Doctor, No

Six months before I moved to Texas I had a blood test. The results came back confirming my being in possession of so much cholesterol that I could have caught fire at any moment, and that my blood pressure was so high as to facilitate my fighting crime as a sort of blood-gusher-based superhero by opening a vein and blasting criminals with a high-pressure geyser of claret.

'It's winter and everywhere is frozen,' I explained to my doctor, 'I've been sat on my arse for the last six weeks, but okay - I'll make the effort to get out and about a bit more.'

She wasn't having it and prescribed Simvastatin, which struck me as a little premature seeing as I felt fine. I had the feeling she was just really into writing out prescriptions.

After three days of taking the drug, I hadn't slept for so much as five minutes, hadn't even felt drowsy, and I wanted to kill myself. By suggesting that I wanted to kill myself, I don't mean to imply that I felt a little bit glum and went around with a frowny face. I mean that I wanted to kill myself. I therefore stopped taking the pills and immediately felt better.

My doctor told me off, saying that I should have consulted her before quitting the prescribed medication and that I'd been very irresponsible.

'It's because I couldn't sleep and wanted to kill myself,' I explained.

'Of course, there are sometimes minor problems of that nature,' she admitted, 'but side effects usually pass after the first couple of weeks.'

'I would have killed myself by then.'

I refused further medication, instead knuckling down to riding my bike fifteen miles each day regardless of ice and snow. Six months later I underwent another medical examination at a Harley Street practice, as required by the immigration people. My cholesterol was fine and my blood pressure was normal.

Gosh.

More recently I underwent a medical examination at the Oakwell Farms medical center, something required by my medical insurance. I came close to weighing 210lbs before Christmas and had therefore been trying to get my weight down, mainly just through increased exercise and less snacking. It seemed to be working, and I was down to about 194lbs when I went for the medical.

'Shouldn't I take off my clothes or something?' I asked.

'No. Just get on the scale,' said the nurse. 'Do you know how much you weigh?'

'I was 194lbs this morning.'

'Well, you're 205lbs now.'

'That would probably be the boots and the three layers of clothing.'

The examination was over in minutes and struck me as lacking attention to detail. The results came back confirming I had more cholesterol than anyone who had ever lived in the entire history of triglycerides, and my blood pressure was so high that I could have severed my feet at the ankles and blasted myself off into outer space like a human rocket.

The results pissed me off so I ignored them. For one thing, my blood pressure was usually normal when I had it checked at the periodontist's office three or four times a year.

Another couple of months later I decided to have yet another medical examination. It seemed like high time I should have a doctor stick his finger up my arse in search of prostate cancer, and I figured I might as well have a proper check up on the same ticket. I was exercising every day, losing weight and doing well, so I wanted to know just how well because the previous examination had been a bit of a joke.

The nurse weighed me, stood me next to a tape measure, filled five big Cumberland sausage sized test tubes with blood, and asked a string of questions.

Do you smoke?

How much do you drink?

How many fingers am I holding up?

Can you tell me the name of the president?

I pulled a face answering the last one, and so did she.

The doctor came in.

'Are you going to stick a finger up my arse?' I enquired.

'No. No. There's no need. Cancer screening is all part of the blood test these days.'

'Okay.'

'I see that you smoke,' he said happily.

'No.'

'You don't smoke?'

'No, I don't.'

He seemed disappointed. 'Well, your blood pressure is a little high.'

'Is it really?'

'Yes, if I could—'

'I can tell you now, I'm not taking statins.'

'Statins are used to treat cholesterol, not high blood pressure.'

'Oh okay.'

'Well, perhaps we'd better wait until the results of this latest blood test come back.'

We waited, but I'd already knew I didn't like the guy. He was younger and fatter than myself, and I was somehow the wheezing porker in the equation. I could already sense him angling to prescribe something. He seemed to be fishing around in my medical history for anything he could work with. That was the impression I received, and the phone call came a few weeks later.

'The doctor urgently needs to discuss the results of your blood test. You have so much cholesterol that we've had to invent a new number by which to quantify it, and your blood pressure is such that at first we thought it was simply that Hulk Hogan was somehow living inside you.'

'Oh fuck off,' I didn't say, not actually slamming the phone down. I made an appointment, then cancelled it and made another for a day on which my wife would be able to come along, because she works in healthcare and is fairly adept at bullshit detection.

We were bang on time because they charge twenty-five dollars for missed appointments, a fine imposed because they could have spent those minutes curing someone, and healing the sick is the only thing with which they are concerned. Forty minutes later we were at last ushered into the presence of my doctor.

'You have a 13% chance of contracting heart disease before you reach seventy,' he smiled.

'Well, no-one lasts forever,' I said, 'and 13% - aren't those about the same odds as I have of being hit by a meteorite?'

My wife pointed out something statistical regarding the hereditary aspect of heart conditions such as the one which had an alleged 13% chance of killing me. I didn't really understand all of what she was saying, but the doctor did, and didn't really seem to have an answer for it, not directly.

'So, is there any history of heart disease in your family?'

'It isn't really a disease though, is it? I mean you can't have a stroke because you ate a sandwich with heart disease germs on it, or have I failed to understand some aspect of my impending doom?'

'It's a very real condition,' he said, apparently not having grasped my point. 'Do you know if anyone in your family has suffered with heart trouble?'

'No-one whatsoever, although significantly more or less all of them have had cancer, which was the actual reason I came here seeing as that seems a more pressing concern from where I'm sat.'

'Well, you're fine on that score.'

'That's good to know.'

'Everything is looking good aside from the cholesterol and the blood pressure.'

'Well, I'm not taking statins as I already told you.'

'Statins have come a long way and have been greatly improved over the last couple of years.'

'I don't care. I'm still not taking them.' I reiterated the account given in the first nine paragraphs above, mainly because it seemed as though he'd forgotten our having met on the occasion of the examination which had yielded the results now under discussion.

'Yes, I've heard all about your NHS,' - he curled off a wry smile, almost a sneer - 'no diagnosis, just chucking a handful of pills at you and sending you on your—'

'There's nothing wrong with the NHS,' I said, noticing I'd used that tone of voice which expresses openness to the possibility of finishing the conversation outside in the parking lot. I wasn't having this fucking tosser running the NHS down.

'Well, for now we can consider other options, healthier eating and so on.'

'I eat healthy,' I said. 'I suppose you're going to tell me I should cut my McDonald's intake down to just four visits a day, or something of the sort.'

'We eat very healthily,' my wife confirmed. 'He does all the cooking and it's all fresh. We don't eat salty things.'

'You may not think you do, but even when you open up a can of Campbell's soup because it's in the recipe, well, the salt content—'

'That isn't,' I cut him off with just a hint of Margaret Rutherford in my voice, 'the sort of cooking in which I engage.'

My wife has a recipe book typed out by an ageing relative during the great depression. I barely recognise any of the recipes, which truly belong to a culture to which I am alien. Many of them seem to combine ingredients which are already recognisably food, a tin of mushroom soup poured over battered onion rings, then baked as a casserole - and the recipe concluded with a bewildering comment of sooooooo good or similar. It seems like the sort of cooking I tried when I was fifteen, baked beans plus a teaspoon of every herb or spice on the rack because if one is good, then twenty-six will surely be amazing. I like to think I've evolved beyond the culinary level of a bewildered teenager left to his own devices.

