Tits

I've had another sleepless night for no reason I can identify, except possibly that it's uncommonly fucking cold and Bess and I have let Kirby stay in our room. Usually the cats get either the rest of the house or outside when we retire depending on which they prefer, but Kirby often spends the night on the corner of our bed because she's generally well behaved. Last night was the exception to the rule and she spent the hours of darkness walking across my face or otherwise engaging in cat aerobics; although I have a feeling I wouldn't have been able to sleep anyway. These days if I can't get to sleep - which admittedly isn't often - I get up and spend a couple of hours writing stuff no-one is ever going to read, then return to bed when I'm properly knackered; but on this occasion it hasn't worked.

So I have a slow day, forcing myself forward through the drudgery of my usual housewifely chores at quarter speed. I make the mistake of having the radio on and tuned to one of the stations which isn't wall to wall Tejano, but it's mostly news about how our President-elect is planning to outlaw rainbows believing they promote homosexuality, or he's appointed Dylann Roof to be the next Minister of Black People. A few weeks ago I made a mental note to avoid the news, but I keep forgetting. Later I go out on the bike, but it's still fucking cold. Frost is infrequent in Texas, but we compensate for the shortfall with icy wind of the kind Alex describes as a cold winter bastard in A Clockwork Orange. The Nahuatl speaking Mexica of Tenochtitlan - Mexico City as it has been since 1521 - associated their land of the dead with the north and divided the mythic realm into nine tiers, and one of these regions was called Itzehecayan roughly translating as Where the Wind Is Like Obsidian Knives, possibly deriving from some ancient fact-finding mission to San Antonio in the middle of January, or Izcalli as it would have been by their calendar.

It's been a long, slow day and by the time evening comes we decide to eat out seeing as the boy is staying with his father. We get in the car and Bess asks, 'Where do you want to eat?'

'Fuck it,' I say. 'Let's go to Hooters.'

Hooters is a sports-fixated restaurant chain seemingly sold on the idea of all the waitresses having great big tits. It was parodied as Bazooms in an episode of King of the Hill, and when I first moved here I was surprised to discover it was real. It seemed like an anachronism, something left over from Benny Hill's little known tenure as governor of Texas, but Bess had told me that despite any other concerns, the food was good, which primed me with the puzzling notion that people go to Hooters for the food.

Sure.

'Isn't it kind of er...'

I didn't need to finish the question for obvious reasons.

'Kind of,' she told me, 'but the food really is good.'

So along we went. The place is clean, bright, and cheery, but not quite with the depressing efficiency of McDonalds, and there are a million flat screen televisions attached to armatures all around the ceiling. There is a football game in progress, or handegg as it should probably be known. I don't know who is playing because it's not a game I understand - the Washington Racists versus the Fresno Basset Hounds or something. We are seated and tended by a waitress called Meghan who seems nice but is thankfully not my type. Being a happily married man, none of them are really quite my type even without taking the age gap into consideration. Having reached fifty it has come as a great relief to find that I'm not significantly attracted to younger women. I always feared becoming a dirty old man, but most women under thirty now seem physically peculiar to me, somehow nascent and unformed. I suppose the media has spent so much time presenting a certain female type as a physical ideal that I mistook it for how we actually work, and thankfully for the most part we don't. Although were I still in my twenties, I'm sure my nuts would have exploded before Meghan had even brought our drinks.

According to Wikipedia, an older version of the Hooters Employee Handbook reads:

Customers can go to many places for wings and beer, but it is our Hooters Girls who make our concept unique. Hooters offers its customers the look of the All American Cheerleader, Surfer, Girl Next Door.

So actually they're mostly just regular gals, admittedly very presentable regular gals, but far from the megatitted trainee strippers I'd been expecting. One of the team seems to be wearing a vest top which somehow has straps which, buckled tightly, make it appear as though she's transporting a couple of blancmanges - wibble wobble wibble wobble - but she's the only one. It comes as a bit of a relief. Despite the above protestations, and despite my inner Ben Elton, I am nevertheless a man who knows what he likes and who responds in certain ways to certain things even if I sometimes wish I didn't, and I'd probably find breasts above a certain volume something of a distraction whilst trying to navigate a menu, particularly with them hovering mere inches from my face.

Bess describes another branch of Hooters where most of the waitresses seemed to be moonlighting as strippers and had those weird fake boobs which appear solid and overinflated, more like what I expected; so either that's just a different place or Hooters has been reigning it in a bit, going for a more family friendly vibe. The sign outside displays the name Hooters written with the oo as the eyes of an owl, although the oo also resembles tits; and okay, so owls make a hooting noise but the chain knows it's not fooling anyone. I had assumed the owl allusion might be part of some recent self-conscious rebranding, but apparently it's been around more or less from the start. Nevertheless my inner Ben Elton still isn't having it.

Hooters is selling sex, isn't it? Its success is reliant on the objectification of women, on reducing women to objects set on parade for our pleasure. Well yes, and three men sued the company for sex discrimination back in 1997, specifically for denying them employment and presumably because being men, their knockers weren't much to look at; to which Wikipedia responds:

In employment discrimination law in the United States, employers are generally allowed to consider characteristics that would otherwise be discriminatory if they are bona fide occupational qualifications (BFOQ). For example, a manufacturer of men's clothing may lawfully advertise for male models. Hooters has argued a BFOQ defense, which applies when the essence of the business operation would be undermined if the business eliminated its discriminatory policy.

So it is what it is, as they say. It's a symptom of a condition of society, and if we need to get pissy and start shaking fists, there are probably a million more deserving targets. The waitresses here seem just like waitresses anywhere, only with slightly less clothing and it's hard not to feel a little sorry for them. Even if you're a complete idiot and all you have going for you in this world is breasts, waitress at Hooters was probably never anyone's dream job; and it really doesn't feel like a strip joint. The place is rammed, and about a third of the customers are women, and there are children running around. The men are mostly big, hairy trucker types, paunchy and balding, oily jeans and baseball caps featuring the logos of agricultural feed suppliers. I just hope none of them came in here expecting to score. Surely no-one is that delusional.

Meghan brings our drinks. I order smoked wings and my wife has a burger. When the food arrives it really is delicious, and so delicious that you actually would go out of your way to eat it; so it genuinely isn't just about the boobies, which is a nice surprise.

A place like Hooters will always have its knockers etc. etc.

The Big, Fat Working Class Sunrise

I'd seen Gary around Dulwich since the mid 1990s, although I didn't know his name at the time. He was a grown man with a paper round and was always walking his dog - something big like an Alsatian, like him in fact. He wasn't really fat, just a great looming lump, like a dole queue Bernard Bresslaw and always a bit scruffy because once a month down the launderette probably wasn't quite often enough; a bit red faced and slightly balding. He looked as though he could probably demolish brick walls with his bare hands if someone paid him to do it, which was a possibility given that he seemed to be an odd-job man. I passed him every morning, usually at the same time, same place, the corner of Friern Road as I snapped rubber bands from the bundle of mail for all the old age pensioners down Rycott Path. I said good morning a couple of times, because when a face has achieved a certain familiarity, it's embarrassing to pass by without some kind of acknowledgement; but he never replied, just stared back with those boiled egg eyes, seeming almost afraid.

