Tin of Doom

One morning I was at work, delivering letters and the like down Hindmans Road in East Dulwich. It was approaching noon and I still had a good hour and a half of work ahead of me. My cellphone rang and I guessed it would be Marian, my girlfriend at the time who, enjoying only sporadic employment, rarely rose from bed before 11:30AM. It was common for her to call me at work and ask favours, usually could I pick up something on the way home and if so how long would I be?

I was correct. It was indeed Marian. How long would it be before I was home, she asked.

'Hours,' I told her truthfully.

'I need you to come home right now,' she said.

The request was not so bizarre as it may seem given that Hindmans Road was a mere five minutes walk from Marian's house, in which I was living as a lodger. She explained that she was unable to open a tin of tuna for Pringle, one of her three cats. Pringle was not allowed to eat cat food for reasons I never fully understood, and so lived on a diet of tuna, and sometimes rice - however the fuck that works.

'You can't open a tin of tuna,' I repeated. 'You want me to come home to open a tin of tuna for you?'

'Yes. That's what I said.'

'What's wrong with the tin?'

'I can't get it open.'

'So you want me to stop work and come home and open a tin of tuna for you?'

'Yes,' she confirmed testily, like I was some slow learner who had failed to grasp a very simple point. 'Pringle is really hungry and he's meowing,' she added for emphasis, letting me know that I now had an important decision to make, and I had better make it fast otherwise my selfishness (etc. etc.) was soon to cause the universe to explode. I decided it wasn't worth arguing. I locked up my delivery trolley, walked home, opened the can of tuna like any ordinary functioning human being would have done, smiled and said nothing when asked what the hell my problem was? Usually in these situations Marian would wheel out oh - so now I'm not allowed to ask you to help me out!, thus pre-empting any eyebrow I might dare to raise in respect to a fucked-up situation.

I still don't know whether Marian was so genuinely physically weak as to have been unable to open the tin of doom - given that she once had me carry a sandwich for her on the grounds of it being 'too heavy', this is possible - or whether this was just one more weird control exercise, one more sledgehammer effort at compensating for being four foot something tall and having a lousy personality. I don't know, and I no longer care, and it feels good.

Doctor, Why?

'He into his bikes, is he?' The question was asked by Peter Sweet,  someone my father knew through mutual love of massive, noisy motorcycles. Even though I was not yet ten years old, we lived on a farm and I was male so I suppose it had seemed reasonable to assume that I was probably into Status Quo, Aston Villa and motorbikes.

'Oh no - he's a Doctor Who man,' my father explained as they headed out the door, intent on keeping a date with a lake of beer and lively conversation about gear boxes.

Without even knowing quite why, even then I resented the label, even though it was certainly fitting. I'd been terrified by Doctor Who up until the age of five at which point, having just watched Jon Pertwee menaced by a man pretending to be an animated stone gargoyle without quacking my pants, I informed my mother that I would be okay to watch the programme from that point on; and I was, never missing an episode until Colin Baker took to the screen and I moved away from home and into a house with no television set, which was possibly ironic in so much as I had relocated in order to study film and video production at Maidstone College of Art. Inevitably I drifted away from the programme because I was eighteen and, without wishing to cast doubt on the quality of either the Colin Baker or Sylvester McCoy years, I had other, more interesting things to do.

Roughly a decade went by without my giving so much as a passing thought to this phenomenon which had once been so integral to my childhood, but then the same is true of Enid Blyton's Adventures of the Wishing Chair, so it's really not such a big deal. Then some time in the early 1990s my friend Andrew gave me a VHS tape of an old Jon Pertwee Doctor Who story for my birthday, and like Clark Kent recalling his secret origin, it all came flooding back in one massive bolus of memory sherbert. I bought some more of these tapes and was surprised at how well the stories had endured for what was essentially a children's programme without much in the way of a budget. Those later years during which the show had tried so hard not to fall off the bottom of the screen had completely passed me by, and I was intrigued by the idea that the clown from Vision On had somehow ended up in the lead role; so I bought tapes of episodes from the Sylvester McCoy era and found I even liked those. This in turn led to my reading the novels published by Virgin Books which continued the story on from the show's cancellation in 1989, with efforts made towards being decent science-fiction novels in their own right - which some of them certainly were.

In summary, Doctor Who was never my reason for living, but I had an investment I suppose you would say. I wouldn't go so far as to claim it for my native mythology as does Lawrence Miles, but it meant something and, more importantly, it led me to other, more interesting places. I can trace, for one example, at least half of the music I now listen to back to the soundtrack of jarring electronic farts scored by Malcolm Clarke for 1972's The Sea Devils.

Then in 2005, Doctor Who was once more recognised as being a viable entertainment franchise and returned to our television screens with Christopher Ecclescake in the lead role. I tried with this revived version but ultimately found myself forced to admit that it really wasn't for me. It's difficult to place the blame on any one thing that has remained consistently poor since its return - aside from Murray Lead's unrelenting incidental music which has remained efficiently and intrusively crass from the beginning - so I tend to attribute its failure to a combination of general shoddy workmanship and the stench of corporately regulated spontaneity and leave it at that.

Of course, I strive to keep such views to myself most of the time. Regardless of whether love or loathing are involved, centring each day around one's feelings for a television programme can never be healthy. I've seen what happens on internet forums gripped by the hysteria of such product overinvestment, and it isn't nice; and nor is there anything to be gained from arguing with someone for whom a fictional character is their life. They won't listen, and the more intellectually inert of their brethren will only counter your argument with viewing statistics, because if Fifty Shades of Gray, The X-Factor, Sex and the City, Justin Bieber and Adolf Hitler's rise to power have taught us anything at all, it is that the cultural or historical value of a phenomenon is apparently proportional to the quota of bums on seats. E.V. Rieu's 1946 translation of Homer's Odyssey sold three-million copies; Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code has sold eighty-million copies worldwide and is by this logic the artistically superior title.

Where Doctor Who in its heyday was spawned of a BBC populated with cranky eccentrics who tended not to play well with others but were good at imaginative programming, now it is imagineered by committee according to the guidelines of focus groups, and if it isn't, then it feels like it is to me, having more in common with Friends or Sex and the City than with its predecessor. Someone somewhere decided that the eccentric charm of the original could be rebranded and marketed with a 45% increased efficiency per unit of metric quirk to the benefit of shareholders and audience alike, floating the selfsame adventuresome zanyplex on the open market thus allowing it to compete with the likes of Spielberg, Buffy the Vampire Portfolio, and other wilfully culty TV shows about teenagers in warehouses full of stuff that fell off the back of a UFO. Even some of Doctor Who's fans now refer to it as a franchise.