'I apologise if it seems like I'm on the defensive,' I said without feeling even remotely sorry, 'but you have to appreciate that I eat pretty well, I don't smoke, hardly drink, and I cycle one hundred miles a week, and you're telling me that it isn't enough. I may as well be sat on my arse scoffing pies and cakes all day for all the difference it makes. That's what you're telling me.'

'Well, I'd like you to imagine the effects of a stroke, being unable to speak, maybe one side of your body paralysed—'

Now he was trying to scare me, somehow imagining I had no idea what a stroke could be or how it might affect a person. 'Sure, but if you don't mind I'll just keep on as I am. I've lost a stone since Christmas and a little bit more drops off every week, so I'm not even sure what I'm doing here.'

'Well, we can see how you're getting on in another six months.'

'Fine.'

We left with no real intention of coming back. It seems I put on weight when I first moved to America, because the government forces us all to eat a cheeseburger whilst saluting the flag every morning; I have about a stone to go before I get back to what is supposedly my ideal weight for my age and height. I will get there, and if my blood pressure and cholesterol remain high then I'll just have to assume that's how it's going to be.

A Few Turds from Our Sponsor

Does advertising work? asks the billboard at the side of the highway, then answering its own question with it just did! To break this down, the billboard suggests that advertising works because you've just read the message stating that it works, and might therefore consider paying the owners of the billboard a load of money to slap up a few images promoting your suppository franchise, or whatever it is you do. Of course, although the billboard suggests that advertising works because you've just read the message stating that it works, the only people who will have read the message are those who read the message because anyone who didn't bother to read the message won't have read it, making this the advertising equivalent of the anthropic principle, namely the philosophical consideration that observations of the universe must be compatible with the conscious and sapient life that observes it. The message is additionally weakened by the presumption of its own cognitive impact, resting on the premise that mere awareness of a product or service is the same as paying for it; which it isn't, as the billboard itself demonstrates, because I've seen it fucking hundreds of times and I'm still not absolutely certain of the six words cited here being the right ones.

Likewise, the following television commercials have sent me flying across the room to hit the mute button on the remote probably hundreds of occasions in some cases, and yet I'm still unable to remember what half of the fuckers are advertising, because all I can see in my minds eye is a parade of gormless grinning faces suffused with halos of how much I loathe everyone involved, which if anything only ensures that I'll go out of my way to avoid purchase of whatever shit they're selling in the event of my ever needing it or even being able to remember what it is. Marketing departments might suggest otherwise, but marketing departments are explicitly in the business of just making shit up and so their testimony is worthless. The civilisation of ancient Egypt endured for around three-thousand years, give or take a few periods of unrest. Isn't it fucking funny how you never hear anything about their marketing department?

AARP. I think this stands for the American Association of Retired People, but I can't be bothered to check. I'm sure it's a worthy organisation, dedicated as it is to involving those over a certain age with theatre visits, wine tasting, salsa classes and so on, but publicising the organisation with weird wobbly-headed older people grinning in your face seems ill-advised. So far there have been two major advertising campaigns, both starring Hispanic oldsters, first a woman and then a man. Each has this weirdly over-familiar grin like they're trying to get you involved in something your parents don't need to know about, and they grin and they wobble their heads side to side as though either pissed or ripped to the tits on prescription painkillers, and they slur something like if you don' think real possibilities when you hear the name AARP, then you don' know AARP, which sounds almost as though it should have my frien' at the end as an unwelcome hand finds its way round to your ass. Considering it all happens on a telly screen, there's something weirdly intrusive about Señor and Señora Real Possibilities, as though television has now found a way to invade your personal space with what nevertheless remains a two-dimensional image.

Contemplative Hillbillies Impressed by Impact of Heavy Object. I can't remember if this is Ford, Chevrolet, or General Motors, but it probably doesn't matter. As our tableau commences we see a group of guys in stetsons and jeans stood around looking at massive trucks, the kind of trucks only ever driven by men with enormous penises, so it's a safe bet that all of these hillbillies probably have penises of at least a foot in length, possibly two foot in the case of a couple of the more stoically rugged ones. None of these men are strangers to big heavy tools, not just the kind presently at rest within their own trousers, but also wrenches and items with rubber-grip handles which they squeeze and twist when engaging in their manly labours, grunting and occasionally pausing to quaff a refreshing beer-style beverage. When these men have finished utilising their big heavy tools out in the wilderness at the mercy of lions, bears and probably Injuns, they toss their big heavy tools in the back of their trucks and head home, and of course being just regular guys, they toss their tools roughly rather than daintily, like some homosexual carefully arranging wildflowers upon a gingham cushion; but in tossing their tools, sometimes they damage their trucks. So here the hillbillies stand in contemplation as heavy metal boxes of tools are cast into the back of trucks with a thud thud thud. One brand of truck sustains denting, but the other doesn't because it is rugged like the men. This makes the men happy and so we see them smile and nod with approval.

Grandpa the Asthmatic Wolf. This commercial riffs - probably unintentionally - on a cartoon I once saw in Punch magazine wherein an old man, having just announced how delightful he finds the unalloyed directness of the young, is asked Grandpa, how come you're so fat, grey, bald, and wrinkled? Here he's reading them the story of the Three Little Pigs, and has just reached the point at which the wolf is huffing and puffing when one of his own grandchildren points out that he too does quite a lot of huffing and puffing . 'It's my asthma,' he explains, digressing off into a long and unnecessarily detailed account of his condition, apparently having missed the point that his girls were simply engaging in banter and hadn't actually requested for this droning summary of his medical history. The advert then enters an animated segment wherein a cartoon wolf consults the advice of his doctor regarding asthma, correct usage of inhalers and so on, prior to tackling those three pigs. One sequence shows the wolf, breathing quite easily whilst engaged in rigorous activity, dancing with his wolf granddaughters, here identified by dresses and tiaras, making it quite clear that the wolf is also Grandpa. Personally I think this sends out a slightly dubious message, and - as with all medical adverts - this one spends five inevitable minutes listing all of the potentially deadly side effects of using this particular form of relief for asthma symptoms, whatever it is. I know they probably have to do it for legal reasons, but when two of the potentially deadly side effects are an increase in severity of asthma symptoms and death by asthma, the whole enterprise is rendered seemingly ludicrous; and Grandpa waving a cuddly toy wolf at the girls and making them scream with delight at the end doesn't really help a whole lot.

Grinning Fool Plays Air Drums. This is a locally made advertisement, possibly filmed on some cunt's phone by the look of it and starring the actual people who own the car dealership and who will probably try to flog you a motor should you find that their advertising has worked for you. My guess would be that neither of them ever took any sort of acting course and are thus banking on the raw, unpolished honesty of their performance, such as it is, to win you over. She is small and Hispanic, and he physically suggests a scenario in which aliens discovered the ruined body of Hoss from NBC's Bonanza on some distant asteroid and attempted to surgically restore him but, lacking any understanding of human physiology, found themselves obliged to use an Alfred E. Neuman heavy issue of Mad magazine for reference. Released back into the wild in the general vicinity of San Antonio, he was cruelly incapacitated by a thorn which became embedded in his mighty paw, but luckily the Latina woman happened to be passing and they've been faithful friends ever since. The part which really gets me is where she prefixes the announcement of some boring special offer by asking for a drum roll, whereupon he hunkers down and does the honours upon an imaginary snare; and whilst it's impressive that he's managed to suspend that stupid grin for a whole two seconds, it's hard not to notice his tongue pop from the corner of his mouth with all the strain of concentration. The guy resembles Gary from the thick kids class at my school, itself not an institution which was ever going to give Oxford or Cambridge much competition. I'm sure Gary was lovely but - Lordy was he stupid! He once gave me the nickname of Funny Eater, inspired by the difficulty I experienced with a particular sandwich. He saw me in trouble, he pointed, he laughed, and his imagination suggested Funny Eater might be a fitting nickname by which to forever associate me with the incident - a nickname which actually leaves the one who came up with it seeming more fucking pitiful than the person to whom it is applied, regardless of how poorly it went for me and that sandwich.

