Another Funeral

We are standing in a field in Texas, about fifteen of us gathered around two holes recently dug in the ground. There's a priest reading out something approximately Biblical, although under the circumstances it feels as though I should probably refer to him as a preacher man.

I met Daniel, my wife's father, on only two occasions, neither of them particularly happy. The first was at Lena's Quinceañera. He'd recently recovered from a stroke and was having difficulties, one of which was with recognising his own daughter, so there didn't seem to be much point trying to explain who I was. I briefly spoke to Charlotte, his wife and the mother of the two children who aren't Bess, and we left it at that. Our second meeting was at the veterans' hospital. He'd had another stroke and was in a coma, following which, that was pretty much that.

His funeral was mostly people I didn't know. He'd separated from Bess's mother a long time ago, back when my wife was still in her infancy, and the two of them had since maintained a loose familial connection mainly because Bess made the effort. He'd lived a separate life. Charlotte, who went the previous year, was the daughter of Kenneth Cash - a cousin of Johnny Cash, whose name should require no introduction. Half of those attending the funeral bore a striking resemblance to the famed country singer, the hawkish nose, the eagle eyes and sweep of raven hair. It was difficult to miss.

That was 2015, and now here we are stood in a field in Texas doing it all over again in 2019. Both Daniel and Charlotte's ashes were kept at the home of their daughter, Bess's half sister, Christina; and when a third urn of familial ashes came along, it seemed like time to think about burial.

Catholicism is a mostly foreign country to me, but I'm told that what happens with post-mortem remains is informed by the belief that the departed will eventually be resurrected on the day of judgement, so there should probably be something physical left to resurrect, and if couples can be kept together, that will also save a lot of time and trouble in the long run. This is what I've been told, and my own thoughts on the subject are neither here nor there. So four years after the first funeral, we're having a second one, this time concluding with a burial.

Daniel's brothers are both present, which is nice because Johnny is one of the few people I've met on this side of the pond whom I would unreservedly describe as sane. You can have a conversation with Johnny and be fairly certain that it won't go anywhere stupid, weird or pointless, and I'm beginning to appreciate this as a rare commodity. We really don't see enough of Johnny.

Here we stand in a field in Texas. The urns are lowered into the ground, and then various members of the congregation - I suppose we're a congregation - are invited to take up the spade and add the initial servings of crumbling orange soil. I decline on the grounds that my contribution would feel inappropriate, at least to me. Johnny and Carl both step forward and take turns. I look around at Charlotte's people and recognise only her brother, six foot at least, skinny as a rake with his hair flowing and white. Charlotte's sister passed a few years back, so it's just him now.

To my eyes, he very much belongs in this landscape. I suppose, eventually, we all will.

Tonight I'm Gonna Party Like It's 1989

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes, I'm from England.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fuck it.

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

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

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

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

Never mind.

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

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

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

Doesn't everyone?

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

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

I fit right in.

Millennium

I spent the first thirty-five years of my life furtively sidling towards the year 2000, running from one bush to another with a bit of twig held above my head like an inept spy in a Spike Milligan drawing. It was difficult to deny the symbolism of the numbers, much as I knew it was ridiculous. Way back in 1977, during my final months of junior school, Paul Moorman had told me that the world would end in 1980. This, he explained, had been predicted by someone called Old Mother Shipton, and she was usually right about such things. I spent the next three years doing my best to not think about it, knowing that it was almost certainly going to happen exactly as predicted. The numbers alone seemed to support Paul's hypothesis - the eerily tidy 1980 rather than the somewhat messier 1979 or the incomprehensible 1981 on either side.

Ultimately, this has taught me to avoid placing too much stock in numbers or dates on the grounds of their appearing pleasantly or even uncannily rounded in the fairly arbitrary context of the decimal system. Even so, it was difficult to avoid feeling something about the approach of the year 2000. As a child I had regularly read a science-fiction comic called 2000AD, so named as to evoke what then seemed like a distant and culturally remote future. The same deadline had generally been recognised as signifying the point at which everything would be different to the present day, and this had been the standard in films, books, and television for a long time, most of the twentieth century, and certainly the years during which I grew up. Tomorrow's World would wheel an unconvincing and glacially slow domestic help robot around the television studio - always a disappointment after the robots of Star Wars or Doctor Who - and James Burke would look to the viewer and explain this is how we will live come the year 2000.

