Doctor, No

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'I would have killed myself by then.'

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

Gosh.

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

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

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

'I was 194lbs this morning.'

'Well, you're 205lbs now.'

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

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

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

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

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

Do you smoke?

How much do you drink?

How many fingers am I holding up?

Can you tell me the name of the president?

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

The doctor came in.

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

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

'Okay.'

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

'No.'

'You don't smoke?'

'No, I don't.'

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

'Is it really?'

'Yes, if I could—'

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

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

'Oh okay.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'That's good to know.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Fine.'

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

A Gastropsychogeography of England

Philip Best of notorious room clearance outfit Consumer Electronics observed that I was a food pusher. I was visiting him in Austin and making delivery of some of my home made pork pies - because it's easier to make too many than it is to make too few and we can't get them in Texas - and the comment came as I was describing a brief period of the nineties during which Jim Macdougall stayed over at my place every other weekend and I'd make us a chili in the hope of keeping him alive - his strict diet of beer, fags, bar snacks and Temazepam being nutritionally questionable; so Best's observation seemed fair. Thus deciding to embrace the role, I hereby declare my invention of gastropsychgeography, a philosophical discourse in which one gives account of what is eaten, where, and what it means. This follows on from psychogeography, a practice devised by Ivan Chtcheglov which seeks to map the meaning of a place in terms of its history, and psychochronography in which Sandifer ingeniously lists what was at the top of the hit parade when certain episodes of Doctor Who went to air. Gastropsychgeography is therefore, in essence, a travelogue of meals consumed by an author except much more important; and this is where it begins. This time next year you'll be reading Alan Moore's brooding testimony of Northampton's finest chip shops and Sandifer will be self-publishing tallies of previously obscure forms of iconic artisan bread consumed whilst binge watching Who, but it was all my idea. You're welcome.

Fish and chips, Earlsdon.
My mum gave me a tenner and sent me up the road for fish and chips from Gabriel's Fish & Chips in Earlsdon, Coventry. Being fifty-four years of age, I was conscious of this being one of those grand English traditions once immortalised in the likes of Beano and Dandy, so grand in fact that I'm surprised some red-faced gammon has yet to fume over imagined EU rulings preventing English mothers sending their offspring up the chippie with a tenner. We had two portions of battered cod and a single helping of chips between the two of us, because Gabriel's single helping is a shitload of chips in itself. It was pretty great, and we ate while watching Downton Abbey, an episode in which one of the butlers gives in his notice and the other one gets a bit sniffy about it.

Doner kebab, Earlsdon.
This time my mother sent me in the other direction, down the road for doner kebabs which I didn't enjoy quite so much as I thought I would. They were okay but not amazing, the main selling point simply being the pleasure of a doner kebab served in pita bread with chilli sauce, like nature intended - as distinct from a puffy flatbread with no sauce of any description, which seems to be a Greco-Texan thing. We watched The Curse of the Were-Rabbit whilst dining, which I hadn't seen before, so that was nice. Less entertaining was that Motecuhzoma took a small measure of his revenge on the both of us the following morning, so that's a lesson learned until next time.

 

Battered sausage with chips, Foleshill.
I was out with the intention of catching performances by Cristiana Ilie and Hainbach at the Tin, a venue situated in Coventry's new fangled Canal Basin, but I hadn't eaten. I'd called at the City Arms, a Weatherspoon pub, about an hour previous in the hope of ordering their Full English breakfast, discovering that it is only served until noon. With my gastronomic plans having been thus foiled, I therefore had to ask around and was directed to the Sandy Fish Bar in Sandy Lane, which was just around the corner. The expedition impressed upon me how the Tin is but five minutes walk from the home of Martin of Attrition, and I'm surprised he doesn't have some kind of residency there, knocking out a set of handbag house standards every Sunday evening or whatever. He literally lives so close that there wouldn't even be much point getting a taxi for the sake of a cumbersome tuba. Anyway, I ate my sausage in batter and chips on the seating provided at the aforementioned Canal Basin, all the while monitoring the venue for signs of activity seeing as I'd arrived about an hour before even the bar staff. The sausage was, in particular, pretty good.

Sausage sandwich, Coombe Abbey.
I asked for a sausage roll and this was the closest they could manage, although it was decent so I'm not complaining. I was at the Café in the Park with my dad. We were up that way having gone out for a stroll during which he hardly mentioned Brexit at all, although there were several ominous remarks hinting at a sceptical view taken regarding climate science. It didn't seem like there was anything to be gained in rising to the bait, so I didn't. I was a bit surprised by the general youthful bewilderment which greeted my attempts to describe a sausage roll to the café staff, but never mind.

Dinner, Binley.
This was prepared by my dad some hours after the above, and comprised steak pie, roast potatoes, runner beans, carrots and squash. The pie was hand crafted and amazing, and the vegetables were all from his allotment. The squash seemed an initially incongruous addition, but was slightly sweet and went very well with everything else. We manged to avoid talking about Brexit, although on a related note, my dad's wife - or at least the woman who would have been his third wife had they bothered to get married, which they didn't - opined that the good thing about Donald Trump is that he's not afraid to say what he's thinking. I couldn't be bothered to argue. Whatever gets you through the night.

Persian takeaway, Earlsdon.
Grilled lamb, rice, and houmous delivered by the Cyrus Restaurant once the guy on the other end of the phone line grudgingly conceded that yes, they did deliver if we really weren't able to get down there to pick it up. The food was at least as good as anticipated, and the rice in particular was delicious, light and fragrant. We ate while watching an episode of Midsomer Murders during which I realised that I sort of fancy Camille Coduri. I knew I'd seen her on telly somewhere before, but couldn't remember where. Later I looked it up and found out that she once played the mother of Bingo from the Banana Splits in Eccleston era Who, which was a bit disappointing.

 

Cream tea, Coventry Cathedral.
Part of the reason for my visiting England, aside from seeing my parents and other people, was because Lynda would be there. Lynda is my mother's younger sister - my aunt. She moved to Australia in 1973 and none of us had heard from her since. Thankfully the reunion was a delight and not at all awkward as a few of us had feared it might be. Part of Lynda's visit entailed wandering around Coventry like tourists with myself and my dad - who likewise knew her back in the sixties due to his having married my mother. There was a lot to look at in Coventry, and certainly one fuck of a lot more than there had been when I lived there. Our particular favourites were the Doom Painting in the Holy Trinity Church - a recently restored fifteenth century mural depicting what happens to sinners in enthusiastic detail - and the Cathedral. My grandfather - Lynda's dad - was a structural engineer whom they consulted when they were building the thing so as to ensure that it wouldn't simply collapse into the tunnels dug by coalminers from Keresley colliery, so it's all connected somehow. Anyway, we had cream teas in the Rising Café in the basement of the modern cathedral, which was nice. The central axis of a cream tea is a scone, which is like the thing which an American would call a biscuit for no obvious reason, but better. A biscuit in the American sense is usually too salty to be considered a scone and is therefore thematically equivalent to a gammon flavoured ice lolly, at least from where I'm stood.

Pizza, Earlsdon.
My mother and I stayed home and had a Waitrose pizza, which was probably a bit scant between the two of us but then she doesn't eat a whole lot and I was probably still full of scones. Midsomer Murders had inexplicably vanished from the television schedule so we watched Have I Got News for You? because I hadn't seen it in fucking years, and it's one of the few English shows I miss. I had no idea who at least three of those involved were, but Paul Merton is still funny. One of the most amusing exchanges concerned an elephant dentist from Peppa Pig. Sarah Kennedy - whom I know from my art foundation course in Leamington Spa back in the eighties - provides the voice of Nanny Plum from Peppa Pig. I think Sarah also had something to do with The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, so like I said, it's all connected. Alan Moore probably hasn't even heard of Peppa Pig.

Full English breakfast, Earlsdon.
I was vaguely inclined to give Weatherspoon a miss, my enthusiasm for cheap beer past its sell by date having waned since the homeless Thundercat who owns the chain started banging on about Brexit; and my friend Carl pointed out that most Weatherspoon pubs have the atmosphere of a cross-channel ferry due to the surfeit of red-faced gammons on a quest for cheap booze; but a full English breakfast is a full English breakfast. I had mine with a couple of slices of black pudding and it tasted fucking fantastic, just as it always does. I had no reading matter to hand and was dining alone, so reluctantly browsed the Weatherspoon corporate magazine. Naturally there was a special feature on Brexit, lifting opinion columns from publications on both sides of the political divide, because that's how much the homeless Thundercat - whose name is Tim Martin, by the way - loves democracy. Each piece was supplemented with commentary from himself under the byline of Tim Says which, in the case of those pieces in support of the remain argument, tended to kick off with what the author fails to realise is that blah blah blah, reducing the enterprise as a whole to something of a stacked deck. The rest of the magazine was mostly interviews with bar staff, so I watched the telly instead, sound down but with captions. They were showing live footage from the Supreme Court legally proving that Boris Johnson is a massive cunt, which was more interesting than the Weatherspoon corporate magazine.