Inexplicable Enthusiasm for Cardboard Chicken. Most of us know Popeye as a Sailor Man with a heavy spinach habit, but here in Americaland he's also a fried chicken franchise which attempts to make a virtue out of taking fucking ages to get your order together by means of the presumably ironic strapline Louisiana fast. I think the implication is that they're not actually a massive corporation, but they're just these guys, you know, and like, they care about nourishing your soul as well as your stomach, so maybe give them a fuckin' chance, yeah? I mean if you got some plane to catch maybe you should've gone to Wendy's instead. To be fair, it may just be my presumably understaffed local branch of Popeye's Louisiana Kitchen which takes forever, although it's not actually the leisurely pace of their service which bothers me. The advertising stars an enthusiastic matronly chef lady delivering a jovial testimony to the superiority of her wares invoking good N'awlins home cookin', fresh spices, and Mardi Gras, mon cher. Conversely, the food, when it eventually arrives, leaves you with the sensation of having consumed an entire loaf of bread in one sitting, albeit a vaguely chicken-flavoured loaf of bread. It's not a good feeling, and contrasts with the promise of the advertising in the same way that the Aryan mythology of white supremacy tends to contrast with the lumpy tattooed mutants who subscribe to that sort of drivel. Also, chef lady smiles so hard that it looks like she's doing it at gunpoint, which is troubling.

Lucky Buffoon Hits Jackpot. This is a commercial for the Lucky Eagle casino of Eagle Pass which is somewhere down near the Mexican border so far as I understand. It's part of the Kickapoo reservation and is probably therefore able to operate outside state laws regarding gambling, whatever they may be. I've never really given much of a shit about gambling and tend to regard those who do as losers and arseholes. Everett's dad was supposedly a professional gambler, and he was a fucking shocker. That said, I'm happy to see First Nations people making a living - taking our money back from white people one quarter at a time, as runs the motto of the Wamapoke Casino. The thing I have a problem with is the hair metal theme song with Grace Slick - or someone of her general type - bellowing out lu-huckee eeyooooooowaaaargh over fifty simultaneous guitar solos whilst a buffoon looks happy in slow motion, drunk with the euphoria of having pumped five bucks into the slots and landed himself a sweet, sweet pay out of four dollars and twenty-five cents, the knob.

The Misery of Dry Skin. This is an advert for either moisturiser or some kind of specifically medicinal moisturiser, in which a robust looking woman explains that the very worst aspect of diabetes is undoubtedly the dry skin. Wikipedia on the other hand lists heart disease, stroke, chronic kidney failure, foot ulcers, and damage to the eyes among those attendant complications one might reasonably regard as undesirable, and yet no mention of dry skin. Maybe the whole dry skin aspect is just too horrible to contemplate.

Pretzelphage Resumes Activity. This is a commercial for Aspen Dental, and I'm not sure why I should remember that detail when I remain in the dark about most of the rest discussed here. Anyway, all Aspen Dental commercials seem to be a variation on a theme in which persons with whom I suppose we are expected to identify realises that their teeth are shit and in need of work, and so they go to Aspen Dental, get those choppers sorted out, and behold their teeth are no longer shit because look - there's our man winning the taco eating competition, munching away like it ain't no thing; and in each case this narrative is delivered in the form of a song, complete with dental staff pulling wry faces to the camera as the patient yodels away in the chair. The thing which annoys me most about the worst of these adverts, the one sung by some woman working in a bakery, is the finale in which, still singing, she grins, snatches a large pretzel from the hand of her associate, and croons 'this pretzel's got nothing on me,' before taking a big old bite by way of demonstration. It's the actual phraseology which bothers me. The statement that something or other has nothing on the person making the statement is one of those things people tend to say because they've heard someone else say it and thought it sounded cool. In the case of our dentally enhanced vocalist, this pretzel's got nothing on me is like saying I am superior to this pretzel, or my victory over this pretzel is assured for I am better equipped to achieve victory than this inanimate baked item; which is a fucking stupid thing to say, because no-one is going to put money on the pretzel winning, and in any case it's a false dichotomy. The entire function of the pretzel is to be consumed and in doing so to provide sustenance. Therefore a victory for the pretzel constitutes its being consumed, which is what happens as a result of what the woman qualifies as her triumph, because she's a fucking idiot who tries too hard.

Purple Turd. Have you ever been bunged up, popped a laxative, and subsequently had yourself a really good shit? If so, did you enjoy it so much that you were barely able to contain yourself afterwards? Did you pull on a t-shirt bearing the slogan I ❤ my Lax? Did you rush down to the shore and write I ❤ my Lax in the sand in letters of a size sufficient as to allow the message to be read by the pilots of any aircraft which might be passing overhead? I've honestly never been that happy to have a shit, and I've spent time in Mexico, so to me it just looks like secret signalling for those who take pleasure in the production of fecal matter towards ends other than the purely alimentary, if you know what I'm saying. If you don't know what I'm saying you should probably consider yourself lucky. The animated segment of the advertisement - assuming it's the same one and I haven't just conflated two different laxative adverts - shows a purple turd set free and at last proceeding along a colon towards a bumhole like we're watching that episode of Barbapapa directed by Joan Miró.  I suppose it's purple so as to allow viewers to get to grips with the general concept of having a shit without directly invoking the act whilst we're trying to eat our fucking tea, thank you very much; either that or someone has been on a diet of nothing but sloes for the past week.

Zipline Bore. 'Now that I'm over fifty,' says our helmeted guy as he's about to slide down a zipline attached to the side of the Matterhorn, 'my friends ask me, aren't you scared?' He pushes away, sliding off into empty Alpine space, just a knot of toughened cord preventing him from plummeting thousands of feet to his death, and as he slips off he yelps the rest of the anecdote, such as it is. The only thing he's really scared of, so it transpires, is leaving himself vulnerable to something or other by failing to either renew his health insurance or get himself inoculated against something or other - I can never remember which it is. I've a feeling this may be one of those adverts in which I asked my doctor and he said blah blah blah followed by four minutes listing all the potentially deadly side effects, so it's probably the latter - the inoculation. Personally, I suspect that our boy is somewhat embellishing his story. I expect he was having a drink with what few friends he has left, or he was hanging out at the sauna or something when he happened to mention that he was planning to slide down a mountain on a bit of rope; and the response was probably 'sure thing, Ken - sounds real scary,' before they carried on with whatever they had been talking about. It seems significant that the guy appears to be having this adventure holiday on his own, apart from whoever is holding the camera allowing him to waffle on and on and on, explaining his wearisome home-brewed philosophy to fucking no-one.

Tonight I'm Gonna Party Like It's 1989

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes, I'm from England.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fuck it.

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

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

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

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

Never mind.

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

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

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

Doesn't everyone?

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

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

I fit right in.