Even as we counted down, as the future approached and we began to realise that it would probably look at least a little like what had become the present, the numbers had taken on too much meaning to be ignored. Millenarian cults popped up left, right, and centre proclaiming that it would be the end of the world, civilisation, or both, or that the spaceship was coming to take us all to Heaven - all the usual bollocks which comes around whenever someone who isn't very bright starts taking their mathematics far too seriously. On a seemingly more tangible note there was the Millennium Bug by which everything containing a microchip would reset itself to the year 1900, Robert Gascoyne-Cecil would return to office as Prime Minister, and everyone would be thoroughly pissed off with nothing but coverage of the Boer War on telly. I asked my friend Andrew if it was serious. He worked in the city as a programmer for Cazenove, and he seemed to know about such things. He didn't really know about this one, he told me, but said it seemed significant just how much money his superiors were throwing at people brought in to solve millennial problems before they happened.

My friend Tim was meanwhile laying an egg, although thankfully he was laying an egg a hundred or so miles away, thus at least affording me the possibility of hanging up and blaming it on a bad line when I'd heard enough. He had a computer and as usual had imagined himself to number amongst an elite group of five or six individuals distinguished in this way; he became an expert, finding it difficult to conceive of anyone else having experience equal to or even greater than his own, because at the root of it all he really needed to feel important, to be someone other than the lonely boatsman with just one oar rowing himself around in a circle on his own social and cultural oxbow lake. He'd probably read an article about the Millennium Bug in the Daily Express, something which had impressed him at least as much as Paul Moorman's testimony had initially impressed me.

'Anything could happen, Lawrence. It will be a free for all for computer viruses and all the computers will think it's the year 1900. You should be careful what you download, you mark my words.'

I had been using a PC for about three years. At the time I had not yet found good reason to hook it up to the internet, and so I was using it purely as a word processor.

'I can't see it happening. I'm not actually online.'

'You don't know, Lawrence. Some of the viruses that are around these days are incredible.'

Maybe they were. Maybe they were so incredible that they could now build themselves physical bodies with which to perform home visits on people with isolated computers and no internet access. Tim seemed to know more about it than I did.

I thought about it and decided the worst that could probably happen would be a temporary loss of either gas or electricity, maybe some disruption to the phone system. In any case, there didn't seem to be a lot I could do, aside from follow Tim's expert advice and buy the most expensive antivirus software I could find for a computer with no actual internet connection. There didn't seem much point in worrying.

Since moving to Lordship Lane in 1995, I'd generally spent New Year's Eve with my friend Eddy. We often seemed to be the only two of our social group who never had anything planned, and so would generally end up in a pub on the south bank of the Thames, followed by watching the fireworks across the river as December switched over to January of the new year. Sometimes there would be a few more of us, Neil and Rachel or Carl and Christine; sometimes it would be fun, or sometimes it would be pissing with rain as we stood shivering amongst assorted Time Out readers trying their hardest to have an experience that would justify paying a million quid every three days to rent a glass cube just past the Victoria Bridge. I nearly always enjoyed the pub, but could never quite work out what I was supposed to get from the postscript with all the explosions and cheering. It being 1999, everyone I knew had planned in advance, Eddy included for once, paying tickets for ringside seats at this or that spectacle. Of course everyone knew that 2001 would be the first true year of the new millennium, but please...

