Butterfly Lions

I met my first Pekingese dog at some point during the seventies. We were living on Sweet Knowle Farm in rural Warwickshire and I must have been about five or six, maybe younger. We already had a couple of regular dogs - Keeper and Tina. Keeper was a black and white mongrel vaguely approximating something in the direction of a sheep dog whom my mother brought home as a stray whilst still living with her parents. Tina was a black, woolly poodle and she was blind, or was blind by the time I was old enough to form memories of such things. One or maybe both of these dogs were still around when the first Pekingese arrived. Some couple, friends of the family, were separating and needed to find homes for their dogs, an Alsatian and a Pekingese. We took the Pekingese. I recall entering the front room and looking across to see what resembled Dougal from The Magic Roundabout looking back at me from the sofa. I don't think I'd realised there could be such animals in the real world. I liked him immediately.

'This is Jolly,' my mother explained.

He was small, at least compared to regular dogs, with a flat face of dark bristles and big soulful eyes. He seemed like a hairier bulldog of some kind, but somehow more refined. He growled a little, and seemed initially wary of me, showing the whites of his eyes; but eventually he sniffed my hand and whatever objections he may have harboured seemed settled. Then inevitably I put my face too close to his and he bit me, because everyone has been bitten by a dog at some point as a child, usually a family pet leaving the mark that eventually prompts the question, what's that on your face? Now it was my turn, although I can't remember where Jolly bit me and he left no scar. Amazingly I was at least old enough to understand how it had been my fault and why there wasn't much point in getting angry with a dog who, after all, was in a strange place and had every right to be a bit jumpy.

He came with a pedigree, my mother explained, and his full name was Jolly Boy of Jancy - something like a secret identity, so it seemed to me. My dad occasionally referred to him as Jolly Bean because there was supposedly something of a resemblance to Judge Roy Bean, the nineteenth century Texan Justice of the Peace. Pekes are one of the oldest dog breeds in the world, and one branch of mythology attributes their genesis to what happens when a butterfly and a lion decide to make a go of it.

Perhaps because of it seeming like we had a canine celebrity in our midst, my mother began to take an interest in the breed, and in dog breeding in general. Through the pages of Our Dogs magazine we met a professional dog breeder resident at Shenstone Road, Edgbaston, Birmingham, a woman we knew as Queenie Mould. I dimly recall our driving to Birmingham to visit her. She was elderly with white hair and spectacles, but she seemed to like me and she laughed a lot. Our first visit was probably to buy a second Peke, a small female named Lucy, also known as Papanya Ni Sun although my spelling may be wrong. I surmise that I may have taken a shine to another of her dogs, a small, excitable female with a reddish coat, being as I vaguely remember feeling disgruntled that we weren't taking this other dog home with us; and I surmise that this was probably the first of at least two visits because I recall Queenie presenting me with a tin of Peek Freans biscuits and telling me that the small reddish dog with whom I had struck up a friendship had bought them for me - a sequence suggesting that the visit I recall amalgamates two separate trips. I had my doubts as to whether the dog had really purchased the biscuits, but I appreciated the thought nevertheless.

Lucy was small and cute, enough so to qualify as what is termed a sleeve dog after the oriental practice of carrying Pekes around in the voluminous sleeves of one's silken robe so as to keep your arms warm. Apparently she was also too small to have puppies, and the couple she birthed were born dead. Pansy, whose pedigree name I forget, came along a year or so later. She was a little more robust than Lucy with a silky reddish coat and somehow reminded me of Lieutenant Uhura from Star Trek - which was something to do with the look in her eye. Pansy had a ton of puppies, the father being Queenie's Mr. Redcoat of Kenghe, who was something of a celebrity in the Pekingese world and who had won numerous awards and fathered many, many children. This I found out only recently. At the time I may not even have been old enough to be aware of a father's role in the process of reproduction and may simply have assumed that lady dogs just kicked out a pile of puppies whenever the mood took them. Pansy managed seven, although one was born dead, another two didn't last very long, and a fourth made it to the end of the week. This left us with Bosie, Clunk and Enoch, here listed vaguely in order of size. Bosie - named after Oscar Wilde's very close friend - was a ball of grey fluff with giant paws and a beetle-browed face so black you could hardly make out his features; Clunk, presumably named after the glossolalia-prone aerialist inventor from Catch the Pigeon was like Bosie but smaller; and Enoch was the little black one with something to prove. He was also my favourite. I seem to recall him being named after Enoch Powell, which I think was something to do with my dad's sense of humour. Enoch Powell had spent a lot of time warning the public about people with black faces coming over here and taking our jobs. I don't think our family liked Enoch Powell very much, and my dad's record collection at least seemed to support this hypothesis. Bosie and Clunk were respectively also called Wimpstone Wind Song and Wimpstone Wind Chimes in reference to the village nearest to the farm on which we were living, although I'm not aware of either of them having been entered in dog shows.

