite summoned up the courage to investigate. I order loco moco because it isn't a burger, and it's the weirdest looking thing on the menu, at least to my eyes. Loco moco turns out to be a bed of white rice, two beefburgers of the kind I used to buy frozen from Sainsburys back in England and which seem conspicuously absent from American menus, all topped with a couple of fried eggs. There's also some sort of gravy on this, and a side of what appears to be a cross between macaroni cheese and coleslaw but without the cheese. As I eat, I study the menu and find a lot of burgers, amongst them a salmon burger which looks decent, and dishes which somehow hint at sushi. Being new to this, it all strikes me as food invented by crazy people, or as a burger joint owned by a maniac who suddenly decides he's running a sushi restaurant, with a knowledge of sushi based exclusively on a scene from a 1960s Batman comic. The food is mad, but strangely it actually sort of works. It tastes pretty good, although there's too much rice, and crucially it tastes home cooked, which means even with a loony at the wheel, L&L Hawaiian Grill already has a head start over Popeye's and all of those places.

Given our working hypothetical model of an establishment selling mainly pineapple burgers, Bess and I have often wondered how the hell L&L Hawaiian Grill manages to stay in business; and now I have my answer in that it's packed with marines and other servicemen presumably attached to Fort Sam just down the road. I guess some of them will have been stationed in Hawaii, and so they come here from time to time. Bess later tells me that moco is Spanish for bogies - or boogers as she inaccurately terms them - but loco moco nevertheless tastes pretty good for something with a recipe which may as well be what do I have left in the fridge which hasn't gone off? It's hard to get past the thought that I am eating a dish named crazy snot, but not impossible.

I walk on along North Vandiver, passing the Quaker's Meeting Hall and a series of utilities trucks repairing overhead power cables brought down by last night's anomalous weather. I turn up Urban Crest, and stroll into the quieter depths of Alamo Heights. I've answered my own question of what food is served at the L&L Hawaiian Grill, and now I get to answer who the hell buys those things? This is a thought which occurs each time we pass a place on the side of the highway selling giant brightly painted figures beaten into shape from sheets of tin. It's always roughly the same line up of cows, dinosaurs, banditos, cartoon characters and so on. They're garden ornaments, and whilst the sight of them always raises a smile, I can't imagine wanting one for our own yard, and I have no idea who buys them. A hot dog in a sombrero grins at me over the fence on the other side of Urban Crest. He's about nine foot tall, as is his friend, the chicken, and so I have my answer.

At the corner of Northridge I pause to inspect a lawn embellished with a Trump campaign sign. It seems worth looking at because this is thankfully the first Trump campaign material I've seen in real life on this side of the internet. I've seen plenty of Bernie and Hillary material, and a fair quota in support of our own homegrown Republicans - Straus and others - but this is my first physical evidence of real people apparently believing Donald Trump might be worth a vote. I notice how there's similarly a Trump campaign sticker on the rear bumper of the truck parked in the driveway, next to one of the state flag with the word secede superimposed in forceful block capitals.

What sort of person might live here? I hear my inner Loyd Grossman ask. I suppose it depends upon which aspect of Trump's campaign most appeals to this individual, although given that Donald Trump seems to hate more or less everyone, it's hard to take a guess. This person might have a problem with all those Mexicans supposedly flooding across the border, and may therefore respond to Trump's vow to represent his or her views in that regard. Of course, someone who dislikes Mexicans choosing to live in San Antonio would have to be a fucking idiot, which doesn't necessarily preclude the possibility of this being the detail which has secured his or her vote. The secede sticker refers to the popularity of the idea that Texas might secede from the union of the United States, thus meaning we no longer have to have anything to do with jazz musicians or hippies who wear open-toed sandals - visits to Austin excepted - which is a nice idea but probably won't happen. I therefore have to assume that our mysterious family not only wish for a big fucking wall built across the bottom part of the state, but for Texas to become its own country, and one which logically wouldn't actually be under the jurisdiction of President Trump; unless they want Trump to move down here before we close the doors and change the locks. Maybe they haven't really thought it all through. Maybe they're just idiots.