It being 1999, I had at last found something resembling a calling, specifically something geographically orientated in the direction of central Mexico. I'd been gripped by Mexica and Pre-Colombian culture since just before I'd moved to Lordship Lane, and had spent five years reading up on the subject. In May, 1996 I'd dug out a bag of acrylic paints which had lain more or less untouched since the end of the eighties - when a really lousy portrait of the poet and author Bill Lewis had convinced me that painting just wasn't my medium - and I began painting images of Mexican Gods and Goddesses. I wasn't entirely sure what I was doing or why, but the composition of each painting gave me a point of focus around which to base my reading. I told myself I was putting a book together, twenty-six paintings of Mexican Gods with a lengthy written piece on each; but I couldn't quite condense the pantheon as I understood it into twenty-six individuals, so it became fifty-two, then finally 104 - these all being theologically significant numbers in the Mexican triskaidecimal system which uses thirteen rather than ten as a base. My painting ability was ropey, but I had decided I could teach myself and fake the rest, and never mind if one or two of them ended up looking a little like X-Men fan art. I was still technically a better painter than Rene Magritte, I told myself.

It seems an absurd undertaking given that some paintings took days or even weeks to complete, but by 31st December 1999 I was working on a representation of Ixpuztec, or Broken Face, a minor Death God. It was sequentially the ninety-eighth painting I had done in the series, and as part of a larger undertaking for which I still had only approximate plans.

As evening drew in on the very last day of what the great majority of people, rightly or wrongly, regarded as the twentieth century, I was perched on my couch with a board on my knee working at a painting. The television was on in the background, and the gas fire was almost certainly turned to its highest setting. My figure work had never been what you would call outstanding, but for once it was looking okay to me, shortfalls compensated by tricks picked up from all those years reading superhero comics. The sky was drawn from a painting by Czech artist Zdeněk Burian which I had known since childhood from a book called Life before Man. I suppose the composition was all a bit cobbled together, but it felt as though I was at least doing something vaguely meaningful, in the context of having spent most of my thirty-five years producing art which aspired only to the appearance of meaning.

It was five minutes to midnight. I set down my board, picked up my glass of tequila and orange, rolled myself a cigarette and went outside. Lordship Lane slopes downhill just past where I lived, meaning that I was stood upon a slight rise looking north towards the River Thames and the newly constructed London Eye, just visible and all lit up on the skyline. I recall the comet Hale-Boppe as a vivid splash of milk in the heavens to the north-east, but according to Wikipedia that would have been a couple of years earlier. I sipped my tequila and smoked my fag, and thought about the twentieth century as the sky filled with fireworks.

It felt as though I had come a long way.

A few months earlier, back in September, I had been to Mexico City. I went alone, and it was the first time I had ever been out of the country. The world had come to resemble something very different to the one in which I had grown up, something I could never have predicted. I had come to view the paintings as something akin to a ritual act, hence the culturally specific count towards which I was working. They were a catechism of sorts, an act of naming by which something was brought into being, specifically brought into being as living rather than dead ideas; and I never really cared whether that made sense to anyone else or not.

It was 2000. The future was here and everything was, as promised, different. Stood alone outside in the freezing cold, paint all over my hands and a ciggy on the go would have been a poor New Year's Eve by the standards of most people, but for me it was magical. We had escaped the twentieth century, and the future had become mutable once more. Almost anything could happen from this point onwards, as indeed it eventually did.

A Brief Time of History

A body of fifteenth century Nahuatl poetry attributed to Nezahualcoyotl, ruler of the Mexican city of Texcoco (1429-1472) reiterates one particular theme over and over, specifically that we live upon the surface of the earth and may only be here for a short while; that our lives are neither so great nor important as we may believe.

We will pass away. I, Nezahualcoyotl, say, enjoy! Do we really live on earth? Ohuaya, ohuaya.

Not forever on earth, only a brief time here! Even jades fracture; even gold ruptures, even quetzal plumes tear: Not forever on earth: only a brief time here! Ohuaya, ohuaya.

These words have held some resonance for me ever since I first read them back in the 1990s, and since I came here, to live in Texas, I've really begun to appreciate the sentiment.