Clunk and Enoch eventually went to hypothetically good homes, leaving us with just four, Keeper and Tina having long since departed to sniff celestial bottoms on the farm in the sky. My mother took Pansy to a couple of shows, but I don't think she won anything.

Pekes are small, but they're a handful when you have four of them, and taking them for walks was always an adventure. Gormless visitors occasionally stood bewildered and smiling, our garden gate held open as all four Pekes shot out, down the road and off into the fields, requiring that we chase after them. Their short legs and rolling gait made them easy to catch but it was still exhausting. Their short legs also made it difficult for them to get down stairs, so occasionally we came home to a worryingly empty house, see that the hall door was open and there would be four forlorn faces gazing down at us from the upstairs landing, all trapped and no lesson learned from the last time it happened.

Having grown up with Pekes, I still experience a thrill of excitement when I encounter one, and sometimes I remember my manners and talk to the owner as well, sharing certain details of the above by way of explanation. I still don't know what I think about dog shows or dog breeding, and Pekes are prone to respiratory problems and trouble with their eyes, but then the four I knew certainly seemed to live happy, healthy lives regardless of the received wisdom. Even looking at the photos of them now will occasionally bring a tear to my eye, because I grew up with them, and they made the sort of memories which tend to imprint quite deeply on childhood. It doesn't seem like they can really be gone, but I suppose the important thing is - as I've probably said before - that they were here at all, and I had the good fortune to be in the same picture.

On Being Ill in America

Amongst the initial differences I experienced when moving from England to Texas in 2011 was the food; not major differences, but small variations from what I knew. For a start, it's a great deal easier to eat out in San Antonio than it ever was in either London or Coventry. There seems a greater variety of places at which to eat, the average meal tends to be considerably cheaper, and the chances of finding anything genuinely disgusting on one's plate appears greatly reduced.

Shopping for ingredients with which to cook for my wife and myself is also a quite different experience. I'd been told that you simply can't get decent cheese or bread in the United States - to name but two from the list - which isn't strictly true. It's more the case that it's easier to buy tasteless cheese or unpleasantly sweet, mushy bread over here than it was in England, so I take care and shop around; and it's probably worth noting that here in San Antonio I am able to buy a wide range of weird and wonderful Mexican cheeses, none of which I could ever find in London, not even in the most balls-achingly pretentious delicatessens of East Dulwich. I also have to be careful about what milk I buy, because I find that the ubiquitous Oak Farms brand tastes like ass in both tea and coffee.

True to the received wisdom, there are indeed some things I simply can't get without a serious headache, or in a few cases, at all. Lamb is unpopular here for some reason, and the few stores carrying liver paté only seem to carry a fairly unpleasant brand, prompting me to make my own. I've found a place which sells Argentinian black puddings, which are delicious, although my wife views them with extreme suspicion so they have become a rare treat because when I cook, I tend to cook for the both of us.

I've acclimatised to the bacon, which is uniformly streaky. Ordering what was described as an English-style fried breakfast in a local theme pub, I was so surprised to be served what I would term proper bacon that I had the waitress ask the chef about his supplier. It turned out that he had it shipped from North Carolina.

Marmite is freely available, if a bit pricey, although I'm one of those people who quite likes Marmite, despite the mythology. I can take it or leave it, so its availability or otherwise has never troubled me. Pork pies are unknown, and the closest I've come to getting my hands on one has been with an online supplier who would have charged me a few dollars for the pie, but asked for something in the region of $70 shipping - which would be eccentric for something which I eat on average once a year. Then there's fish and chips, but we have a fast-food chain called Long John Silver's which gets it close enough for me to not care about the minor details, paradoxically meaning it's actually a little easier to get decent fish and chips in San Antonio than in London. I miss steak and kidney pie, and will probably have to get around to making my own at some point; and I occasionally crave a proper doner kebab served in pita bread and newspaper with a half pint of chili sauce dribbled across by a bloke who speaks English fine but doesn't feel like doing so, and is probably going to thump the next drunken arsehole who calls him Stavros.