If I have any idiotic qualities, they have been lessened by my walk, statistically speaking. I return home via HEB, our local supermarket, clocking up a sum total of just under seven miles, which seems like enough. I've eaten crazy snot, penetrated the mystery of L&L Hawaiian Grill, discovered who the hell buys those things, and observed Trump support. I am moderately wiser than when I set out this morning.

The War on Silence

My wife was excited when it was announced that a branch of Target would be opening on Austin Highway, just a few minutes from where we live.

'What's so great about Target?' I asked.

I don't remember her answer in detail, but what I took from it was that Target was like a Walmart which had bothered to wipe its ass, brush its teeth, and maybe made the effort to pull a comb through its hair every once in a while. It was just a store, basically a warehouse selling more or less everything from inside a space in which you might otherwise store a jumbo jet. If we're going to accept soulless corporate retail as an inevitably, then at least you don't feel the need to take a shower each time you enter a branch of Target.

We passed by and would note the progress of the building work as what had once been a branch of Hobby Town gradually shuffled towards its new identity. Then the day arrived and the fences came down, and we went in to buy bars of chocolate for the sake of making a purchase in the new store. As I have discovered, despite being the land of unnecessarily sweet unhealthy shite, the United States nevertheless scores poorly when you want a bar of chocolate. Hershey bars aren't entirely without merit, but they're more or less all you can buy of their general type and are no substitute for Cadbury's Dairy Milk. Only certain stores carry proper sweeties as I recognise the category - or candy as I still refuse to call it - and Target is one of them.

We looked around, located the Dairy Milk, then headed for the checkout, and as we approached we became aware of a noise; and as we became aware of the noise we realised it had been there in the background since we first entered the store, something like how whining would sound if it was cheerful. We approached the till and saw that the noise was produced by Douglas, our cashier.

We probably didn't know him as Douglas at the time, although there's a chance we saw his name tag, but for at least a couple of visits he was just that guy.

We waited patiently in the short queue. Douglas was dealing with a woman buying an item of clothing. He was talking about the weather and how hot it had been, which seemed a slightly unimaginative topic given that we were in Texas, and that even I had given up passing comment on days when the river catches fire. Exhausting meteorology as a subject, Douglas moved on to bludgeon his customer into revealing all with his relentless interrogation.

Yes, she was going on holiday.

Yes, this was the reason for her purchase of clothing.

Yes, it was true that she was looking forward to the holiday.

Douglas dropped items into bags and touched virtual buttons upon the screen which operated his till. His voice was loud with an upper register that carried a long way without quite being shrill, and he never stopped talking, sing-song and sounding not so much effeminate as just unnecessarily friendly; and now we were going to learn all about his holiday plans.

My wife and I gazed across the store, considering adjacent queues. There were two other cashiers on duty, each getting on with the job, more or less silent but with an occasional glance in our direction, towards Douglas. Everyone else stared openly in something approaching disbelief.

We made it to the front of the queue.

'Oh I just love chocolate!' he told us with undisguised delight, and then delivered an essay on the subject as though he were a contestant on a game show requiring one to discuss a topic for a set length of time without interruption. I grunted and mumbled to show that I was listening and that I would be paying by debit card, words too brief to reveal my English accent. I already felt certain that he had either been to England, or knew someone who had, or owned every episode of Keeping Up Appearances on DVD and just loved that show.

It's always Keeping Up Appearances.

My wife's family all told me how much they enjoyed it when we were first introduced. Even bag-packers in my local supermarket have told me how much they like Keeping Up Appearances as soon as they've identified my accent. The thing is that I'm not sure I ever saw an entire episode until recently, and that was mainly in order to see what all the fuss was about. I mean it's okay, but not a patch on One Foot in the Grave, and the irony is that my father lives around the corner from the house of the fictional Hyacinth Bucket from the television series in Binley, Coventry. He knows the man who grew up in that house, and who was a child when the BBC chose his home for their outside shots, and who vaguely remembers how he used to wonder whether Hyacinth was an aunt of some kind. Furthermore, the house of Daisy and Onslow from the television series is in Stoke Aldermoor, also Coventry, and I'm fairly sure I delivered mail to it back when I was a postman.