More fish and chips, Earlsdon.
Once again my mum gave me a tenner and sent me up the road for fish and chips from Gabriel's Fish & Chips in Earlsdon, Coventry. The queue wasn't quite so enormous this time, comprising just three people. As usual, there was some fish left over, so that was saved for next door's cats, Geoff and Pig who are brothers and both ginger with white bits. By the end of my stay in Coventry, Pig had taken to meowing his head off every time I went into the garden in presumed anticipation of my handing a tupperware box of cod over the fence. I think that's how he got the name.

Bread and cheese, Earlsdon.
My aunt Lynda told us that her favourite food is bread and cheese, and specifically sourdough bread because other types of bread tend to give her digestive trouble. My mum therefore gave me a fifteener and sent me up the road for sourdough bread and an assortment of cheeses from the Co-op in Earlsdon, Coventry. I came back with edam, brie, one of the blue mouldy ones, and a fourth cheese I can't remember. Lynda was delighted beyond expectation. It turns out that this love of cheese is apparently a familial trait. Some doctor once told my mum that she might like to think about cutting down on the cheese. She told him that it wasn't going to happen because were she to make such a dietary adjustment there would be no point in being alive.

Curry, Greenwich.
Back when I lived in London, I often went for a curry with my friends Carl and Eddy, their choice because whilst I enjoyed Indian food, there were other things I preferred. We usually went to the Mogul in Greenwich. Since moving to America, my love of curry has increased for reasons I don't fully understand, so I was fairly keen to revisit the Mogul and give it another go. Unfortunately the Mogul experienced some kind of civil war in my absence, resulting in a diaspora which led to the establishment of the Mountain View on the Trafalgar Road, so that's where we went. I recognised the staff, and even shook the hand of Ron, who I believe runs the place and for whom Carl and Eddy seem to be the equivalent of season ticket holders. I had chicken korma with saag paneer, which was gorgeous.

Tunnock's tea cakes, Solihull.
I went to visit my friend Martin who lives in Solihull. I know Martin from the art foundation course we took with the woman who went on to become the voice of Nanny Plum. Martin was in the very first line up of the Cravats, and later played in different bands with both Carl and myself. As we'd scheduled an afternoon of just hanging out rather than alcoholic abandon, we started with a trip to the corner shop for Mr. Kipling's cherry bakewells and Tunnock's tea cakes, following which we drank tea and listened to the Shameful Ca$hin album. Shameful Ca$hin is Martin's current band and they've recorded an album at Woodbine Street Studios in Leamington Spa, soon to be issued on vinyl, all going well. The album reminded me a little of the punkier incarnations of the Cravats with a touch of the Stranglers and a bit of a rockabilly undercurrent. It's possibly the greatest thing Martin has ever recorded. I opted for Tunnock's tea cakes out of curiosity, having no real memory of them whilst being aware of a wave of nostalgia having spread their legend across certain stretches of social media. They're essentially chocolate covered marshmallows, arguably the English equivalent of American snack foods such as Hostess Twinkies and the like. I thought they were okay but nothing special, and Martin didn't seem to like them at all. Also worth noting is that Martin has a ginger cat called Jeff. He really loves that cat.

Thai curry, Earlsdon.
My mother and I stayed home and had a Waitrose Thai curry, which came in a natty little wooden box, and was excellent. Midsomer Murders had once again inexplicably vanished from the television schedule so we watched three episodes of Upstart Crow on DVD as I'd never seen it before. Having grown up in close proximity to Stratford-upon-Avon, I'd pretty much had enough of Shakespeare by the time I was seven, so I didn't know what to expect but nevertheless found it very watchable. I don't actually have anything against either Shakespeare or his works, unlike Martin who is of the considerably stronger opinion that it's all bollocks, but Upstart Crow almost made me wish I'd developed more of an appreciation. My mum on the other hand thinks Shakespeare is the shit, to phrase it in terms with which she is most likely unfamiliar.

Melted cheese sandwich, Shrewsbury.
I went to visit my friend Charlie who lives in Shrewsbury. I know Charlie from the fine art degree we took with Martin who was in the very first line up of the Cravats. Charlie is best known as artist of the Walking Dead comic book and is accordingly now a local celebrity, which was impressed upon me when I noticed that the local art gallery was advertising an exhibition of his work with his name in massive letters. We went for a bite to eat at a small café called, I believe, Ginger & Co. We talked mostly about comic books, superhero movies, comic book publishers assuming that, having finished with the Walking Dead, what Charlie really, really, really wants to draw next is even more zombies, and we talked about Comicsalopia, a comic art convention which was held in Shrewsbury a few months ago. Apparently it hadn't gone so well as hoped due to organisational complications arisen from one of the major sponsors screwing up with the wonga whilst failing to fully understand the genre, expressed as an unusual fixation with Peppa Pig. The sandwich was fancy and involved spinach and possibly mozzarella. It was very tasty.

Another full English breakfast, Coventry.
I had this one at Café 37, Earlsdon, which seems almost like it's just some bloke's front room. I've been there a few times over the years and don't ever recall any other customers, so I'm glad it's somehow managed to stay open. The food was good, sort of like the Weatherspoon version but with a bit more soul. Options for reading material were Coventry Evening Telegraph, Daily Mail, and the Sun. I tried with the Coventry Evening Telegraph but it mostly seemed to be articles on the level of how some local sports club had purchased a new tennis racket. The only piece I read in full was something about the council intending to pull down the swimming baths, which makes me a little sad as they were structurally engineered by my grandfather. I reluctantly switched to the Sun and was pleased to notice that whilst the right-wing bias was such that it actually came off on my fingers, the paper generally wasn't quite so rabid as I remembered, its mania being concentrated in small, evenly distributed flare ups within the wider context of a generally gormless whole. The only article which really caught my attention was an argument against the closing of private schools, at least partially predicated on the notion that if Jeremy Corbyn thinks it's bad then it's actually good. I don't know where the readership stand on the matter, but it's always entertaining to see members of the working class moved to fuming indignation over threats to the well-being of chinless Etonian twits who regard them as, at the very best, a slightly smelly economic resource.

Yet more fish and chips, Earlsdon.

It was my last evening in England, at least for a while, so my mum gave me a tenner and once again sent me up the road for fish and chips from Gabriel's Fish & Chips in Earlsdon, Coventry. This time was a bit later than usual. My mother is an independent benefits advisor, meaning she gives advice to, or even represents in court, those who have been wrongfully denied benefits, which is pretty much everyone who has been denied benefits due to government policies which hold that numismatic hand-outs are the only thing preventing most claimants from becoming high paid executives. Anyway she had two such persons turn up at six in the evening seeking her advice, one of whom had no head and only one leg but had nevertheless been declared fit for work and denied disability benefit. My mother had anticipated that their case would take about fifteen minutes to sort out, so I should go up the road for fish and chips once they were done. Unfortunately their case took about an hour to sort out, and in the meantime Sue from next door, patron of Geoff and Pig, came round. She was trying to separate the two sections of the tubing of a vacuum cleaner which had become stuck. I was unable to pull the two lengths of tubing apart. One of the people who had come to see my mother gave it a go, but he couldn't do it either. Anyway, it was close to seven before everyone left and I was able to go up the road for my final fish and chips from Gabriel's Fish & Chips in Earlsdon, Coventry. Now as I compose this account in a house built on a different continent, I know that even as I write, Geoff and Pig are probably finishing off the bit of cod that we couldn't manage. It's a circle, my friend.

Full English breakfast with Japanese influence, Heathrow.
I'd got up at ten to five in the morning so as to catch the flight back to lovely, lovely Texas, and yet somehow I'd managed to end up with hours to burn, just bumming around the airport; so I figured I may as well eat to pass time. Wagamama caught my eye because I recall having loved their food back in the nineties, and there was a full English on the menu which struck me as weird. I went in thinking about bowls of big fat noodles with crunchy ginger stuff, but somehow just couldn't not order the full English because it would be my last one in a while and its presence at Wagamama, which let us not forget serves primarily Japanese and Asiatic cuisine, seemed improbably incongruous. It came in a bowl and incorporated spinach and shitake mushrooms, but was otherwise the genuine article - sausages, bacon, couple of fried eggs and so on - and yet it had some Japanese quality which seemed to justify its place on the menu and yet was difficult to pinpoint, something in the subtle flavours department stemming from how it was cooked; or it could just be that I was prevented from blobbing the customary dollop of tomato ketchup on the side. Naturally I asked for ketchup, even qualifying the request with sorry to sound like a caveman, but… - but they didn't have it, and I was therefore forced to tackle the flavours unalloyed, which was okay because it was delicious. I read some more of The Face in the Abyss by Abraham Merritt as I ate. It's about four hard boiled blokes who go off in search of lost gold, and who keep having arguments about which one of their party might be considered the dirty double-crossing rat. They talk like James Cagney in a gangster movie, often finishing sentences with an interrogative see. So far I'm enjoying it. I picked the book up at the Oxfam shop on Broadgate in Coventry, which is a fucking great shop and seemingly the closest England comes to having a branch of Half Price Books, albeit a somewhat compact one. I also picked up a Rupert Bear annual and two Hornby Railways catalogues which I had as a kid - which is apparently what my midlife crisis looks like. I only mention these details because I haven't found a way to shoehorn Peppa Pig, Shakespeare, or anyone named Geoff into the account.