What did I know?

What was my game?

Then suddenly he is my neighbour. The house next door has been divided into four flats, one to each floor. The basement flat has been broken into a couple of times, our part of Dulwich being particularly susceptible to burglary, and I myself have been similarly hit twice. The previous tenant has moved out, taking her horrible kid and criminal boyfriend; and now here he is, adult paper round man grinning over the top of the wall, and it's the first time I've ever seen him smile. 'You're the postman, aincha?'

'That's me.' I'm a little surprised that he remembers me from those mornings as we passed each other on the corner of Friern Road.

'I fort so. I seen you around.'

The council have placed him in the flat. He introduces himself as Gary and tells me a little of his story, but it's difficult to follow and is annotated with testy defences of alleged crimes at which he will only hint, and which in any case weren't crimes 'cuz he weren't doing nuffink wrong and you can arse anyone. He'd been living, so I gather, in one of the tower blocks up Friern Road with an ambiguous tally of pets - cats, dogs, budgerigars, fish, and possibly a squirrel. There had been complaints but he remains unspecific and anyway he hadn't done nuffink wrong and he was always doing little fings like putting the wheelie bins out for people or getting you a pint of milk from the shops or bringing in your mail from the boxes down at the bottom when the postman couldn't be bovvered to climb all them steps because the lift was bust, and he never even arsed for fanks or nuffink and it just went to show how two-faced some people could be dunnit. All that can now be said for sure is that Gary is gunna behave himself. He ain't gunna be doing nuffink silly again. He ain't gunna be writing on no walls or nuffink silly. He has learned his lesson.

So have I, namely that asking for specific details of the occurrence to which Gary occasionally alludes is more trouble than it's worth, and seems to upset him. Sometimes he'll arrive there under his own steam, in which case it's best to shut up and let him get it out of his system, and most of all to avoid the temptation to dig further no matter how darkly intriguing the testimony.

'You know women, right?'

I could answer well, not all of them, but it will only complicate things so I just say, 'yes.'

'Always arseing questions ain't they?' He scowls as though finding himself once again let down by half of the entire human race. I have a brief, horrible image of this particular train of thought leading to bodies uncovered from beneath an unevenly laid patio, and so I keep my mouth shut.

He seemed like an ordinary bloke, I will have to lie. Always kept himself to himself, except he never does.

'Funny bloke, ain't he?' Bill, my ageing Landlord, stands on the doorstep. I am paying the week's rent and our eyes have been drawn across the top of the wall to next door's garden and Gary labouring away on the latest of what he refers to as his projects.

'I can't figure him out. What does he do exactly?'

Bill belongs to the generation raised upon a solid work ethic. He doesn't really understand concepts of either unemployment or disability, and Gary seems to fall somewhere between the two.

'He works up at the flower shop on the corner,' I report, seeing no harm in telling just Bill. Gary has sworn me to silence, but so far as I can tell, most of our neighbours already know him as Gary from the flower shop on the corner. I'm not quite sure what the work entails, besides lifting and carrying anything which is too large or heavy for regular humans.

Bill sighs. 'He delivers the bleedin' newspapers and all, you know. I seen him in the mornings.'

I nod, uncertain of why we're having this conversation. Gary is an odd one for sure, but it doesn't seem like there's much to be done about it.

Over the next few months we watch Gary's projects come to fruition. The garden of the house was intended by the owner to be shared by the residents of all four flats - an intention formed from a fairly basic misunderstanding of human nature, particularly in London. Gary has taken over the entire garden, not a passive-aggressive occupation of territory but simply because he doesn't know when to stop, and none of those living above him care enough to complain. In addition to the flower shop and the paper round, he sometimes undertakes gardening jobs, often returning with plants or even small trees discarded by some client, now transplanted to his own garden.

He's a human magpie, transposing anything bright, shiny, or even just available to what has become his garden, which now includes all manner of plaster features and figurines, dry fountains shaped like sea shells, pink flamingoes, ornamental wooden arches and trellises, chunks of rotting wood that looked kind of interesting, and even a gravestone. It's not really a gravestone, although it's roughly the same shape, and I'm staring over the wall trying to work out what the hell he's doing now.

'I'm painting it Chelsea colours, ain't I. Whatchu fink?' He steps back to allow for an inspection, clearly proud of his work.

'I see.' I don't really see at all.

'You into football?'

'It's not really my thing, Gary.'

He indicates the letters he's begun to paint across the gravestone. The paint comes from half empty tins of emulsion which someone or other was throwing out, red, white and navy blue. There's a name which I can't read followed by a date in fat, uneven letters.

'She was my dog,' he explains. He is silent for a moment, almost thoughtful. 'I always fink when I die, they'll all be waiting for me up in heaven, all jumping up and down and pleased to see me like dogs are, you know?'

I grunt because it's a moment of unusually tender understanding. Gary's vision is comical, but it is absolutely sincere.

'They'll all be up there, all me dogs, me rabbits and me cats, all being friends.'

When Gary first moved in I promised myself I would keep my distance, that I would avoid encouraging him. I have no need of a new best friend, but Gary has other plans. He begins to call around to have a lend of my bicycle pump or to use my phone to make a call which sounds like an emergency. I'm knackered. I've had a hard day. I'm trying to watch the box, but Gary is stood directly between my eyes and the screen. He fumbles with a scrap of paper, dialing the number scribbled in blue biro. He considers the television then turns to me and grins. 'I was watching the football.'

I was watching a DVD of The Sopranos, but obviously I'm not doing that right now. It doesn't seem worth mentioning, because the call is clearly something important. I hear a faint crackle as the call is answered.

'Hello. Have you still got a budgerigar I can buy?'

Crackle. Crackle.

'I just want one. How much is it?'

Crackle.

'Yeah. Is it a boy budgerigar or a girl budgerigar?'

During the winter of 2004, I go to work on Bill's neglected garden, attempting to restore it to horticultural capacity following the destruction wrought by another tenant, George Marshall. George  offered to look after the garden a year or so before as it had become obvious that Bill was no longer physically up to the task, but George's efforts were weird and cranky and borne of no apparent gardening experience, more like a child playing in the mud. Having spent many years in the army, George rationalised the garden by digging the whole thing up to a depth of about three feet, then sifting all but the tiniest of stones from the soil. This resulted in a lifeless crater of clay with a mountain of stones at the far end, at which point he lost interest. I have taken it upon myself to reverse the damage.

My first task, as I see it, is to restore the soil by mixing all the stones back in. I have a wheelbarrow and a spade, and it's fucking cold with frost still on the ground at four in the afternoon, and my breath hangs in the air. After a couple of hours I'm knackered, and haven't really got anywhere. I realise that this will take months.

'Whatchu doing?' Gary's face has appeared over the crumbling garden wall like a big, fat working class sunrise, like the solar baby from Teletubbies in later years. I explain what I'm doing, and before I can finish the first sentence, he's over the wall and shovelling away like a steam engine. I race backwards and forwards with the wheel barrow, bringing clumps of damp soil then taking Gary's blend back to fill in the craters. I have the easy job and I can barely keep up, and I hadn't even arsed for his help. The mountain of stones is gone in about forty minutes; no more weird craters, just ground waiting to become a garden.