I, Fatso

I experienced a medical condition during the winter of 2010, a certain itch brought on by a surfeit of the body's natural yeast. It was a condition I recognised as having affected at least two human females of my formerly close acquaintance, but no-one ever told me that a male might also suffer with the same embarrassing condition. I went to see the doctor, specifically asking to see a male doctor just as I would were I a character with a sensitive problem in a seventies situation comedy. He explained that it was common - much to my astonishment - probably resulting from either too much sugar in my system, or not enough exercise of a sort which would ordinarily convert that sugar into the energy by which I might open up a packet of crisps or wobble along to the chippy in Earlsdon High Street. He said that my condition was probably nothing, but recommended that I eat less shite, get more exercise, and have a blood test.

I wasn't aware of my diet being particularly poor, and ignored the associated segments of advice on the grounds of my having reached the age of forty-five without ever having eaten either a deep fried Mars Bar or anything purchased from Taco Bell; although I realised that he probably had a point about the exercise. When employed full-time by Royal Mail I'd never really had to think about exercise as an activity in its own right because the job was physically very demanding. Since leaving Royal Mail I had taken agency work with Parcel Force, but the work was intermittent - three days a week, sometimes two, and sometimes nothing at all. When there was no work to be had I spent my time engaged in selling off many years of accumulated crap on eBay, but would usually try to get in some cycling each morning for the sake of exercise and getting out of the house. Ordinarily I would follow a fifteen mile circuit of rural back roads through Kenilworth, the villages of Leek Wootton and Stoneleigh, and then back into Coventry; but this was winter.

I'd spent twenty years trudging around in the freezing cold and pouring rain of English winter, fingers numb to the bone, and with the midday sun barely risen above the rooftops of the houses on the other side of the street for most of November through to January. Just the thought of outside was bad enough, and with no wage-related incentive to propel me forward each morning, I had fallen to the habit of putting off the daily bike ride for later in the week when it might hopefully be a bit less miserable out there. Following the initial visit to the doctor, I coaxed myself back onto two wheels a couple of times, but it was hard to find the motivation.

I'd had a blood test and was called back to the medical centre now that the results had come though. This time I saw a female doctor but I didn't let it bother me seeing as this visit was not directly concerned with the previously mentioned sensitive problem and it therefore didn't seem likely that I would be required to slap it out on the table. She told me that I was overweight for my height and age, and that my blood pressure was through the roof, as was my cholesterol, and I would probably be dead before the end of the week. Okay, she didn't actually say that I would probably be dead before the end of the week, but given the severity of her report I expect she was thinking it.

'What can I do?' I asked, terrified.

She muttered something about reducing my daily quota of visits to McDonalds, something about exercise, and then wrote out a prescription for a course of simvastatins.

This seemed more shocking than any implied coronary resulting from my chip-scoffing ways. 'Is that really necessary?' I asked.

She seemed to think it was.

'Look,' I said. 'I've been sat on my arse eating crisps for most of the last six weeks, or may as well have been. How about if I get back to my daily routine of fifteen miles? I mean, that should make a difference, shouldn't it?'

'I'm more worried about getting those triglycerides down right now,' she said, whatever the hell that meant. Her face suggested this was a life or death situation.

I argued some more, then relented and picked up a box of the prescribed tablets from the chemist in Earlsdon High Street.

I started taking them, having read about the possible side effects on the side of the packet. As the warning predicted I was unable to sleep and began to feel somewhat depressed. By the third day I had been awake for seventy-two hours, and awake meaning wide awake, and I felt like killing myself. My existence had turned cold and grey and joyless. I hadn't seen the sun in weeks. There was nothing to look forward to. There was no good in the world. My life was pointless and a complete waste of time. I had never felt so profoundly bereft of hope as on that third day. I spoke to the woman at the chemists and she told me that it generally takes a couple of weeks before you get used to simvastatins. The urge to commit suicide would pass.

Fuck that, I said to myself, and stopped taking the things.

I returned to the medical centre. My doctor was seriously pissed off. 'You should have spoken to me. You don't just decide to withdraw from a prescribed course of medicine as you've done. You can't just stop like that. You're very lucky that nothing terrible happened.'

'Well it was either stop,' I explained, 'or hope I could make it another two weeks without slashing my wrists. I'm sure simvastatins are wonderful once they start working properly, but unless I'm actually at death's door, I'd really just like to see how I get on with a bit more regular exercise.'

She wasn't happy, which was too bad. I myself hadn't been particularly delighted by our initial encounter in which she had started on my prescription before I'd even finished speaking. It had felt somewhat as though she'd been considering what course of drugs would be best for me before I'd even walked through the door.

Anyway, as promised I'd been getting out on the bike every day, and accordingly when she took my blood pressure it was normal. Nevertheless she didn't seem convinced, but I refused to take any more drugs when the side effects seemed far worse than whatever good the stuff might be doing.

Six months later I visited a doctor in Knightsbridge for a medical assessment in accordance with the conditions of my applying for the K1 visa by which I would emigrate to the United States. My blood pressure was fine. My cholesterol was fine. I was in perfect health, despite the doom which had been foretold back in Coventry just before Christmas.

Five years later I am subject to another medical examination, this time at my wife's place of work conducted in accordance with the wishes of whoever it is that supplies our medical insurance. I take off my shoes and stand on the scales. I am fourteen stone, which is the heaviest I remember ever having been. A nurse takes blood from my fingertip, and then I sit and await the results. After about five minutes another nurse takes me to a different room. I sit in front of a laptop, and a young woman appears on the screen. She wears a headset and has the results of my blood test in front of her. I am mystified as to why this part of the consultation can't be done right here with another human present just like in the good old days.

The woman speaks. Her voice sounds autotuned, and the words suggest a script with the customary quota of phrases deemed conducive to customer satisfaction by some focus group. She smiles far too much and talks about the two of us like we're a partnership, how we might consider refraining from emptying an entire shaker of salt over our platter every time we sit down to our daily triple-cheese lardburger.

My cholesterol is high.

My blood pressure is high.

What a fat bastard I am, and so on and so forth.

I might like to consider engaging in daily exercise, which I suppose means that the fifteen miles I've been cycling more or less every day, five days a week for the last five or six years isn't actually exercise. I should also cut down on processed food, and I have trouble working out what she even means by this given that I haven't eaten a Dairylea cheese triangle since I lived in England. I need to stop eating all those naughty but nice things which I'm not actually eating anyway, unless you count chicken fried steak at Jim's diner once every couple of months.

Screw you, Lady, I think resentfully whilst smiling and thanking her for her competitively priced time. I'm already looking forward to the online customer satisfaction survey.

It's true that I'm fourteen stone, which is the heaviest I've been; but then I'm fifty and I no longer smoke. I'm no stranger to carbohydrates, it's true; but at the same time I exercise regularly and it's not like I'm chugging Big Macs all day long, or at all for that matter. This annoys me somewhat, although I suppose my own personal call centre healthcare professional failing to suggest a course of simvastatins must count for something. I suppose I could cut down on mashed potato and pasta, but I'm reminded of my mother being advised by her doctor to avoid cheese.

'Then what would be the point in being alive?' she asked.

I could cut down on mashed potato and pasta, but I'm not going to because that's why I cycle fifteen miles a day.

As a concession I've now upped my daily ride to twenty miles, mainly because it's weird being fourteen stone and I have trousers and shirts I would like to wear again before I die; but this is as much as I'm doing because if a daily twenty mile bike ride isn't enough, then maybe I'm simply destined to be fat and there's nothing I can do about it, short of switching to a diet of food I don't want to eat.