Funny Foreign Food

Here's what I ate whilst back in England visiting the folks, nothing I've been unable to live without, but food which I've nevertheless appreciated on some level, and have eaten as something like exotic cuisine, despite having grown up with it.

Pork pie. I think it was from Sainsbury's or somewhere of that general type, and it made for a respectable restorative as I wrestled with a jetlag hangover resulting from the previous eighteen hours spent in more or less constant motion. Having failed to find pork pies in Texas, and being reluctant to pay $70 refrigerated postage for something I would ordinarily eat only twice a year, I have learned how to make my own. The process is a bit long-winded but has resulted in the best pork pies I've eaten by a wide margin. The one I ate in England probably wasn't great by comparison, but timing is everything.

Full English breakfast. This was at the City Arms in Earlsdon, Coventry, which is a Weatherspoons pub - fried egg, baked beans, a sausage, bacon, couple of fried slices and black pudding; of which only the fried egg and bacon can be conveniently reproduced back in Texas with any degree of authenticity. I'm not sure what's different about American sausages, but they are different, possibly due to the influence of the mighty German sausage. American bread is also different for no reason I can really pin down, and English baked beans are sweeter. So far as I'm concerned, most of these serve as a vehicle for black pudding, because it would probably be weird just eating solo black pudding, although that's the one thing I really can't do in Texas. There used to be an Argentinian delicatessen which sold something that was a lot like black pudding, but the establishment converted to an exclusive club accessible only to persons in the catering trade, which was a pain in the ass, so no more stateside black pudding for me. I suppose I could try to make it myself, but the recipe seems laborious and messy and would in any case prove prohibitively indulgent when I can't even pay my own wife to consider black pudding as edible. Anyway, the saga of this specific full English breakfast - such as it is - was that, feeling jetlagged, I realised I couldn't be arsed to walk a couple of miles to Carphone Warehouse to buy one of those cheap disposable phones used by crack dealers, so instead opted to stuff my face at the pub, an enterprise which, like that with the pork pie, proved similarly restorative.

Here it is again.

Meringue. I've tried to make them but my meringues are comical, like something from an overambitious school science project. Texas doesn't seem big on meringues either, so it had been at least a year since I ate one. The first was nice but smaller than I remember them being, which struck me as related to those factors which make it appear as though policemen are getting younger and younger. The second meringue was about the size of a football with a swirly orange pattern giving it the appearance of the planet Jupiter. The swirls were due to it being a passion fruit meringue, although you couldn't really taste anything but meringue, not even the cream. This was because it didn't have cream, although clearly needed some for sake of contrast with everything else. I obtained the Jovian meringue from Warren's Bakery in the precinct in Kenilworth, ten foot from a hole in the ground which had once been the local toy shop when I was a kid, and from which I made purchase of a number of Micronaut figures, vehicles and accessories, notably the Crater Cruncher which was a sort of futuristic digger. Although Warren's meringue needed work, his Cornish pastie was pretty great, and the shop proudly sells pies and cakes from beneath an athletic looking sign reading Forever Fit owing to the presence of a gymnasium on the second floor of the building, which is amusing.

Fish and chips. I've always thought fish and chips were a little overrated, but when the moment is right, they're amazing. The Long John Silver restaurant chain here in Texas does fish and chips which are so close to the real thing without being quite the same as to constitute a decent alternative, at least in the sense of methadone being an alternative to heroin; but actual fish and chips served in a chip shop by a fat bloke with a red face takes some beating. All the same, I'm nevertheless left a little weary by the mythologisation of fish and chips as one of the five things Americans understand about being English*.

Two sausage, egg and chips. This was my proverbial daily bread for at least twenty years, and is difficult to recreate in America mainly due to the sausage thing. Not only are we talking about an English sausage, but a caff sausage which I suspect has been prepared using very specific techniques understood only by those in the biz - possibly fried beforehand, then kept at a specific temperature by heated buffet technology. The first two sausage, egg and chips of my trip was consumed in a caff in Bermondsey, which is significant because two sausage, egg and chips was actually invented in Bermondsey - and you can check that on Wikipedia if you don't believe me. As I ate, an elderly diner at an adjacent table congratulated a small boy on his choice of football team with the words, yor a little Gooner, aincha!, so it was the real thing; and it was beautiful, although I somehow propelled some of my egg from off the side of my plate and onto the floor during the excitement. I ate the dish again, or at least a variation on the dish additionally incorporating baked beans, at the Star Cafe in Coventry, which is part of the coach station. This second serving was okay, but the situation obliging one to petition a caterer for sachets of tomato ketchup in the absence of anything squeezy readily available at the tables, was disconcerting. As a city, Coventry has had a troubled history characterised by Hitler's bombs and whatever scrapping compelled the formation of the racially progressive Two Tone record label, so I assume there's still some concern that hooligans might use ketchup dispensers as weapons were they more freely available. Also, the sausages weren't so good as those eaten in London. I propose that this deficit results from the Star Cafe's distance from the two sausage, egg and chips epicentre and their cuisine can as such be likened to the shadow of two sausage, egg and chips cast upon the wall of Plato's cave.

No ketchup dispenser? Thanks a lot, Hitler!

Co-Op sandwich. My dad and I ate Co-Op sandwiches in the absence of pub food, which the White Bear in Shipston-on-Stour didn't seem to feature. I'm pretty sure the George, twenty yards up the road, still did pub food, but it probably would have been served on square plates and involved jus. Therefore we went across the square to the Co-Op, which had been a post office back in our day - as distinct from the Co-Op which had been Fine Fare back in our day - and which is bewilderingly situated at a mere fifty yards distance as you head for the public bogs in the Telegraph Street car park in what is a very small town - not somewhere you might expect to be served by two supermarkets, and definitely not two branches of the same supermarket virtually next door to each other. We had consumed beer, we had shared hilarious anecdotes of inept local law enforcement, and we were hungry, so sandwiches it was. We both chose bacon, lettuce, and tomato. Following purchase, we walked down to the River Stour, just by the Old Mill, and discussed things we could remember when they were all fields. Those were probably the best sandwiches I ever bought from a supermarket chiller cabinet.

The River Stour which my dad and I were able to remember when it was a field.

Doner kebab. I have been confused by the differences between English and American variants of the mighty doner, particularly with the latter being served in something more closely resembling naan bread and without chilli sauce. I suppose, given that I live in San Antonio, the absence of the seemingly crucial chilli sauce is something to do with how everything else I eat is usually drowning in the stuff. The American doner kebab is nice enough, possibly even more authentic for all I know, but I can't see it being much use at two in the morning after forty pints and a homeward bus trip to the wrong part of town with your trousers worn on your head. Somehow I failed to reacquaint myself with the mighty English doner kebab when I was last over that way, so this time I made a point of getting myself down to that kebab place on the Butts, which is an amusingly named street in Coventry rather than a sequence of arses. A crusty looking bloke with tattoos stopped me to ask for a light before I'd made it into the shop. I whipped out a lighter and he said, 'thanks - a fucking human being, at last,' which seemed to contribute to the experience somehow.

'I'm going to enjoy this,' I told the bloke behind the counter. ' I haven't had one in two years,' which led inevitably to a conversation about the state of American kebabs, and why the bread is so weird, and how Disneyland Florida isn't as great as you might think, and why people voted for Donald Trump.

The kebab was good, but not so good as I remembered, so possibly I was specifically thinking of London kebabs; unless it's just that I wasn't sufficiently pissed.

The man we discussed in the kebab shop.

Chinese takeaway. I once loved Chinese takeaways and would order them as a treat for myself on occasions when it seemed like I deserved it, and always sweet and sour pork balls with egg fried rice. Then one day - I would guess late nineties - some sort of paradigm shift occurred within the world of Chinese takeaway, sweeping away all that had been served in those tidy little foil trays and replacing it with something which seemed broader in culinary scope, but just not as nice. Thankfully this development coincided with the advent of Pizza Pan, who delivered, had an outlet on Barry Road, and who got to know me so well that all I had to do was phone up and ask for the usual please, Kristos. Where Chinese takeaway once crunched, it became a sort of warm slurry dominated by the tang of monosodium glutomate, so I moved on. A conversation about Chinese takeaway with my mother somehow resulted in our ordering from Lucky Star - who had popped a delivery menu through her letterbox at some point - despite the thrust of the conversation having been that I'd gone off Chinese takeaway and she'd never liked it in the first place. Anyway, Lucky Star proved to be lucky mostly for those who like their chicken balls to resemble scotch eggs in terms of volume and structure - bland, chewy chicken embedded in a thick mantel of bland, chewy batter. We didn't eat much of it, then pulled off the alleged batter so as to give the chicken to Geoff, next door's cat, who seemed to enjoy it more than we did. A couple of nights later, we tried again. My mother gave me, a fifty-two-year old man, a tenner and sent me to the Chinese at the end of the road. Unfortunately it was closed so I found one called Peking House up the next road along - surprising myself at the fidelity of a vaguely remembered impression of another Chinese takeaway having been somewhere in the vicinity. The food was a little better, and the inch-thick layer of batter at least had a bit of crunch, but Geoff still had most of it in the end.

Geoff, or possibly Geoff's brother.