Characters routinely undergo modular emotional journeys - the usual generic tripe about how daddy was never there and so on, standard soap-opera fare - scored without exception to a deafening barrage of boo hoo music just in case we didn't realise that a crying girl with big eyes is supposed to make us have a sad and because no-one trusts the script to deliver anything beyond tiresomely snappy wordplay and plot explanations; and it's no wonder when said scripts amount to a collage of time-tested set pieces already proven to have got the job done on other shows - the Doctor pleading you don't have to do this to the pissed-off alleged Silurian just like a million Nicholas Cages before him all talking the terrorist out of detonating the bomb, and nine times out of ten building up to the worst ever threat to the continued existence of everything ever yet again. It's all piss, wind, and bluster - just meaningless scale presented over and over because the steering committee understand sales targets and viewer ratings better than they understand the basic mechanics of telling a story, or why anyone would even want to tell a story without first consulting the Financial Times. This is why Doctor Who now so closely resembles proven-sellers - Indiana Jones, Star Wars, Harry Potter as the the camera zooms in for a close up, the music swells, Matt Smith looking directly into the camera to deliver one of those lines you only ever hear in the bronchial voiceover of a cinematic trailer: this ends here; the time for something or other is over; there's one thing you don't ever put in a trap; bring it on, numbnuts and so on and so forth. It's a magical funtime ride of wonderment and adventure because Tim Burton didn't win all those awards just for combing his hair. That's commercial, as Borgia Ginz observes in Derek Jarman's Jubilee.

I object to this because I dislike being condescended to by anything more stupid than myself, anything which assumes that like a south-sea island tribesman I will be impressed by bright flashing lights and loud music and so fail to notice the absence of content, or that the dribbling stream of trite jokes and twee observations aren't actually that funny. The sheer insincerity is breathtaking.

I've worked hard over the years to elevate myself above the level of gurgling idiocy to which I was born, and unfortunately this has meant that as I grow older and hopefully a little more discerning, some things just don't cut it any more. I get bored easily, particularly when confronted with the sort of mechanically-reclaimed science-fiction that has recently become so popular, and was actually already somewhat limited in its scope thirty years ago when Star Wars put an untimely end to those pleasantly cerebral science-fiction films of the early 1970s by reintroducing us to the Flash Gordon method of storytelling. I dislike being sold the same idea over and over, particularly when the idea really wasn't that amazing in the first place. Doubtless this may sound elitist, but I prefer to think of it as having standards, the ability to tell the difference between McDonalds and actual food. If that makes anyone feel threatened or somehow inadequate, that's really a shame.

I dislike contemporary Doctor Who because it smothers any story it might be trying to tell with the narrative equivalent of sex aids - something novel to spice up that which lacks the proverbial wood - and because it just isn't anywhere near so clever as it wants us to believe it is. It has been suggested to me that this is simply the way television is made these days, as though I might like to try getting used to it or else piss off back to my penny farthing and wax cylinders. That this is simply the way television is made these days is not strictly accurate, but rather seems to be one of those stock phrases people tend to repeat because they've heard someone else say it and it saves them having to think about whether or not it's true. There's really quite a bit of television employing narrative language entirely unlike that of Doctor Who, mostly television scripted by people who can actually write, who don't require smoke and mirrors to compensate for any lack in the production; and to condense all of the above into a single sentence, I dislike contemporary Doctor Who because it's Nickelback trying to fool us into thinking they're The Sex Pistols.

A few might agree with the above, or at least with some of the above, and there are many, many who would disagree in the strongest possible terms. Being able to cope with the notion that others might hold views different to my own, I don't have a problem with that. If people wish to spend their time watching Doctor Who then fine. Not everything has to be The Deer Hunter, and as for myself it'll be a cold day in hell before I get tired of Godzilla movies, absurd though they may well be. However, I do object to those individuals who seem unable to cope with anyone holding opinions so wildly divergent to their own, and who for some reason seem to take any insult to their beloved yet entirely fictitious Doctor Who Magic Telly Man as an assault upon them, their children, their children's children, and everything that is right and true. If you hate it so much, they bleat because they've seen the question posed before and it seemed to work for the previous guy, then why do you watch it?

Truthfully, I don't. I gave up after struggling through the first ten minutes of Hitler, Go Home or whatever it was called. Matt Smith had just made an amusing remark about wearing either a fez or a bow-tie. The woman who played Dirty Den's second wife in Eastenders had quipped hello, darling to hilarious effect whilst Rory died and Amy McBoggle pulled that feisty popeyed face she does every few minutes, and I knew I just couldn't stand it any longer. I knew it was never going to improve, and that both Steven Moffat and I were wasting each other's time. Later I trawled the internet seeking commentary upon the episode and found I know Hitler was a bit of a bad lad and all, but surely even he deserved better than that..

Unfortunately Doctor Who, whether you watch it or not, has become difficult to avoid, and it's impossible to entirely disassociate oneself from something you enjoyed for at least a few decades of your life, particularly when you still have some sneaking regard for the previous version. It's also difficult to prevent strong opinions such as those expressed above boiling to the surface when any view you might share is pounced on by ravening hordes driven by the sort of religious bloodlust that Tomás de Torquemada would have regarded as slightly creepy. You are the ones, they scream, who can't let go, the jealous losers who take it all too seriously, who can't stand that it's back and that it's more brilliant than ever before, and so on and so forth to paraphrase a Doctor Who author whose books I will never buy. More than anything it comes across as terrible insecurity: tread softly because you tread on my dreams...

Well, that's how it sounds with the slightly more rabid defenders of the faith, but who knows what they're thinking? I suppose you might argue that in writing this I too am failing to let go, but I really feel the accusation would be rendered somewhat flaccid by the word count of material I've written which has nothing to do with Magic Doctor Who Man Telly Adventure Time. Often it is suggested that my fellow naysayers and I might like to shut the fuck up lest we somehow spoil other's enjoyment, because if history has taught us anything it is that those who made unkind comments about the Bay City Rollers, Kenny, Curiosity Killed the Cat, the Jo-Boxers, Bros, Oasis, Take That, Westlife, Busted, and One Direction must ever live with the shame of knowing how their hurtful remarks have destroyed people's lives and engulfed orphanages in the terrible killing flames of death; which is why wanting something to not be rubbish is frowned upon, I suppose.

Essentially I like people, and try to see the best in everyone. I like to see people making something of themselves and doing whatever it is they do well, generally speaking, developing themselves and learning to appreciate what a great world we live in. Therefore it pisses me off when I see people wilfully wasting their time on that which doesn't matter, or coming out with moronic drivel because they've never made the effort, or even been inspired to make the effort, to expand themselves - like the person who in intellectual terms lives in the same town their entire life, never once expressing an interest in the world beyond the horizon of their television set, who justifies such myopia with reasoning amounting to well I think you'll find Solihull has a lot to offer on the face of it. I don't understand why anyone wouldn't want more, and the sheer lack of curiosity about experiencing that which one might not have previously experienced is terrifying - failing to engage with any form of culture not bearing a specific logo, for example. There is no-one on Earth who eats at McDonalds to the complete exclusion of all other gastronomic options, and yet there do seem to be people who bifurcate the world into Doctor Who and all that other stuff.

