SMH

We're back at Jim's diner, the second time in a couple of weeks and once again the car is there. I'm no good with automotive brands and think of it as a Lincoln, which it probably isn't. It's new but is styled more like something from the seventies, clean and brilliant white with a scatter of political stickers across the trunk and rear window - proud supporter of President Trump, amongst others, most of which propose that the driver is additionally a proud supporter of the Lord Jesus Christ. I don't understand why anyone would want to advertise their personal preferences on their means of transport, but this sort of thing particularly gets on my nerves because it also seems to advertise their stupidity as though it's a boldly chosen stance - I done a smelly poo right in me knickers, laughed in your face with a big happy smile.

The car is parked right in front of the entrance and, as I say, this isn't the first time we've seen it. The glass door of Jim's is decorated with the usual array of literature concerning coronavirus and the requirement of masks to be worn within, but there's other stuff too and it takes me a second to decode what I'm looking at: colour images on paper, presumably printed off on a home computer. There's a photograph of Hillary Clinton with a caption referring to the supposed suicide of Jeffrey Epstein. I can't even tell what is implied here, which I guess means I don't spend enough time on the internet, but the political angle is implicit in the other images, each pasted on the door with a single strip of tape. The other two are too bland to stick in my memory, but something rhetorical along the lines of what those liberals will come up with next. It's the cosy syntax of persons who have learned all they needed to know at the university of life, and are not only secure in their ignorance but feel it represents an achievement, the sanctity of a mental virginity kept pure from anything with too many long words. I've encountered these people online, usually in response to some not unreasonable proposition - cops probably shouldn't shoot innocent people, for example - and their stock response will be SMH, which stands for shaking my head, or something borrowed from someone else about the sad effects of a mind destroyed by liberalism. It's not really an argument. It's barely even coherent as a sneer.

'You know, I think I've changed my mind,' I say. I've deduced that this material probably doesn't actually represent views endorsed by either Jim's management or staff, but it bothers me.

'I know, but I'm hungry.' Bess goes in and I follow.

'Take a seat,' the waitress suggests, pausing on the way to someone's table.

I wait for her to deliver the tray then catch her attention. 'I don't know if you realise, but someone has pasted a load of right-wing crap on your door over there, and it's kind of annoying.'

She sighs in a long-suffering way and mumbles something about dealing with it, and I immediately realise who is behind this. I said right-wing crap quite loud and he's staring at me from a few tables away. He's a little old man, maybe in his eighties, wearing a cap identifying him as a Korean war veteran. His jacket is similarly adorned with badges. He likes to advertise. He was in here last time with a friend of similar vintage and the same cap. He's small and the lower half of his face protrudes like that of a monkey or someone in a thirties Popeye cartoon. He's Cotton from King of the Hill.

I'm kind of tired of the fetishisation of the military in this country. I have no problem with anyone signing up with the military, but would hope they do so for reasons besides the eternal gratitude of complete strangers who bark thank you for your service at the first whiff of khaki. Military service does not mean you're a sentinel of freedom, and I'm suspicious of anyone who advertises having been in the military regardless of whether it's on a hat, a car sticker, or tattooed on one of their mighty biceps. Merely walking around with a gun on foreign soil does not make you a hero; and if your actions have been genuinely heroic in the service of your country or some cause you consider noble, you shouldn't need your ass kissed by the rest of us on a daily basis. I find it difficult to truly respect those who advertise their having served in the military, because it feels a little as though they have something to prove; and had they seen the sort of action which might be discussed in terms of heroism or courage, my guess is that they wouldn't feel the need to prove anything, much less by means of something so trite as a bumper sticker. I've met one veteran of the Korean war, my wife's uncle Elton. He told us all about it, particularly about the mass graves filled with the bodies of Chinese people, and it sounded nightmarish. For some reason he chooses not to advertise his military experience with slogans displayed upon either his person or vehicle.

Monkey Man regards us with fearful piercing eyes as we take a seat in the booth adjacent to his. He knows he is old and feeble, and he knows that I don't like him very much and could crush him, and he knows that it will take more than his veteran status to get me swooning like a seventies schoolgirl at a David Cassidy performance. I'm one of those people he's been warned about, here to ban everything reasonable with my mighty powers of political correctness, here to force your children into gender reassignment surgery regardless of their own personal feelings on the matter, and I do this because I'm following orders passed onto me from the mighty Antifa world headquarters inside a hollowed out mountain of the Sierra Madre. Ordinarily he might only frown to himself, then an uncharitable chuckle as he types a damning SMH before moving on to the next thread; but this isn't that kind of situation.

The waitress comes to take our order.

'Sorry to be that customer,' I say, waving my hand in the general direction of the door, 'but we just came out to eat and I don't want to see that sort of stuff. It's like having the worst of facebook following you out into the real world.'

She understands. She explains that the person who decorated the door is a regular diner of many years, leaving her in an uncomfortable position, but the memes are coming down just as soon as he's paid up and left. She speaks quietly. Although we're in the booth next to Monkey Man, a glass partition divides us at head height, and my guess is that his hearing may not be the greatest. The waitress is evidently smiling behind her face mask, but it's clear that she's on our side and that this is some bullshit she really could have lived without.

Our food arrives and we eat.

Monkey Man begins his long, slow pilgrimage towards the cash register with waiting staff as he goes. Eventually he makes it outside to the car driven by a proud supporter of President Trump, obviously himself. We hear the waitress agonising with the guy in the kitchen, just wishing this sweet old guy wouldn't be such a dick, then she goes to the door and removes the liberal-baiting crap.

One day he'll be dead.

They will all be dead, and the world will be a nicer place to live at least in that respect. I think of the people I've known who managed to make it into their eighties without turning into Enoch Powell, or at least a massive pain in the arse. Thankfully they outnumber Monkey Man and his kind by a significant margin.