Biscuits. It's not that you can't get biscuits in America, but choices are often limited as the market is swamped with cookies, which are soft and doughy and are therefore not biscuits. Cookies came about when a Chicago biscuiteer named Herb Cook decided he didn't have time to finish cooking a batch of biscuits because he needed to play a video game and support his local football team while eating a burger, so the cookies - as they came to be known - came out soft, and achieved popularity with those who don't like the distraction of anything crunchy while playing a video game or supporting their local football team while eating a burger. This is a shame because biscuits are fucking great where cookies are truthfully a bit shit, on the whole. Consequently I ate my way through three or four packets of Fox's ginger custard creams during my stay in England.

*: The others being the Royal family, the Beatles, Keeping Up Appearances, and Benedict Cumberbatch.

Drinking Until You Can't Stand Whilst Stuffing Your Face

It is April and Fiesta has come around once again, Fiesta being the week long festival commemorating the battles of the Alamo and San Jacinto back in 1836. I've now done most of the significant Fiesta events - the river parade and that weird thing in the theatre with the kids of assorted local billionaires wearing capes made out of diamonds. The only event I am still to attend is called a Night in Old San Antonio, so that's the one we're doing this year.

I like to pace myself, not being a huge fan of crowds and all.

Old San Antonio here sounds like a term of endearment but refers to the old part of San Antonio located at the heart of the city, a village's worth of narrow streets of stone houses on the bank of the San Antonio river, just a short walk from Mission San Antonio de Valero, the building historically known as the Alamo. It's not quite the sort of thing you expect to find in America, or at least it wasn't quite the sort of thing I expected to find in America because it looks too old for something built by people who weren't native; but then I'm forgetting that we used to be Mexico.

A Night in Old San Antonio is actually four nights and mostly seems to be about drinking until you can't stand whilst stuffing your face. This is probably why I've left it until last as I've never really regarded either pursuit as a justifiable end in itself, at least not to the extent which is apparently customary for the festival.

We drive into the centre of town, myself and my wife, pay much more than normal to park, and then queue for admission to a section of the city into which we would simply be able to wander at any other time of year. It's all been corralled off, the old town, turned into a fairground with the majority emphasis on drinking until you can't stand whilst stuffing your face. We queue for about fifteen minutes and then the gates open. We already have tickets so we get wristbands advertising the fact. Most of the old houses are stores and their associated workshops during the day, mostly artisan stuff, people making things for tourists, but generally quite nice things, I suppose. We don't really have any equivalent of the plastic bobby's helmet so far as I'm aware. Most of the old buildings are closed up now because it's early evening, excepting those serving as either eating or drinking places. One road is lined with small scale fairground stuff, stalls in which you throw things in order to win underwhelming prizes, but otherwise it's food and booze.

We enter a Germanic tent, acknowledging the significant Texan presence of settlers from old Deutschland. There is an oompah band, and men in lederhosen and frauleins drinking from biersteins until they can't stand whilst stuffing their faces with bratwurst and schnitzel and all of that good stuff. We have something to eat and sit for a short while, pacing ourselves - basically saving room for tacos.

We rejoin the crowds and shuffle along the narrow streets, eventually finding ourselves in a sort of Gaelic appendix, a few stone steps off the main track leading down to the river where three verdantly attired persons play Irish music, one of them banging a spoon against a bodhran. Everyone wears green and clover-based imagery is in abundance. They're drinking the Guiness, in all in all in all, until they can't stand whilst stuffing their faces with potatoes, so they are. I'm beginning to feel uncomfortable because I know actual Irish people and I feel like I've stumbled into the equivalent of the Black and White Minstrel Show.

We're quite near some Irish-themed pub. I can't remember what the place is called but it's surely only a little way further along the riverwalk. There's a menu outside from which my wife and myself read out the names of self-consciously Irish sounding drinks to each other until the prospect of a refreshing pint of Black & Tan stunned me into silence. I knew the term only as the nickname of the notoriously brutal Royal Irish Constabulary Special Reserve, which is probably through my having had grandparents of vaguely Northern Irish heritage. I never realised that the Black & Tan was also an unrelated drink, so it initially struck me as kind of stupid and tasteless, like something with which you would wash down that delicious Sinn Féin pizza with a side of H-Block fries; and a top o' the mornin' to you too, pardner.

Having had our fill of the Emerald Isle, we visit one of the few shops which is still open. The place is run by Marisol Deluna, a friend of my wife. Marisol designs textiles, makes clothes, and is apparently quite a big deal in her field. I can see why, because the clothes and the fabrics look classy even to me; but the woman herself is in New York right now so we don't get to see her.

We wander further, and I have a drink to pass the time, which isn't so enjoyable as it should be. Drinking at events such as this tends to be more enjoyable if you're already drunk, in my experience. We watch people drinking until they can't stand whilst stuffing their faces. We have some tacos filled with beef cooked right there before us on massive grills big enough to accommodate several humans should the need arise, although thankfully it doesn't. The air is full of smoke, which is not unusual for San Antonio, and there is a live band playing in a sort of courtyard. They're very energetic, but unfortunately they're playing hits from Grease, Beatles numbers and that sort of thing. The crowd seem to like it, and I suppose the band are good at what they do.

The taco is stuffed with peppers and onions and I have to tip my head backwards to form a chute in order to eat it, which isn't very dignified but I don't suppose it matters. Three little girls are performing Call Me Maybe by Katy Perry at a karaoke booth on the corner of the street lined with all the fairground attractions. We watch them for a minute mainly because they're obviously having serious fun singing the song, and will remember this moment for a long time to come; and it's better than watching persons even older and fatter than I am singing You're the One That I Want. Then Bess throws a few foam balls at wooden boards in which holes have been cut, failing to win any of the prizes on offer; and we go home because we've already covered the ground twice and feel we've had all the fun there is to be had.

A couple of mornings later we watch the Pooch Parade, a less formal Fiesta event held in the suburbs. Everyone with a dog comes along and walks a set route for a couple of hours, and about half of the dogs are dressed as Batman, or Barack Obama, or some other public figure. This is the fourth Pooch Parade we've attended in the same number of years, and it's always fun. My personal favourite is the sausage dog who usuallys comes as the Red Baron in a scarf and occasionally with flying goggles, pulled along in a cart customised so as to resemble a blood red German triplane of the 1920s; but for some reason he's not here this year.

Maybe next time.

A Glossary of American Television Shows

These are only shows I've seen since moving to San Antonio in 2011, otherwise we'd be here all day. I haven't included anything which I've watched and then found myself unable to remember what it actually was. For example, I've probably watched at least one episode of The Flash, but who fucking knows?

A Charlie Brown Christmas - By the way, I'm also including American shows I saw whilst living in England if I've seen them again since moving here, and my wife watches this religiously every Christmas so it makes the cut. It also makes the cut because it's a classic. Just the scene with Schroeder tickling the ivories whilst a stage full of kids engage in oddly repetitive expressive dance is by itself better than anything else seen on television since about 1995.

Agents of SHIELD - This is some Marvel Comics thing based on a bunch of spies living inside a giant floating helicopter. It had the Man from UNCLE in it, or one of those guys - not David McCallum, the other one - unless it was just somebody who looked like him. I have no memory of what happened in the episode I watched except that it involved a lot of people discussing the importance of teamwork, and some guy in a dark room kept looking at a green glowing thing.

Amazing Race, The - Various unpleasant couples competitively quest forth to different locations in different countries so as to find clues as to the next place to which they will all be required to race amazingly. Some shit found in a windmill in Holland will mean they all get to spend the next episode questing forth to the place in Germany where Hitler gave his famous speech, for example. Most of the couples wear bright lycra jumpsuits and they spend a lot of time either running around, sweating, whining, or giving it 110%. Most of the couples come across as horrible wankers. It should really be called The Unpleasant Race.

American Dad - This is one of those animated shows which appears to be drawn by the Garfield artist - what with the big, heavily-lidded eyes and everything - and it contrasts the cutesy appearance with edgy jokes about date rape, sodomy, farting, coprophilia and so on. Junior loves it, and it's one of those things he'll watch over and over, hopefully missing 99% of the references. American Dad gives the impression of being funny as I pass through the front room while it's on, but once you sit down to view an entire episode, it gets headachey pretty fast - one to file under trying too hard.

Andy Griffith Show, The - This was a show from the fifties or maybe early sixties. It's the black and white adventures of a rural law enforcement officer and the hayseeds under his jurisdiction. Most of the jokes can be discerned as incoming about five minutes before they happen, much like weary travellers seen approaching from afar upon a lonely road, and the episode I saw was based around an hilarious mix up occurring when impounded jars of moonshine were stored in the same room as the lemonade the kids had made for their stand. I can't remember why Andy Griffith had nabbed the lemonade as well, but I guess that's cops for you. I actually found this show pretty funny.

Angel - Angel is a good vampire, and was probably the first of the current glut of good vampires who shun human blood. He solves supernatural crimes in this Buffy the Vampire Slayer spin-off, and although the show suffered from the same problems as the corporate entertainment franchise from which it was spawned, it was generally pretty good, particularly when it wasn't taking itself too seriously; and once they ditched the predictably heart-warming yet tormented Irish-themed character from the first series.