'That's better,' Gary observes happily, leaning on the handle of the spade and not even short of breath so far as I can tell. 'That should be nice now. Get some flowers and that.'

'Yes,' I croak feebly, hoping he'll go home, that he won't volunteer for anything else which might need doing and thus oblige me to help. I already feel like the weakest link in my own chain.

Over the following weeks I begin to stick in a few plants and to lay down grass seed. A regular flow of rescued shrubs still finds its way into Gary's garden, and inevitably he begins to run out of room.

Bang bang bang like the Incredible Hulk doing home visits.

I open my front door.

Gary stands there grinning, the stem of a newly rescued shrub clenched in a mighty paw, held forth like a prize snatched from the jaws of a dragon in a distant and mystic realm. 'E'are!, which means here you are, in case you were wondering.

'Thanks, Gary.' I've told him how I like to sleep afternoons because I start work around five in the morning, but he doesn't seem to get it. I leave the shrub by the kitchen door for later and go back to bed.

The years pass, and each day I am out in the garden at some point, weeding, planting or watering; and each day there is a big, fat working class sunrise over a garden wall which is still crumbling but has been recently fortified with old doors and sheets of hardboard found at the roadside as another of Gary's projects.

He always wants to know what do I fink of this or that.

Who's the best - U2 or the Rolling Stones?

Have I got a hat he can have a lend of for the U2 concert?

He wants to buy anuvver dog - a girl dog in fact. I ask him what kind, and he tells me a white one so he can name her Snow.

He arse for my help lifting up a fish tank. He just found it. They was chucking it out. He's gunna put it inside and put stones in it. He's gunna paint the stones all Chelsea colours. I can't really say no because it's Gary and, as the cliché goes, he'd do anything to help you out, and often does.

He lifts one end. The fish tank is like a motorway support of thick green glass. I can't lift my end. I can't even budge it to one side, and I realise that I have no reference point for what it must be like to be as strong as Gary. He's practically superhuman.

The big, fat working class sunrise is worse in the summer because he never seems to wear a shirt, and he has these great big sweaty man tits, and he pongs a bit now that the weather is warm.

Eventually, due to circumstances beyond my control I have to move out. Gary gives me a leaving present, a handful of old CDs he is chucking out and don't want no more.

'You can have them if you like. I ain't bovvered.'

Two of them are Sex Pistols live CDs, which surprises me. Gary explains that he saw them a couple of times when he was a kid. Johnny Rotten walked past him after one of the gigs.

'That was brilliant,' Gary told him.

'You weren't supposed to enjoy it,' Rotten gurned, laughing.

I move out, but eventually I make my way back to the old place, mainly just to see what has become of it, and once or twice I run into Gary, and I am astonished at how glad I am to see him. He once drove me up the wall to the point that I would often pretend to be out when I heard that distinctive bang bang bang on the door, but it's been a good couple of years and I've had some time to reflect, and I've come to realise that despite all his flaws, the worrying allusions to past misdemeanours, this gentle and slightly aromatic giant with a personality somewhere between that of a twelve-year old boy and a big happy dog, Gary is still one of the nicest people I've ever met. He has no hidden agenda, and no propensity for bullshit or delusion - least of all self-delusion. Of all the writers, artists, and musicians I have ever met, you would need to combine a good sixty or seventy of them to come up with someone even half as decent as Gary.

So it's Thursday the 19th of May, 2011, and Gary and I stand in the street talking for about an hour, stood outside the house in which I lived five years ago. He often wondered what happened to me, and how it all worked out in Texas, and he's so unconditionally happy for me that it's embarrassing. He still has his little projects, and the latest has apparently been the transformation of his garden into a zoo with dogs, cats, rabbits, guinea-pigs, and a not unimpressive aviary full of small birds. He's made the aviary out of things found laying at the side of the road. He tells me a little about his weekends. He goes fishing out in the country quite a lot. His dad used to take him when he was a kid, growing up in Camberwell, and he always loved it; and where once I regarded him as a well-meaning pain in the arse, now I realise just how lucky I am to have known this bloke.

Sausage, Egg and Chips

I am back in England, and specifically I am back in East Dulwich. It's a brief visit mainly for the purposes of catching up with old friends. I moved out of London in 2009, and haven't been back to England in the last two and a half years. Even more specifically it is Monday and I'm in the Dulwich Café on Lordship Lane, just next to the Lord Palmerston and I'm eating sausage, fried egg and chips in a fit of nostalgia, crossing another item from the list of things to eat whilst I'm back in the old country because it isn't quite the same as what you get in Texas. The Dulwich Café was my favourite café after Ken's place in Crystal Palace Road closed down. I would drop in every Saturday after work and read whatever rap magazine had hit the news-stand that week over a plate of sausage, egg, chips and beans. Today I've given the baked beans a miss because I'm jetlagged and am feeling a bit weird, but the rest tastes as good as ever.

I'm pretty sure the place used to be called Starburger, but Dulwich has changed since I've been away. The framed photos of boxers, James Dean, and various rat pack types have been replaced by tasteful aerial views of London, and the windows are now hand painted with images of healthy wholemeal rolls stuffed with rocket and falafel. Thankfully, inside it's still very much wipe-clean formica tables, ketchup, and actual working people, some of whom are still to be found in East Dulwich, still holding out against the encroachment of braying upwardly mobile tossers in red trousers.

I'd eaten sausage, egg and chips on Friday morning in another café, over in Bermondsey. The tables were Formica, each one of my fellow diners wore a high visibility tabard, and the radio blasted out that autotuned hybrid of grime and R&B which the English yoots dem seem so keen on these days innit. It was fucking beautiful.

Right now, eating my second plate of sausage, egg and chips of the trip, I realise I am sat at the table at which I last saw Nelly.

When I transferred to East Dulwich sorting office in 1993 or thereabouts, I was assigned to a walk in the corner of the building, working between Debbie and Graham, with Terry on the other side of Debbie, and Nelly at the back against the outer wall. These were the first people I came to know in the office because we were all huddled together as described for a couple of hours each morning. Graham was difficult to figure out, and seemed to spend most of his time chuckling at Ron's jokes - Ron being the postman working on the other side of him; but Debbie and Terry were funny, and I found it easy to get on with them, particularly once I began to pick up on the private jokes, most of which were based on imagined embarrassing or even pornographic situations encountered whilst delivering mail to easily offended members of the local clergy.

You probably had to be there.

Nelly, a Turkish woman with glasses and a severe haircut appeared initially less genial. She often seemed to take jokes the wrong way, or would attempt cracks of her own which didn't quite work. She was prone to angry or emotional outbursts, and struck me as somewhat intense.

'You know she's mad, yeah?' Debbie told me one day as Nelly went off to collect her registered items.

'Mad?'

'She's been in a mental home and everything. She's all right though. She's on some medication or summink.'

By this point I'd already accrued a couple of psychiatrically unorthodox friends, so I knew the form, and Nelly suddenly made a lot more sense.

'She's a lesbian too.'

'What? Really?'