Lacking any pronounced enthusiasm for Keeping Up Appearances, I'm tempted to relate some of the above for the sake of something to say when the subject arises, as it does from time to time; but I never do because I always fear it will sound weird. In any case, it was unnecessary on this occasion as our dialogue with Douglas required only that we listen as he shared his opinions on different brands of chocolate.

We left and didn't think of him again until our next visit to Target. There he was, still holding forth, talking up a storm, oblivious to the stunned expressions of everybody within earshot. What a happy guy, we said to ourselves, loitering with our jar of curry sauce and bag of cat food until the queue went down at one of the other tills.

'You know, when you come in here, you always buy potatoes!,' Douglas warbled to his current customer. 'When you came in I saw you and I said to myself, I know just what she's going to buy.'

'What the fuck?' I mumbled, not quite under my breath. 'Maybe the woman likes potatoes. Who cares?'

The guy working our till rang up our curry sauce and cat food, trying not to laugh.

The next time, Douglas was on the till of Target's in-house Pizza Hut concession, just next to the in-house Starbucks; and after that we spotted him wandering the aisles with a clipboard, still delivering one of his monologues. We got into the habit of stopping off at Target just to see if Douglas was there, and he always was, and with each visit we told ourselves his performance simply couldn't have been anything like so loud or weird as we remembered - he was just a chatty guy who liked to keep the customers happy - and with each visit we realised we were wrong, and that he had been at least as loud and weird as we recalled. He was at college studying something managerial, as we learned over the course of subsequent addresses, and Target was just how he paid his way, and like me, he wasn't native to San Antonio, which possibly explained the earlier discussion of the weather.

Bess took a photograph and posted it on facebook. It was greeted with a flurry of enthusiastic responses. It turned out that everyone knew of Douglas. One of Bess's friends described him as a national treasure. His popularity made sense in so much as that if you'd spent more than a minute within earshot of the guy, you would be unlikely to forget the encounter.

Then the day came when there was no Douglas.

Week after week, he remained absent. Sometimes we went in just to check without buying anything, and eventually my wife summoned up the necessary cheek to ask one of his colleagues, 'what happened to that guy who used to work here, the one who talked a lot?'

'You mean Douglas?'

The cashier immediately knew who we meant, even though it transpired that she herself had not been working there very long. Recalling Douglas referring to some sort of managerial course, Bess and I assumed our boy had been promoted, or moved some way up whatever ladder is available to Target employees, but the woman told us that he'd been fired.

We were overcome with an entirely new emotion, one which had not existed before that moment, a form of astonishment containing no element of surprise.

It has been a full year since we set eyes upon Douglas, or heard that faintly invasive call-centre receptionist voice wailing away in discussion of traffic, pyjamas, places to eat, Texas wildlife, or your plans for the weekend. We don't know where Douglas has gone or what he's doing, or how that vaguely quantified course of study worked out for him, but the Target on Austin Highway is a poorer, quieter place without him. Wherever you may be, Douglas, we salute you and your never ending war against the forces of silence.

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.

Conversations about Weather

As a teenager living in the small market town of Shipston-on-Stour, I augmented my five pounds or so weekly pocket money with the wages of a paper round, six days a week for Martins newsagent delivering mainly to Callaways and Springfield Road. Most mornings I would cross paths with the old couple who handled the local milk round, and whichever one of them I saw first would always greet me with some casual observation regarding the weather. The sky would be blue, prompting a prediction of a pleasant day ahead. If it was grey, I would be told that it looked like we were due for some rain.