Aqua Teen Hunger Force - Laboured date rape funnies delivered by anthropomorphic fast food items in a production which additionally attempts to distract viewers from the piss poor animation by making jokes about its own general ineptitude. Worthless.

Arrested Development - I have no idea how I missed this one when I was living in England, but presume it must have been on after my bedtime, what with my having to be up at five every morning and everything. Arrested Development is fucking great - apart from the final series which was rubbish - and is not actually particularly far fetched. It could quite easily have been based on half the people who live in Alamo Heights.

Battlestar Galactica - Meaning the recent, heavily revised version, rather than the seventies one which was more or less Starsky & Hutch in a space rocket. This was one of the first things I watched when I got here and discovered that my wife-to-be had Netflix, one episode a day until I'd seen the lot. It was pretty darn great too, aside from the shitty ending with a Jimi Hendrix song as some sort of avatar of cosmic infundibularity, or whatever the hell was supposed to be going on there. Science-fiction television is mostly drivel aimed at selling action figures, but this was decent.

Better Call Saul - This is a Breaking Bad spin-off which is better than Breaking Bad. American television has spewn forth a ton of drama serials about lawyers, solicitors, and chartered accountants over the years, and it's a testament to the creators of this thing that I didn't even notice that this was one of them.

Big Bang Theory, The - This is a comedy show based upon the hilarious premise that nerds collect Batman comics and retain an in-depth encyclopedic knowledge of minor details of Batman continuity. Ha ha. It's also one of those sofa entrance hilarity comedies distinguished by half the cast being sat upon a sofa facing the viewer as another enters the room to a soundtrack of general hooting and hollering so as to suggest that we will soon be laughing our arses off. The new arrival usually makes some amusing observation such as I guess I missed the Nicks game, huh?, and that's when the comedy happens. Oh my aching sides. The Big Bang Theory seems to be very popular amongst people who don't actually understand what humour is or how it works.

Big Brother - American Big Brother is even worse than the English version. Unlike the English version, American housemates are free to discuss who they will vote to have evicted from the house, so that's pretty much all the fuckers ever talk about; and there's no phone-in vote so viewers aren't involved other than as passive observers. Additionally, where English Big Brother excels in filling its house with people more or less guaranteed to want to kill each other, in America it's mostly just whiny annoying wankers, and the obligatory Texan almost always turns out to be a closet white supremacist thus making the rest of us look bad, which is disappointing. The most annoying contestant I've seen thus far was the fedora-hatted Californian skateboard tosspot who asked a housemate from Colorado, so how's life in 'rado?, because man, those first two syllables - ain't nobody got time for that. Thankfully, he proved even more hateable than the rest of them brought together for that particular series and his anus was promptly booted back to 'fornia after the first week.

Black-ish - here's yet another one of those families, but with four kids rather than three, and they're black. As situation comedies of this general type go, it beats the shit out of about a million others, and the jokes are mostly funny, but I don't know. I'll watch it and I may even chuckle, but for some reason it never occurs to me to tune in the following week.

Bob's Burgers - It's a cartoon set in a burger joint featuring one of those cartoon families with three children which manages consistent brilliance without resembling The Simpsons in the slightest.

BoJack Horseman - I've seen the pilot episode twice, and I seem to recall a few chuckles, but for some reason I've never bothered watching the rest.

Breaking Bad - If not the greatest TV series ever made, definitely the greatest TV series about a chemistry teacher cooking crystal meth so as to finance cancer treatment ever made. The only problem with Breaking Bad is that you end up hating everyone in it by the third series, possibly excepting Jesse, and yet feel compelled to watch anyway. Having briefly regarded Breaking Bad as the greatest show ever made, I was surprised to find it such tough going and considerably less enjoyable second time around. In fact we gave up with the final series on second viewing. It was just too horrible.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer - Decent but possibly overrated series about a teenage girl and stuff who kills vampires and stuff and related supernatural horrors and stuff. It somewhat went off the boil and stuff when later episodes and stuff began to take themselves far too seriously and stuff, and the bovine Tara turned up to moo at viewers and make us feel all bad about shy people being shy and stuff; and then with the excessive reliance on mumbling Buffyspeak and stuff began to outstay its welcome and stuff; and it's a damning indictment that by the end the only good thing about the show was an American dude pretending to be Sid Vicious and stuff. Thank fuck and stuff they cancelled it.

Caprica - Incomprehensible but nevertheless enjoyable attempt at making a Battlestar Galactica spin-off. Shame it didn't last.

Catfish - This is another reality show, one in which online sweeties discover that the person to whom they've been emailing their intimate hamburger or hot dog shots is actually a fifty-year old male sex criminal from Missouri and not, as they have been led to believe, a youthful Beyoncé lookalike eager to move in and start a family. It's sort of fascinating to watch, providing you can get past the entirely unnecessary soundtrack of the worst music you've ever heard and the fact that everyone involved refers to each other as bae - because it can sometimes be hard to spell the word baby; but sometimes it gets a bit too depressing given the high quota of tattoos, piercings and ear gauges on display; and as for those text message montages of u mean so much 2 me, I feel like I can tell u anything, and the rest - sweet Jesus.

Chowder - This is a children's cartoon about a little purple guy who looks a bit like a cat, and who seems to live in some sort of pseudo-mediaeval feudal society. All I can really remember of it is that the episode I saw - possibly the pilot episode - featured a joke which made me laugh so much that my sides hurt, so that really happens.

Cleveland Show, The - See American Dad. It has its moments, and I wanted to like it, but...

Dance Moms - Pouting borderline psychopathic mothers encourage pre-teen daughters to compete in competitive dance events whilst pointing out how the offspring of rival matriarchs got to prance about to Like A Virgin last week and so this week it's Shanillia's turn, you fucking cunt. The high levels of passive-aggressive on display in this show are frankly terrifying. It's like a live action re-imagining of hell as envisioned by Hieronymous Bosch but with greater emphasis on little girls in pink tutus dancing to that Cher song which sounds like it was recorded inside a flying saucer.

Deadwood - It's about a load of cowboys in the old west who say fuck a lot, and the worst of the bunch is the bloke who runs the local antiques shop, which is called Ye Olde Bide-a-Fuckin'-Wee Antiques 'n' Shit. I tried one episode but it all looked a bit grim and seemed to feature more murdered prostitutes than I usually require of a television show.

Don't Trust the Bitch in Apartment 23 - I saw two or three of these and I think it made me laugh, but I can't remember anything else about it except that the blonde one reminded me of Lamb Chop of Shari Lewis fame. I think there was a scene set in a whole food restaurant because I vaguely remember being annoyed.

Duck Dynasty - Duck Dynasty is a reality show following the fortunes of a family of hillbillies who run a duck call manufacturing operation. For some reason everyone seems to think it's amazing. The five minutes I watched comprised footage of them arguing at the warehouse, with the argument escalating into open hostility disguised as pranks. One guy emptied a sack of some white powder over the other's head. The victim looked pissed off, as was then underlined by footage of him commenting upon the incident, explaining how the guy had emptied a sack of some white powder over his head, but that dang fool had better watch out because payback sure 'nuff do be a bitch. This was followed by footage of the victim emptying a retaliatory sack of some white powder over the first guy's head. I'm not sure what the powder was, although I have a feeling it probably wasn't cocaine. It was like watching an episode of The Three Stooges in slow motion.

Empire - My wife loves this one, and it's basically a Mexican telenovela by virtue of the dramatic faces pulled every thirty seconds; except I suppose, technically speaking, it's actually just Dallas with black people, and instead of oil they're trading in R&B singers.

Family Feud - I think this was remade as Family Fortunes in England. A game show host asks thick family members to name a kind of animal with four arses, and points are then awarded depending on whether their answers correspond with those given by members of the general public who have been asked the same question. Our current version is presented by the comedian Steve Harvey who is otherwise very funny, and makes the best of finding himself obliged to work with idiots, but is still very much polishing a turd where this thing is concerned.

Family Guy - See American Dad. I almost liked this one. As with all the other Garfield spin-off shows from the same stable, it's hilarious until you sit down and watch an episode all the way through.

Futurama - Brilliant, obviously.

Garfield and Friends - See my treatise entitled Garfield = Jeremy Clarkson which is to be found elsewhere on this blog.

Glee - This one started off so well that it fooled even me, then took about a series to reveal itself as the same old aspirational stage school shite about all which can be achieved if you just dare to dream hard enough. I suppose it might be awarded points for smuggling a gay character onto mainstream telly, although all the gay people I know - and for some weird reason I seem to know a ton of the fuckers - hated Kurt's guts, so I'm not even sure if that really constitutes a victory. The best thing about Glee was the psychotic sports coach played by Ayn Rand. She was great.

Goldbergs, The - The Goldbergs is a situation comedy based on someone's actual memoirs of growing up in the eighties in America, and sometimes it makes my wife laugh so much that she falls off the sofa. Having grown up in the eighties in England, I find this one a bit mystifying in places. It's not without chuckles and I can appreciate that it's a quality product, roughly speaking, but more than anything it impresses upon me that America and England are very different countries, despite the superficial resemblance.