Where Doctor Who was once a show that at least aspired to inspire, to open up a wider world to young viewers without giving any attendant adults too much of a headache, now it is concerned principally with the perpetuation of its own mythology. It has become a marketing exercise garnished with tried and tested signifiers of authenticity - generic emotive or humorous sequences as the televisual equivalent of McDonalds deciding to sell fruit or using twee folk music as part of their advertising campaign - and its only purpose seems to be the occupation of as much cultural bandwidth as it can appropriate before everyone wises up and starts spending their money elsewhere. What this boils down to, at least for me, is an issue of fundamental curiosity regarding what's out there, all the books I will never have time to read, films I may never see, or places I may never visit. I try to broaden my horizons as I proceed through life, to experience as much as I can, not least through reading; and I read a great deal of science-fiction because that's what I enjoy, but I try not restrict myself to any one genre. It depresses me that there are people out there who will never pick up a book without it bearing some relation to Doctor Who, who may bang on about science-fiction literature on some stupid forum without actually quite knowing even who Isaac Asimov or Clifford Simak were; or worse, who might not even read at all, just sit there drooling over the same crappy DVD they've seen a million times whilst assuming that a broadened horizon means watching fucking Stargate instead. I don't want to live in a world full of morons. I don't want to live in a culture where you have to drive fifty miles to find a Denny's or a Jim's because no-one understands why you would want anything other than a Big Mac. The great energy harvester of western society feeds us quite enough fake homogenised culture as it is without our encouraging it further.

Of course, in the end it's up to the individual, and I have many valued friends who I actually hope don't read this because I know it will piss them off, and it needn't because it really isn't about them (apart from Steve*). I don't tend to make friends based on mutual appreciation of the same bands because I'm not sixteen years old, and I can make a distinction between the individual and whatever they have printed on their T-shirt; and I can even, under the ordinary circumstances of friendship, respect their holding views differing wildly from my own. By extension, I'm not interested in discourse with any individual unable to extend the same courtesies to others, and so I don't see why anyone should be expected to shut up about something they dislike, particularly if they are able to offer some illuminating reason as to why they dislike it.

Doctor Who has often been sold as an ongoing story with almost limitless possibilities, mainly because that's a neat little phrase and no-one really stops to think about it too hard; but its possibilities are only limitless within the confines of every single variant requiring the involvement of a man in a box having adventures whilst his chums stands around asking questions. You might just as well say Garfield is an ongoing story with almost limitless possibilities, then accordingly revise Crime and Punishment in order to illustrate this, having Raskolnikov debate the morality of his actions with a wisecracking pizza-scoffing cat. If it really is about the story rather than the franchise, then why would anyone settle for an inferior model simply because it carries a familiar logo?

So there you go. It took a lot of squeezing but I think that's most of the pimple in so much as there's nothing much I could add without further repeating myself. That's my view pretty much in full and set to a semblance of order so that I shouldn't need to do it again. Hopefully the reader will have gained something from the above, one way or the other, and may at least appreciate why I hold such views: it's not so much about my opinion of, for example, Moffat as an alleged writer, whether new Doctor Who episodes will ever attain the giddy creative heights of The Twin Dilemma or Timelash, or any of the specific and deeply uninteresting details. It's mostly about possibilities, people bothering to look outside their front door, accepting that views divergent from their own may be equally or even more valid, and maybe even learning to recognise when they're being diddled; and to invert the stock challenge so beloved of a certain type of contemporary Doctor Who fan, if you hate all of that so much, then why did you read this?

*: Relax, dude. I'm joking.

History Lesson

My knowledge of American history is assembled piecemeal from a wall full of books about pre-Colombian Mexican pot sherds, watching The Rockford Files and The Waltons, the recorded oeuvre of Ice Cube, and reading Mad magazine when I was a kid - well, not so much Mad magazine itself as the paperback collections with which Ballantine Books generously flooded English book stores in the 1970s. Surprisingly this means that my knowledge of American history has turned out to be marginally more comprehensive than that of my wife who was born here. Mad taught me about Millard Fillmore, Mr. Clean, Jack Paar, and how a reluctantly dieting Teddy Roosevelt once asked his niece to sneak into the kitchen, speak softly, and carry a big sticky, gooey sundae back before anyone found out. In her defence, my wife knows more English history than anyone I've met. If ever I need to know anything about King Shakespeare or that guy who burned a cake and caused the great plague, I just ask Bess. In this respect - and not only in this respect I hasten to add - we complement each other.

The sum of our American historical knowledge was expanded this morning when Junior portrayed Daniel Boone in a short pageant put on by the third graders of his school. There were seventeen of them in all, each dressed as a character of his own choosing, each delivering a short speech explaining who they were supposed to be and why they were famous. This was a yearly presentation which had previously taken the form of living waxworks. The children would stand still, delivering their speech each time a fake button was pressed, but that version was apparently abused by older boys who would press one child's notional button over and over in order to see if they could make the kid explode. The non-interactive revision was itself surprisingly entertaining, and I don't feel that we've missed out.

So for fifteen minutes we were treated to a parade of nine-year old boys wearing stick-on moustaches, false mutton chops, and the obligatory stovepipe hat for Abe Lincoln, and for the first time at that school I felt that I was watching something which the performers actually enjoyed. Previous and lengthier occasions have featured selections of seasonal songs and the sort of scripted jollity I recall hating when I was a kid, mostly delivered with faces suggesting  performers enduring the same discomfort I'd felt at their age; and worse, all of this punctuated with the self-aggrandising, simpering oratory of a Principal who probably imagines himself melting hearts with the homogenised warmth of his testimony. Today he managed to keep it short, just a few words about the performance and how he too knew the agony of stage fright, before apparently remembering we were there to see our children rather than him.

Of those historical figures brought vividly to life before our very eyes as though by the agency of an actual working time machine, the stand-outs for me were Junior's Daniel Boone, George Washington, Sitting Bull, an extremely cute Wright brother, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Walt Disney and a kid who could have been either Neil Armstrong or Steve Albini - renowned singer and guitarist of both Big Black and Shellac - but who was almost certainly Neil Armstrong now that I've got that admittedly thin observational joke out of my system. There were others, but mostly faces from stretches of American history with which I am entirely unfamiliar, a couple of renowned baseball players for example. I personally would have appreciated an Oliver Hardy and a Nixon just for the hell of it, but it was impossible to fault the choices made, not least because they had been made and enacted with such infectious enthusiasm.