Nearly New Kids on the Block

'Look,' my wife chuckled, holding her smartphone so I could see the screen. 'Someone dug up New Kids on the Block.'

I squinted at the tiny font and saw that New Kids on the Block were playing at the AT&T Centre on the 16th of May. 'They'll be a bit long in the tooth by now, surely. I'm surprised trades descriptions aren't after them if they're still going by that name - assuming we have something like the trades descriptions act here.'

We both chuckled and then rededicated ourselves to viewing Wheel of Fortune, smiling as a contestant to whom we had both taken an immediate dislike submitted an obviously wrong answer.

My wife's smartphone rang.

'Hello,' she answered. 'What's up?'

'What are you doing on the 16th of May?' asked Will, her brother.

'Well, I know I won't be going to see New Kids on the Block,' Bess laughed. She laughed because she knew that there was no way her brother would be interested in going to see New Kids on the Block, and he'd be sure to find it funny.

Nevertheless, here we are. A few weeks have passed and we're at the AT&T Centre, myself, my wife, and my brother-in-law. The New Kids are still alive, still performing, and are engaged in something called the Mixtape Tour. This means not only the hits, but appearances by Tiffany, Debbie Gibson, Salt-N-Pepa, and Naughty by Nature, so it's mostly an eighties nostalgia thing - a concert based on the sort of stuff which would have ended up on a cassette tape, although not one of my cassette tapes which is why both Esplendor Geometrico and Portion Control remain conspicuously absent from the bill. Personally I don't have a whole lot of nostalgia for the eighties, and particularly not the stretch inhabited by the New Kids, but it's a night out and I figured Naughty by Nature might be approximately worth a look.

Will is here because he's a massive Debbie Gibson fan. He's a very complicated man.

I don't know anything about Debbie Gibson, other than that herself and Tiffany were presented as examples of everything which was wrong with music at the end of the eighties by the comedian Bill Hicks. The routine in which Hicks presents this argument daringly goes against the consensus by suggesting that the music of both Tiff and Debbie was ephemeral and therefore inferior to that of fucken' Hendrix, man. The routine was additionally of such macho shithead composition as to put me off bothering with any further Bill Hicks material ever again and, if anything, to leave me slightly better disposed towards both Tiffany and Debbie Gibson, as people if not as recording artists.

Back in the eighties I was in a band called the Dovers. We hosted a competition during one of our gigs - whoever applauded the loudest would win a copy of our album. The punchline was that our album was a copy of Tiffany's debut which Carl, our singer, had come by at his place of work, a design studio specialising in record covers. We never said it was something we had actually recorded, only that it was an album owned by ourselves.

Ha ha.

Tiffany's cover of I Think We're Alone Now was one of the songs on that record. As for Debbie Gibson, the title Electric Youth rings a bell, but her celebrity otherwise passed me by; and I always thought The Right Stuff by New Kids on the Block was a great song, but have no idea what happened to them after that.

Weren't they one of those dance routine based outfits? Wasn't Mark Wahlberg a member? I wonder whether they managed to lure him back to the fold, given that he's clearly a busy man these days.

Anyway, we're here and I'm sure that all of my questions will either receive answers or else cease to matter in the fullness of time. The AT&T Centre is enormous, on a scale sufficient for basketball and rodeo events, and nevertheless the place is swarming for a phenomenon long past its sell by date. It feels as though we're at an airport as we migrate towards the section of the arena in which we are to be seated. It seems incredible that this bunch could inspire such a turn out thirty years since they could legitimately be described as kids. There are a great many women in their early forties who would have been teenagers when The Right Stuff hit the charts, but the age range of tonight's audience varies wildly, including even men. We see a few women togged out in dayglo rap gear with big hoopy earrings - actually more TLC than Salt-N-Pepa, so far as I recall - but mostly it's fans of the New Kids, big gangs of them, possibly even a few hen parties. More than once I'm fooled into thinking I've spotted someone from the cast of Orange is the New Black.

Will is after a T-shirt so we join one of the many queues. After ten minutes I go and buy a beer, then come back. I've had two beers by the time we get to the front of the queue although to be fair I may be drinking fast, and it turns out that this particular concession is out of Debbie Gibson merchandise. We retrace our steps and find another concession, one with Debbie Gibson T-shirts on display.

Some of us grew up listening to NKOTB, reads the shirt of one woman who passes us by. The cool ones still do, is the punchline on the reverse of the garment. I'm apparently on that planet where New Kids on the Block were cool.

Music starts up.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

I wander over to the entrance for the nearest terrace and draw back the curtain. I'm gazing down into an entertainment grand canyon. Termite trails of fans shuffle towards their seats over on the far side. A rapper and a DJ are at work upon a circular podium at the heart of the auditorium, about a hundred feet below where I'm stood. This is the warm up act, Illtown Sluggaz which is something to do with Naughty by Nature without actually being Naughty by Nature. They sport baseball clobber and the DJ wears a cartoon bear head, like a sports mascot. He looks fucking ridiculous and I feel an involuntary shudder of disgust that I, a fully grown man, should be presented with this Disney teddy as entertainment.

'Everybody put your hands in the air,' suggests the rapper, 'and wave them like you just don't care.'

The DJ segues a few bars of Material Girl into a few bars of The Final Countdown into a few bars of Walk This Way - hits of the eighties, and everyone cheers because they recognise the songs. It doesn't matter that more than half of the songs are shite, because familiarity is the point. To my ears, it may as well be Peter Kay asking who remembers Curly Wurly or Crackerjack. I am more or less watching the twenty-first century version of Jive Bunny

'Everybody make some noise!'