Growing up in England, I have lived in dwellings more or less identical to those in which my grandparents lived but for the minor details of a telephone line and inside toilet. I have visited the hotel in Dunchurch in which one of my grandfathers worked as a boy. One side of my family traces some of its ancestry to Scotland by way of Liverpool and Northern Ireland, whilst the other side - from what I gather - ranged across the Midlands between Norfolk and Shropshire, wherever work was available. All of this occurred within a radius of a few hundred miles from where I grew up. The United Kingdom is an island, the very centre of which is found in the village of Meriden, a few miles from where my parents presently live. It doesn't really matter where you go in England, because wherever you stand, you will almost certainly be aware of its history on some level, history running thousands of years deep with you in the middle. This was at least my experience, and whilst such a richly layered inheritance may provide a strong sense of identity - or whatever else it is one may be seeking - it can seem equally daunting, even oppressive.

America, or specifically Texas, is very different. Internet dwelling morons may pass snide commentary about the United States having a sum total of two-hundred or so years of history, which of course ignores the entirely legitimate history of those who first made their way here, hunting, growing crops, building complex architecture and social systems of several thousand years antiquity; and I've read enough to appreciate that there was never anything backward, primitive, underdeveloped, or in any way uncivilised about the people who yielded this land to European invaders, of which I am but the latest. I try to keep this in mind as it seems the least I can do, but their history is closed to me. Regardless of my fine intentions, it is not something I can directly experience.

So I now experience geographical history through my wife's family, and the difference to that to which I am accustomed is disconcerting. I have spent some time scanning old baking recipes written out by my wife's grandmother, and they speak of a very different world to the one around me, something which seems suspiciously akin to the old west I recall from western films watched as a child, something much further removed than the distance from here to the house without telephone line or indoor toilet. History is much closer to the surface here. We are standing upon it, and it seems a very thin layer.

A week or so back, Bess and I went to the funeral of Hilda Huth. She lived to 103 and the funeral was attended by many of Bess's paternal relatives, her uncles Carl and Johnny and others. This was the Germanic familial branch, people who came here amongst the great many other Germans to settled this part of Texas in the 1830s or thereabouts. My wife has relatives who still regularly pull on the lederhosen to celebrate Oktoberfest right here in the United States, relatives for whom German remains their native tongue regardless of having been born here.

I never met Hilda, but it only seemed right that we should make the effort and attend the service. She was born in 1911, and for a few minutes I suffered the unfortunate impression that the preacher had composed his address primarily through consultation of Wikipedia; but once he was done with a somewhat dry catalogue of those changes which Hilda Huth had witnessed during her lifetime, his discourse became more personal, more interesting, and more obviously the testimony of one who had known the woman. Hilda had been likeable, very generous, and had apparently killed rattlesnakes on a weekly basis, finding them something of a nuisance when they got into the house or garage. By the end of the address, I felt as though I had known her. This was turning out to be an unusually moving experience, something going beyond the formal requirements of showing one's face.

I wrote and delivered the eulogy at the funeral of Bill Edney, my landlord, knowing full well it meant little to the sea of relatives who had barely known the man but nevertheless felt no particular shame in turning up at the first whiff of inheritance. The next funeral I attended was that of my grandfather, a farming man who had never shown the slightest interest in either the church or its belief system, but who had very much enjoyed a pint or two of an evening.

'Arthur was not a religious man,' the priest conceded, before going on to speculate about my grandfather enjoying a celestial pint in that pub in the sky with all the other dead people, underscoring this faintly insulting image by getting the names of my father and his various brothers and sisters mixed up.

Thankfully, Hilda Huth's send off was more dignified, and if not exactly happier, then at least a more appropriate response to her passing. After the service, Bess and I found Uncle Elton, Hilda's surviving brother whom we had spoken to at the viewing the previous evening. As we talked, he told us of his time in Korea during the war, witnessing the mass graves of Chinese troops. He had retained quite a strong German accent. I listened and found myself marvelling at how far all of this lay outside of my ordinary experience.