So, there is the minor inconvenience of a few items I can't get or can only get with some difficulty, balanced against all of that which is available here but which I would be unable to find in England - decent Mexican restaurants, Jim's diner, chicken fried steak, and so on and so forth; but it's a minor inconvenience and only a fucking idiot would move to a different country with an expectation of everything being exactly the same as it was in the one he's just left.

There is a purported truism of the American diet being generally overly reliant on salt, sugar, fat, and everything that's bad for you; and that this explains why everyone in America is fat, and they all carry guns, and they all believe that the Earth is only six-hundred years old and that the capital city of France is Poland or one of those places, and they're all in the Klu Klux Klan, even the black people and the Mexicans...

Being as I had no plans to base my diet around the nearest branch of McDonalds - a chain which has a much lower profile over here than English people seem to realise, possibly due to the stiff competition of rival chains serving meals which more closely resemble actual food - and as I never intended to sit on my arse watching Jerry Springer for ten hours a day, I assumed this wouldn't be a problem; and it hasn't been a problem. I've filled out a little, but then I'm nearly fifty and I no longer smoke, so it would be stranger had I remained the same size. Nevertheless, I've had some sort of trouble with indigestion over the last couple of years, something which comes and goes, which hasn't been so bad as to keep me awake at night but which has left me tired and uncomfortable some mornings. The condition was so infrequent that I assumed it to be just one of those things, something unidentified which had disagreed with me as can happen from time to time. Occasionally the discomfort was with me almost every morning for a couple of weeks running, but still nothing so definite as to inspire concern; and even more occasionally I would worry that I simply wasn't built to digest American food or that I was developing some sort of allergy.

Finally, a couple of Saturdays ago, whatever it was came back with such force as to make me doubt it could really be anything so innocuous as an undigested taco. It wasn't quite pain, but it was certainly unpleasant. Now beginning to worry, my wife went out to pick up Pepto-Bismol from Walgreens predicated on the idea of my simply having terrible indigestion. I sat at the computer, looking at pictures of cats on facebook as I awaited her return. After about thirty minutes, beginning to wonder where she had got to, I stood and realised that I couldn't stand because I was now in serious and unambiguous pain, and I knew that I could no longer put off taking whatever I had to the doctor.

Had I still been living in England, I would almost certainly have wandered down the road to the medical centre to get myself checked out some time before, but the process appeared less straightforward in America and I'd been hoping to avoid it.

The popular model of England as home to a wonderful free health service whilst Americans have to pay for everything isn't quite true, or at least it's a gross oversimplification. For example, in England I was unable to get free dental treatment through the NHS, and lacking either health insurance or a means of paying for the sort of treatment I needed, I was pretty much screwed until I came here; and I've experienced fairly shabby treatment at the hands of the NHS in respect to other medical problems. None of this has really been the fault of the NHS, or of socialism - as some of my more moronic adopted countrymen would have it, apparently without feeling any strong need to actually understand what the fuck they're talking about. Rather it is directly the fault of those forces which would prefer that healthcare in the United Kingdom were more like the American system. Cutting funding and thus disabling the system whilst pointing out that the system is disabled and therefore needs to be scrapped in favour of something else is the act of someone who shouldn't be left alone in charge of a pan of hot water, let alone be allowed near any sort of office; but that's politicians for you, and it's not like they're any better over this side of the pond.

Contrary to received wisdom, if you happen to come a cropper in America, there are places you can go without having to worry about the expense or health insurance, namely the military hospitals. I had been told these are places you would not wish to find yourself in the event of an emergency, waiting rooms creaking with coughing and spluttering characters from a New Yorker cartoon patiently waiting for somebody to come along and sew a severed head back in place, impromptu surgery performed with rusty cutlery in the corridor and so on; but Bess and I visited her late father in a military hospital after his last stroke. Regrettably he didn't come back from this one, which has been tough all around, but it was pretty clear that the medical staff did everything within their power, and there was no obvious evidence of underfunding, lack of training, or anyone being overworked. The place appeared clean, efficient, and conspicuously lacking anything I'd been led to expect from the aforementioned horror stories. If anything, the military hospital made King's College  back in Camberwell seem decidedly ropey by comparison, which I suppose might be due to its military credentials, that being one aspect of American social infrastructure which never seems to experience any trouble with funding.