Hell's Kitchen - If Gordon Ramsay has any failings it is only that his generosity of spirit leads him to go easy on those who foolishly agree to be fired out of an allegorical cannon on one of his celebrity cheffing shows. Additionally, much of his televisual work wastes precious airtime pissing about with recipes, airtime which might be better spent showing Ramsay kicking some perpetrator of culinary idiocy down a fire escape or battering an uncooperative waiter about the head with a cricket bat through which twenty or thirty six-inch nails have been driven. Never mind. I never really liked this one so much as Kitchen Nightmares because I've never really cared whether Paul Daniels can make a soufflé, or that Noel Gallagher has just turned up, and - blinkey-blonkey-blimey - he's ordered the curry! This is like the English one except I have no idea who the celebrities are, and when Ramsay starts bollocking his team they salute him and bark sir, yes sir like in Full Metal Jacket.

Hey Jessie - Jessie is a Texas teenager who goes to babysit a bunch of wisecracking kids in New York City with presumably hilarious consequences. I've never actually seen the thing, just heard the annoying theme song blasting from the kid's room at Motorhead decibels over and over, one episode after another. Jessie herself is currently starring in a shampoo advert of some description, thus allowing me to report that she resembles a Hispanic Kerry Katona, but is significantly easier on the eye than such a description doubtless implies. Hopefully Jessie, as a Texan, spends most of the show either protecting the second amendment or threatening to secede from the union, but being as it's a Disney production I imagine it's the usual crap about brushing your teeth and not being mean to the weird kid, not even when that screwy-looking son of a bitch is effectively giving it away.

Ice Road Truckers - All I can remember of this one is footage of some guy wrapped up so as to endure subarctic temperatures stood forlornly upon a frozen river pointing at his truck, its front end sunk deep into the ice. 'My truck is in the ice,' he explains to the cameraman, and then we watch various attempts to pull the truck out of the ice. The most interesting thing about this one, at least to me, is that it's edited by an English bloke, and an English bloke I know because I was at college with him. I saw him last year and he explained that he landed the job because apparently Americans don't know how to edit reality television and regard English people as experts in the field. They should probably ask English people what they should make their reality shows about too while they're at it. Had they asked me, I could have told them that this one probably wasn't the greatest idea.

Jessica Jones - This is another Marvel thing. The character is somewhat after my time, although I gather there's a tenuous connection to the Purple Girl who used to be in the Alpha Flight comic book, which I used to quite enjoy. Her powers seem to be mainly to do with smart-arse one-liners and shagging, and apparently Doctor Who shows up in the later episodes. Comics sure have changed since I was a kid.

Keeping Up with the Kardashians - I saw about a minute of this once, and it was the one with the arse whining about something or other. I don't know who these people are or why they exist.

King of the Hill - I always loved this animated show, but I love it even more now that I live in Texas. When people ask me how my life now compares to how it was in England, I tell them that it's a lot like King of the Hill because it genuinely is, and as it happens, yes, I do know someone just like Boomhauer. It is my firm belief that King of the Hill may ultimately prove to be the greatest television show ever made.

Kitchen Nightmares - As with the English version, here Gordon Ramsay descends upon the eating establishments of fools in order to explain why no-one wants to eat their shit food. The high point of the English version was probably the complete knob who fancied himself an award-winning chef despite never having actually trained, and who was serving a hockey puck sized slice of black pudding on square plates drizzled with chocolate sauce as his signature dish. Ramsay naturally had him crying within about three minutes. It was amazing. Unfortunately the American version is less entertaining, because we don't like those sexual swearwords over here, never mind the sight of someone having their head kicked off by an irate Ramsay. Most of the venues upon which the lad descends seem to be either pizza places or burger joints, and whilst he nevertheless scares the living shit out of everyone involved as good as he ever did, I guess the really violent stuff just doesn't get broadcast. It's sort of like giving Pavarotti his own show on the condition that he doesn't sing. Also, there's sometimes a bit in which they all get together and pray out loud, usually something along the lines of dear God, please make it that so our restaurant stops being shit; and Ramsay joins in too, when really he should be stood to one side, mocking them all whilst smoking and drinking a can of Kestrel.

Leave it to Beaver - I'm not sure how I ended up watching an episode of this. It's a black and white thing from the fifties, the slow-moving adventures of a small, well-meaning child who finds himself embroiled in moderate scrapes with vaguely amusing consequences culminating in a heavy-handed message - you have to help your friends, that sort of deal. I'm not opposed to gentle television on principal, but it really makes you wonder how dull the rest of the schedule must have been during the era when this was a hit. Leave it to Beaver resembles early video art more than it resembles comedy.

Lilyhammer - This isn't a Sopranos spin-off although I get the feeling it wants to be, and the Jools Holland of Bruce Springsteen's band is easily as watchable here as he was playing Silvio Dante. The Scandinavian setting comes close to inspired, and the show only really falters when it really does pretend to be an episode of The Sopranos, getting Paulie in to play that priest, implausibly sending half the cast to New York and so on. Stick to the episodes with ice and snow and you won't go far wrong.

Lost - This was amazing for three or maybe four series, and then turned suddenly and dramatically to shit. New mysteries were piled on top of older, still unresolved puzzles, and it began to feel as though they were making it up as they went along for the sake of seeming weird and interesting like some goth drawing spiders on his own face before he goes to sign on. Particularly pointless was the killing off of Charlie the former Hobbit. It didn't quite do it for me as I'd always hated the character and didn't really care that he'd pegged it, so it felt like an ostentatious diversion from everyone having forgotten what the story was supposed to be. Charlie as a supposed Gallagher brother never really worked if, like me, you regard Oasis as the most worthless bands of more or less all time, and yet they still found a way to make him even more annoying with his dreary fixation on Clare and the baby, who became his equivalent of John Steinbeck's Lenny asking George to tell him about the rabbits.

Louie - Louis CK is presently my all-time favourite comedian, roughly speaking, and whilst this not-quite-autobiographical show isn't always what you might conventionally term funny, I think it stands as a testimony to his wit that he can come up with some of the most profoundly depressing material ever broadcast, and yet somehow it still feels like comedy, even when you want to slash your wrists afterwards.

Mad Men - I think I made it to about the sixth episode before I realised that I couldn't give a shit whether any of them lived or died, or what happened next. It probably could have done with a few jokes. Maybe it had a few jokes but I just didn't notice. The thrill of seeing a man smoking a ciggy on telly also wore off after a while.

Making a Murderer - This is a thoroughly depressing ten-part documentary about a supposedly innocent man being locked up in prison for eighteen years of his life, freed when it's finally proven that he didn't do it, then locked up again for a new crime he almost certainly didn't commit just as the state was about to say sorry. I say supposedly innocent for the sake of impartiality, but he looks innocent to me. Some have accused the programme makers of bias, but you might just as well say that all those World War II documentaries made Hitler look bad and there was a lot more going on that we don't know about. On a positive note, Making a Murderer at least shows that people still know how to make documentaries - contrary to what you might believe from a quick glance at the History Channel - but unfortunately this one is, as I say, profoundly depressing because it doesn't say much for the legal system.

Malcolm in the Middle - This was a prequel to Breaking Bad, and is probably the best thing any of these people have ever appeared in.

Maron - See Louie, but with an entirely different comedian, and again one who doesn't really do jokes. The episode with Danny Trejo is pure gold.

Middle, The - I still don't know what it's supposed to be the middle of, but never mind, and Malcolm is nowhere to be seen. Like Malcolm, Bob's Burgers and a thousand other fucking things, this is a comedy about a family with three children, a big one, a medium-sized one, and a little one. Despite the wearying familiarity of the premise, The Middle is sort of watchable because the actors are good and the jokes are funny, or at least superbly crafted - although it never quite loses the feeling of having been designed by committee.

Mighty B, The - My wife likes this one because the main character is called Bess, which is also my wife's name and is what the B stands for. This is another children's cartoon, but one of the good ones. It has a lot of energy. It's sort of like listening to three different Ramones albums all at the same time.

Mike and Molly - This is another sofa entrance hilarity comedy with the unique angle of there only being room for two on this sofa because Mike and Molly are both quite fat, which I suppose means they're jolly. I only saw about ten minutes of this, and most of the jokes seemed to be about cakes and how hard it is to not eat them, but it made me laugh a couple of times.

Modern Family - This is an odd one in that it does all the sort of things I tend to enjoy in a comedy, and doesn't bother with a laugh track, and it has obvious wit, and yet...

Munsters, The - Obviously the greatest situation comedy of all time (please disregard any previous claim I may have made to this effect) and superior to the Addams Family because the Munsters don't realise that they're monsters. They may as well have stopped making television shows after The Munsters. It has pretty much everything.

Must Love Cats - I don't remember much about this one aside from it being a reality show about a guy who visits people who own cats, and who sometimes sings songs about them - the cats I mean, not the owners. He has an acoustic guitar. I seem to recall one episode in which someone with a massive garden had enclosed the entire place in a vast Jurassic Park style cage with overhead walkways, all for their cat. It impressed me anyway.

My Cat from Hell - This is very similar to Must Love Cats, and the guy even carries a guitar case around as he visits cat owners. His name is apparently really Jackson Galaxy, and he used to be in some band or other, but now the guitar case is just full of cat toys. It's often fascinating, and Galaxy somehow manages to be both likeable and aggravating at the same time.