I turn to rejoin my wife and brother-in-law, who has at last bagged himself some Debbie Gibson merchandise. We resume the Tolkienesque pilgrimage towards our section, ascending an escalator to the upper floor past vast stylised murals of the San Antonio Spurs and their mascot, a man in the suit of a chubby coyote with googly green eyes suggesting substance abuse - to me, but apparently to no-one else in the entire city. You would think that being able to afford this futurist space station of a venue, the Spurs could at least slip some grade school kid a few dollars to come up with a less-creepy mascot.

Our seats are on the back row, up against the rear wall, almost in the roof. The incline of the terrace seems perilously steep, certainly more than forty-five degrees, although at least we shouldn't have any trouble seeing the stage, which is still occupied by a man wearing a cartoon bear head playing snippets of Can't Fight this Feeling, The Heat is On, and other crowd pleasers. Gazing upwards, I have a view of the underside of the roof structure criss-crossed with monumental air conditioning, pipes large enough to facilitate escaping prisoners. It feels as though we're underneath the USCSS Nostromo from the movie Alien.

The venue fills to capacity, not an empty seat to be seen. A larger stage is set up against the far side, facing the central podium upon which the Illtown Sluggaz skillfully play short excerpts of familiar songs. This larger stage is picked out in neon strips delineating the shape of a huge cassette tape, and the screen behind is suddenly illuminated. We are shown a short film of the individual members of New Kids on the Block as they are now, mowing the lawn, renewing home insurance, riding a horse, having a colonoscopy…

The crowd go wild.

The face of Donny Wahlburg - brother of Mark, hence my confusion - fills the screen. He holds up a smartphone. He tells us we need to download an app called Appix in order to get the most from tonight's performance, which raises all sorts of questions that I can't be bothered to think about.

'I love you, Donny!' screams the forty-year old woman sat next to me, and she really screams, just like those teenagers in the black and white footage of the Beatles. Now the New Kids take to the stage, five tiny figures dancing upon a giant cassette tape which now has The Way written across it in neon as though by an invisible giant, that being the name of the song they are performing. A woman I uncharitably come to think of as Fat Snooky stands in her seat, directly in front of me, blocking my view. I can see only her silhouette, but what I can see suggests Snooky from Jersey Shore. The women of the three seats adjacent to Fat Snooky also stand. The terrace is at such a profound incline that my knee is higher than the top of the head of the person seated in front, and yet Fat Snooky and her friends somehow need a better view, placing me in the position of being unable to watch something I'm actually not that bothered about seeing, or wasn't until my view was so rudely obstructed.

I poke in the ear plugs as the New Kids go into My Favourite Girl. This reduces the volume, cuts out some of the distortion, and the music actually sounds sort of listenable as a result, even though it's New Kids on the Block. Despite believing that The Right Stuff was okay, they were never my sort of thing. It never bothered me that they were manufactured so much as that most of their material is quite clearly designed to make young girls go week at the knees, and its effect on me is therefore minimal. Beyond that, I'll concede that they have decent voices, and certainly with more actual soul than is the case with most boy bands; but the bottom line is that I couldn't give a fuck about dance routines, and I dislike the sort of blandly efficient corporate emoting which has been normalised by shows such as America's Got Talent and the rest. I thought we'd got rid of it all in the seventies, but somehow it came back bigger and more powerful than ever, much like an X-Men villain.

The writing on the giant cassette tape announces I Think We're Alone Now and on comes Tiffany. She seems older and a little more grizzled, but the on-screen close-up shows the face of a regular person. She reminds me of Wendy. She doesn't look as though she's had any facial surgery, and her make-up is just kind of average. Most surprising of all is that she has a rich, powerful voice, the sort you might associate with a few of the more ruthlessly authentic country artists. I'm sure she didn't sound like this as a teenager in the eighties. I'm impressed in spite of myself.

Tiff is followed by Debbie Gibson who accompanies herself on a piano which emerges from the plastic window of the giant cassette tape. She doesn't seem familiar, aside from a passing disconcerting resemblance to Debbie McGee, wife of the late Paul Daniels. Just like Tiff, she too has a surprisingly powerful voice, and I guess her piano is the only live instrument we'll be hearing this evening. She's knocking out a ballad which sounds like the sort of thing you hear on the aforementioned America's Got Talent. It's not to my taste at all, but I am warmed by just how wrong the late Bill Hicks has turned out to have been regarding this woman's musical chops.

Salt-N-Pepa are up next. I actually have a few bits and pieces of Salt-N-Pepa in my collection. They date from the era of mainstream rap having been mostly annoying and reliant on cheesy nursery rhyme style hooks, and there's only so much of that stuff I can listen to. Salt-N-Pepa give us the hits and are actually pretty entertaining. They perform with an authenticity, a certain rough, lively edge which I hadn't anticipated. It's also pretty clear that they're having a whale of a time, and the audience picks up on this too.

The New Kids return to the stage.

'You know, they said we wouldn't last,' bellows Donnie.

They would presumably be the critics. I don't specifically recall anyone doubting the longevity of New Kids on the Block, the major criticism being that they were manufactured and therefore shit, but never mind. The performance suddenly takes a peculiarly post-modern turn as we're treated to a slide show of other boy bands, everyone from New Edition to the Stylistics, reminding us that the form has occasionally thrown up a song which even miserable cunts such as myself have to grudgingly admit is decent. This is a preamble to Boys in the Band, a new song celebrating the history of boy bands, which is easily the weirdest number of the evening.

Next they tell us how happy they all are to be right here in San Antonio, which pleases the crowd no end. Houston and Austin are both called out as having played host to previous evenings of New Kids magic, which is greeted by good-natured booing from the audience of one-hundred thousand. Anyway, the point is that they like  Texas, a declaration prompting a verse of Deep in the Heart of Texas, but all I can hear are the four quick handclaps which conclude each bar and remind me of The Birdie Song. Next comes the Selena tribute - which of course we've all been waiting for seeing as how Selena was a local and all, and which is essentially karaoke, mostly sung by one lucky young Latina randomly picked out of the audience. I suppose it's the thought that counts.