In any case, I'm covered by the health insurance which comes with my wife's job, or at least I'm mostly covered. Thus far I've only had to whip out the magic insurance card for dental treatment, some of which has been pretty expensive. Health insurance covers most of the costs, or in certain cases will meet you half way depending on various esoteric stipulations; so while I haven't necessarily had grounds to live in fear of a huge bill should it turn out that my arse is about to undergo gravitational collapse, it has tended to encourage discretion, meaning you visit the doctor only when it's pretty certain that ibuprofen and a nap isn't going to help.

Something is throbbing in my lower gut. It is painful and obviously sufficiently so to justify medical attention. I call Bess, getting through after the usual round of swearing at the phone, my wife's messaging system, and the button which somehow served to turn the fucking thing off because the battery was low whilst I was trying to get to the text message function, which is apparently how these things work. Eventually I get through, and at least save my wife the cost of a bottle of Pepto-Bismol. She is home within minutes and rushes me to the emergency clinic on Broadway.

I sit groaning in the waiting room clutching my stomach for a couple of minutes, taking care to sit in such a way as to avoid exposing myself to other patients. I'm still in my dressing gown. I had been in too much pain to face the suddenly gargantuan task of dressing myself. My wife fills in the forms, copying down numbers from my insurance, social security, and green cards whilst I distract myself with People magazine, reading up on the royal family and Kim Kardashian's stepfather who is, I suppose, now Kim Kardashian's  stepmother.

We are ushered into a cubicle by a nurse who asks, 'what seems to be the problem?'

'It began about two years ago,' I begin, describing a career of suspected  poor digestion, eventually swinging around to the statistics of the pain. I hear myself embarking upon a detailed monologue describing that morning's bowel movement, and how it hadn't really seemed to represent anything out of the ordinary.

'He has stomach pains,' my wife interjects.

The nurse chuckles, a little embarrassed, still writing on her clipboard, and I realise this was all she had really needed to hear. Through the haze of my discomfort I have effected full transformation into Mrs. Brady, Old Lady from Viz comic. It's me back body, doctor. I've been getting dizzy spells when I pass water ever since 1947, and as for me number twos - oh my goodness...

We wait another minute and the doctor arrives, an amiable man who begins to prod my stomach, seeking to locate the source of the pain. 'So where are you from?'

It always strikes me as a peculiar question, but apparently the Texan ear has difficulty distinguishing between English and Australian accents to the point that I've had conversations in which people have made references to tinnies and down under before I've set them straight. 'I'm from England,' I tell him.

'Whereabouts in England?'

'London,' I say, because as a default point of origin its easier than listing the places I lived prior to London. Sometimes I'll say Stratford-upon-Avon because that was the nearest large town to where I lived when I was growing up, and everyone has heard of Stratford-upon-Avon.

'So you're in some pain here?'

'Yes.'

'So painful you couldn't put on a pair of pants?' He seems amused by this, the fact that I have arrived in just a dressing gown and slippers.

'It's because I'm English, and we're related to the Scots, and you know that whole thing with the kilt...'

He laughs, then tells me that I almost certainly have something called diverticulitis. The pain is in the wrong place for it to be anything else, and my urine sample shows no evidence of kidney stones. Diverticulitis is the infection and inflammation of small pockets which develop in the wall of the intestine as a matter of course in later life. The problem is usually brought on by tiny particles of food becoming trapped within these pockets, and my doctor lists sesame seeds, broccoli, and - oddly I think - Brussels sprouts as the most common culprits. The previous evening Bess and I each had a burger at Jim's, and the buns were of course covered in sesame seeds. The evening before that I had prepared salmon with broccoli, and on Wednesday it had been a roast dinner including Brussels sprouts. I've ticked all the boxes.

I have a prescription for antibiotics and codeine, and before I leave am given a preliminary injection of a painkiller. I am specifically given the injection in the arse, which is a first for me. I'm not sure I even realised it was a thing, something occurring outside of sixties comedy films in which Kenneth William bends over and pulls that face whilst Hattie Jaques stands behind with a cruel smile and a hypodermic syringe the size of a bicycle pump.