American history is a fascinating animal - chock full of screw-ups and moments for which there will never be an apology of sufficient strength, just in case anyone is so stupid as to think I might not be aware of that, and there's usually at least one - but we're hardly unique in that respect, and whatever the small print may have been, the culture at least makes the effort to put on a brave face, to give an impression of looking forward. American history, or more properly, the American history of the last few hundred years, is in part a story of triumph over adversity and people motivated largely by altruism, and even if the precise details are to be doubted as Disneyesque sentiment, the overall impression remains a positive one, even to someone so prone to cynicism as myself.

Rightly or wrongly, this was what I got from watching a bunch of nine year old boys grinning and chuckling to each other in false moustaches and 1930s trousers. If there's anything that distinguishes America from England it is, in my experience, that over here, what you see is what you usually get; which I believe is why, quite incidentally, it is not unknown for American culture to be described as crass in some cases, usually because it's exactly the same deal as English culture, just lacking the veneer of bullshit. It's probably no coincidence that those most suspect of American institutions tend to aspire to some nebulously European neo-classical ideal inherited from Washington's era when perhaps it meant something more than just a more effective means to sell used cars.

I'm not even sure what I learned today, but considering that it was taught by a bunch of kids who probably would have picked that Gangnam Style bloke or Pikachu as historically significant had  twenty-first century names been an option; and that it was taught in the halls of an institution with all the soul of a debt collection agency and yet which has somehow mistaken itself for Harvard; and that Bess and I walked back to the car with big wide eyes all afroth with joy and fuzzy stuff, I'd say it was probably something important. Anything that stops me sneering for an entire fifteen minutes can't be entirely without value.

Evil Morons with Too Much Money

One evening back in the very early 1980s, Pete and myself were at Graham's house doing whatever it is you do when you're fifteen, but doing it quietly because Graham's parents were downstairs trying to watch something soothing like Terry and June or perhaps Ask the Family. As it was the middle of the week I'm guessing we had convened in order to see one of the various BBC2 music shows whilst our respective parents stayed stubbornly tuned to other channels, and Graham being the only person we knew to live in a household blessed with more than one television set. This magical second television set was a portable which lived on the dressing table in Graham's parents' bedroom, and once Riverside or Something Else or whatever it was we were watching had finished, then came Dallas. None of us were regular viewers of the popular US soap about millionaire Texans, but we found the theme tune entertaining, and so as the titles began, all three of us went at it on the air drums. We each had our own imaginary kit, and we sat in a line at the foot of the bed pounding those notional snares, stamping away at incorporeal foot pedals, giving it some John Bonham. Graham's parents were of course delighted to hear what sounded like an unusually violent rugby match being played just three feet above their heads, and Mr. Pierce quickly came upstairs to congratulate us in person.

It seems peculiar to think that the millionaire Texan, once as remote an animal as any unicorn or talking elephant unwittingly dyed blue whilst playing with his mother's fountain pen, is now a beast which I encounter on an unfortunately regular basis; then again, I suppose it isn't at all peculiar given that no school age child can realistically be expected to know where they will be or what they will be doing by the time they hit forty.

This being said, the second graders at San Antonio Academy for Prestigious Children seem to have a few ideas in that direction. Bess and I had turned up to collect Junior one day last summer when we saw the project work proudly displayed on hall notice boards, our eight year old Texans responding to the question what do you want to be when you grow up? Some wanted to be attorneys, investment lawyers, or simply to take over dad's business as CEO. No-one harboured the desire to be an engine driver or an astronaut or a dinosaur tamer, or if they did I guess they understood such an answer would be more trouble than it was worth, inviting only further questions about how they might have come by such a dangerously liberal attitude.

It was profoundly depressing.

San Antonio Academy for Prestigious Children - as I'm calling it because these people didn't get rich through being nice - is the private school where the dwellers of the Bubble send their offspring in order to set them on the road towards becoming attorneys, lawyers, CEOs, persons of a certain standard. The Bubble is that part of San Antonio falling within the 78209 zip code settled by the conspicuously and unpleasantly wealthy, their colonial style ranch houses distinguished by lawns which remain perfect even when the summer heat soars into the hundreds, each formerly embellished with a tidy little warning which read not keep off the grass as you might anticipate, but no socialism. This was something to do with the election; you know - just in case.

I'm no stranger to the outrageously wealthy, and as a postman in East Dulwich I shot regular breezes with a surprising number of Lords, Ladies, a Baroness, and at least one Lady Asquith, who was lovely and still able to recall D.H. Lawrence dropping around for a cup of tea and a bun back when she was a girl - which was obviously exciting for me, what with my being a big fan of frowning David Herbert. As a rule, these representatives of the aristocracy were mostly pleasant and entirely lacking in ostentation. Regardless of the evils of the English class system, those inhabiting the upper reaches often seem unassuming and likeable, as tends to be the case with people who don't feel they have anything to prove. It's the ones busily screwing their way up the totem pole who are usually the arseholes, and this is as true here in America as it was back in England; except there's no such thing as aristocracy here, much as the Bubble beings might like to believe otherwise, but then these are people who never quite got the subtle distinction between class and just having too much money.

The 09ers, San Antonio's self-proclaimed elite define themselves by zip code; by raising pretentiously-titled children through the agency of nannies; and by sending little Winchester Jnr. IV or whatever the hell he's called to the most expensive school they can find, whereupon he will be guided along his course towards greatness, destiny, excellence and other slightly overused qualitative nouns by a Principal who oozes all the sincerity of a 1970s game-show host but compensates with portentous speeches delivered at school functions. The place costs so much it just has to be some classy shit, right? Plus they have them in those cute little uniforms saying yes sir and no ma'am like toy soldiers, which is somehow more important than the slightly weird statistic of such an establishment not actually requiring its teachers to hold any formal teaching qualification. Anyway, every few months the children assemble to sing seasonal medleys of show tunes prefixed by our edumacational ship's captain waving his hands and invoking Gahd - this being his pronunciation of God - in an implausible show of humility presupposing that the entire institution isn't just a stay-rich-quick scheme. The parents smile and struggle to recognise their own children from photographs supplied by the nanny, and feel duly secure in their status as the cultural elite, the movers and shakers. Those working in the medical profession attend such functions in their scrubs, fresh from performing unfeasibly expensive life-saving and Oscar-nominated operations because as you know, it takes many, many hours to change out of a green overall into civilian clothes, precious hours that could be better spent resurrecting the dead. We're not talking fucking bus drivers here. These are the people who matter.