I was fourteen, and I really didn't care. The weather would do whatever it was going to do, and I could see no point in discussion. Even at that age I was easily irritated by what I considered to be inane conversation, despite most of what came out of my own mouth arguably belonging to the selfsame category. I told my mother as much, expecting support, understanding that she too had little patience with meaningless chatter.

She frowned, apparently bemused, and explained that weather-related conversation is a valuable institution, something which should not be taken lightly. Years later, I have come around to sharing this view. No-one is really that interested in the weather, but it's either that or greetings along the lines of I acknowledge that you and I have little in common and so wish to impress upon you that I have as yet formed no explicit objection to anything you may say whilst reminding you that any subject discussed beyond a certain level of detail is likely to be a source of embarrassment for both of us, and so with this in mind I offer you both my greeting and fervent hope that you may judge this encounter accurately in terms of how interesting I'm likely to find whatever you say next.

Conversations about weather - possibly excepting those occurring between meteorologists - are for the most part more about social interaction than exchange of information, a means of establishing that we're talking roughly the same language; and apparently the English are known for them.

Sometimes my wife will comment upon the weather, and for a moment I'll wonder if she is simply trying to make me feel at home, but I realise this can't be the case because - aside from the obvious point that I actually am home by most definitions that matter - she never tries to engage me in discussion regarding members of the Royal Family or football teams. Probably it is because the weather here in San Antonio is of some interest to me, it being quite unlike that which I experienced for the first forty or so years of my life, because it seems fair to say that England is significantly colder than Texas.

I grew up on a dairy farm, living for my first decade in the house which came with my father's job. Heating was provided by a single fireplace and warm clothing, and due to subsidence there were cracks in the walls of the house through which one could pass a newspaper, provided it wasn't rolled up and there hadn't been much happening in the way of news that week. In winter it snowed at least enough for the construction of life-sized snowmen to which we could have commuted by sledge had we so chosen. Of course, being young and unable to remember previous lives lived in ancient Egypt due to there being no such thing as reincarnation, I lacked an understanding of the wider context of climate, and it didn't seem so much that it was cold as simply that this was how things were during the months around Christmas. I knew there were warmer places in the world, but I was unable to relate them to my own experience.

As I grew older, I came to dislike the cold weather more and more, not least following one frozen day in the winter of 1984 when I left the home I shared with two others in Leeds village, Kent, heading for art college without too much thought wasted on why no water had emerged from the bathroom tap that morning. I understood that the pipes had frozen, but assumed this was simply an inconvenience which would pass once they were thawed later in the day. I didn't know to leave the taps open so as to prevent the pipes bursting when the thaw came, but the lesson was learned that evening as I returned home, looking out from the window of the bus as we passed our house to see something that resembled the frozen tomb of the Cybermen from the Doctor Who story of the same name, ten foot icicles each as thick as a human being drooping majestically from the window of Reuben's bedroom up on the first floor. Several villagers had strapped snow chains to their feet and were stood around taking photographs, having braved the weather on the promise of a sight to remember.

Between the farm and moving away from home, I had lived in a house with central heating and had thus become spoiled, accustomed to certain minor luxuries such as not freezing one's knackers off for nine months of the year. As a student I was reacquainted with the living conditions of my formative years, spending most winters huddled over a series of portable gas fires, shivering in five layers of clothing as the winter sun crept reluctantly above the tree line before sinking back down again in the late afternoon.

In 1988 I took a job with Royal Mail, becoming a postman and so resigning myself to pounding pavements in all conditions for six days of the week, painfully aware of having once celebrated the final day of my paper round with the promise that I would never do anything like that ever again. During the next twenty-one years I reached an unprecedented degree of intimacy with the elements, wind, rain, snow, sleet, and - most hated of all - the cold, and in particular the sort of cold that gets into your bones and stays there, which can only be shifted with a long and dangerously hot bath. The two dominant sacred powers of the Precolombian Mexican world were held to represent not good and evil, but hot and cold - roughly speaking - with cold as a force in its own right rather than a simple absence of heat; and two decades as a postman gave me some insight into how the Mexicans may have arrived at such a belief.