Somehow it transpires that fifteen miles a day wasn't exercise, and yet twenty is, because I've already lost a couple of pounds

I suppose that's a good thing.

Reading Stuff Out Loud

One morning last summer, Holly failed to turn up for breakfast. Holly is our youngest cat. Our cats tend to spend summer nights outside, patrolling the neighbourhood and doing cat stuff before returning at dawn to meow their heads off at the prospect of a bowl of cat food; except for Holly on this one occasion. I tried not to worry because they don't always all show up at breakfast, and when they go missing they have thus far always come back.

Holly turned up in the late afternoon. I opened the door to let her in and noticed that she seemed subdued, which could result either from having found herself trapped overnight in some neighbour's garage, or maybe just because it was a baking hot afternoon; but I noticed that she was hopping along on three legs, and worse - one back paw dangled from the ankle like an earring dangles from its lobe.

'Meow,' she said pitifully.

The vet told us that the leg was broken clean through. It could be set, but he could give no guarantee that it would return to full function afterwards, and it would probably be expensive. Thankfully the forecast was in error regarding Holly losing the use of that leg, although they were right about the expense. I could have flown back to England at least six times with the money which got sucked into that vet's bill.

'Damn,' I said to myself as I sat staring at a screenful of text much like this one. 'I really need this shit to start paying out.'

I'd been paid for the novel published by Obverse in 2013, and since then there had been bits and pieces here and there - mostly paintings done for the covers of other people's books; but I was conspicuously still some way short of buying a yacht, or even paying to fix the leg of a small cat. Maybe I should be reading this stuff before an audience, I told myself, recalling that it was the spoken performances of Jello Biafra, Henry Rollins, David Sedaris and others which had got me writing autobiographical material in the first place. The big money is in performance - that's what everyone always says, plus that's how you shift units, units in this case mostly being my print-on-demand books. Were I ten years younger I would have written to the local radio station, maybe even to NPR saying look, you've never heard of me but that doesn't mean a thing. I'm the negative universe David Sedaris in that I'm English, I'm over here, and I'm not gay. I'm hilarious and you need to give me my own weekly show, and to pay me for it. This had been my promotional strategy at least since when, at the age of sixteen, I wrote a letter to Fetish Records explaining that I would probably one day be at least as famous as Throbbing Gristle, so can I have a record contract, please - oh and send me a blank tape so I can send some of my music for you to listen to. I can't afford blank tapes because I'm just a kid at the moment. Now approaching fifty years of age I had learned to accept that my promotional strategy was cranky and off-putting, and I needed to start at the beginning.

I would accrue valuable experience reading my shit out to a live audience, to any live audience I could get to stand still long enough, and eventually I would end up on either stage or the wireless with a regular pay-check, droning on about that time when me and Sean Downham nicked some penny chews from the Goose Lane newsagent in Lower Quinton as an aside to whatever memory I had decided to administer to my many millions of bewildered followers as an anaesthetic that week; and I would have money to fly back to England on a more regular basis, and vet's bills would no longer be a problem.

I nosed around online and decided that open mic poetry readings were probably the way to go given that no-one would be required to pay admission and there would be no expectation of my being any good. I had no intention of reading anything I would ever call poetry, but it seemed a better idea than attempting to pass myself off as a stand-up comedian, that being the other option.

Pretzels - what the hell are those all about? Am I right, guys? Am I right? Goddamn pretzels, man - all weird and shit.

It just wasn't me.

There was an open mic night, an event called the Blah Blah Blah Poetry Spot held at the Deco Pizzeria here in San Antonio on the first and third Wednesday of each month. It seemed as good a place to start as any. My wife drove past the venue a few nights before, to be sure of where it was and so that we could take a look. It was a free-standing building in part of San Antonio characterised by striking art deco architecture. The venue seemed decent, so I dug my old minidisc recorder out from a box in the garage and tried to remember how the thing worked because I'd need to record the performance.

I'd had a couple of years worth of weekly writings gathered together as a print-on-demand paperback called An Englishman in Texas - after the blog upon which the essays first appeared - and I was going to read something from this to my as yet notional audience, something short which might hopefully get a few laughs in the right places. That was the theory. My printer is of the kind which refuses to work when a new printer cartridge is inserted whilst insisting that normal service will be resumed just as soon as I insert a new printer cartridge, so my printing off anything I'd written on sheets of A4 for recital before a live audience wasn't going to happen. This was a worry because I'd kept the font used in my paperback edition of An Englishman in Texas pretty damn small so as to cram it all in and to keep the size down to a manageable six-hundred or so pages. The book resembles a small housebrick but is easy enough to read in bed providing I'm wearing glasses. I would read from it on stage, or whatever was going to serve for a stage.

I spent a couple of days wandering around the house reading aloud from the paperback, timing myself so as to deduce what I could get away with. To my surprise and mild horror I found it took me a little over three minutes to read a page of my own text, meaning that I was pretty much limited to essays of three pages at most when the great majority of what I've written runs to at least five. I decided I might be able to justify four or five pages if it seemed likely that the material would go down well - keeping in mind that this depended on my ability to judge both the quality of my own writing and the tastes of the people who would comprise my first audience.

Well, not my first audience. I suppose, for the sake of argument, my first audience in this respect had been the teachers who judged the impromptu reading competition I entered when our school had some sort of activities week. I wasn't particularly interested in impromptu reading but I put my name down because I assumed it would be a piece of piss. It wasn't. It was nerve racking, and as I stuttered and stumbled through some unfamiliar and fairly dull text, I heard my own voice as though it belonged to someone else, and I realised that I sounded like a gurgling moron.

More recently - or at least back in the early nineties - I'd played guitar and sang in front of paying audiences as a member of the Dovers and then Academy 23, and I'd even begun to enjoy the experience before I decided I was fed up of being in bands and jacked it all in. The point here is that I'm not unaccustomed to performance. I suspected that reading prose wouldn't be quite the same, but assumed that it couldn't be too different.

When the day came I got in training by charging my discman with my most muscular Rollins Band CD for the morning bike ride; then by reading the piece I'd selected from An Englishman in Texas over and over once I was home; and then by changing my mind when I realised that Geoff was too long, I couldn't do a Tyneside accent, and in any case no-one would get the references.

The evening came and we drove over to the Deco Pizzeria. Bess stayed inside and shared a pizza with the boy, and I went out onto the patio which, judging by the speakers and assembly of people with a whiff of the poetic about them, was to serve as our venue. It was Wednesday the 19th of August and was therefore a warm evening what with this being Texas. I bought a beer and took a seat at a free table. The tables around me were strewn with sheets of paper, notebooks, tablets and the like, anything which could serve as a vehicle for text. It was still only seven in the evening. The Blah Blah Blah Poetry Spot was scheduled to begin at eight, but I was early. Everyone seemed young, or at least seemed mostly younger than myself by a decade or two. I could turn my head and watch Bess and the kid through the window enjoying their pizza. She had told me that she didn't want to cramp my style, or something of the sort.

The place fills and people hop from one table to another as old friends do, excited and excitable. They compare notes and discuss who will read what, pieces they've been working on. I sit alone at my table trying hard not to think of Charles Bukowski recorded on a VHS video I once saw, steaming drunk and describing how he walked out of a university when someone asked him to read his poetry. Hungover, he throws up and collapses on the grass outside the building.

'Look at that old man,' says a student he identifies as one of the little birdies. 'He's really fucked up.'