Except they really don't; they just have too much money which is a different thing altogether, and that which they have taken to signify class - or at least a better standard of person as I recently heard one 09er define his kin without a trace of irony - amounts to face-lifts and surface and having a bigger swimming pool than anyone else. In fact I don't think I've ever seen quite so much surface expressed in a single demographic: cut one of them in half and you'll just find layer after layer of emergency surface held in reserve all the way down to the bottom. As a group, they don't seem to have quite grasped that riches beyond imagination make no difference if you're a selfish, lying, vacuous, lazy, alcoholic, gambling, adulterous, strip-joint patronising parasite with the emotional development of a six-year old and the personality of the turd that just won't be flushed. Neither do they seem to grasp that these unpleasant qualities are difficult to conceal through simple membership of a country club.

These are people who, like Donald Trump, seem to believe that gold-plated taps signify success, and whilst I have no doubt of Trump being a lovely guy, he's really not someone I'd want to hang out with for too long. These are people like Jon Thomas Ford, the 09er convicted of strangling his former girlfriend in 2012. It made national news, but no-one here was too surprised when he was sent down as guilty, and the consensus would seem to have it that he never once considered the possibility of not getting away with it, because that's how it works in the Bubble: money will find a way.

The 09ers, these Ewingistas are heirs to the fundamental mistake of American capitalism that a will equates to a way, that all is fair in business, and that being a ruthless bastard is a sign of character. It's money as more important than people taken to the extreme at which point the people and their money become the same thing regardless of whether one is buying or selling. This, I presume, accounts for no socialism warnings, most likely planted by the hired Mexican gardener as a statement against something the owner probably can't even spell, much less understand. The simple logic runs that those who have worked hard for their money should be entitled to keep as much of it as possible - socialism apparently being a threat to this - which would be fine but for the extremely loose definition of hard work which tends to apply in so many cases, and the basic evil of those who cram their mouths with cake for no reason other than to deny those who have none. Having been a postman for more than two decades, I feel confident of being able to recognise hard work when I see it, and the only ones in the Bubble doing anything of the sort are the Mexicans who tend the lawns and borders.

This is why I have as little to do with the 09ers as possible, although I share their postcode, and Junior has certain familial ties which oblige my wife and I to occasionally grit our teeth and shake a few hands. Many of them may be nice enough people in their own way, but not in any sense that necessarily sets them above any other social stratum; and having few real interests outside matters of wealth and status, they generally aren't that interesting as people, and their instances of generosity tend to be slightly predatory.

Dallas from what little I recall, was presented as a caricature, and had I given the matter serious thought, I probably would have concluded that such people could not be real. Three decades have passed and I now live in the same state as the fictitious Ewings, and I occasionally get invited to pool parties by people who resemble those characters, although maybe not quite so likeable in a few cases - thinking here of a repulsive octogenarian gambling millionaire with a trophy wife more than forty years his junior and their demonic third grade kid on a $200 a week allowance, which is probably another story in itself.

The difference is that now I've seen them with my own eyes, I know that these people aren't real.

The Trouser Conflagration

Mandy once had a flatmate called Andrea, and Andrea was dating Steve Jansen, drummer of Japan and brother of David Sylvian. Anyone already bewildered should probably note that I'm referring to Japan the 1980s new wave band rather than Japan the country. The notion of an entire country designating a single individual as its drummer is clearly absurd, even without bringing up the fact of Japan the 1980s new wave band being from Catford. Of course, Mandy and her friends were eager to meet Steve Jansen, drummer of Japan and brother of David Sylvian, but each time he dropped Andrea off at the pub or a friend's house, it seemed like he always had somewhere else to be and would rush off without saying hello - probably had to go and do some drumming or something. Inevitably, as time went on and Andrea's boyfriend - Steve Jansen, drummer of Japan and brother of David Sylvian - continued to shun his fiancé's friends, questions were asked, questions which Andrea countered with photographic evidence of the relationship as something real and not just a load of stuff that had happened inside her head. Unfortunately the evidence was not unanimously accepted as convincing due to the picture of Steve Jansen, drummer of Japan and brother of David Sylvian, having quite clearly been cut out of a magazine. 

Telling lies can be a lot of fun, and as hobbies go there are probably worse. Anyone who's ever been in a band will tell you that an accomplished liar is worth at least two and a half averagely competent guitarists, unless you plan on spending the rest of your life performing Splodgenessabounds covers to an audience of three visiting French students who got lost on the way to the bureau de change. In this crazy music business, the very practice of telling lies can sometimes be equivalent to a fifth band member - conditional to the band in question being a quartet.

At the age of fourteen I formed a group with three of my friends. We called ourselves The Pre-War Busconductors and we weren't particularly musical, but then tunes weren't really the point. It was more about making a racket and coming out with stuff that made us laugh until our sides ached. It was about the performance, which was awkward given that we never played any gigs, nor let anyone who wasn't actually in the band listen to our cassettes. We got around this by becoming our own audience. Everything was taped on a mono portable cassette recorder, and we differentiated live from studio recordings by clapping and cheering at the end of each song, whistling, shouting out requests, telling ourselves to piss off and so on - just like it would have been at a real gig. I'm pretty sure Peter Frampton did the same thing. I know his live album was supposed to be some big deal, but I've never met anyone who was there.

At the age of nineteen or thereabouts I played guitar for a group called The Dovers, formed with my friend Carl who sang and jumped around. Although we played live gigs before audiences comprising people who weren't other members of the band, we nevertheless took great pleasure in making things up - tour posters listing dates all across the globe, the Budokan, Madison Square Gardens, Shea Stadium - all regrettably cancelled but for the one solitary gig at the Blue Lagoon in Chatham. Carl had a gift for telling fibs, of which my favourite  was the suggestion that we change the name of the group to Live Dinosaur on Stage in hope of fooling people into turning up expecting to see a real live dinosaur.

I know at least one musician who has claimed with a straight face to be secretly working for the KGB, and there's Sun Ra who insists he's from Saturn, and Malcolm McClaren desperately scrabbling to get just one person to believe the Sex Pistols were his idea. Then there was this other band in which I played, one which remained obscure in England whilst having sold many thousands of CDs in Germany and the far east, at least according to our cover story. The theory ran that the potential punter would be encouraged to believe every other person in the universe was into us, had bought our CD, and had been playing it constantly. Everyone thinks we're amazing, we were saying, but apparently you didn't get the memo, so you must be different; you probably smell a bit funny or something - the you in this instance being the entire population of the British Isles. It was a sound enough concept - sort of like when Adolf Hitler visited Rome and Mussolini had forty miles worth of fake buildings painted on wooden panels either side of the railway track in order to make the city seem all the more impressive, except we were selling shirty punk rock rather than an illusory testament to Fascist ideology expressed in architectural terms.