As years passed I came to resent English winters more and more, usually suffering mild depression each October as I began to contemplate the dark months ahead, the freezing wind and rain winding down to a little over a six hour day of dark slate skies in place of anything one might properly identify as daylight, coupled with the absurdly increased work load around Christmas, and the promise of at least a few days during which I would leave for work hours before dawn and arrive home exhausted and freezing cold long after the sun had set. Needless to say this presented a considerable impediment to my ever feeling even remotely Christmassy, and Lenny Henry wearing reindeer antlers and shouting katanga, my friends somehow just wasn't enough to get me there.

Whilst it would be ridiculous to suggest that I moved to Texas for the sake of living somewhere with warmer weather, I wasn't exactly upset by the idea. I had already been to Mexico City a few times and come to appreciate the more equatorial climate - even the less frequent grey skies being brighter, even cheerier due to the angle of the sun; and tropic rainfall as a spectacular and dynamic event of almost Biblical passion in contrast to the month after month of English drizzle and damp. Amongst all other considerations, Texas was a step in the general direction of Mexico, which was as such very much the right direction so far as I was concerned.

On the other hand, the heat can reach such extremes in this part of the state as to present its own problems, so it was never really a case of swapping six foot snowdrifts for afternoons spent on the beach drinking piña colada from a coconut shell. The outside temperature reached 107°F during my first August in San Antonio, staying close to this figure until the end of September, meaning that outdoor activities were best undertaken well before midday. The few occasions when I stayed out gardening until two in the afternoon, even working in the shade, I suffered a terrible heat stroke which knocked me out for the rest of the week; so the situation is comparable with that of the old country in so much as each has a few months of the year during which the elements drive us to seek cover, but the months are different and Texas depends on air conditioning rather than central heating to get us through the chewy part.

Texas winter on the other hand has no direct comparison. Some days resemble those of the finest English summer, and warm spells can last for weeks at a time; then suddenly we'll wake to frost and a freezing wind that cuts into your bones as sharp as anything arisen from the North Atlantic.

Typically, when I now speak to members of my family on the telephone, weather is almost always amongst the first subjects to appear on the table.

If it is summer, I'll try to describe the climate here in terms of eggs fried upon pavements, the planet Venus, or the experience of walking into a pizza oven, although I know that San Antonio is temperate compared to the outdoor furnace of Houston, and that my descriptions will inevitably prove inadequate, sounding like I'm reading aloud from a science-fiction novel.

If it is winter, I'll ask about the English snow, the wind, the rain, the arriving indoors with face stinging from hail and rainwater seeping into shoes, not because I like to hear about these things, but through genuine admiration for anyone able to endure such a climate, and I still like to remind myself that it's December and I'm probably stood outside in a T-shirt and shorts unless it's one of the cold patches. Furthermore, I fear that my descriptions of the Texan non-winter will sound like I'm crowing.

Frost and ice are mild here, of a severity that would barely merit comment in England; and yet as I venture outside I see that everyone else is wrapped up in anticipation of Arctic conditions, and I feel like Superman, freshly arrived from Krypton and enjoying his strange, new powers in this unfamiliar environment; but because San Antonio has so little experience of the conditions that would be recognised as winter in England, no-one is prepared, no roads are gritted, and so it all evens out.

Then the wind comes, and it seems so strong that I end up staying inside, taking shelter, just as I would have done in Coventry, wondering if I have acclimatised so quickly that what would once have barely seemed noticeable now feels to me like a scene from The Day After Tomorrow. So I'm caught between two meteorological worlds, scoffing to myself as neighbours regard their own breath misting upon the air with abject horror, yet nevertheless finding myself donning three layers and bracing myself against the icy wind. It seems peculiar, and I long for the baking summer, sweating indoors with the air conditioning on full, occasionally going outside to gather up the eggs I've been frying on the pavement, but it has at least given me some reason to talk about the weather, and tomorrow may be warm once again.