The next day we drove to the hospital out at Stone Oak. My wife's cousin had given birth to her second child. These were people from the other side of the family, Irish and English with a dash of Swede according to the DNA tests. These were yet more people I had never met, and although I knew roughly what to expect I had no idea how it would work out. I had spoken to both Jenni and Ellen, mother and grandmother respectively, by means of the usual social media channels, but it can be very difficult to get the real measure of a person by such means. I knew Ellen to be of what I suppose you might call traditional Texan stock, with strongly held religious convictions, and that Skip - Jenni's husband and father of the child - was some sort of punk rock preacher. Their first child was named Texas - or Tex for short - and the new baby would be christened Tennessee, thus fully acknowledging the home states of both parents. All I could say for sure was that these were not the sort of people one met growing up in rural England; but my wife told me they were good folks, and I trusted her, and she was right.

We found Jenni's room and settled down to the business of cooing over the baby and getting to know each other. Ellen and Jenni were, as promised, wonderful, warm, and witty, immediately putting me at my ease and inspiring painful pangs of regret at every occasion on which I had posted a facebook status message making use of the word fuck. Then I got to talking with Eli - Jenni's father - about our shared love of science-fiction, specifically the novels of Asimov and Frank Herbert. Being English, I still suspect I had a certain novelty value, but I tend to believe that good people are pretty much the same wherever you are or whatever language you may be speaking, and so I was made to feel very welcome; and it was a tremendous pleasure to meet this new branch of my extending family tree, one of which the existence I could not have anticipated just five years ago.

Talking to Uncle Elton, then to Jenni and Eli and Ellen, I was reminded of how we are all recent arrivals in one sense or another. Even if these people weren't themselves settlers, their recent past had touched upon wooden shacks built in the desert, single room schoolhouses on one of those dusty trails you hear so much about without ever quite realising that they actually exist. Our history only goes back so far before the tracks reverse across the Atlantic; and we exist only for a short time on the surface, as Nezahualcoyotl observed. For all the imperfect genesis of the United States of America - as so generously identified with such frequency by Europeans who can't tell the difference between a people and its government - this is why so many still come here and will continue to come here. This feels like a place which still has possibilities no matter how poor the odds may sometimes appear, because it isn't quite weighted down with a thousand years of redundant European history. Regrettably this means we have been free to make our own massive mistakes, and make them we have; but there at least remains the spirit of possibility in what little time we have upon the earth.

The Raven

The first time I moved house, in fact the first time I left home - which was for the purpose of attending college in Maidstone, Kent - with all of my boxes of crap and ephemera unloaded from my dad's car, I set up my stereo and my turntable - or record player as would be its correct title. I wanted to listen to music whilst unpacking and lining up crappy Doctor Who novelisations on a window sill recently washed clean of mildew by some friend of the landlord, and I chose The Raven, the fourth album by the Stranglers.

Ever since then, each time I move house I baptise each new address with The Raven. There's something special about the record. Longships is well placed near the beginning of side one, and has an optimistic thrust without resorting to happy-clapping. It suggests a future full of new and exciting possibilities, and the album as a whole - after more than thirty years - still manages to sound as exciting as the very first time we all piled around Graham's house and sat listening to his copy on the day of its release. Somehow, at least in terms of my own private mythology, The Raven sets things up for the future.

I am now living at the fourteenth address since leaving home three decades ago, the second address to terminate with a country other than the United Kingdom. It has taken me nearly three years during which time I have shipped my record collection over from the old country, bought shelving, set it all up, sought out a new turntable, then an amplifier, and most recently a preamp because regular stores no longer sell amplifiers with phono inputs suited to the low level signal put out by a record player.

Just an hour ago, my preamp arrived in the mail. I am at last sat here listening to The Raven. The unpacking and sorting out and moving in and settling have been long dealt with, but this one undertaking was still to be done.

The Raven still sounds as wonderful as it did that first time.

Lovely.

All is right with the world.

David Hall

David Hall was born in 1937 which, to my astonishment, means I am now older than he was when we first met in the summer of 1984. He was head of department for the Film, Video & Sound course at Maidstone College of Art. It was a fine art degree course and, as I have subsequently discovered, was the first of its kind, initiated by David himself in 1972. Understanding this I feel I gain a deeper appreciation of why he became so pissed off as the course was steered increasingly towards the vocational towards the end of the Thatcher years. The Time Based Media department - a name change referencing a term he himself had coined - had been about art, not selling tins of baked beans; and art as something other than a commodity.