For three days I'm on a diet of clear liquids only, meaning just iced tea and broth. It's a bit boring, but the pain has gone and in any case my appetite is greatly reduced. This is followed with a month on a low-fibre diet, meaning no seeds, broccoli, or Brussels sprouts, and I'm going to have to peel potatoes before I cook them. This will be followed with the resumption of a high-fibre diet which will apparently somehow, cure the condition. It's awkward, but not as awkward as a nut allergy would have been, or any of the other conditions I've worried over these past couple of years. I speak to my mother on the phone and it turns out that both she and her father before her have suffered from diverticulitis. There was probably a certain degree of inevitability to my getting it too. I'm just glad it was nothing worse.

Obama

It is August 2011 and I've been in the United States a couple of months; and I've also got married and become stepfather to a nine-year old boy in that time. Everything is different to anything to which I am accustomed, and on occasion it feels like I'm living on a different planet. At this precise moment, having only just woken up, my most immediate concern is that the bedside table is just a little too far away from the bed. This concerns me because it means that nothing on the bedside table - alarm clock, reading glasses, earplugs, glass of tea, crappy science-fiction novel - is quite within comfortable reach, and it also concerns me because whilst I know this to be a problem which would take less than a minute to solve, I know this to be precisely the sort of problem I will never get around to addressing. My personality has doomed me to suffer the yawning gulf between bed and bedside table for at least as long as my wife and I remain in this house.

I reach out and miss, as usual, and there follows the sound of something hard hitting the floor. Cursing, I rise from the bed and pick up my wristwatch. I look at the time. The watch has stopped.

Shit.

The watch was a present from my mother, something connecting me to the world as it was before K1 visas and wild leaps in the dark. There is something horribly symbolic about this, and from this point on each time I think about my watch falling to the hard wooden floor, I will think of it in unnecessarily dramatic terms borrowed from the fourth volume of Watchmen by Dave Gibbons and Alan Moore - swarms of tiny broken cogs and springs cast cinematically to the floor; and the djinn refusing to return to its oil lamp, Pandora's futile efforts to cram all that crap back into the box, or the man in the child's joke crying with laughter as he tells me I should have seen the monkey trying to put the cork back in.

I feel terrible.

'Take it to Walmart,' my wife tells me. 'It's probably just the battery.'

I consider asking how likely it would be that the battery just happened to run out of juice as I dropped the thing, but I say nothing because it's hardly her fault; and I suppose it might be worth a try.

A few hours later I am in Walmart at the jewellery counter. I have explained to the girl what happened, although she doesn't seem that interested. Either she is confused by my accent, or I've given her  more information than she needed. She pops off the back and prises the battery free from its housing, and meanwhile there is now someone here who isn't at all confused by my accent.

'Why you must be from England!'

A jovial older woman who walks as though there's something wrong with her leg grins at me. It is the grin of someone generally addressed as Mawmaw as she calls ranch hands in for their supper, a nourishing stew with chitlins and grits and vittles, whatever those may be.

I smile an encouraging smile, because although I have a feeling I'm about to experience that conversation yet again, it's difficult to take ill against someone who seems so clearly delighted by one's presence.

'Yes, I am from England.'

She asks which part. I tell her Stratford-upon-Avon because she will almost certainly have heard of the place and it seems more likely to facilitate conversation. I spent the first two decades of my life within ten miles of Shakespeare's birthplace, but lived in London longer, and concluded with a couple of years in Coventry before moving to the United States. I think of myself as being from London, but it seems best to give a simple, populist answer.

She asks how I like Texas, clearly expecting cute complaints about being unable to find a pub that serves Marmite or uncertainty as to whether my prayer mat is correctly orientated towards Buckingham Palace. I tell her that I like Texas very much, because I do. I find the people generally a little more pleasant than the English, and the weather is less depressing.

'Well,' she chortles, apparently taken aback, 'it's a fine country, I guess.' The tone of her voice becomes conspiratorial. 'It'll be an even finer one when we get rid of that damned Obama!'