This is different because not only am I not a raging alcoholic but I don't even like the beer, and yet somehow the situation feels similar. Everybody is young and full of beans, and everyone knows each other, but there's this old dude sat at a table pretending to read his own vanity published book, and the old dude is myself. The next table is occupied by a young woman in her twenties with horn-rimmed spectacles and a fifties hair style. She leafs through pages of text, scowling and making notes with a ball-point pen. She looks ready to give some section of society or other a hard time using just poetry, and I tell myself that appearances can be deceptive.

At least I hope so given that I'm beginning to feel like the enemy, the white man, the narc, the informer, the undercover Republican dressed as a plantation owner in Stetson and guayabera, and I'm sat alone and friendless, just monitoring the situation with my own book before me on the table like it's a bible. I am in a minority, and this reminds me that white males who describe themselves as such are always, without exception, arseholes.

My fears are reduced when a young black guy approaches with a clipboard. He is one of the organisers and he is somehow able to tell why I am here. Amazingly, he recognises me as a type. He asks what I intend to read, and doesn't seem to mind when I tell him that it isn't actually poetry.

'How long?' he asks.

'About ten minutes,' I tell him, hopefully.

He explains what will happen. There will be an hour or so of open mic followed by a group performance which has already been scheduled. I will be on later rather than sooner because ten minutes is long compared to what some have planned. He will call me up front when my time comes.

We begin.

It's all poetry, maybe performance poetry if you want to split hairs. Some is read from iPhones or tablets, and some from memory. Everyone is either in their early twenties or younger. Everyone has stage presence and confidence, and performances are peppered with nods and in-jokes shared amongst the other poets of the audience. There is a lot of laughing and shouting. A young Latino guy reads a poem about his genuine appreciation of low-riders and other stereotypically Mexican passions, things his supposedly more-enlightened friends somehow believe should be beneath him. It's funny and it's pretty good. In fact most of what gets read is good, or sounds good. Two school age girls take to the microphone. They look like characters from a Japanese cartoon series. They speak alternate lines of a single piece, call and response, addressing the phantom of some censorious school principal. We're going to wear our short skirts regardless, they tell him, then share cruel laughter and ask why he was looking and whether he liked what he saw.

I sigh and think of Hank Hill.

Young people know everything there is to be known.

My time is here.

'He's come all the way from England to read for us tonight!'

I suppose it isn't actually untrue. I stand and shuffle towards the mic like the fat old man about to set these beatniks and homosexuals right, and to tell them to vote Republican. My copy of An Englishman in Texas feels as fat as a bible in my hand, a self-published symbol of my redundancy.

Good evening, children. Allow me to regale you with some most entertaining tales of my days as a younger man.

It turns quiet so I introduce myself. 'As you can probably tell by my accent, I'm not from around here, so I hope you can actually understand what I'm saying because a lot of people have trouble with it.' This is pre-emptive, and comes from how often I'm asked to repeat myself.

'Iced tea,' I will say, and the waitress boggles and looks at my wife as though hoping she will be able to translate whatever language I'm speaking. I don't believe my accent can be so out of place as to mangle just those two syllables beyond recognition, so I suppose it's simply that they don't expect to hear so unfamiliar an accent in Texas.

I am dimly aware that I am talking horseshit, but I can't quite stop myself, and my accent now sounds like a caricature even to me. I read an essay called The Mysteries of the Pyramids which was written after someone tried to involve Bess and myself in a pyramid scheme. I've chosen this one because it contains jokes, spends some time making light of my being a foreigner, and identifies the relentless pursuit of wealth as essentially idiotic. I briefly give some account of which English terms I'm not going to bother translating into American, whilst wondering whether such an explanation is really necessary.

Then I take a deep breath and read, leaning into the text and finding myself surprised by how my voice sounds amplified through the speakers. To my own ears I sound as though I'm impersonating John Peel or maybe Stuart Home, which I suppose is better than sounding as though I'm impersonating David Sedaris or Henry Rollins. It's difficult to read in the low lighting of the patio, but I'm coping and somehow I manage to keep a steady pace without screw-ups; and I even enjoy it a little. I like how the words sound. I like what I've written.

I stumble briefly as I begin a paragraph I'd already decided to leave out, and there are a few further hiccups, but I get through the thing in just under twelve minutes. 'I hope that wasn't too painful,' I say as I finish with the intonation of Johnny Rotten asking if you ever get the feeling you've been cheated at the last Sex Pistols gig. 'Thanks for being tolerant,' I add, because I have the impression that most of them were listening, even if they didn't get the jokes or didn't think they were so funny as to warrant laughter.

Thanks for being tolerant. Even as I say it I am faintly disgusted by my own peculiar need to apologise, my apparent desire for approval. If they enjoyed it that's great, but I don't need people half my age to stamp my card or tell me I did okay. I already know that I did okay.

There's a smattering of applause, ramped up somewhat by the compère, the black guy I spoke to earlier. 'He's flown a long way to spit for you guys,' he tells the audience, but he's still calling me Mr. Lawrence. I sit feeling vaguely dissatisfied, not with myself so much as the circumstances and I can't quite say why. The Mysteries of the Pyramids seemed to go down reasonably well, but somehow I can't take pleasure from it. Maybe next time...

The next time is the 2nd of September. Two weeks have passed and Bess has dropped me off so once again I'm alone and watching everyone hop from one table to another as old friends do, excited and excitable. They compare notes and discuss who will read what, pieces they've been working on. Again I don't feel nervous, not exactly. This is just something I'm doing and it's the waiting which is the worst part, that and the waiter failing to bring me a beer. I'm English so I'm accustomed to buying drinks from a bar, and I'm not accustomed to a waiter who comes to your table to take an order. You know where you stand with the English system, but this guy took my order nearly an hour ago. I've seen him three times since then, and on each occasion he's caught my eye, pulled a face to show that he's realised he has forgotten to bring me a beer, and then still failed to deliver. I consider the possibility of him bringing a beer the moment I go inside to buy one at the bar, and the possibility of losing my table, and I also consider that I don't actually want a beer, that I'm just passing the time.

The evening grows dark, the readings begin, and at last I'm back on. There are a few supportive whoops. Some people seem to remember me from before. I begin with an explanation, recalling how on the previous occasion I stood before them as some fat old white bloke whining about how his previous girlfriend didn't understand him, and I tell them that I was very much conscious of this. 'That really wasn't my intention,' I explain, 'and were it otherwise, I kind of hope a few of you might throw things at me and tell me to shut the fuck up.'

Amazingly there is laughter, and I get the impression that they are on my side, but the problem is that by now it's too dark for me to read the tiny print of my paperback copy of An Englishman in Texas. I've purchased a reading light from the supermarket, a tiny LED on the end of a flexible armature which you clip to the top of the page, but the light it casts is too feeble to make a difference. This is why everyone else reads from iPhones and tablets.

'Ugh - can I get some sort of light? This is ridiculous.'

A young Latina who could quite easily be my granddaughter illuminates the screen of her phone and holds it over my shoulder, allowing me to read Tin of Doom, the account of a previous girlfriend who didn't understand me.

I've picked Tin of Doom because it's much shorter than The Mysteries of the Pyramids and is much simpler, a basic comic account of self-involved idiocy. It's also the one essay which has been named as a favourite amongst those who have read my stuff on a number of occasions. It's a crowd pleaser, and this time everyone laughs in the places I expect them to laugh. It does its job, and I take pleasure from the telling. It feels less presidential address, more rock 'n' roll.