My Name is Earl - Along with The Sopranos, this was the greatest show ever made; and along with King of the Hill it's more or less as close as dammit to a description of how I find life in Texas. I don't yet have my hair cut into a mullet, and I don't drive a Camino, but otherwise it's more or less the same. Of all the cancellations ever to cruelly pluck decent shows from the starry firmament of our viewing, this has surely been the most bewildering and the most criminal.

Nanny 911 - I used to watch Supernanny - roughly speaking the English version of this - and found it sort of enjoyable in so much as any of those bullying shows wherein simpletons are reprimanded for their oafish ways are sort of enjoyable. Weirdly, the American version seems to staff itself from the exact same pool of English televisual nannies - at least one of whom I always found slightly bothersome due to her resemblance to an ex-girlfriend. Weirder still, these nannies seem to represent a Thunderbirds style task force answering the call of distressed parents unable to cope with their generally repellent offspring. They all live in a quaint English cottage - apparently their version of Tracy Island or Avengers Mansion - and each week the Overnanny draws their attention to a new case. The Overnanny is an ancient nannorial matriarch of such wisdom and power that she never actually leaves the cottage. She isn't formally identified as the Overnanny, so I'm just taking a guess with the name. Anyway, each week she bids that her teamsters do gaze forth upon that which is revealed in the mystic mirror of telling - usually footage of screaming toddlers flinging bowls of cereal at clueless parents; the nannies pull faces like unto the duck of disapproval and make tutting noises, and then the Overnanny decrees which of them has powers most suited to the challenge. Many Americans seem to have a weird and possibly unhealthy fixation with all things English. Apparently only we have the power to tell junior to shut the fuck up, clean his room, and stop acting like a cunt.

Nurse Jackie - Following whatever the hell happened at the end of the final series of The Sopranos, Carmela got a job in a hospital, changed her name to Jackie and started banging Father Phil who, by pure coincidence, has also undergone a complete change of identity and profession. She took a load of drugs for a few series, was sacked for taking drugs, then was reinstated, over and over so as to save having to change the name of the programme to either Nurse Zoe or Former Nurse Jackie. It was great while it lasted, but after she'd been sacked and reinstated the seventh or eighth time, the plausibility of the whole situation began to suffer, and it all turned to shit.

Office, The - I've only watched the first episode so far, and whilst it's clearly a quality product, I really can't get past it being a more or less word for word cover version of the English situation comedy starring Ricky Gervais and others. I liked the original a lot, so I find this karaoke act kind of strange, although I guess I'd be interested to see what happens in the later episodes, those made past the point at which they ran out of Gervais to recycle and had to generate their own material.

One Step - I've checked online and this is the name given to an advertising campaign for something called Prevnar 13, specifically to a commercial repeated with such frequency that it has come to seem more like a television show, and it's always a mad scramble to find the remote and hit the mute button when it comes on. American television commercials are weird. You might imagine them to be fairly slick, but the great majority appear home made, like those things you used to see at the cinema in the seventies - fancy a meal after the film? Then why not come to the Jade Pagoda conveniently situated in the high street and so on and so forth. Living in Texas, this means that half of the adverts I see involve a red-faced man shouting about trucks whilst stood in front of his car dealership. Generally more professional are the adverts for products designed to stop you dying of something, generally aimed at seniors and shown in the breaks during Wheel of Fortune; and these seem to go on for minutes and minutes, usually with somebody reading out a long list of legally prudent disclaimers - may cause drowsiness, may cause death, and even may increase severity of asthma symptoms, which turned out to be one possible side effect of a product otherwise promoted as a means of relieving asthma symptoms. Anyway, Prevnar 13 is some kind of jab which inoculates against a whole variety of conditions - so far as I can tell - and so the advertising runs with the gimmick of it being just one thing which is able to address many problems; and so we see footage of perky oldsters doing just one thing in order to illustrate the point - some guy cooks a single sprig of asparagus on his barbecue grill, a slightly aggravating woman purchases a single strawberry from her grocery store, and most annoying of all Dr. Russell from Space 1999 goes to the gym and does her single sit up. It probably isn't Dr. Russell from Space 1999, but the woman looks a bit like her except more smug and a lot older. She's got the leotard, the leg-warmers, all the shit. She unrolls her exercise mat - or whatever you call those things - and then does a single sit-up, her face bowling forward to fill the screen as she does so. She says, 'One,' out loud, counting her single sit-up, and then gets up and goes home. It's the expression on her face as she counts her single-action work out, a sort of half-smile with just a faint hint of superiority which asks and just what are you doing with your life, you fat fuck? It makes me want to kick in the screen, but I never do.

Orange is the New Black - Semi-autobiographical life in a women's prison and amazingly they managed to not screw it up, at least not yet. This one's right up there with The Wire and The Sopranos in my estimation.

Pair of Kings - Pair of Tossers would be more like it. Junior was briefly addicted to this show, and thus did I see a few more episodes than I would have liked, the number of episodes I would have liked to see being none at all. The premise is that a pair of wisecracking kids implausibly end up as rulers of an obscure presumably south-sea island, the kind where cars tend to be made out of bamboo with a couple of logs for wheels, like on the immeasurably superior Flintstones. This thing might have had some charm had it been made by Hal Roach back in the thirties, but it was made by Disney and ran from 2010 to 2013, so just how good do you think it could be?

Parks & Recreation - This one is a work of art - just beautiful. It's only failing is that Ron Swanson isn't a real person.

People's Court, The - The People's Court is a televised court presided over by a Judge who isn't actually a Judge so much as just some woman who makes decisions about what seems right. The cases brought before the court are usually things like when some bloke sells his car, but the car turns out to be shit, or somebody put their penis into an extra-marital vagina, or some guy owes twenty dollars and he doesn't think he should have to pay it. It's mostly minor stuff, and you can usually watch about three of these things before you begin to feel bad about yourself. A recent National Enquirer headline ran with something about People's Court being rigged, which I suppose would mean something to readers under the illusion of it being a real court, just like the one in which Steven Avery was found guilty of a crime he had no reason to commit. Talking of hysteria and the wisdom of the mob, some readers may have encountered facebook idiocy concerning sharia law and how entire cities in Englishland are now under sharia law because of Muslamic immigrants and political correctness innit. Aside from being untrue, I watched a documentary about sharia law as practiced in Islamic countries a while back, and the weird thing was that it actually seemed a lot like People's Court, so I'd say facebookers need to know what the fuck they're talking about before repeating such bollocks.

Phineas and Ferb - I have a feeling this is Disney getting down with the kids. It's animated in that sort of wacky angular post-Ren & Stimpy style favoured by production companies who've realised that three kids and a crime-solving dog will no longer cut it with today's sophisticated under-tens, and it follows the vaguely wacky adventures of a boy-child who invents things; but there's something unpleasantly wholesome about it, and the nagging hag of an older sister as stool pigeon and destroyer of all that is fun strikes even me as a bit sexist - and I couldn't ordinarily give a shit about that kind of thing.

Portlandia - Much that is terrible about the modern world, or at least its media image, apparently comes from Portland - twenty year-old men with full beards, breakfast cereal restaurants, bands called Ha Ha Tonka, multinational conglomerates attempting to pass themselves off as a Women's Institute knitting circle but with hippies, and adverts for the same soundtracked with corporate ukulele; and Portlandia takes the piss out of all that. The only problem is that it somehow seems to resemble the very thing it's taking the piss out of, or at least it does to me. These Americans can be so inscrutable at times.

Raising Hope - I get the impression that this was an attempt to remix My Name is Earl in such a way as to avoid cancellation. It has some of the Earl magic for sure, but steers just a little too close to sentimentality for my liking, although I like the funny-looking woman with the ukulele and a missing tooth. She's cute.

Real O'Neals, The - They're Irish, they have three kids, and one of them is a homosexual. I say they're Irish, but they're actually Irish-American, which isn't the same thing. No it isn't. Drinking Guinness and wearing a green hat with a shamrock printed on it is not the same as being from Ireland. I know actual real Irish people from Ireland, and most of them think you're fucking ridiculous, quite frankly. This show was probably okay, but I couldn't get past my own irritation, even despite the presence of the otherwise wonderful Martha Plimpton. Also, I'm not sure quite how they qualify as real given that this is a sitcom rather than a fly-on-the-wall documentary. I suppose they're real like The Real Ghostbusters were real, so I guess this is a meaning of the word real with which I am unfamiliar, specifically one which translates to not as good as the film. Sure enough, my impression of The Real O'Neals was that it is not as good as Bridget Jones' Diary, which is the worst film I can think of at the moment.

River Monsters - Junior presently spends most of his time attempting to impress people by relaying fascinating facts in a portentous voice resembling that of Doctor Doom as depicted in seventies animated superhero fare, usually the sort of fascinating facts no-one with half a brain would care less about - the life cycle of the world's most dangerous squid, the amazing stuff which you can get from Japanese vending machines and so on. Needless to say, he's a big fan of River Monsters in which some bloke relates folk tales of this week's reputed killer fish, describes just how terrified he is, locates something significantly less deadly which clearly isn't the thing he was looking for, and then concludes that perhaps we shall never know as the music swells to a predictable crescendo. The show would last about three minutes if you edited out all the embellishments, recaps, and associated horseshit.