I find myself shocked by this, not quite so much the sentiment as the thematic thrust of the sentence, clearly a revision of that damned nigger! I'm suddenly annoyed by the presence of this idiot, and annoyed with myself for having failed to recognise her as such. It's the assumption that I find aggravating, the assumption of our all being in agreement regarding that damned ni—that damned Obama and our supposed desire to be rid of him.

I glance over at the girl behind the counter, still fiddling with my watch. She is black. She can't really have misread the situation, somehow believing I might know this woman, but she has no way of knowing whether I too wish to be rid of that damned ni—that damned Obama. Then again, maybe she didn't hear; or maybe she too wants rid of that damned ni—that damned Obama; or maybe she doesn't care.

It doesn't make a great deal of difference to me in the sense that I'm not eligible to vote, but generally speaking, I like Obama. For one, he's the first black president of a country which still had widespread racial segregation laws as recent as 1964; so his election seems indicative of something positive to me, regardless of whatever else the man may have done. Of course there are those who would probably describe this as an inverse form of racism, typical of a wet lefty liberal tofu-scoffing PC thug commie apologist like myself, but such persons - at least in my unfortunate experience - also tend to spout crap about white heterosexual males being the last minority which it is still apparently okay to oppress, so their testimony is really worth no more than that of a sophisticated mobile telephone.

I don't follow politics inordinately closely because I find the small print fairly dull and almost always unpleasant, but nevertheless I fail to see why anyone would object strongly to Obama on grounds other than that he's American - if you're from somewhere else and dislike America as an institution - or because he occasionally gives the appearance of favouring regular people over people with more money than they need, in the event of that not being your scene. I expressed this admittedly casual support by sharing a pro-Obama campaign meme on facebook during the last Presidential election. Inevitably an English person I don't actually know responded with a sneering well, what about the tent cities?

I replied with a dismissive and hopefully annoying sure, because I wasn't interested in an argument, and particularly not one fought in the name of point scoring as indicated by an opening salvo equivalent to I suppose you think it's good that tiny babies are being roasted alive? I suppose you think that's a good thing, do you? Perhaps I am indeed an over-privileged and uninformed moron on the grounds that I don't spend twenty-five hours a day quivering with indignation, but the bottom line was that I would prefer to live in a country governed by Obama than a country governed by a man who believes the Earth to be only six-thousand years old, or who is at least popular amongst those who believe the Earth to be only six-thousand years old, and for reasons that really should be obvious. I nevertheless regard the majority of politicians to be essentially corrupt, so it struck me in this case as patronising to assume that my support equated to blind adoration; but of course, that's the internet for you.

In any case, those who dislike Obama probably need to cheer up a little given that there's so many of them. Obama is referred to as the worst president we ever had by some, even as a dictator by those who apparently can't tell the difference between concentration camps, news blackouts, and a politician saying things you don't like whilst raising certain taxes. National Enquirer regularly plasters a haplessly grinning Barack across its front cover, explaining how once again he's been caught having a sneaky peek at someone's tits and the Obama marriage is in ruins, and what we really need to do is to tie weights to his feet and drop him in the sea, and then at last we will be free... free, I tell you... ha ha ha...

It was the same with Tony Blair, I suppose. I don't know anyone who didn't spend the day punching the air when it was announced that he had become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, ending what felt like four-hundred years of Conservative government; but was anyone really under any illusion that he wouldn't ultimately turn out to be just another shiny-faced three-timing insurance salesman? That's what politicians do; and despite his apparently being the most evil man who ever lived, I still think Obama is probably okay in context of the menu as a whole.

I didn't say any of this to the woman in Walmart for the same reason that I didn't bother responding to Mr. what about the tent cities? Happily she had already moved away, chuckling to herself and probably composing some anecdote about the British guy at the store by which to entertain the ranch hands as they tucked into their stew and chitlins and grits and vittles.

I like Obama, personally, I imagined myself saying to the girl behind the counter in an effort to disassociate myself from the woman, but thankfully I had the sense to keep my mouth shut, given that such a defence would only continue the cycle of assuming stupid shit about complete strangers. Hey, great - you know I really love the music of Bob Marley!

She handed back my watch. 'It was the battery. I put in a new one for you.'

I looked. The second hand was moving again.

It seemed like an incredible thing.

The world was set to right.