'You know, life is precious,' Donnie waxes philosophically as preface to a ponderous spoken interlude, doubtless inspired by Selena's passing, and the truism that we're none of us getting any younger.

'I love you, Donnie,' screams my neighbour.

The boys briefly jig to the very worst hits of the eighties in illustration of our all having been younger than we are right now - Living on a Prayer, Eye of the Tiger, and others I would ordinarily cross the road to avoid. Naughty by Nature take the stage, and I realise I had erroneously recalled them as having incorporated Nature, the Queensbridge rapper who famously worked with Nas.

Naughty by Nature are best known for their hit OPP, the central thesis of which is that one should keep an open mind when it comes to nobbing persons already confirmed to be engaged in a sexually monogamous relationship with a third party. I have OPP on some CD somewhere so I've heard it plenty of times, and yet I still don't remember the track. I don't even remember how it goes right now even as it is being performed live on the stage in front of me. The rest of the set is convincing and energetic, but I still can't quite get away from it being just a couple of blokes rubbing their lips together on a podium accompanied by a twat in a cartoon bear head. The words are just a pointless rhythm from where I'm sat.

Blu-blub-blublu-blu-blu-bluh-blu-bluh! That's right y'all.

Salt-N-Pepa return, and then it all begins to blend into a gushing noise that's been going on far too long, unless you're here for more sincere reasons than I am. I have a notebook on my person, and I've been scribbling away for the duration of the performance, the current stretch of which is acknowledged thus:

We conclude with some spiel about how the best people are those who grew up in the eighties, then a song along the lines of you're my eighties girl, which somehow begins to feel a bit Readers' Wives; and then everyone is on stage doing everything at once for a while.

Fat Snooky and her pals make their way to the aisle. Three hours of their bobbing ponytails have left me with an impression of four young girls with Croydon facelifts - even that I've spent this time back in south-east London - but in profile I see that none of them are much younger than myself, and we're still in Texas in the year 2019. We've all had a great time, even if I've had a great time for the wrong reasons; and Will particularly has had a great time, which was the main point as this has been something to do with his upcoming birthday. The woman sat in the next seat along has apparently spent the last three hours hitting on him, but he found her advances a little weird, which is understandable.

He settles into one his monologues in the car on the way back, softly spoken and very witty with the confidence of a man who has more than earned the right to not give a shit about what anyone else thinks of his dedication to Debbie Gibson. The monologue is born from notes compared about staying at Edi's house when she used to live in Houston. Bess recalls a home which was quite different to that which Will remembers. His story expands to include a period of infirmity at Edi's place, confined to bed watching a stretch of late night television dedicated to Mariah Carey; then finding himself somehow about to buy a Mariah Carey album.

'What am I doing?'

He recreates his own reaction, disbelief mixed with horror, leaving me laughing for more or less the rest of the car journey. As with everything, not least being New Kids on the Block, I guess you had to be there.

Art School Re-onion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'I'm afraid I don't.'

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

'Sorry.'

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

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

'Right.'

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

'I remember Jane.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Who was this?' Sue asks.

'Charlie Adlard,' three of us chorus.

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

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

London Calling

I'm never sure what to say when people ask me where I'm from. Generally, I tell them England, but if they're after anything more specific - usually on the off chance of their having spent a holiday there - it's tricky. I grew up in Warwickshire, specifically on the farm which eventually became home to the Teletubbies, which sounds a bit insane when offered as a response to enquiries regarding my origin; so more often than not I'll say London. I'm not from London, but I lived there from 1990 to 2009, nineteen uninterrupted years, which is the longest I've lived anywhere. My personality was probably in flux for most of the years prior to my moving to London, so I'm not convinced I was properly myself when living in Shipston, Maidstone, Chatham, or Coventry, at least not by any terms I still recognise; so it feels as though I'm from London.

London was the first place I felt I belonged, and is therefore high on the list of places I need to visit whenever I return to England to stay with my mother in Coventry. Unfortunately though, it can be difficult. Sat at the PC in San Antonio, it's easy to fire off emails announcing my proposed arrival and reiterating the awful hey, we really must meet up for a drink - awful because it's usually the mantra of people I haven't seen in decades, despite my best efforts to prise open a window in their busy schedules, which always seem to be at least as dense as the crust of stuff you find stuck to the event horizon of a black hole.

Then when I arrive in England, I remember that the train fare from London to Coventry is usually about a million pounds return, and we're talking off-peak; and that I can't afford hotels or bed and breakfast and that I'm far too old to sleep on the floor; and that I haven't actually told anyone I'm coming because I didn't want to be pinned down to an itinerary I might not be able to keep, or in which I might feel trapped; and that I've just spent eighteen hours on planes so I don't feel well disposed towards further travel; and that I hate crowds; and that I hate having to squeeze onto public transport, and how long it takes to even get anywhere in the city; and that I fucking hate London…

I don't hate London, but the circumstances of my last couple of years in the capital were somewhat shitty, which has left a lasting and unfavourable impression; but the bottom line is that I actually have mentioned my being back in the country to a couple of people, so I'll look like a twat if I fail to make the effort.

I've already reeled in my travel plans. Sat at the PC in San Antonio, I had all sorts of grand ideas about taking a bike on the train, then having a couple of days in London, cycling down to the Medway towns and Maidstone, seeing all those people I've been meaning to see for years and years. It would have taken up most of the second of my three weeks in England, and I've now whittled it down to a single afternoon in London, conditional to the existence of a train ticket costing less than a million pounds, and I might stay overnight on someone's floor or sofa, but probably not as I'm already depressed by the idea.