Roseanne - I watched a few of these in England about a million years ago, and they seemed fairly funny. I saw a repeat more recently whilst living here, and it still seemed fairly funny. I still don't understand how Friends got made. I'm not saying Roseanne was some sort of comedy year zero, but Friends nevertheless seems like a backwards step by comparison.

Salem - I managed about ten minutes, but it was too much like listening to a Fields of the Nephilim album for my liking.

Simpsons, The - It may be well past its golden age, but it still beats most of the competition.

Six Feet Under - It wasn't quite The Sopranos, but Six Feet Under was still pretty darn good. It wasn't quite a comedy, but it had a sense of humour, and as such probably struck just about the right balance for what is essentially a soap opera based around a funeral parlour. I'll add extra points for it keeping up the pace right until the end, rather than tailing off into an implausibly shite treading water phase after the first three or four series as was the case with both Lost and Weeds.

Sons of Anarchy - I assumed this was some sort of post-apocalyptic deal but no, it's just a bunch of bikers, pretty much The Sopranos in piss-stained leathers with a chicken stapled to its jeans. They drink hard, they raise funds by illegal means, they ain't keen on the law, and they communicate exclusively in short gruff sentences excepting the point in each episode during which young Jax Teller reads a little more of his late father's unpublished memoirs and it briefly turns into The Waltons. It's kind of shit, but it's watchable.

Sopranos, The - I probably could have lived without quite so many dream sequences, but otherwise this was more or less the greatest show in television history, which I offer as scientifically verifiable fact rather than mere opinion. If you disagree, or if you're reading this with even so much as a twinge of now just hold on there a moment, stop reading right now and get yourself to the office of your nearest education authority because you need to start all over again at grade school level. People who don't like The Sopranos are just wankers, and useless wankers into the bargain. It's as simple as that.

SpongeBob Squarepants - Words seem inadequate as medium for the summary of just how great this show is. If you've just woken up from a long space voyage spent in suspended animation. SpongeBob is a yellow cuboid denizen of the deep who hangs around with a starfish and works at an undersea fast food outlet, and as such his adventures closely resemble the science-fiction novels of A.E. van Vogt. I'm not even sure I'd call it a children's show. It's kind of a thing in itself.

Super Mario Brothers Super Show, The - See Don't Do the Mario, Please... elsewhere on this blog.

Suspect - See Catfish, except lacking the generally entertaining presence of Max wossisname, and suffering from the problem that it's the exact same thing every week. Some person is worried that their friend or partner is moonlighting as either a prostitute or a stripper, but it turns out that they're just taking an evening class; and it's easier to call in a nosey television show than to simply ask what the fuck is up with you never being around and shit? The show is further hamstrung by the leaden presence of co-presenter iO Tillet Wright - and yes, that's how we spell it with the first letter in lower case - who is named after one of Jupiter's moons and reminds me of more or less everyone I ever crossed the road to avoid back in 1987. She is the human embodiment of the decision to wear a fedora with a leather jacket whilst playing a trumpet in Camden Market. I'm sure she's a delightful person, but she makes me want to buy Whitesnake albums and eat the raw meat of something I've killed with my own bare hands.

Toddlers and Tiaras - This is another reality show in so much as that it comprises footage of stuff which actually happened, but in all other respects it's what Heironymous Bosch would be doing if he was alive now and working for whatever lame channel thought this shit was a good idea. Every week we meet a different group of psychotic morons and watch as they tart up their five year-old like a hooker and have her compete in alarming beauty pageants. I don't know if Gary Glitter is particularly a fan of this show, but I wouldn't be too surprised if that were the case.

Total Drama Island - Junior has watched some seriously headachey shit over the years, but this one makes most of them look like one of Harold Pinter's less eventful plays produced in a Trappist monastery. Total Drama Island is animated in that vague sort of animé Pink Panther style which seems very popular with the younger generation, and purports to be an animated reality show, sidestepping the point that the only saving grace of most reality television is its spontaneity. Total Drama Island works if you regard the word awesome as a viable humourous punchline regardless of the context, or you piss yourself laughing when something is described as swag, or when an observation is prefixed with the word hashtag, as though all human experience is one big Twitter feed. For the rest of us it's just screechy zero-ideas shite which doesn't need to exist, and it was probably written by a computer.

Trailer Park Boys - I saw one of these and can recall having received the impression of it being just the sort of thing I might like, but that was four years ago and I still haven't got around to watching a second episode. I guess that must tell you something.

Ugly Betty - As everybody in the universe knows, Ugly Betty began life as Yo Soy Betty, La Fea, a Colombian telenovela about a right old munter attempting to make it in the fashion biz, and the Salma Hayek version is just one of numerous regional variations. Less well known is that Yo Soy Betty, La Fea wasn't that amazing. At least I didn't think so, and assuming I was watching the Colombian one rather than some regional variation. It just looked like your average telenovela with endless scowling, leering, heavy breathing, heaving bosoms, dramatic exits, and not much in the way of chuckles - not that there's anything wrong with telenovelas, but Ugly Betty is significantly better, just as anyone who ever covered the Velvet Underground will logically improve upon the original.

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt - I didn't watch enough of this to be absolutely certain of how she qualifies as unbreakable, but I suspect it's probably her relentlessly perky disposition thrown into sharp contrast by life on the mean streets of the big city. It's a comedy written by Tina Fey, which probably tells you all you need to know. If you piss yourself laughing every time Tina Fey wrinkles her nose and pulls that I'm just a little bit quirky face, then this may well be the show for you. Personally I thought it was shite.

Uncle Grandpa - This is another Cartoon Network children's animation which tries far too hard to be weird, hence the name, and probably the fact that I can't remember the first thing about it beyond how entertained I wasn't. SpongeBob has a lot to answer for.

Waltons, The -  I know it's schmaltzy, wholesome enough to have someone's eye out, and features writing so heavy handed as to make your average episode of Scooby Doo resemble the work of Jorge Luis Borges, but Goddammit I loves me some Waltons, and so do you, unless you've got something wrong with you. Even my mother likes The Waltons. Sometimes you just have to swallow your pride and accept that nothing good ever came from attempts to reinvent the potato.

Weeds - Weeds was amazing up until they accidentally burnt the entire subdivision to the ground, forcing the cast to relocate to a house near the Mexican border whilst Nancy took a job in a shop which, by pure unlikely coincidence, housed one end of a tunnel leading to the home of some hunky cartel dude. I'm not sure how many series that was, but I think it was about three, and then it all turned to shit. It felt as though they were just throwing any old thing into the mix in the hope of something working - Nancy shags the cartel bloke then everyone else, Kevin Nealon finds a suitcase full of heroin at a circus and has to flog it all before the clown notices that his stash is missing, an alien saucer lands and they come in search of a truly mellow legal high blah blah blah... It just became hard to care after a while.

What Not to Wear - Clothes-horsey woman and a bloke bearing an unsettling resemblance to my wife's boss coax tattooed hoochie-mommas into not dressing like they're still fifteen and auditioning for an Insane Clown Posse video shoot. As makeover shows go, this one seems harmless and fairly watchable, I guess, if you like that sort of thing.

Wheel of Fortune - The host is a million years old and apparently a font of all sorts of horribly Republican opinions - according to the headline of something I didn't bother reading on facebook - but really, who gives a shit? It's a game show and it does it's job without shouting at you, and is as such significantly less headachey than Family Feud. It's also the closest America comes to Countdown, which I sort of miss, so that's nice too. My only real criticisms of Wheel of Fortune are that having the contestants engaged in continuous applause, even apparently applauding their own often unremarkable contributions, makes them seem a bit lobotomised; and secondly, those words and phrases. For those who have never seen it, Wheel asks contestants to pick letters and guess at a phrase or term denoted only by blank spaces on the quiz board with a clue given by categories such as around the house or sayings. The problem is that some of the categories just seem a bit ridiculous - things being one of the less helpful examples. Anxiety disorder, pearls before swine, and stegosaurus cheese alienation could all legitimately be regarded as things. In fact everything in the universe is a thing by some definition, so I don't really know why they bother with that aspect; and then we have clues leading to popular phrases such as people who dwell in glass houses shouldn't hurl stones or a rolling rock doesn't gather moss, or even living creatures like beautiful birds flying south. I know it's a petty grievance, but I really feel that whoever sets the puzzles needs to get their shit sorted out before the show ends up with contestants required to guess random sequences of letters, because that would be pointless.

Wire, The - The Wire was amazing, and it probably says something about me that I prefer television serials which aspire to be books, or rather to work in the same way as a good novel, as was a stated intention of this one. What it says about me is that I am a fully grown man. That's how I see it.

Year Without a Santa Claus, The - This is an animated children's thing from 1974 made by someone called Rankin-Bass. It seems to enjoy nearly legendary status over here, and yet I'd never heard of it. I guess maybe the English TV stations didn't buy everything America had for sale in the seventies after all. Anyway, I'm not actually sure what happens in this as I didn't see it all the way through, but it involves various reindeer and a character called the Heat Miser who has a dualistic counterpart in the form of the Snow Miser. Both of them sing their own big band numbers, which sound like they were written by the Foetus bloke. This was some seriously weird shit.