In case I appear to be taking any sort of moral high ground here, I still burn with embarrassment to recall when fifteen years ago I told John Eden how some of my mother's side of the family were from Mexico, which obviously they weren't. I suppose it was at least original. I'm uncertain of general trends, but in terms of lying about one's nationality in pursuit of kudos, I get the impression that pretending to be Mexican is fairly rare.

Race is of course another matter, particularly with the potential anonymity now afforded by the internet, which leads us to the self-proclaimed cult film and TV forum for black people. This was a message board run by a white man posting in the style of what I suppose he imagined to be an amusing black persona, for example dismissing those opinions not to his liking as lickle white bwoy shit or some such, because as you know that's how black people speak. I posted there for about a year but managed to get myself banned before I realised it was an elaborate and weirdly pointless put on. As I do actually have black friends - by which I mean friends outside the context of some guy who serves me a burger or drives me to the airport - it struck me as sad and possibly a bit insulting when I discovered the truth, vaguely akin to a clutch of drunken white media studies students quoting Samuel L. Jackson zingers and addressing each other as my nigga.

As lies go, I'd mostly characterise the above as tics - or at worst, errors of judgement - small fictional flourishes that don't really hurt anyone and make life a little more colourful for those involved. However, from what I was told, Andrea's delusion always seemed like a different kettle of prevaricating fish - the kind of lie that inspires only pity and suggests something fundamental has escaped from the author's psychological menagerie. When a child claims to have seen a dragon, not for a moment considering the possibility that stating something as truth will not in itself make the story seem plausible to others, it can be cute. When an adult does the same thing, it's just weird and disturbing.

My own personal Andrea introduced himself as John Schölle. He had placed a postcard in the window of Gruts cafe in Chatham back in the late 1980s. The postcard made some promise I didn't quite follow about organising a sound system and wishing to enlist the help of interested parties. I knew a sound system to be something to do with reggae, of which I've never really been a huge fan, but I got the impression that there was nevertheless some sort of musical common ground - at least in the more unorthodox recordings of Scientist and the like - so I called the number and went around for a cup of tea.

The guy lived three streets away from me, so it turned out. He was a few years older, living with his girlfriend Janine and a hyperactive dog called Jack. He played and recorded music that wasn't a million miles from the sort of material I'd been doing, and we both enjoyed a lot of the same things, and it seemed to me that we hit it off straight away - which was nice because he was one of the funniest people I had ever met. His sense of humour struck a fine balance between raucous and deadpan and found its most vivid expression in a series of plays he set down in an exercise book for his own amusement.

These plays were, very roughly speaking, a conflation of Harold Pinter, Samuel Beckett, and Derek & Clive. One of my favourites involved two men fighting over a packet of biscuits whilst shouting at each other through a letterbox for the duration of the notional performance - I think the pivotal biscuits were custard creams. Another play was entitled Three Empty Chairs and featured Ted, an ageing bully regaling his indifferent companions with unlikely accounts of former glories, each conversational turn inspiring a fresh revelation of better days and what people used to call him. At one point the electricity meter runs out, plunging the room they share into darkness. Someone asks for a tanner for the meter and our man explains, 'I used t'ave tons of loose change when I was a youngster... Rattler Ted they used to call me.'

Reasoning that John probably wasn't going to do anything with Three Empty Chairs - which I regarded and still regard as a masterpiece - I had a go at turning it into a Pinteresque cartoon strip, but gave up after thirteen pages. The play was long and I lacked patience, and although John said he liked what I'd done, he later confided to Carl that it had pissed him off greatly. I still don't know why he couldn't have just told me, but never mind...

Similarly entertaining were The Joneses, John's imaginary band parodying The Smiths - amongst others - without quite sounding like a parody due to the incongruous use of sped-up tapes, armpit generated farting noises, and a drum machine. It was really more of a grotesque than a parody in the strictest sense, a sort of precursor to Chris Morris with jangly guitars:

A man at work keeps touching my knee.

Is he dangerous?

I'll wait and see.

Ooooooh horror at the office.

He's after my orifice.

Then there were John's videos, crash edited on a domestic VHS from footage off the TV, old films and what have you. They were funny in a way, but mainly just odd, although you could tell John loved putting them together, amusing himself regardless of how ludicrous the results might seem to others; which was what I liked about him.

So that was John Schölle, except after about six months I realised Schölle wasn't even his real name. We recorded some tracks together, but I still didn't quite get the sound system angle. He gave me a tape made by someone who had written to him, beefy electronic rhythms from an individual calling himself C.S. Teknono - the initials standing for Christopher Smith - who would be helping in setting up this mythical sound system. I loved the tape, then about a month later I bought Major Malfunction by Keith LeBlanc and recognised it as the same material. I told John and we sat down to listen to the album. He rubbed his chin and seemed uncomfortable, and I genuinely believed he'd been hoaxed by this Christopher Smith, what with my tending to look for the best in people and having failed to put two and two together regarding John already being quite the fan where Keith LeBlanc was concerned.

Months passed, John and Janine got married, and I failed to spot his increasingly erratic behaviour. He seemed often unreliable, failing to show at agreed meeting times, and I only began to regard this as peculiar when my friend Carl and I visited him one day. We had been invited but nevertheless John didn't appear to be in. It wasn't the first time he'd let us down, but listening at the door we heard sounds of movement which stopped dead as we resumed knocking. So he was in but hiding from us. It was hard not to take that personally, and I gave up on the guy and eventually moved away from Chatham, increasingly flaky friends being one of a number of factors that had contributed to the diminishing appeal of the Medway towns in my eyes.

John and Janine resurfaced in Beckenham about five years later, by which time I was living in East Dulwich. With John being difficult to dislike and easy to forgive, we resumed the sporadic habit of an occasional drink to lubricate rambling conversations about music, art, films, literature, and Derek & Clive. Inevitably after another few months, he once again dropped off the radar - no reason given, just the sound of a telephone left ringing. If I was really that much of a pain in the arse, I concluded, hopefully he would know better than to bother next time around.

Another five years and he reappeared for one single raucous drink at The Uplands during which he told me that he and Janine had separated - which seemed a shame - and that he was living with his mum in Peckham on disability benefits, prevented from working by  some psychological condition - which actually made a lot of sense. Then he vanished again, up until his most recent manifestation about a year ago, now reduced to an internet presence, just a YouTube account living in Leicester and apparently spending his days editing segments of old films into faintly amusing clips. I responded to his slightly cranky email with little enthusiasm, and then forgot about it.