Debbie nodded, and I squared this new information against Nelly's appearance, which made few concessions to conventional femininity. Strangely, I found I was impressed. Royal Mail could be a pretty tough place to work at times. You kept yourself to yourself, revealing nothing which could be weaponised against you as part of the ongoing war against all which might be deemed either a bit soft or a bit too fancy for its own good. Generally I didn't have much to say about the three years I'd spent at art college, so this open declaration of sexuality struck me as very brave. In Nelly's case, maybe it hadn't actually been an open declaration of sexuality so much as something which just got around, and which she had no interest in denying, but still it suggested a certain strength of character.

Gradually I got to know her better, at least enough to realise that she actually did have a sense of humour, but found little reason to engage it at work. On Saturday the 24th of September 1994, I wrote the following short autobiographical story, attempting to capture an incident which had occurred at the sorting office:

Nelly was swearing. The air was blue with fuck, shit, wank and others. She was often tense as a result of doing too much overtime. Still, not my fault, or anyone else's for that matter. Today she was swearing because she'd been doing too much overtime and because of her car. Some other road user had scratched past taking paint off the door. Was it Wednesday? Thursday? Well, today was Saturday and she was swearing a lot.

'What's wrong, Nelly dearest?' enquired the ever polite Terry Nevitt from beneath his bald patch.

'Fuck off!' she exploded without bothering to turn around. 'Don't call me fucking Nelly. Me name's Onel for the last bleeding time.'

She continued to sort mail into the Northcross Road frame, swearing quietly as she did so. Fuck. Shit. Wank. Each profanity was neatly punctuated by the dull thud of a gas bill striking home.

5, Archdale Road.

Thud.

'Bollocks.'

7, Archdale Road.

Thud.

'Bollocks.'

9, Archdale Road.

Thud.

'Bollocks.'

'Is it tea break yet?'

Onel spins around to glare at Debbie. 'If she asks is it fucking tea once more I'll... I'll fucking knock her out!'

'I didn't fucking say a word!' Debbie turns to me. 'Lawrence, did I say anything?'

'No,' I answer. 'It was Jen.'

Jenny mumbles something in fluent northern. We continue to sort in silence broken only by the steady drumming of letters going into frames.

Now Onel has gone outside. She rushes back in, muttering testily and then leaves again. Debbie tells me she's gone to the police station. She's seen a car in Pellat Road that may well have done the dirty deed. The dented bumper matches her scratch. She's very fond of that Mini is Nelly.

***

We're in the van - me, Ben, and Graham. Ben drives. We turn out of the bay, down Pellat Road passing Onel. She's stood by her car talking to a policeman.

'So what was all that about?' I ask.

'Nelly had a scratch on the door about the size of Graham's cock,' answers Ben indicating with his thumb and index finger the size in question. Very small.

Graham laughs and splutters in his usual undignified manner. He's holding his hands apart, his arms at as full a stretch as the confined space of the van will allow. He's trying to indicate something very large but nobody believes him and we don't understand what he's saying through the raucous farting guffaws that shower his spit onto the dashboard.

Her name was Onel and we became friends, partially because she was essentially a driven and fairly lonely individual reliant upon medication in order to keep her brain running along in a straight line, and partially because in the working environment of Royal Mail, you tend to value those of your colleagues whose brains work at all, those who are able to talk about something other than fucking football.

We went out for walks together on the occasional afternoon after work, just to the local park or whatever. Sometimes I invited her over for tea and would cook something or other, and sometimes she would return the compliment and cook for me. We were lonely people in a huge city with similar problems, and Nelly being a lesbian somehow made things easier for both of us, there being no awkwardly compatible interests to be avoided for the sake of decorum. One evening we went over to Juanita's house in Forest Hill, just for a drink and the purpose of generally talking shit. I only vaguely knew Juanita as a short, apparently surly woman from Catford sorting office, my previous place of employment, although we hadn't really had much to do with each other; but it was better than staying at home, and I was curious to hear how things had been going at Catford since I left.

It turned out that Juanita was also a lesbian, and this was how she and Nelly knew each other - specifically common interests in a predominantly male environment rather than anything more squelchy resulting from the sort of unlikely scenarios imagined by readers of Loaded and its like. The three of us drank tea, and talked about people we knew, who had been sacked and why, and watched television for a little while. The BBC crime drama Silent Witness came on, bringing with it the actress Amanda Burton in the role of Professor Sam Ryan.

'Fuck me,' Juanita growled happily. 'What I could do with that!'

Nelly chortled. 'Fuckin' fit, ain't she!'

I don't know why, but it had never occurred to me that lesbians might be just as prone to lurid drooling as heterosexual men, and there was something oddly comforting in the discovery. I realised that I understood Nelly better than I had thought.

More troubling, and even more troubling than her occasionally manic episodes, was her Christianity and tendency to introduce Jesus into the conversation more or less without warning. I could never work out whether faith really helped her get through the tough times, or whether in some ways it made them worse, keeping her distracted from whatever course of action might be more helpful given the sometimes precarious balance of her sanity.

One day she described the automotive accident she had narrowly avoided at the weekend. She was cut and bruised, and we were all trying to work out what the hell had happened. She had, she told us, woken up sat in her car in the wrong lane of the motorway. She had passed out. She had been about to crash into the metal barrier of the central reservation when Jesus had physically lifted her beloved mini up into the air, and set it down on the other side.

'You're really sure it was Jesus?' I asked.

'Of course it was.' She thought about it for a moment. 'If it weren't Jesus, then what was I doing on the other side of the motorway when I woke up. Explain that!'

I could think of a number of explanations, but I hadn't been there, and it seemed better to let her have this one, not least because she seemed to be in one of those manic phases usually foreshadowing a month off sick and then a few more assigned to the night shift up at Mandela Way pending psychiatric evaluation confirming her being fit enough to resume regular duties at the sorting office.

One evening as we sat watching television at her house, following her having served an excellent roast dinner. She told me a little of her upbringing in response to my enquiries about her family, with whom she had little contact. They had been of an unfortunately traditional disposition from somewhere in rural Turkey, where sons were an endless source of pride, and the birth of a daughter was announced with shame. Nelly's father had beaten her regularly with a belt, then left her locked inside a small cupboard for six hours at a time. I immediately understood why she had psychological issues.

Eventually those psychological issues got the better of her, and she became effectively full time up at Mandela Way on one of the duties set aside for the lame and the sick simply because the union would go apeshit if they were to be sacked. We ran into each other around Dulwich from time to time, and she seemed much the same as ever, doing her best to stay positive under miserable circumstances.

Finally our paths crossed in Starburger one afternoon. She was with an older, somewhat haggard looking woman who seemed to grin a lot, either a girlfriend or another lost soul.

'I've got cancer,' Nelly stated as though announcing she had just bought a new car. I suppose by that point one shitty deal was much the same as another.

Six months to a year later, she was dead. We had been friends, perhaps not great friends, but friends nevertheless; and for all that she was hopelessly neurotic, bonkers, and occasionally annoying, it seemed like a terrible loss even to those at work who had never particularly liked her. She lived; she received one shitty break after another, and then she was gone. It was a terrible waste.

I finished my sausage, egg, and chips, and thought about Nelly for a while as I drank my tea; but there was nothing positive that could be taken from the memory, nor any clear lesson to be learned.

Elephants Will Eat Anything!

Mark began at our Royal Mail sorting office in East Dulwich in much the same way as the Nazis began at Poland in 1939. He was hard to miss. Wherever you went, there was Mark. Whatever you had done, wherever you had been, Mark had either been there, done it, or had a mate who knew someone.