Amazingly, there's a return ticket costing just thirty quid, travelling at specific times with a rail operator no-one has heard of, and stopping at every station, siding, and signal box on the way. The comparative cheapness of the ticket means I'll probably be sharing a carriage with people who've been on the Jeremy Kyle Show, but the price is right.

I arrive at Euston around noon. The promised stopping at every station, siding, and signal box on the way has turned out to be just Watford Junction, Rugby, and the usual places, just like in the good old days when I could afford any old train fare. Not being a regular on the railways, I forget that those ordinary extortionate fares tend to be for journeys at the speed of light stopping at no stations other than the one at the end of the line.

Euston isn't too bad in terms of crowds, and I seem to be on a roll, so I think fuck it, I'll get the tube. I have an Oyster card from the last time I was here, and amazingly it still works and even has a couple of quid on it, so I top up at a newsagent and head for the underground. My memory of travel in London is mostly buses, because I dislike crowds and ended up with a hatred of tube trains. I've been left with a falsely distended impression of how easy it is to get anywhere, and find it weird that I'm stood on Tottenham Court Road in just a couple of minutes. I can't work out if the crowds are less congested than once they were, or whether it's all been so long that it seems like a new thing and I haven't had time to get sick of it.

I head to Forbidden Planet because I'm after the latest issue of Interzone magazine, and Forbidden Planet seems like the sort of place which might stock it. The latest issue of Interzone features a story by Erica Satifka, author of the novel Stay Crazy; and Stay Crazy is wonderful, so I'm trying to support both a new writer and the general concept of visiting shops in order to buy things which have been printed. Amazingly, they actually have the copy of Interzone I'm after, which is probably a first, and so I read it on the train to Greenwich - a trip of about ten minutes.

I left London in 2009, at which point I vaguely recall the first of the new, funny-shaped skyscrapers going up somewhere in the vicinity of Elephant & Castle. At the time I was spunking away three-quarters of my weekly wage on renting a rabbit hutch in Camberwell, despite holding down a reasonably paid, if back-breaking, full-time job; so I felt more than a little resentful as my city went all Blade Runner whilst overmoneyed tosspots banged on about posterity and capital and investment and growth and ways forward. Returning as a foreigner of sorts, carnivorous progress no longer directly affects me beyond that I can't afford to stay in a hotel, so it no longer feels personal; and I sort of enjoy the spectacle of what is to be seen from the window of the train. They're everywhere now, gleaming prongs thrust miles into the sky above London like the city seen on the cover of David Louis Edelman's Infoquake, and not a single one of them is regular skyscraper shape. It's as though the architects have been in competition with each other to come up with the strangest, most ostentatiously surprising design. There's the Gherkin, the Shard, the Cheese, the Sex Aid, the Pokémon…

'Computers,' Carl tells me. It's due to the development of certain architectural software that we are now able to throw up any shape of building we fancy.

I'm at Carl's house in Greenwich.

I arrived twenty minutes ago.

He lives in a square with a small central garden, or at least a barbecue pit and a bench surrounded by bushes. Upon arrival, I sat on the bench and had a fag in preparation for ringing the doorbell of my friend whom I'd not seen in at least a year. As I sat smoking, I heard the sound of a door, then approaching footsteps, then an indistinct verbal address which sounded like Carl's voice. In my mind, it already was Carl, and I imagined him calling out Loz in the usual way, so I went to reply even though I was replying to a call I had only anticipated, and somehow I myself called out, 'Loz!', having mixed up the two components of the predicted exchange.

It wasn't Carl. It was some elderly woman who regarded me suspiciously, possibly because I had just emerged from behind a bush to yell my own nickname at a stranger.

Now I'm within Carl's house watching him finish up and save what he was doing on the computer, specifically retouching photographs of REM for some book or other. He's a designer, and he's also working on a book about Japan.

We discuss this for three or four minutes before I realise he's referring to the band rather than the country. I forget that he knows a couple of them, and he tells me they were originally from Catford - which is one of the places I worked for a couple of years. It feels as though Carl and I have been transported into a weird future, a world we never made - whatever the hell that means.

He places the cherry boldly on the futurity cake by informing me that another mutual acquaintance is now working as a prostitute, specifically a BBW prostitute specialising in bondage, domination and the like. This is another eventuality I could never have foreseen, but apparently she makes eight-hundred quid a session and enjoys the work, so why not? I'm somewhat out of my depth with the profession, but I always imagined that dominating people for money would probably be one of the better sex work options providing one could find the right clientele - for example, a frustrated bank manager who would happily clean your toilet and then pay for the privilege, thus avoiding the necessity of finding oneself penetrated by anything too ghastly.

The subject resumes later as we approach Herne Hill station. We've had a wander around Greenwich park, a bit of lunch and then caught a series of trains to Herne Hill. The conversation resumes because I'm reminded that I've recently read Stupid Baby by New Juche, an autobiographical account of life amongst prostitutes in one of the rougher bits of Thailand. It's one of the best books I've read in a while and is written with a refreshing honesty and none of the hysteria one might expect, given the subject. The funny thing is that it's published by Philip Best, formerly of Whitehouse, who now lives in Austin and is therefore almost a neighbour. I consider this funny because Carl and I are on our way to visit Pete.

I was at school with Pete many years ago, back in Shipston, and we were both friends with Graham, who may or may not be turning up tonight. Graham and I saw Whitehouse live in Birmingham back in the eighties, during which Graham was injured by an object casually launched from the stage by Philip Best, who was probably the most hated man in underground music for much of that year.

I've been wondering how to broach the subject.