John was a comet, his eccentric solar path bringing him around roughly twice a decade leaving observers bewildered as he once again buggered off back to giggling obscurity. It always seemed a shame, because aside from his being a genuinely talented musician, and his plays so impressing my friend Rob that there was even talk of getting one performed before an audience, John did a convincing impersonation of being great company. It wasn't like he really needed to make stuff up in order to appear interesting; he was already more interesting than most people; but for some reason he just liked to live a life of reckless invention. As with Steve Jansen, drummer of Japan and brother of David Sylvian, specifically his short-lived relationship with Andrea, I guess you just have to enjoy it for what it is while it lasts, because even if it's just a story, at least it was a good one.

What I Learned from Being Punched in the Face

Although this hasn't been true of late, life can sometimes appear very grim and I have generally found this is often down to my not listening to enough rap music. Of course, my eviction from the flat in which I had lived for a decade back in 2006 can't be blamed directly on a dip in my listening habits with regard to the Ice Cube back catalogue; but as a soundtrack to daily existence, rap really gets you through the tough bits, and the surlier and more offensive, the better it serves as a sympathetic if slightly volatile imaginary friend.

I listened to one hell of a lot of rap whilst working as a postman for Royal Mail. When a manager half your age tells you that your refusal to work unpaid for an hour past your official finishing time may result in a formal warning for delaying the mail, rap is your friend, or if not actually your friend, at least someone who is just as pissed off.

One day, as I was sorting mail, Graham wandered up to me, as was sometimes his habit when at a loose end.

'What's that you're listening to?' he asked, eyeing my CD Walkman.

'Black Rob,' I told him.

'I've never heard of him.'

'You know Rob Grieg,' I said, referring to the young postman of that name assigned to the Forest Hill end of Lordship Lane. 'Well he's a bit like that, except he's black.'

I don't think Graham really got the joke, or possibly he just didn't think it was funny, but it was probably a miracle that we were talking at all so I didn't press the issue.

When I first transferred to East Dulwich sorting office back in 1993 or thereabouts, I found myself working next to Graham. He struck me as odd and a little manic, and I found him slightly abrasive. He wasn't rude, but he laughed at certain jokes more forcefully than seemed appropriate. Being new to the office and thus keen to avoid making enemies so soon, I tried not to let myself become irritated by him; and I would have succeeded were it not for his laugh, a booming hurhurhurhurhur that you could hear just about wherever you were in the building, usually in response to things that never seemed particularly funny. I tried hard, but I just couldn't get past that hurhurhurhurhur. It brought out the worst in me.

I took to echoing Graham's laughter as some sort of coping mechanism. 'Hurhurhurhurhur,' he would guffaw from some unseen location on the other side of the sorting frames in response to Ronnie Jeff observing that someone or other was a bit of an arsehole. 'Hurhurhurhurhur,' I would repeat in the assumption that, being unable to see me, Graham would have no idea who was responsible.

I found another reason to resent Graham. He was an almost supernaturally fast worker, and this was why he so often had time to wander the office asking about listening habits whilst the rest of us hadn't even got around to sorting through our packet bags. I never found out how he did it, but I assume he was hyperactive by some definition. Any walk he was on, he would finish at almost twice the average speed; which was fair enough except it made the rest of us look bad. This also meant that any walk to which he was assigned for any length of time would usually end up with a few streets added because he'd made it seem too easy. We would mutter and grumble amongst ourselves, lamenting all those once cushy routes which had been expanded to unreasonable length because Graham just had to get back to the office before everyone else so he could stand around gurgling hurhurhurhurhur and doing that weird thing with his hands - like high speed counting using just fingers, not quite the full Lady Macbeth but along those lines.

It wasn't that we didn't get on so much as I never knew what to say to him. We didn't have anything in common aside from moaning about work, and given that a percentage of my moaning would have related directly to his presence, that particular vehicle had limited mileage. Sometimes he would mention listening to Led Zeppelin or dub reggae or something very much outside the norm in terms of the general musical tastes of our office, but it wasn't really enough to fuel anything beyond the most casual of conversations.

In September 2001 a few of us went out for a drink at The Foresters* one Saturday evening. Dave was moving on to better things and so this was his leaving drink, and I guess about fifteen of us showed up: Terry, Andre, Steve, Joel, both Dannies, Geoff - who had most likely been in the pub since midday and hadn't got around to leaving - and of course Graham.

This was awkward. I had been avoiding Graham at work, knowing myself too well and how easily irritated I can get. Some people have pointed out that I have a bit of a sharp tongue and am prone to acerbic commentary, which I didn't really believe until my mother told me how her friends used to be scared to visit when I was a child apparently due to the mighty force of my prepubescent sarcasm. Anyway, we dutifully observed the tradition of each sticking a tenner in a communal pint glass which would serve as a pot and thus ensure no-one need know the misery of being able to walk in a straight line by the end of the evening. The first drinks arrived and we started, embarking upon the customary slagging off of those who hadn't bothered to show. I wasn't thrilled to be sat at the same table as Graham, not least because he insisted on talking to me, cracking jokes and being annoying. My responses were short and functional, conversational place-holders which failed to compensate for the fact that Graham, regardless of perceived faults, actually wasn't an idiot.

Unfortunately, as well as not being an idiot, he was additionally able to down ridiculous quantities of the sort of booze which often leads to concerns voiced loudly and without inhibition followed closely by a punching of available faces, offending or otherwise. After a while, he grew quiet, both sullen and conspicuously refreshed*, and I assumed he would probably just go home. He didn't, and at the end of the evening as we all made to leave, he at last decided to voice his objections in the strongest possible terms.

'So you think I'm a cunt, do you?'

He gave me a slap and was immediately restrained by the others.

I feigned craven innocence, shocked, concerned only to learn what I had done to give offence whilst experiencing a sudden and chilling insight of my absolutely having deserved it; and although the it in question had felt like a slap, nothing worse than you would dish out to a mosquito, I had - against expectation - a black eye the next day. One of the Dannies took Graham around the corner, launching him off in the general direction of home, and I headed back up Lordship Lane with Andre, Joel and Terry; and everyone was on my side, with the possible exception of myself.

What the hell was Graham's problem? they asked, incredulous. I tried to explain that I'd been relentlessly returning the hurhurhurhurhur since at least January, and I'd known all along that I really should have just risen above my own intolerance given that Graham wasn't actually harming anyone, but by then I'd had an entire three pints of weak, fizzy lager and the case for Graham's defence just came out as a series of burps.

I woke the next day to the previously mentioned black eye and an awareness of having annoyed someone so much as to inspire violence. It was sobering.

I called one of the Dannies and got Graham's address, which I knew to be elsewhere in East Dulwich, just not the house number. Danny told me to leave it as Graham probably wouldn't even remember, but I went anyway, reasoning that I owed the guy an apology regardless of his recollection of the previous evening.

He came to the door, apparently pleasantly surprised to see me, not the faintest suggestion of either hangover or lingering resentment.