I was never really sure how David regarded me, but presumed he'd seen some potential in the rudimentary video work I'd done during my art foundation course and which I brought to my interview. One such work was a droning Throbbing Gristle inspired collage of media images mixing Margaret Thatcher and Richard Nixon up with Charles Manson and J.R. Ewing. As a comment upon the media it was doubtless a bit bleeding obvious and entirely kak-handed, but I guess it did its job. Someone later explained to me that our tutors tended to see potential in anyone whose video work incorporated images of television sets, so I suppose that would have been the commenting upon the medium box I had ticked.

Being eighteen, from my perspective David seemed ancient, a grey-bearded patriarch who gave the impression of having already seen and done it all. Of course the thing was that in terms of video art, he sort of had seen and done it all, and had even invented some of the things we were all busily playing back to him in hope of passing it off as something new. From time to time we got to see his work, that upon which he'd built something of a reputation. One piece featured the BBC newsreader Richard Baker, and it particularly impressed me that the video material had been produced with Baker's co-operation; it wasn't simply some crap taped off the telly, which is what I would have done under the circumstances, and did do on a few occasions. There was also a short film called Edge, a western which played with suspense and expectation, moody shots of frowning gunslingers approaching each other, building up to the inevitable confrontation until, in the last shot, they finally appear in the same frame only to pass one another without a word. It was clever, funny, and beautifully simple.

I tried, but I'm not sure my work ever really made him happy. Each tutorial was more or less the same. I would show a video piece - whatever I'd been working on - in a darkened room. I would turn on the light as the screen went to black. David, by now almost horizontal in his chair would blink, then make a noise acknowledging the shift of tutorial emphasis. He would sit forward, interlace his fingers and stretch, then sink back, hands behind his head, the body language of a long-suffering but otherwise soundless groan. Whilst he never directly pointed out that I was apparently producing self-involved and largely derivative crap into which very little thought had gone, this was generally the thrust of his observations; and this was always galling because he was right, and right in such a way that obliged the case for the defence to shut the fuck up and take its beating like a man. Ultimately this meant that I never butterflied into the great video artist, and the world has thus been spared my wibbling time based crap which would in any case have no real reason to exist, and thankfully doesn't. This should not be taken as a complaint, nor as requiem to a promising career cruelly foreshortened by a man saying some things that weren't very nice; on the contrary, David Hall was probably the first tutor to disabuse me of the idea that a piece or art was necessarily and inherently valid because I had done it; and a friend who will tell you when something is basically drivel will always be more valuable than one who finds some value in even the most pointless and inane expressions of art for the sake of art.

David's arguably gruff exterior was thrown into relief on the occasions when he joined us down the pub. He didn't suddenly transform into Tommy Cooper, but he was warm, convivial, and generous company - from which I deduced that his apparent dislike of my work was at least nothing personal.

David Hall very clearly cared about art as a potentially redemptive method of communication, and he cared strongly. He wasn't in the business of feeding anyone's ego, or pandering to lowest common denominators. He tended not to speak unless he had something worth saying, and in this respect was ever a source of valuable advice, providing one had the wit to recognise it as such.

In more recent years as I discovered his presence on facebook, I came to appreciate the above understanding all the more, and to realise that the man had a quite profound influence on my development at a crucial time, even if that development ultimately fired off in a completely different direction to that for which David might have hoped as head of Time Based Media.

Just today I discover that he is no longer with us. At the time of writing, I am not even sure as to the cause given that no obituary has yet appeared in any of the usual places. During those few years I knew him, I often found him a somewhat awkward man, even a little rude at times, but now that he's gone I realise that part of me always hoped that one day we would meet again, and I would be able to buy him a pint, and say thanks, and admit to his face that he'd been right all along. It has been a privilege to have known him.

Some details of his life and work here.

Deer

There was a deer under the bridge near Los Patios and the Northeast Baptist Hospital, just to one side of the path as you cross beneath the Connally Loop. I passed it every day. It had been a baby, the smallest I've seen. In fact I don't think I had ever before seen one so tiny.