You remember that time we saw Whitehouse, and you remember the bloke who was chucking stuff into the audience, and how you got hit? Well, he lives down the road from me and we seem to be pals these days, sort of. I think he's calmed down a bit in recent years. Anyway, he seems like a decent guy.

I tell all of this to Carl, and so we talk about Glenn, because somehow we'd both forgotten that Glenn was also in Whitehouse. Carl and I recorded music with Glenn at one point. Glenn left a keyboard at Carl's flat for a couple of months, apparently on loan from William Bennett - also of Whitehouse - who was living in Spain at the time. When you switched the keyboard on, the name Susan Lawly would scroll across the LCD display in greeting, that being the name of Bennett's record label. The connections form a peculiar imaginary cat's cradle in my thoughts. I'm beginning to think that current estimates regarding human population are grossly exaggerated, and that there are actually only about twenty of us.

We arrive at Herne Hill and walk to Pete's house.

I'm hoping Carl and Pete will get on okay, given that neither of them have been in the same room since about 1987, and were never conspicuously close in the first place.

Here's how it works: I was at school in Shipston, Warwickshire, with Pete and Graham back in the eighties. Pete's family had moved to Shipston from somewhere down south a couple of years before, and once Pete left school, they moved again, to Eastbourne down on the south coast. I left school and did an art foundation course, at the end of which I was told I should have a look at Maidstone College of Art if I wanted to take it further. I didn't actually have the faintest idea of what I wanted to do, but it seemed like as good a plan as any, so I went for an interview at Maidstone and was accepted, thus dispensing with the need to bother looking around any other colleges. By sheer coincidence, it turned out that Pete had already been at Maidstone a year, studying graphic design. Carl was also at Maidstone, a former graphics student by that point serving as president of the Student Union, so that's how I met him, and how he and Pete came to know each other.

Back at school, Pete, Graham, and myself had been in a band, calling ourselves the Pre-War Busconductors amongst a variety of other interchangable, wilfully ludicrous names. We barely had any instruments, couldn't really play, but nevertheless churned out tape after tape of scatological songs about people at school whom we regarded as twats. Having spent the last couple of years digitising these tapes, I now have our entire body of work saved on memory sticks, one for Pete and one for Graham. This is partially the purpose of our meeting tonight, so I can hand over the sound files and we'll all have copies.

Carl, Pete and myself walk to the Half Moon. Pete tells me it seems unlikely that Graham will be along after all, presently being in Devon with his girlfriend. We buy drinks and sit outside. Most of the talk is between Pete and Carl, because they're simply chattier individuals than I am, and somehow we get onto the subject of how Pete came to move to Shipston in the first place. I recall that he had lived somewhere down south prior to Shipston, and that somewhere turns out to have been the Medway towns - which is where Carl grew up. Furthermore it turns out that Carl and Pete both attended the same junior school, the Hundred of Hoo as it was known, without having been aware of each other at the time, or having been aware of this fact until right now in the year 2018; and I've a feeling this may also be the school attended by Jayne, Glenn's first wife.

The cat's cradle seems to be approaching critical mass.

Eddy and Neil turn up, which is wonderful as I haven't seen either of them in years. It's also wonderful because I have to ask Eddy whether it will be okay for me to kip on his floor. The latest specific time I can return to Coventry on the ticket purchased from a rail operator no-one has heard of is nine this evening, which would leave thirty minutes in which to have a drink with my old pals. The thing is that I feel awkward asking Eddy because I haven't actually spoken to him since his mother passed away. He's one of my favourite people in the universe, but somehow he only makes sense in person. We've communicated on facebook, but you're either hanging out with him, or arranging to hang out with him which, combined with my not being much of a fan of the telephone, means we haven't spoken for a while and it will feel a bit fucking cheeky when I ask if I can kip on his floor for the night; but like a true friend, he doesn't give a shit and is simply glad to see me, and of course I can sleep on his floor.

So we all catch up, getting cautiously drunk in the way middle-aged men get cautiously drunk. Everyone gets on fine, even though Pete is from a different shard of my existence to the others. Neil is, as ever, darkly entertaining with his tales of dealings with showbiz types, recent clients including Helen Mirren and Idris Elba. He doesn't seem to have a particularly high opinion of Idris Elba.

Eventually it's time to go and Eddy drives, being the one of us with a car and sobriety. His flat, which I've never seen before as he moved in just over a year ago, is small but functional. Money is tight, but he's getting by. Money is tight for everyone I know still living in London. I wouldn't have stood a chance.

Eddy assembles a camp bed purchased from some hardware place. It comprises canvas stretched across tubes of steel and works like a hammock. Two of the steel tubes are missing, but it doesn't matter because I'm not seven foot tall. We have a cup of tea, watch an episode of Urban Myths - which dramatises the true story of a regular dude giving Public Enemy a lift to one of their shows in his Ford Focus - and then go to sleep; and against my expectations, I sleep well because the camp bed is very comfortable.

Next morning we have a walk to the caff along by the Thames. Eddy points to a house over on the other side of the river.

'That's where Helen Mirren lives.'

I have two sausages, egg, and chips in the caff and it tastes fucking amazing. I realise how much I've missed this place and its people. I can still feel my roots here, reaching down into the tarmac and cracked paving, in the newsagents and pound shops and the bite of cold far too early in the morning. I'm quite happy to live a long way away, but I'm glad I came back, just for a day.

Chuck Ramirez

I'm in HEB, my local supermarket. My shopping basket is, as usual full of cat food.

'Oh. My. God.'

I look up. There is a vaguely Hispanic looking dude stood in front of me with his mouth hanging open. A couple of seconds have passed before he realises that he should probably say something.

'You are the very image of a friend of mine.' His mannerisms seem a little camp, which I realise may not directly correlate to his sexuality, but this really sounds like a chat-up line.