I finish and savour the applause, then return to my table and phone my wife, who comes to pick me up. I feel buoyed up and powerful, like I've stepped off the stage after a great gig.

Two weeks later I am indisposed, it being the day before my birthday, and then the 7th of October comes around and I realise I can't face another reading. I'm entirely happy with the material I have, but even when it's well received I've realised that I don't actually care one way or the other. I don't need the approval. Then there's the waiting around, sat on my own at a table trying to work out how to get hold of a beer I don't really want when I'd much rather be at home. It's tedious and there's no-one to talk to with whom I could have any sort of meaningful conversation, or even a mildly amusing one. I've never really been a social animal, and I'm way out of my depth. There will be other, better opportunities, I decide.

The cast comes off Holly's leg after about a month. It's been tough because she's had to have the cast replaced at the beginning of each week, each visit somehow costing a couple of hundred dollars. Then we have to detain her in a little cat tent to keep her from jumping up onto anything, and all the while she's trying to get the cast off, and she obviously isn't happy about any of this. Eventually she somehow manages to chew through the thing, plaster, bandages, plastic armature and all. She seems to be getting around okay, so we decide to forego taking her back to the vet and coughing up another couple of hundred dollars. She gets on fine, although her leg now projects backwards when she sits, straight out as though she's enacting Christina's World, the painting by Andrew Wyeth.

So Holly is okay. We managed without the revenue tsunami I hoped I might eventually generate by the power of my words; and whilst the readings remain part of some remote and poorly defined ambition, I suspect there is a better way of doing it. Eventually I will find out how.

Download poor quality but nevertheless free MP3 file of my first droning live reading here.

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.

Sedona, AZ

I have a theory that modes of human thought are influenced by  geography to a greater extent than any of us may realise. I say theory, although vague assemblage of ideas might be a more accurate term, a vague assemblage of ideas which came to me as I noticed certain stylistic similarities between the art and architecture of the Classic Maya of Mexico and that produced by their very distant relatives across the other side of the Bering Straits in parts of Asia and northern China. The early twentieth century folklorist Donald A. MacKenzie saw clear parallels between Mayan and Asian cultures of such strength as to indicate pre-Colombian contact for which there is unfortunately no worthwhile evidence, despite the protestations of conspiracy theorists. However, looking at the art of the two unrelated cultures, you can't really blame MacKenzie, such is the apparent synchronicity of vision. My idea was that environment might influence thought in so much as that a society which develops in a river valley will yield persons thinking in subtly different ways - in certain respects - to persons of a society developing high on a mountain plateau; and maybe these divergent modes of thought are passed on by whatever mechanism in such a way as to mean that, for example, two very distant cousins separated by many, many generations, when asked to draw a sailor will both independently produce the image of someone who very much resembles Popeye through the inheritance of a shared visual language; and spoken language and the forms it may take prescribe what can be said and how it is expressed, so perhaps similar laws apply to thought and perception.

With no clue as to whether any of this actually applies to anything in the real world, I intuitively feel that environment really does exert its influence on human thought and ways of seeing. Having visited Mexico on a number of occasions, it has struck me that the pre-Colombian Gods - Quetzalcoatl, Tezcatlipoca, Toci and the rest - make perfect sense in context of the environment from which they were born; or specifically, it's easy to see how someone might subscribe to a belief in that particular pantheon whilst wandering around Tepoztlan or Malinalco or Teotenanco, for these are spectacular environments. At least they were spectacular environments in terms of my experience, and whilst my experience may well be the false impression of a visitor whose eyes have not yet grown accustomed to the surroundings as commonplace, I somehow doubt this on the grounds that I continue to be impressed by mountains in a general sense, no matter how many I see.

Certain landscapes, I would suggest, are resistant to ever becoming so familiar as to reduce to wallpaper, specifically those which we usually describe as epic or panoramic by virtue of features which will remain forever at the periphery of human experience, craggy peaks, desert expanse, or great oceans - places we can visit, but upon which we cannot quite make a home, not without significant difficulty. Mountains and the like therefore remain distant, removed from regular human experience whilst providing an ever-present reminder of forces at work with which we cannot immediately identify, and whether geological or supernatural - it doesn't really make a lot of difference. This is why Thomas Cole and Albert Bierstadt painted what they painted in preference to parking lots or drinking establishments at chucking out time: landscape as summation of the sacred.

I've vaguely subscribed to most of the above at least since my parents used to take me on holiday to the lumpier end of Wales as a child, even if I didn't quite have it all set down in such terms. I was reminded of it when I visited Mexico, and again more recently when passing through Roswell in New Mexico. The marshy uplands as one leaves the town heading for Ruidoso, passing through fog sporadically illuminated by distant gas flares all equate to a landscape which seems unusually conducive to belief in extraterrestrial visitors crashing their saucers. If it's going to happen, you think to yourself, then it would make sense for it to happen here.

Of course, none of this accounts for that which is understood by both science and psychology regarding Mexican Gods, crashed flying saucers, or the emotional upswell of feeling which some may choose to describe as religious experience, but then I'm not really talking about either science or psychology so much as the human experience of a subjective response to one's environment, because that is the part which most of us understand, and that is the part from which mythology is born, mythology amounting to an intuitive understanding of one's environment for which the issue of rationality may not be directly relevant, at least no more so than it is to a Bierstadt landscape. Mythology represents neither a scientific discipline nor necessarily an objective representation of what we experience, but it can be helpful in describing what we experience given that what we experience is generally experienced as meaning rather than material substance.

To get to the point, I had enjoyed a memorable fortieth birthday in Oaxaca, Mexico with my friend Rob; and a similarly stimulating forty-ninth - the transitional year, I suppose - in Roswell, Ruidoso, and New Mexico with my wife; and now as I was about to hit fifty, it was to be the Grand Canyon. I've lived in America for nearly five years, and it seemed like due time.

We flew to Phoenix, hired a car, and drove the hundred or so miles north following I-17 up to the small town - or possibly city given my not yet quite having grasped the American distinction - of Sedona. The Grand Canyon is another hundred miles north of Sedona, but my wife had stayed in this place some years before and said the experience would be worth the extra distance, and she was right. Leaving Phoenix, the land was much closer to desert than anything to which I'm accustomed, characterised by scrubby plants scattered across the rocks and sand, creosote bushes and forests of saguaro - arguably the most fundamental of all cacti, the kind we all remember from cowboy films we saw as children, the kind we drew at school based on images from Little Plum or Desperate Dan. The terrain changed as we headed north, switching abruptly to a landscape more closely resembling our corner of Texas with familiar salt cedar and nopal cacti replacing saguaro so completely that it seemed as though we had passed some ancient horticultural frontier which no plant had been willing to cross. I suspect it was probably our elevation above sea level, climbing higher as we travelled north, up out of the burning desert to that which, like San Antonio, is merely scorching.

It being our birthday - my wife forty-four and myself fifty on the very same date - we pulled in at a Denny's restaurant, having heard a rumour of there being free food to be had therein on one's birthday; and the rumour was true so we each had a free grand slam - a dish pretty much constituting the last word in breakfast for those of you still to pop your respective Denny's cherries - which probably represented some sort of seminal moment in the history of mooching.