'He's a good lad, that Mark,' Geoff observed sagely one morning in the canteen. 'He's got character.'

No-one said anything. Mark had just left the room, having spent half an hour telling us about how his dog once regularly caught a train to the nearest town and came back with a newspaper. On a good day the dog would even bring the correct change. We were all still trying to digest this information as we ate our beans on toast in silence.

'Mark's a fucking cock,' I suggested to Snowy as we sat drinking in the pub one afternoon after work.

'Mark's all right,' Snowy told me, clearly understanding that he was arguing against a massive body of evidence to the contrary. 'He's got a good heart.'

This was true, although it wasn't really the issue. Mark had gone from walking postman to the vans fairly quickly, and it was fair to say that he was generally one of the better drivers. If you were amongst the postmen or postwomen for whom he was obliged to provide transport to the first point of delivery, he was nearly always on time. He rarely kept anyone waiting, and he never turned up early to whine about you making him late as you tore around like a blue-arsed fly doing twelve things at once in the rush to be ready. If it was Mark's week to drop off your pouching bags, there was never much cause to worry about finding yourself stood around waiting at the designated box, or for bags to have been left in the wrong boxes.

'He'd do anything to help you out,' Snowy observed.

The problem was Mark's having been assembled during a transporter accident involving David Brent, Alan Partridge, Dennis Waterman's character from Minder, and both Mike Reads - singers of Ugly Duckling and UKIP Calypso respectively. He was always ready with some not-quite-funny quip, those wide blue-eyes and the grin of a seventies disc jockey.

'Yeah,' his voiced boomed through from the other side of the canteen, the room with the television set, 'that's right. You see a shark is actually a mammal.'

I knew this to be wrong and felt an almost sexual drive to set the stupid fucker right, so I poked my head around the corner of the door. The room was more or less empty, just Mark and Jackie - reading the paper and obviously not even remotely interested - and some nature programme on the box. I took a deep breath and had a quick rummage around in my memory.

'Actually sharks are technically cartilaginous fish,' I reported. 'They're quite primitive because they evolved way back at the beginning, and they give birth to live young, which is probably what you're thinking of.' I may have suffixed this with I rather think you will find, and I had a hunch that what I had said was only generally rather than scientifically true, but it wasn't like Mark would be able to tell the difference. Mammal, my arse.

'That's right,' he confirmed, making us those two blokes who know about sharks and stuff, somewhat robbing me of my victory.

Eventually I found a comrade in Jason Aslett. Jason was in a band called Orange Can who, if memory serves, briefly became NME Best New Band or something of the sort. They had a record label and tours arranged, and they had CDs coming out. Nevertheless Jason needed a day job, something by which to pay the rent, and so he signed on with Royal Mail. We became friends fairly quickly, sharing some music industry common ground and pulling similarly perplexed expressions each time Mark opened his mouth and formed words.

'I'm going to tell him that I'm into shagging small boys or something,' Jason said one day. 'Just to see if he's done it as well.'

Sadly he never fulfilled this promise.

Christmas came around and we were in the canteen, taking the early morning tea break. The television was on as usual, a wonky image of a zoo on the broken set, some feature shown as part of Good Morning Britain or whatever it was. In the background an elephant is stood shovelling hay into his mouth with his trunk. There is a keeper in the foreground talking to the camera. Well Christmas is coming up, so - you know - we'll probably be giving him a bit of turkey and sprouts and all that, followed by the inevitable chuckle of a man enjoying his own unambitious joke.

'Yeah!' Mark turns from the screen to face Jason and myself, both sat in the corner with our cups of tea and plates of buttered toast. 'Elephants will eat anything!'

His eyes are wide because the time for joking around is over. We are beyond the looking glass now, people. He is absolutely serious. He has never been more serious in his life. Elephants will eat anything! and he looks back to the TV set as the weather comes on. It's going to be fucking freezing.

My God, I think to myself, he's about to tell us that he used to have an elephant. He's speaking from experience. He knows that elephants really will eat anything because he had one living in his mum's garden in fucking Sydenham.

I turn to Jason. He is sat with toast stalled before his open mouth. He regards me with something that could be either disbelief or horror. He too has had exactly the same thought. He too knows that Mark is about to tell us that he once owned an elephant.

We are trying hard to not laugh out loud.

Mark watches the weather and swears. If he ever owned an elephant, he is now distracted by thoughts of van tires skidding across icy tarmac, engines refusing to start in the cold. He will just have to tell us about his elephant some other time.

In that moment, I feel terrible for regarding Mark as a fucking cock. I recall all the times he's helped me out, dropped off certain difficult packets, or given me a lift back to the sorting office when I've forgotten something. He's a fucking cock, but he's our fucking cock, and we wouldn't change him for anything. He's one of a kind.

Florence la Petite Goth Français Gênante

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Really?'

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

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

Mandy wasn't moving.

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

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

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

'We're really doing this?'

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

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

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

'Why doesn't she just go?'

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

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

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

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

We heard more knocking, but different.

'She's gone downstairs.'

'Oh fuck.'

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

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

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

'She is here with us.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kremmen

It was the early nineties. I was working in Catford. Each morning I would struggle out of bed at five and take a bus from outside the pie and mash place in Lewisham High Street, past the hospital, past the giant fibreglass cat of Catford precinct, past those tower blocks in which one of the Sugababes was still about ten and hence not yet famous, eventually arriving at Catford Royal Mail Sorting and Delivery Office on the Bromley Road. This morning, it being winter, it was still dark as I went in the gates, up onto the loading bay. I pushed through the double doors, passing Captain.

He regarded me, expressionless as ever, his lower lip flapping. 'Don't listen to what they say. I was never on that show.'

'Okay.' It was too early to care about whatever this latest nonsense might be. I passed him without breaking step. I could see Joe over by the packet frames.

'Hey Joe,' I called.

He looked over, another early morning blank expression, although Joe had a naturally deadpan face. 'What?'

'Where are you going with that gun in your hand?'

He considered me for another second then gestured with his thumb. 'Down here.'

He went on his way, following his established direction of travel whilst generously supporting my pitiful joke by deigning to understand it and even to play along.

I passed the inward sorting frame. A few of them were already at it, letters into metal pigeon holes - chunk chunk chunk... I walked around to the back of the frames and stashed my delivery pouch under the bay. I could hear the usual distorted noise of radio and chatter but with an elevated level of amusement, elevated at least above the usual. Something had happened.

I considered Captain's mystifying edict from a moment before. Those big blue eyes had looked kind of shiny now I thought about it, now that I brought that big blank face back onto my inner television screen. He was upset. It was difficult to discern emotional subtleties amongst Captain's ordinary discourse because almost everything he said was in the brittle tone of a frustrated school tyrant refusing to acknowledge that he'd already lost the argument, still defiant against the tittering chorus of those who knew better. You could ask him the time and the reply would still sound like go fuck yourself.