'Okay.' I'm not sure what else to say. If he thinks I'm hot, it really doesn't bother me.

'A friend but - well, he died a while ago. You look just like him. Have you ever heard of an artist called Chuck Ramirez?'

I haven't. I shake my head. 'Sorry, no.'

'It's the eyes…' He seems to be moving his hands as though framing a film he's planning to make. 'You could be his brother.'

'Okay.'

I can't help but think of Richard Ramirez, the serial killer, which means at least I won't have any trouble remembering the name of my alleged doppelgänger.

'He was a photographer,' - my admirer suddenly remembers something and steps back a little. 'I need to take a photograph of you. Is it okay if I take a photograph?'

'Sure.'

'They ain't gonna believe…' he fumbles in different pockets. 'I don't have my phone with me.'

'Well, I'm in here every day about the same time, usually buying cat food.'

'I'll look for you again.'

'Sure.'

I'm smiling as I head for the checkout because it's funny.

'It sounds a lot like he had the hots for you,' Bess suggests when I tell her about the encounter that evening. She hasn't heard of Chuck Ramirez either, but she looks him up on her phone, and there actually is a resemblance, stronger in some photographs than others, and particularly around the eyes. A website called Ruiz-Healy Art has this to say:

Chuck Ramirez (1962-2010), one of San Antonio's most beloved artists, was a major force in the San Antonio art community before his untimely death in a 2010 cycling accident. A 2002 Artpace resident, Ramirez' work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. As an artist and graphic designer, Ramirez employed the visual and conceptual techniques found in contemporary advertising and package design, isolating and re-contextualizing familiar objects to explore cultural identity, mortality, and consumerism through his photographs and installations.

The next evening we're driving back from Jim's diner, or possibly some other diner, and something catches my eye as we cross North New Braunfels onto the Austin Highway.

'Holy shit!'

'What?' Bess squeaks in panic, almost losing control of the wheel for just a fraction of a second.

'Look!' I point.

We are driving past the McNay Art Museum. What's on at the McNay is advertised on four sides of an immense wooden cube permanently situated on the grass triangle adjacent to the museum. The side facing us is taken up with the fourteen foot high image of a woman's handbag, top open to expose key chains, pills, a cellphone and so on. Above the handbag is the name Chuck Ramirez. The poster promotes an exhibition of his work. It's just started and will run for the next couple of months.

I've lived in San Antonio since 2011.

I'd never heard of Chuck Ramirez, my double, before yesterday.

Today I see his name in letters several feet tall.

It feels a little like the universe is fucking with me, as though it's only just thought of this guy.

Next evening we go to have a look at the exhibition, which is called All This and Heaven Too. It mostly comprises large photographs of small everyday objects, handbags, a vase of flowers, trash, Mexican candies and so on. It reminds me a little of the work of Andy Warhol, which is unfortunate because I couldn't care less about the work of Andy Warhol, generally speaking. I find it bland, and that it seems in many cases to be intentionally bland is not enough to excite my interest.

Each to their own.

The gallery is packed, I guess because it's only the second or third night. I anticipate people dropping their drinks and standing, open-mouthed to point at me, maybe even a few screams.

Oh my God! It's him! There he is!

It doesn't happen. Maybe the resemblance is dependent on lighting, or whether or not the eye of the beholder finds me sexually attractive; leaving just the art as the sole source of potential pleasure, and it simply isn't the kind of art I'm ever likely to appreciate.

I think of people I knew at art college, still plugging away, these days as facebook friends who post slightly blurry photographs of an old tin mug on a piece of wood, or rusted cooking utensils. The photographs appear frayed at the edges as though printed on handmade paper, and always there's the associated information about what type of camera or lens were used. I've never worked out why they share such images with the rest of us, or what I'm supposed to get from them.

The exhibition isn't that big, and after twenty minutes it feels like we've tried, so we go to the gift shop. I look at the art books. Most of them seem to be geared towards fostering an appreciation of art amongst people who don't actually like art but might not mind getting some gifty book for a birthday or Christmas present: Matisse, van Gogh, Picasso, Warhol, Dalí, all of those guys…

Bess buys chocolates for her grandmother, and we head out for a quick look around the other galleries, the permanent collection, the place where they hang paintings by Corot, Dufy, Renoir, Courbet, Marsden Hartley and others; and I remember how much I like these paintings, like a good beer after a bland yet efficient hamburger which I hadn't really wanted in the first place.

Banbury

'What a handsome fucker!' exclaimed the Pixie happily.

I leave Newbold, Warwickshire around eleven, cycling a zig-zag path heading east along the smallest country lanes I can find in the hope of avoiding anything you'd call traffic. Sue has offered to give me a lift from Halford, reasoning that it's a long way on a bike and Sunrise Hill will probably kill me. I've told her I'll be okay because I need the exercise and enjoy cycling.

'I scoff at hills,' I roared laughingly in the manner of Brian Blessed, but not out loud. My laughter was internal. I hadn't heard of Sunrise Hill, but I've cycled up other hills, and surely it couldn't be any worse than the one outside Wellesbourne; and people who cycle less than I do always seem to regard the smallest speed bump as a giant escarpment; and other reasons, probably...

I cycle from Newbold to Halford, then on to the villages of Oxhill and Upper Tysoe, at which point I come to Sunrise Hill; and unfortunately it is indeed a bastard. Fuck you, I mutter to my inner Brian Blessed, conceding defeat after about a hundred yards and getting off to push the bike the rest of the way. I stop to catch my breath three or four times, and after about ten minutes I'm at the top of the hill. I follow the road into Shenington, along what turns out to be the edge of the escarpment, dipping right back down to my original elevation and then back up again three or four times, up-down-up-down-up-fucking-down and rarely has such agricultural language been directed against a single geographical feature.