We got back on the road, resuming our northwards trajectory and gradually acclimating to it still being only ten in the morning thanks to Arizona being two hours behind Texas. The distant mountains grew more impressive, more cinematic as we went on, presumably geologically working towards the general thrust of the Grand Canyon, culminating in a spectacular splash of red rocks as we approached Sedona; so spectacular that we stopped the hire car and got out to take photographs and swear in appreciation, little realising that even this scene would come to appear humble in comparison to that which lay ahead.

Sedona itself nestles amongst red rocks, immense outcrops of heavily layered red sandstone, alternately craggy or made smooth by wind and water. It was like no place I had ever been, and those cowboy flicks of my youth - a good few of which had almost certainly been filmed here - hadn't done it justice. It felt like a rehearsal for the Grand Canyon, also like certain places in Mexico in being at similar distance from anything previously experienced; and similarly remote with mile upon mile of mountain or desert scrub upon which no-one had yet attempted to erect a billboard advertising car insurance.

We found our hotel and settled in, then went back out after a short rest. Sedona, so it transpired, is nothing like a town or city by any European sense, but rather comprises dwellings, restaurants and the occasional store - mostly of adobe - hidden away in upland conifer forest and arranged along a spider web of roads and highways following the canyons and rivers. It feels mostly like wilderness, and each turn in the road brings a freshly astonishing panorama into view. We began to recognise certain flourishes of hill or mountain by shape. Bell Rock is easy to spot because it resembles a bell, sort of; and then there's Snoopy Rock which from one angle roughly duplicates the profile of Charlie Brown's cartoon beagle reclining on top of his doghouse. Another angle reveals Snoopy Rock's close set and top-heavy sandstone columns, features which seemed to justify our briefly rebranding it European Dentistry.

As if all this spectacle were not enough by itself, the terrain is of such quality as to appear in constant flux, changing each minute as the sun drags shadows across the mountain landscape, eventually culminating with evenings of splendour equivalent to epic Biblically themed paintings of the nineteenth century - plunging river valleys sinking into sepulchral shade as high peaks shine like gold in the deepening blue expanse of the heavens.

Pardon my adjectives.

Back in the sixteenth century, the Spaniards inhabiting Mexico  encountered rumours of the Seven Cities of Gold reputed to be found in the north, somewhere beyond the Rio Grande, and being big fans of gold they sent expeditions in search of the same. Needless to say, none of the legendary cities were ever located, and one enduring interpretation of the myth suggests it may have been only a rumour springing from numerous hopeful Mexica pointing northwards and saying, sure - go that way. Just keep going until you find those puppies. Another interpretation is that the myth springs from a misunderstanding of an early traveller trying to describe the Grand Canyon, and although Sedona isn't quite so far north, it could equally well have provided inspiration for the story.

In the evening we ate at a passable Mexican place, discovering that Max Ernst had lived in Sedona for a while - which makes a lot of sense when one compares the texture of many of his paintings with that of the landscape; and then we retired, exhausted by a twenty-six hour day of which the latter half had been spent in a state of near continuous awe; and here is why I began with a lengthy preamble concerning the influence of landscape on human psychology. Both my wife and myself found it difficult to believe that anyone could become bored of Sedona, such was our reaction to the place. It doesn't seem like one could cease to appreciate the mountains or the canyons or the spectacle of it all, and so it probably isn't too surprising that the town should have become a Mecca for new age types, simply because this is a landscape which demands consideration of forces larger and less easily quantified than oneself. This thought was underscored when we stepped out from the hotel the next morning and found ourselves immediately awestruck all over again, just like seeing it all for the first time.

The new age presence in Sedona manifests as shops retailing crystals, books, and related paraphernalia, or else offering services which probably must mean something or other to those who hand over money for tarot readings, channelling, rebirthing, having their aura photographed or whatever. Ordinarily I might have found such things quite irritating, but in Sedona they are at least an understandable response to the surroundings. One specifically local response to the surroundings is the phenomena of the vortex, or vortices - supposed natural regions of poorly defined energy one may encounter whilst exploring the wilderness. These regions are apparently highly conducive to meditation, and a guidebook on sale at the Sedona branch of Walgreens promises that deep thinkers will experience greater clarity whilst meditating within a vortex. The book contains a map should you wish to go looking for one.

I am a little irritated by this idea. It suggests persons requiring that their powerful emotional reaction to nature hold some deeper meaning. It's someone stood before a scene of sublime beauty  deciding that it isn't enough, that it needs a bit of that old Harry Potter magic sprinkled on top to make it really interesting; but then again, in Sedona it seems all bets are off, and I find myself thinking well, if it works for you, then whatever... It is difficult to maintain one's customary cynicism in such surroundings.

As with Roswell, I can see why people gravitate towards certain modes of thought in this setting, even that certain modes of thought might be considered appropriate, no more harmful than an emotional mapping of the territory, a means of description beyond the dry statistics of geology.

With my curiosity operating at a reduced level of cynicism I purchased several books written by Tom Dongo, a Sedona author who describes innumerable incidences of mysterious forces and encounters allegedly occurring in the region over the past couple of decades. He writes with a pleasant, conversational style and doesn't really seem to care too much who believes him, and whilst I'm not sure I do, neither do I exactly doubt his testimony, peculiar though it may be, and I nevertheless very much enjoyed his books.

Anyway, on the Friday we went to see the Grand Canyon. Naturally it was spectacular, and so much so that no description can really be adequate. It is something one really needs to see for oneself. That said, the Canyon has about it some disconcertingly underwhelming quality relating to its being somehow too spectacular. The Canyon is a mile deep in places and eighteen miles across at its widest, meaning that standing on one side affords a view of more earth and rock than most people will ever have seen and from an angle which may as well be above, and at a greater distance than is generally facilitated by the natural curvature of the Earth's surface; so the view is probably not unlike what you might see from orbit, the novelty being that it's down here and is thus viewed with the naked eye. The result of this is that you can't quite take in what you're looking at, and it's difficult to tell which distant outcrops or peaks are in front of others.

Bess and myself walked along the edge roughly to the point at which the safety rail ends before being driven back by vertigo. We could see teenagers messing around on nearby outcrops beyond the safety rail, taking their selfies on strips of rock four feet wide with a mile drop either side, and the sight alone made us feel ill. The information sheet we'd been handed back at the entrance reported a statistic of around a hundred deaths a year at the Grand Canyon.

We sat for a while, some way back from the edge, trying to ignore the woman on the next bench singing her whining improvised hymn to Mother Earth - sung out loud because presumably the words would be meaningless without an audience to define her deep, deep spirituality as visionary and against the common grain by regarding it as slightly comical, the unenlightened fools. Then we got back in the car and came home, or came back to Sedona given that it had already begun to feel like home; and we both realised that, regardless of scale, the Grand Canyon had been substantially less breathtaking than the place we were staying. Sedona works on a more human level.

On the Saturday we pottered around a couple of sites south of Sedona, the somewhat misnamed Montezuma's Castle and the hilltop fortification of Tuzigoot, architectural remnants of local Sinagua culture of the fourteenth century, and somewhat refuting the received wisdom of pre-Colombian North America lacking anything resembling civilisation.

Then on Sunday we came home, returning to the established here and now. Obviously there was more to it than only that which is described above, and the details of where we ate and what else we did were set down in my diary, but mainly because I am otherwise unlikely to remember any of it given the contrast of the setting in which it occurred. I've lasted half a century, and I've seen the Grand Canyon, and I've probably been changed in some sense by the landscape of Sedona. I probably could have said this in significantly less than three-thousand words, but sometimes you just have to go the distance with your subject, particularly when there's no map which will ever really do it justice.