But why is he called Captain?, I once asked Gilbert on the grounds that Gilbert seemed to know more or less everything about everyone. I anticipated the nickname acknowledging some sort of military background because he seemed the type, but no, it was because the guy used to have a beard and had resembled Captain Kremmen - the animated cartoon character who used to feature on Kenny Everett's various television shows. I could see it. Our Captain was tall and skinny, kind of awkward and angular, and maybe not with a big head so much as a head that seemed bigger than you would expect to find on those shoulders. I had nothing against him, and I suppose I quite liked him for all his faults, but you really had to keep in mind that he wasn't very bright, had no sense of humour, and that his personality had a naturally abrasive quality.

Once Danny and I were talking about what we'd seen on television the previous evening. I had watched something featuring the comedian Vic Reeves. Overhearing this, Captain felt obliged to point out that he himself did not find Vic Reeves at all funny, and furthermore felt obliged to point this out at intervals for the rest of the morning each time he'd thought of some new thing to which he could make unfavourable comparison with Vic Reeves' enduring inability to raise a chuckle at the Captain's table.

'Vic Reeves is about as funny as - as - as,' he stumbled towards the subject of the latest simile, 'about as funny as a dead ant!' He emphasised the dead ant for illustrative effect. That was how funny Vic Reeves wasn't. He really seemed to have a bee in his bonnet, although I couldn't see why. I had no deep seated need for him to find Vic Reeves funny. I wasn't bothered.

Anyway, I walked around to take part in the inward sorting. There was Joe again, Big Bird as he was occasionally identified, and it was true that he did seem to share some elusive looming quality with the Sesame Street character. There were two columns set about six feet apart near the packet sorting frames, roof supports. Joe had a coffin, one of the wheeled plastic trolleys we used for moving packets around the office. The coffin was eight foot in length, so of course Joe stood regarding it with affected confusion, bashing the ends against the support columns, engaged in a futile attempt to fit it lengthways though the gap. He glanced at me with a nervous Tommy Cooper chuckle. 'Fucking thing! It won't go!'

There was no aspect of working for Royal Mail which Joe was unable to turn into Alfred Jarry class absurdist theatre. Not for the first time I considered that of all the unfunny cunts in all the sorting offices across England who are told they should be on telly by easily amused colleagues, Joe was the one who really should be on television.

'I wasn't on no television. That was my brother who was on it!' Captain's voice was raised even above its usual emergency broadcast volume, but the resulting laughter was louder. I looked back to the sorting frames and saw my usual spot next to Micky Evans. I took my place, picked up a handful of letters and got going.

Boundfield Road.

Sandhurst Road.

Woodham Road.

'What's up with Captain this morning? What's he done now?'

Mick shrugged. 'Search me. He was on the telly or something.'

'He was on the telly?'

'I don't know nothing about it.'

An arm reached across my shoulder to pull letters from one of the pigeon holes - Gilbert clearing in.

'What have you done to the Captain, Gilbert?'

'He done it to himself this time, the silly fucker.'

'Did what?'

'You weren't watching telly last night then?'

'No.'

Gilbert was trying not to laugh, relishing the retelling. 'Well, you know how Captain is such a hit with the ladies?'

I did in so much as I knew that he apparently wasn't, which was why he was always talking about the birds and how you need to treat them in order to keep them happy. It wasn't that his information was wrong or necessarily bad, just that it was obvious he had neither idea nor experience of what he was talking about. He would have inspired pity had his tone been less like that of a five-year old insisting he's really seen a dinosaur. I had myself weathered something of a sexual drought for most of the previous decade, but Captain's erotic testimony sounded ridiculous even to me.

'How come you're such a hit with the chicks?' Carl Prosser once asked, having endured Captain's spoken sexploits for the best part of an hour.

'It's because I've got a massive cock,' Captain bellowed happily in bold upper case, as ever oblivious to the sarcasm of the question.

So now Gilbert explained it to me.

Captain had appeared on a late night television show called Contact designed, as the title implies, to aid the conspicuously single in their search for a partner. The highlight of his appearance had supposedly been the section in which he told viewers a little about himself.

'I've got a Ferrari,' he explained.

'You enjoy driving?' the presenter prompted.

Captain thought about this for a moment, then, 'It's not a real Ferrari. It's a Matchbox car. I haven't passed my driving test.'

This being at his home, he beamed as he produced the toy car and showed it to the camera.

I hadn't seen the show, and had it been anyone else I would have assumed this to be a simple example of lame humour attempted by someone who just wasn't very funny, but what you saw with Captain was generally what you got.

'What was it called? Contact?'

I'd never heard of it.

'Yeah. I was in bed by then. Troy saw it though,' - Gilbert stepped back and called to a postman sat about three frames along. 'You was watching, wasn't you, Troy?'

Needing no introduction to the subject, it being uppermost in everyone's thoughts that morning, Troy nodded. 'It was late, like half past two or summink. I don't suppose he thought anyone would still be up.'

We settled into the morning. Chunk chunk chunk and occasionally some minor flare up, Captain's protests still ringing out from across the other side of the office. It hadn't been him on that show, it must have been his brother, and anyway he hadn't said nuffink about no toy car. And fuck off.

'Where are you going, Gilbert?' somebody asked.

Gilbert stood at the centre of the aisle, half-creased with laughter and heading for the sorting frames around the back. 'I'm going round here so I can make contact with my mate Kremmen.'

Months passed and the story died down, settling into the social fabric of the place, each objection made by its subject ensuring that not only would it be told for years to come, but that it would be believed with the sort of conviction which would make Richard Dawkins' atheism seem vague and non-committal.

The last I heard of Captain, long after I'd left Catford Sorting and Delivery Office, were the circumstances of his dismissal. A young woman to whom he delivered mail had kissed him on the cheek in an expression of thanks for some minor good deed. He had allegedly gone back to his car to drop off both mail and clothing, then turned up on her doorstep naked but for a smile loaded with priapic anticipation. The woman, suspecting Captain had perhaps misinterpreted the extent of gratitude expressed by the kiss, understandably made a formal complaint about this nudist incident in the strongest possible terms. It sounded a complete yarn, a friend of a friend story, or would have done had it been told about anyone other than Captain.

Then again, maybe that one had been his brother, the one who looked just like him.

Last of the Sumer Wine

The Goddess Ishtar did one day come out from the wood crafted door of the ziggurat and began to wash the step, cleaning desert sand and mud from the brick with a pale of water. Hidden near to the ziggurat within a mulberry bush were Enkidu, Gilgamesh, and Utnapishtim. As ever, Utnapishtim wore upon his face a faraway look as though lost in thought. Enkidu on the other hand jostled forth, regarding the Goddess with lascivious intent. He licked his lips and rearranged his crude woollen headpiece saying, 'By heck, Gilgamesh, were it not for the dampness of my sandals, I would believe that we were in heaven.'

'Well, she certainly is a vision,' conceded Gilgamesh. 'I'll give you that much.'

Ishtar, sensing the consideration of unseen eyes, paused in her work and looked out from the balcony, her gaze ranging across the great city of Uruk from one doorway to the next. 'Who speaks? Who is here that dare not show themselves?' She raised up the wooden handle of the implement with which she had been making her work. Her lips pursed together as though she had eaten of some bitter fruit.

The mulberry bush sneezed, rattling its leaves and boughs before coming to bloom with conversation.

'You stupid great lump!'

The thin, high voice of Utnapishtim came forth like a timid bird, halting but not quite apologetic. 'Well perhaps if we had not taken such a route through the marshes. It plays havoc with my sinuses.'