After seventeen miles I'm in the next county, Oxfordshire, and specifically I'm in Banbury. My guesswork regarding travel time has been a bit out and I'm late for Tom and Fiona's barbecue.

Tom probably isn't quite my oldest friend, but he's the first I visited on a regular basis. He lived in an old farmhouse in the village of Darlingscote, Cotswold stone, exposed wooden beams, and uneven floors. I found the place magical. The main thing we had in common was, as with all children, probably that we were the same size, but we shared a sense of humour and we both liked Star Trek. We'd play in the fields at the back. He was probably Spock, which I'm guessing from the fact that he'd keep calling me Jim, and somehow, despite this, I was a Cyberman from Doctor Who. The logic of these scenarios probably doesn't stand up to much scrutiny, and the continuity is all over the place, but I guess it worked for us at the time. My assumed identity for such childhood roleplay tended to be one chosen for its silent implication of terrible power, which unfortunately didn't necessarily translate well when the point of the game was in pretending to be captured on an alien planet or whatever. Tom didn't seem to mind, or possibly even to notice that my Cyberman was a fairly boring choice of persona; although I distinctly recall Sean objecting to my electing to be the Mighty Thor on the grounds that Thor was never really known for jumping around all over the place, unlike Spiderman.

Somehow we drifted apart about half way through secondary school, our respective peer groups polarised by divergent relationships with pop music and the automotive industry. Years later we ran into each other at a school reunion, having both reached an age at which what differences we had cultivated no longer seemed to matter; so that was nice; and amazingly, he was still very, very funny. Stranger still was that he'd married Fiona, with whom I had shared a table during art lessons for most of the fourth and fifth years.

I've been to see them once before in Banbury, back in 2015 during a previous visit to England, and this time they're having a barbecue. My road map doesn't extend into Oxfordshire, so I've scribbled directions on post-it notes copied from what I could find on the internet. I don't know Banbury at all, despite having lived nearby for the first twenty or so years of my life. I asked my mother about this and she told me we'd simply never had any good reason to pass through Banbury. It wasn't on the way to anywhere we ever went. This might partially account for why I'm already lost. I stop to ask directions, and happily it turns out that I've been heading the right way, and that Tom and Fiona's house is only a little further. Tom calls my mobile just as I turn the corner into his close.

'Where are you, Loz?'

'I'm right outside. I think I can see you,' but the bloke pottering about in his back garden seen through two panes of glass is someone else. I've been here before but none of the houses look quite familiar; except maybe one of them does, sort of...

I lock my bike, shove it down the side of the garage, then pass down the side of the house into the garden, greeted by a chorus of jokes about where I've left my horse. I'm wearing my stetson, so I only have myself to blame.

Nathan, son of Tom and Fiona, crushes me with a bear hug and a grin.

'Hello, Nathan,' I wheeze.

He lifts a glass from the garden table to show me with some pride. 'I can drink beer now!'

'Blimey,' I suggest, doing the mental arithmetic and realising he must have passed eighteen since I last saw him. 'I'm surprised you remember me. I was only here for an hour or so, and that was two years ago.'

'I remember you.'

Sue is already here. 'I told you I'd give you a lift,' she sighs.

Tom works the barbecue, flipping burgers and hot dogs, and Zoe is here too. I haven't seen her since school. I vividly recall thinking she was the blondest girl in the whole universe on our first day at Shipston, and she is still lovely as ever. It seems almost scary how little we've all changed, and mainly because we obviously have all changed but it's hard to tell, so I'm probably losing my marbles.

I pull up a lawn chair and we get down to the important business of talking complete bollocks, catching up with the last thirty years of business.

Paul Betteridge is definitely dead, we conclude. The facebook account has to be someone using his identity for reasons best known to themselves. Sue remembers his demise quite well, and with good reason given his attempt to brand her with a lump of red hot metal, fresh from the furnace. I don't remember him being such a bad lad - really more of an inventive nutcase, but then he never tried to brand me. This at least means that I haven't just imagined him ending up in a coma after crashing a stolen combine harvester into a haystack, or whatever it was that happened.

We discuss who has had a sex change, mostly referring to sons and daughters of people we knew at school, or daughters and sons depending on how much time has passed since I wrote this. It's difficult to imagine how such a conversation would have gone one generation past, but in 2017, none of us seem that bothered by the idea. It's weird and out of the ordinary for sure, but I guess we're all too old to give that much of a fuck about someone else's business.

Fiona and Sue talk about work, which opens out into a wider discussion of the joy of telling people we don't like to either piss off or stick it up their respective arses. We talk about Nathan, the kids, and even a few grandchildren who've been buzzing around at the periphery of the conversation, what they will do, what sort of world they will live in, the usual stuff.

The strangest development of all seems to be that Tom, Fiona, and Nathan are one of those ballroom dancing families you hear about, all three of them, and they're probably fairly good at it because they keep winning prizes. Tom invites me to inspect the shed he's built at the foot of the garden. It's bananas and yet brilliant - a stroke of genius. It's his own tiny dance studio, complete with the mirrored wall and all the trimmings; at which point I notice he's lost a spare tyre since I was last here. I guess it's good for him.

We eat burgers and hot dogs, and Fiona and I compare notes about diverticulitis which she recently contracted. Thankfully she's getting better now.

I hit the road about four, reasoning that I want to be back in Coventry before it gets dark, which I just about manage. I've covered one hell of a distance on just two wheels, and it's been knackering but absolutely worth it. I've spent an afternoon in the company of people I never really anticipated seeing again once I'd left school, and not because I ever had a reason to avoid anyone, but because we all seem to have shot off on different paths; but meeting up again, I realise that we probably all have more in common than we did first time round; and that we've made it to fifty without turning into arseholes, which is nice.