White tailed deer are now a common sight for me. I see them as I follow the trail that runs along Salado Creek. I see them daily, pretty much. Most days I see one or two nosing around in the brush as I cross Morningstar Boardwalk, sometimes a few young females trailed by spotty babies sending me cautious backwards glances with their big, dark eyes; occasionally there will be great herds of them scattered amongst the trees as I approach the railroad that runs parallel to Wetmore. These are flood plains and so no-one is allowed to build on them, and so the deer and the other animals have a lot of space in which to roam and to breed.

I used to see red deer in Charlecote Park near where we used to live in England, but never as much more than a scattering of hillside dots some miles away. Now that I live in Texas, they are no longer such a rare sight, although I still feel the same pleasure as I always did when I see them. They have not become too familiar in that sense.

As an ethnological exercise I once worked out my day-sign in terms of the calendar and theology of pre-Hispanic central Mexico - as used by the people we now know as the Aztecs. I was Chicoce Mazatl or Six Deer in Mexican terms, this being the date which seemed to correspond with my birthday. I later found out that my calculations were off, but for a long time I believed that I was Six Deer. The deer was not generally held to be a good sign, it being associated with inconsistent or - I suppose - skittish behaviour and to some extent alcoholism, although not so much as was Tochtli, the Rabbit day-sign. Them's the breaks, I thought, consoling myself with the notion that the Mixtec culture hero Lord Eight Deer had made something of himself according to the Tilantongo Annals, and I was only two digits short. As I say, once I recalculated my version of the pre-Hispanic calendar, it turned out that Six Deer had never been my day-sign after all, so I guess it didn't matter.

Once, during a period of heavy rain, I startled a baby deer. It splashed out from the waters gathering beneath Morningstar Boardwalk, startled by my presence. It was probably a few months old and still speckled. I couldn't see it's mother anywhere near, and the thought of this young, apparently abandoned animal obliged to take shelter in the mud beneath the boardwalk was quietly horrifying; but there didn't seem like much I could do, and the rain kept coming.

The creek filled, then the sun returned and the waters quickly receded. The ecology of Texas often seems like a sped-up film, particularly with regard to these huge lakes which appear from nowhere and then become dry grassland within days. Black vultures now swarmed the boardwalk, scattering at my approach, leaving just a rib cage picked clean of all but a few scraps of fur. I felt sick.

I am reminded of this each time I pass the deer beneath the bridge at Los Patios and the Baptist Hospital. It is literally only skin and bone, a desiccated scrap of tan coloured hide with white spots attached to a sightless skull a little bigger than that of a cat. Stray bones peek from beneath the scrap, like knuckle bones or prehistoric game pieces, tiny black hooves on one of them. Seen from the corner of the eye it appears momentarily alive, having just enough substance to foster the illusion. I try to guess its age and suppose it can hardly have been even days. I wonder how it died. It's near a major highway, but there are also large flood drains on the other side of the bridge. It is hard to think about something so sad and pointless. Every single day I pass the dead baby. It is horrible beyond description.

Death is everywhere in Texas. It's presence is inevitable given the accelerated pace of life in which lakes can fill and then drain away to nothing in the space of a single scorching day. We have fish and frogs which require only tiny windows of swimming and feeding opportunity in order to complete their life cycles before returning to the mud. One cannot walk a mile of open land without encountering the bones of the dead, and some days you may even encounter something which could kill you, or at least which could kill you in the event of your being at more than two hours distance from a hospital. These things are not so common as you might believe, but they are there. Not only are we close to Mexico, but in the good old days, we were Mexico, and if Mexicans understand anything it is death and its role in defining our time on the earth.

After passing the dead baby each day for nearly two months, I can take no more. I bring it home. I collect the bones in a bag. They weigh hardly anything. I dig a hole in our garden and there I bury the baby deer, because no-one should end their days dead beneath a bridge near a flood drain, and no-one should die alone as I fear this baby most likely did. It seems like the right thing to do.

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.