'I'll play havoc with your sinuses in a minute!'

A third voice offered amused commentary. 'I think he means to punch you on the nose, Utnapishtim.'

'Yes, well that's his answer to everything.'

'Well, he is a wild man, after all. Pinched from clay of the stuff of the firmament by Aruru, unless I'm very much mistaken.'

'I'll pinch you in a minute!'

Ishtar's brow turned dark and she called out, 'All right you three idiots, I know you're there. You may as well show yourselves before I set the temple guards on you.'

Enkidu emerged, turning back to his two companions as they followed, and yet keeping both twinkling eyes and an unseemly smile trained upon the enraged Goddess. 'My lady beckons! Methinks the time has come when my rustic charms have at last worked their magic, as unto the shepherd's crook upon his wandering flock.'

The lady Ishtar stepped back a little way, fearful of the trio and yet reluctant to reveal that fear. 'Yes, it's the wandering that bothers me - the wandering hands!'

Now Enkidu ran forward to the base of the temple, gazing up with eyes made heavy by devotion, and by the strong desire that he might plant his wild, manly seed within the fundament of the Goddess. 'You know you're gorgeous when you're angry.'

Gilgamesh, now fully emerged from the bush and stood alongside the taller third of their group, showed a face of great wryness. 'Not just when she's angry either, but most other times as well. That's our Enkidu for you. He's nothing if not consistent in his affections.'

Utnapishtim effected to shudder as though stricken with thoughts of death. 'Please - I'd rather not give too much consideration to his consistency. I'm sure the bit about the clay was a euphemism.'

Ishtar was again at the edge of the overhang raining blow after blow down upon the hapless and yet happy wild man. 'You're disgusting, you are! Get away from here!'

Enkidu's great hair-covered paws reached upwards to the heavens, his fingers opening and closing like grapples. 'You know that wrinkled flax robe drives me wild.'

'You're already wild, you fool!'

The Really Massive Corner Shop

Dan Patrick, Houston Republican candidate for lieutenant governor recently induced an outbreak of frowning upon the brow of Congressman Joaquin Castro - identical twin brother to Julian Castro, Mayor of San Antonio. I say recently, but I don't actually care enough to find specific dates, so let's take it as read that the following events occurred at some juncture later than Achitometl's ascension to the throne of Culhuacan in the Valley of Mexico in 1388, but not later than the present. Anyway, Dan Patrick had apparently posted a picture of himself stood next to a man dressed as a beaver on his facebook page, dignifying the image by stating to my great delight after our (primary election) win Tuesday, I got a call from the owners of Buc-cee's who said they wanted to meet and support me, thus accounting for the beaver, this being the mascot of Buc-ee's, which Wikipedia identifies as a chain of convenience stores located in the Central and Gulf Coast region of Texas. Like so many Texans, I love Buc-ee's, Patrick added. The service is great, the food is great, especially my favorite, the pastrami sandwich, and of course my wife loves the clean bathrooms.

Well of course she does.

Buc-ee's owners Don Wasek and Arch Aplin have contributed over sixty-thousand dollars to campaigning Republican candidates over the last few decades, so it probably isn't such a big surprise that they should back Patrick; although some guy called Jeff Nalado, acting as general counsel for Buc-ee's has publicly stressed that the owners of the chain are the ones supporting Patrick, not the corporation itself, and that as a company, Buc-ee's does not support political candidates.

Nevertheless, Congressman Joaquin Castro was sufficiently disgruntled to state that he would not patronise Buc-ee's, objecting to their support of what he called a fearmongering immigrant basher.

I am disappointed to learn that a popular and well-respected retailer would lend its corporate brand to a candidate for state-wide office who has built his career around dividing Texans and bashing immigrants, solely for his own political gain, he further explained in a written statement; and so arose a number of online campaigns in support, all calling for a boycott of Buc-ee's, and in turn the inevitable responses from those vowing to make an extra effort to shop at Buc-ee's on the grounds that anything which pisses off a few liberals must be worthwhile, responses such as this from some guy on facebook, a Libertarian both politically and grammatically, although I've helped him out some and fixed up the punctuation here and there:

For those of you who attempt to hurt a business based on its political affiliation, you are practising the same discrimination you rail against. You may as well hang a black man for being black or refuse service to an atheist. I am a Libertarian, but I have seen this too many times from the democrats' side. They accuse Republicans of fighting dirty while pulling crap like this. This man is proudly standing up for what he believes is best for Texas, and you go after his family by trying to take food off his table.

How dare you?

How dare any of you?

You are committing the most cowardly version of assault there is. You would be committing less of a sin if you simply kicked his ass. At least that would not steal from his family. You claim to want what's best for Texas. What happened to us being the friendly state?

If you were born here and are acting like this, I will be happy to escort you to California where you will be welcomed with open socialist arms. Chances are, though, that California is where you originate from because they have invaded Austin and brought with them this type of bullshit. Look around Texas. You won't find this crap anywhere but Austin. Texas has conceded that city to the liberals who believe government can run our lives better than we can. Personally, I have rarely had the opportunity to shop at a Buc-ee's, but because of this, I will stop in every time I see one from now on to help counteract the loss of income from you ill-informed tyrants. And, it will make me feel good knowing that I've helped to punch a bully in the mouth.

You hypocrites! You demand freedom from government oppression while dishing out your own version of capitalistic oppression. I would like to personally dress up in a beaver outfit and beat the shit out of each one of you liberal oppressive if you're successful we'll bring you down so we can give your money to who we want pieces of crap, just so you could get your picture in the paper getting your ass kicked by a theme park icon.

It could of course be a parody, but how does one even tell? It is an argument I have encountered on a few occasions, all of them through a computer and not one in real life thankfully, an argument amounting to will no-one think of the poor starving millionaires asking only to make for themselves an honest gold-plated crust? It is the argument of someone who has thrown themselves wholeheartedly into helping out with their own exploitation, pulling the wool down over their own eyes and paying for the privilege, secure in the knowledge of having done the right thing.

The conscious choice to not buy a sodding Three Musketeers bar at a Buc-ee's outlet, or even to suggest that others might refrain from purchase of sweeties at the same, is not simply akin to invasion by dangerous totalitarian Communists, it is the exact same thing; and even more exhausting is that it is telling people what is best for them, and what is best for them would be their cutting out all of this telling people what is best for them.

I generally dislike politicians regardless of their hue, but I like Castro on the grounds that he and his identical twin brother have occasionally got into trouble for pretending to be each other at important functions - which at least suggests personality - and because he's pro-Mexican. Furthermore, I would suggest that political office is one that in an ideal world requires intellect, and that intellect tends not to be found in the man or woman who spends too much time blaming local problems on all those brown people coming over here taking our jobs and eating their funny food and that. Someone once attempted to explain the somewhat right-leaning immigration policy of UKIP - an unpleasant English fringe party - to me by means of an example so simple that even I would understand it. You know that Mexican border about a hundred miles south of you, he began, presumably failing to realise that I live in a city with a 63% Hispanic or Latino population, and that I would be a fucking idiot to live here if I didn't like Mexicans. The argument was unconvincing.