Englishness in Texas

I often wear a Stetson. Explanations for this millinerial choice posited by those of my friends who have neither lived in Texas nor ever worn a Stetson tend to vary, including my going native, irony, and it being a knowing wink to an episode of Doctor Who in which Matt Smith wears just such a hat, despite my strong dislike of the show in question. In actual fact I've been wearing hats quite similar to the Stetson at least since 1999 when I first travelled to Mexico and discovered it to be a good means of keeping my distinctly pale face from burning in the hot sun as I dislike having to apply sun-cream. In addition, such headgear also provides good cover during showers of rain, and has proven useful as a means of pooling coins, keys, and other metal objects when travelling through airport security; and it really is that simple.

I purchased my current Stetson at a branch of Cavender's Boot City, a chain of warehouse capacity stores specialising in western wear, as they call it. I guess my friend Dave probably wandered into a branch of Cavender's when he came to Texas in November. Dave was a tutor on the art foundation course I took at the Mid Warwickshire College of Further education back in England in the 1980s, just after I had left school. He and his wife had come to America, and had hired a car so as to tour a number of the western states over a period of a few months. Texas was their final port of call, so my wife and I took them to our favourite Jim's diner for chicken fried steak.

'There was this store,' Dave explained to us as though bringing back his report from the new world, 'and there were hats and boots as far as the eye could see, just hats and boots and nothing else.'

It had made an impression on him, as had the real live cowboy he'd met in New Mexico a few weeks earlier. As we ate, he described these wonders, and we couldn't work out whether it had occurred to him that, living here, we found neither cowboys nor their apparel out of the ordinary. We guessed that he was most likely setting his thoughts to order, thinking aloud, a hypothesis supported by some of these selfsame thoughts later cohering as Boots On The Ground, the blog he'd been keeping as documentation of his trip across America. I am referenced in Boots On The Ground as the Englishman in Texas, presumably to preserve my anonymity when Dave asks so who is this particular Englishman, with his self-styled moniker and blog of the same name? He attempts to answer the question by explaining that even after two years exposure to American life in San Antonio, he remains resolutely unaffected, having neither adopted any accent or phrases nor shaken off a predisposition towards serving tea as his afternoon beverage of choice!

The most puzzling thing for me was that I didn't really recognise myself from any of this. An Englishman in Texas was picked without much serious consideration as a reasonably descriptive title which might negate the requirement of at least some explanation. It was never a mission statement, nor an intentional reference to any song by that bloke from the Police; and the tea in question was brewed in a teapot I had purchased only a month earlier in Boerne, a town some thirty miles north-west of San Antonio. It was the second time I had used the teapot and I haven't used it since because I prefer coffee.

Nevertheless, a certain impression was either given by myself or taken by my visitor, and one that puzzles me a little. Complete strangers and even members of my extended family occasionally try to engage me in conversation about what is going on with the English royal family, or they will refer to some old country event so newsworthy as to have crossed the ocean perhaps believing I might be personally acquainted with those affected. At least one person, fully cognizant with the fact and duration of my marriage, asked how I was enjoying my stay in Texas, like being here is just a phase I'm going through. Others have launched into bewildering Dickensian caricatures in my presence as though I too am quietly amused by my own nationality. It becomes exhausting.

'Still black, I see,' I might say to our African-American mailman. 'I'm glad that's working out for you. Keep it up!'

No less exhausting was an encounter in an antique shop in the previously mentioned Cotswold town of Boerne. It isn't actually a Cotswold town, although I tend to regard it as such for its being one of a number which remind me a little of that region of England on the Gloucestershire-Oxfordshire border. Boerne was built from limestone in the nineteenth century by German settlers and does not resemble the typical American town as commonly seen on television; and the shop wasn't exactly an antique shop in the sense of selling antiques. I was on the look out for Christmas presents, and was considering an old ceramic teapot with a human face and the characteristics of a lemon, presumably made so as to appeal to fans of lemon tea. It had put me in mind of the ceramic pots collected by my father, pots combining human facial features with assorted vegetable characteristics and intended to store piccalilli, chutney, horseradish and so on. The price seemed reasonable and I had told the proprietor I would think it over and perhaps return, and so my wife and I continued to browse in the other shops along Main Street.

As we reached the end of the block, we entered another shop. A woman in her early fifties - I guessed - with long red hair was sat behind the counter, speaking to someone on the phone as a compact disc of The Smiths played in the background. We looked around the clutter of the store and, seeing little that immediately caught our eyes, went into the room at the back.