This war of words between Patrick and Castro served to elevate the Buc-ee's phenomena a little further within my consciousness, it being something which had nagged at me for a time without my quite knowing why. How had this debate become so heated? Why would anyone care so much as to wish to dress up as a beaver prior to the dispensation of rough street justice? I had a faint impression of a world divided into two, those who had been to Buc-ee's, and those who were yet to have the opportunity to visit the store in question, like it could be considered an experience. I knew that I myself had been to Buc-ee's, and furthermore I'd been to the most amazing Buc-ee's in the known galaxy, the one situated just past New Braunfels as you head out towards the People's Republic of Austin, about which Wikipedia states:

The New Braunfels travel center is the largest convenience store in the world at 68,000 square feet. The store features 120 fuel pumps, 31 cash registers, 4 Icee machines, 80 fountain dispensers, tubing and water gear for the Guadalupe River, and a farmer's market that features Grade 1 fruit and produce.

The New Braunfels, Texas store was named the 2012 Best Restroom in America by Cintas.

Isn't it just a really big motorway service station?, I wondered to myself, barely able to recall anything of my visit, or visits as I had a feeling my wife and I may have stopped there several times.

If it was really so amazing, why couldn't I remember?

The first expression of this corporate entity I'd noticed when I came to live in Texas was its mascot, a cartoon beaver wearing a baseball cap drawn as though by an enthusiastic ten-year old who had learned how to copy the Disney characters, but still didn't quite understand what made them tick. Buc-ee, who is depicted from the shoulders up on the signs at an uncomfortable angle, like he's broken his neck but has learned to live with it, was inspired by the better drawn and significantly cuter Bucky Beaver who advertised Ipana toothpaste back in the 1960s, and even had his own spaceship. I'm not sure whether the name was revised so as to avoid any perceived breach of copyright, but it seems an ill-considered change to me. The hyphen, the phonetic ee, the possessive apostrophe - as a name it's a mess, something that might work sprayed wildstyle on the side of a New York tube train, but awful as a molded plastic logo beneath that funny looking beaver. It aspires to be cute but, to paraphrase Bill Griffiths, ends up exuding a kind of desperation that cuteness only accentuates. Poor Buc-ee - he makes even Chuck E. Cheese seem like he knows what he's doing.

Determined to penetrate the mystery of the world's biggest corner shop, to quantify the appeal that had apparently thus far eluded me, I had to ask myself what is the magic of this thing we call Buc-ee's?, and so a visit took place. My wife and I were going to Austin anyway, so it wasn't like it was out of our way. We passed the billboards announcing that we were approaching Buc-ee's with merely five miles to go, then only two more miles, then the mystifying and faintly sinister the eyes of Buc-ee's are upon you, which delivers no real information and is probably funnier if you follow their semi-regular series of purportedly humorous billboards carrying messages like don't stay thirsty, my friends, and ice, beer, jerky: the three food groups.

Ha ha.

The store when we came to it was indeed basically the world's largest gas station - or petrol station, as my English upbringing still compels me to term it, albeit to a lesser extent. We parked and entered a vast room in which one could have concealed a couple of jumbo jets had the ceiling been a little higher. We were in the company of what seemed like thousands of people, all browsing aisles of beef jerky, fruit, pickles, sweets, cakes, nuts, corn chips, and chocolate bars, with chiller cabinets full of ice, beer, sandwiches, and food in the shape of Texas. My wife went to use the rest room and I looked around for a dining area, a restaurant or café or something that would distinguish the place as being at least on the same level as a Happy Eater. The closest was the food bar specialising in pulled pork which I suppose once it had been pulled by one of the attendant pork pullers could be consumed off the premises, perhaps as one drove away, cheerfully washed down with the first of many beers. I didn't make too close an inspection, as I am yet to discover just what pulled pork is, and am at present still making the most of this state of innocence. My wife came back and we went further into the store, inspecting the aisles of clothing, T-shirts, barbecue aprons, and baseball caps with amusing slogans relating either to the excessive consumption of beer, shopping at Buc-ee's or amusing marital dysfunction. The clothing department was decorated, as are a surprising number of things in Texas, with barbed wire motifs and the skulls of longhorn cattle. For a moment I considered the possibility of whether the skulls might themselves be on sale, even if there might be one with the Buc-ee's logo painted at the centre of the forehead; but I knew I was letting my imagination run away with me, although such a thing would certainly have brought the store a little closer to the nirvana promised by its reputation. We went ahead, leaving the clothing department behind, passing rack upon rack of country music CDs in search of further material at which to scoff.

For those who like myself have never seen the show, I understand Duck Dynasty to be a documentary series about the lives of amusing rural folk typical of the poke them with sticks and watch them jump freak show that is disingenuously referred to as reality television. Duck Dynasty merchandise is everywhere at present, and Buc-ee's hasn't been left out of the loop in this respect. Camouflage tins of beans sporting pictures of bearded men seemed incongruous near the entrance, but deeper into the store such material blends in with the rest. At the far end, in amongst bags of animal feed, fishing equipment, and everything a hunter might require aside from an actual firearm, the Duck Dynasty promotional products become as one with everything else in a vague sea of green and black. The absence of guns came as no surprise given that they're really not quite so ubiquitous here as everyone seems to believe, but much of the other stuff was astonishing, mainly because I had no idea what any of it was for. I took a photograph of something called a Redneck Timer because its purpose seemed unusually ambiguous, but I left it at that because there didn't seem much point in filling up my camera with endless images of the incomprehensible.

More surprising was how I found that as we left I had experienced a reversal of opinion regarding Buc-ee's. The light hearted slogans of the T-shirts hung upon the wall had somehow got to me, or at least the spirit in which they were presented as something you might want to wear had done its work. Buc-ee's was really just a big, stupid gas station selling meaningless crap to numbskulls, but it didn't know that it was just a big, stupid gas station selling meaningless crap to numbskulls. It believed itself to be something else, and stupid though it certainly was, pointing this out felt akin to kicking a child, or at least kicking somebody with the mind of one. Buc-ee's didn't really care that I had come with the intention of disproving the existence of God, it just hoped I had enjoyed myself and thanked me for my visit.

Outside I posed for photographs next to the bronze sculpture of Buc-ee the beaver. It wasn't a great sculpture, bearing no resemblance to the poorly executed cartoon mascot, and my wife and I agreed that the big beaver teeth were really the only feature that distinguished the sculpture from one of Popeye or any other cartoon character. Nevertheless, we still had to wait for the three families in front of us to have their pictures taken with the unconvincing statue. My photographs show a fat English guy stood next to a brown blob of bronze. Neither of us came out of it looking good.

In conclusion, whilst Buc-ee's may indeed stock some half-decent things to eat, drink, listen to, wear, or fire at ducks, and is very probably good of its kind, aside from maybe a choccy bar, there wasn't much I would have wished to buy anyway, so I guess that would be me also filling up on the bread stolen from the mouths of an innocent millionaire's children.

If people wish to give their money to possibly horrible politicians then that's what they should do, and hopefully the rest of us will have more sense than to vote them into office. If you dislike the way someone is spending their money, then there's no reason why you should be required to give them any of yours. Neither is there any reason why you should be prevented from telling anyone about it. It's not that complicated, and it really is just a very big corner shop, and nothing more.