'Does she sound English to you?' I asked Bess.

We both listened, but neither of us could quite place the proprietor's accent beyond that it was clearly not American. We browsed further and the phone call came to an end.

'I'm sure she's from England,' I said.

'Go and ask.'

'I don't like to.' I didn't know why, but it struck me as a thin premise upon which to open a conversation. I was curious, but not actively interested.

My wife gave me a prod, possibly inspired by her occasional fear that deprived of the company of countrymen, I might pine and whither away to nothing, requiring a restorative course of Marmite and warm beer. 'Go and ask her if she's from England.'

I knew it would bug me if I didn't find out, so I shuffled up to the counter, half-wishing we hadn't entered the store. The woman wore orange lipstick and green eyeshadow which I found unsettling. Her appearance spoke of someone who clearly regarded themselves as a bit of a character.

'Excuse me, I hope you don't mind my asking but' - I hated myself for falling into the usual bumbling Hugh Grantisms - 'are you from England. It's just that I noticed your accent—'

'I am indeed,' she grinned. 'And so are you!'

She explained that she was from Manchester with the inflection of someone who clearly regarded themselves as a bit of a character, and I wished I hadn't asked. There is a specific brand of regional pride found in certain persons from the north of England I have never quite warmed to, a peculiar inverted snobbery based on the bumptious proposition of their being collectively more down to earth than anyone else, whatever the hell that is supposed to mean. It seemed like this woman subscribed to this view, telling me how she had been in Texas for two decades and yet still never missed an episode of Coronation Street, a long running soap opera set in Manchester. I couldn't actually remember when I'd last seen Coronation Street, but it was probably not much later than 1985.

'So are you a City supporter or do you prefer the scum?' she asked. It took me a moment to unscramble the question as referring to my preference for either Manchester City or Manchester United football teams.

'Well, I don't really—'

'Who do you support then?'

I could have said either Gillingham or Millwall on the grounds of these being teams to which I will admit a minor degree of loyalty through mainly geographical and social associations without ever having felt the need to attend a match, but it didn't really seem like a conversation worth having. 'Well, I'm really not so big on football—'

'You like rugby then? Or is it the cricket?'

I indicated the dusty stereo system behind the counter. 'Is that the Smiths you're listening to?'

'Aye.' She seemed pleased. 'You like the Smiths, do you?'

Whilst I would agree the band had recorded some great songs, I've generally come to regard them as an overrated institution, but again it didn't really seem like a conversation I wanted to get into. 'So have you read Morrissey's autobiography?,' I asked, steering the subject like a canoe over the rapids.

The story of the former Smiths' vocalist's life had just been published by Penguin back in England, so this seemed a safe conversational gambit, at least equivalent to discussing the weather.

'I've got it on order. I can't wait.' She grinned and then nodded her head to emphasise some point or other. 'I love Mozzer, me.'

I shuddered inwardly at hearing the nickname, the use of which denotes the true fan, specifically the true fan of a man who had in my view come to epitomise the most parochial aspects of English culture. For all that Reel Around The Fountain was but one of many cracking tunes, this is the man who wrote crap like Bengali in Platforms and America Is Not the World, a song carrying the startling proposition that the United States is a land of fat people who eat hamburgers.

'So have you read it?' she asked.

'Not yet.'

I glanced at my wife, a silent plea as I pointedly orientated myself towards the door; but Bess seemed genuinely interested, apparently believing I'd found a kindred spirit; and so we listened as the woman expanded upon the theme of herself as a bit of a character, turning to those subjects to which English people always turn when their paths cross in foreign lands. As I listened it occurred to me that of all the things of the old country my kind are supposed to miss, there are very few which I miss at all. Furthermore, I don't understand why anyone would come to live here if they're going to spend the rest of their lives pining after sausages in batter or The One Show. I don't understand why anyone would wish to live in a distant land if they weren't going to bother engaging with it, and preferably on its terms rather than those they've brought with them.

We left the store, stepping quickly through a hole in the conversation, and crossed the road. I had decided that I would return to the first shop and buy the strange lemon teapot with the human face, but first we dived quickly into a third antique emporium, this one thankfully run by a Texan from whom I purchased a teapot for myself, a more traditional kind with a plain brown glaze from which I would serve tea to my two English visitors in but a few weeks time.