'Listen, Graham,' I said, 'I deserved that, and I'm here to say sorry for the way I've been acting of late.'

He laughed an amiable hurhurhurhurhur and made a dismissive gesture. 'I'm the one who should say sorry, mate. I was on the cider all day and I hadn't had anything to eat. I should know better by now.'

We shook hands, and every snarky opinion I'd ever formed regarding his character was immediately revealed as my own bullshit. We didn't exactly become buddies after that, but I no longer found him so abrasive, and we were at least able to hold a conversation. Years later he was absent from work for a few months for mysterious reasons that resolved into his having been stabbed by his own father. This seemed to confirm the conclusion I had drawn: Graham probably didn't have a great life, and most of it seemed to be spent either in the pub or at work. He had drinking buddies, but I've no idea if they were friends as I would understand the term; and the latest sour cherry upon the cake of Graham's existence was that his own father had sent him to the emergency ward.

I might have understood some of this picture much earlier had I bothered to use my brain, but instead I took the piss because his laughter got on my nerves, like he really needed that on top of whatever else he didn't have going for him.

Just two days after being awarded my somewhat deserved black eye, I went to spend a couple of weeks in Mexico City. Airline officials frowned at my passport photograph, and then at the blanco who had apparently recently been contestant in a face punching competition, but no-one said a word. I've found the best way to get around in Mexico is to avoid looking too much like a tourist, or like anyone who might be worth bothering with - as though the cheapest hotel is the most you can afford but you've still made your best effort to appear respectable - your best not being that great. My suits were from Oxfam, so it wasn't like I had to dress any different, and they did the job. The Mexicans to whom I spoke assumed I was probably German, or I was involved in some sort of mediocre business, but no-one seemed to think it likely that I was there on holiday. I also like to think that my walking around with a black eye helped in some way, perhaps conveying the impression that I got into scraps all the time and would therefore not be worth the effort.

Graham wasn't exactly a friend, but he ended up teaching me a huge lesson probably without realising it, and hopefully I'm less of a tit these days as a result. To some extent this does seem to have thus far been the proverbial story of my life - that which you most need is often to be found in the most unlikely place, and is rarely that which you think you need; and sometimes the thing you need turns out to be a punch in the face, which probably brings us back to rap...

footnotes:

The Foresters: A once decent pub since reimagineered as the sort of twee yuppie wine trough full of laptop wielding tossers that has been driving regular people out of East Dulwich since at least 2005.

Refreshed: Colloquial euphemism for an advanced state of inebriation, for example: Gary, having finished off his ninth cold drink of the evening, was now so refreshed that he could barely stand.

On Camels Failing to Pass Through the Eyes of Needles

A moral high ground is so often adopted where Stuff is concerned, specifically the possession of large quantities of Stuff. We see someone whose shelves sag with the bulk of whatever crap they've accumulated over the years, so we frown and shake our heads. Conversely, we greet the same person sat smiling beatifically in a bare room whilst contemplating a grain of corn with contemplative one-handed applause. We admire their wisdom, their having shaken off the need of material distractions, and then we go home and listen to John Lennon telling us how fab it would be if we could just live without Stuff, just like he did. You can't take it with you when you die, well-wishers remind us, as though anyone in the entire history of the human race with the possible exception of certain Pharaohs ever failed to grasp that particular clause of the mortality contract.

Of course, there are those who really do have too much Stuff, who make compulsive purchases in the doomed hope of achieving an elusive happiness, who accumulate vast libraries of overpriced tat they will never read or watch because, having failed to develop critical faculties, they are obliged to assess value by the criteria of whether or not something has a Doctor Who logo printed on the cover - to specifically identify one road I might have travelled but for the grace of having become a fully grown man. There are those who really, really don't need a jet-ski, or another pair of shoes, or two houses, or books explaining what J. Michael Straczynski was trying to say with Babylon 5. Having long known that neither the simple purchase nor possession of an object has ever done much to raise my spirits during times of sorrow, I'm pretty sure I am not one of those people. At least I hope I'm not one of those people, even though it's true that I do have one hell of a lot of Stuff.

I justify my ton of Stuff - mainly records, compact discs, cassettes, books, and comics - by periodically getting rid of anything I have in my possession just for the sake of it. If I'm unlikely to look at or listen to some vaguely cultural artefact again, there's not a lot of point in keeping it, and I try to avoid buying anything through either boredom or habit; but that said, I still have a lot of Stuff. The occasional purge is okay, but there's no point in getting rid of things just for the sake of a purge. I've done this before, mainly with books, and only ended up buying them again, which has at least helped refine my sense of what I can live without.

Girlfriend number three was a big fan of getting rid of Stuff, or decluttering as she called it, having presumably read the term in one of her four million self-help books. She was also a big fan of television programmes like How Clean is Your Arse? and Well, I Just Hope You're Satisfied in which self-proclaimed advice gurus hector and bully regular people into feeling worthless for the sake of ratings.

'Oh Doctor Gillian,' number three would chortle, inadvertently commending a bum-faced snake oil peddling televisual quack for reducing a fat person to tears over a bag of sodding Maltesers. 'What are you like, Doctor Gillian?' number three would titter at the screen as though sharing in some private joke communicated by means of long-distance telepathy, simultaneously earning the dubious distinction of being the last person in the entire Milky Way galaxy to believe in Gillian McKeith's medical qualifications. For whatever reason, somewhere along the line, girlfriend number three had learned to associate distress and abuse with self-improvement, apparently missing the crucial point that telling somebody off is never really an end in itself and is more productive when there's a subject. Of course, she saw all my shelves of books and comics and, unable to appreciate the skips full of cranky UFO-related literature that I had already Joseph Stalined from my own personal timeline, she helpfully set me a challenge. Each week I was to pick five books I didn't need and give them to Oxfam, and she would be checking up on me.

One week later she checked up on me and found that I had failed to pick five books or to give any away. I explained that this was because I had no intention of accepting her idiotic challenge regardless of what conversations may have transpired inside her head. Besides, I didn't exactly need any of them, I just liked having them. It didn't strike me as difficult to understand.

By the time I fled the house and my nonsensical entanglement with girlfriend number three, aided and abetted by a genial chain smoking Irish motorist and his van, I was painfully aware of just how much Stuff I had accumulated, having moved three times in as many years. The fourth move was to my mother's house in Coventry, an undertaking distinguished by the additional task of my having to carry all that Stuff up a flight of stairs.

By this time I'd met Bess, and we had drawn up tentative plans to marry and live together in Texas, so I spent eighteen months selling half of my Stuff on eBay in order to afford shipping costs for the other half. I suppose the point of my describing all this is to set forth the thesis that by 2009, if I owned a particular book, record, comic book or whatever, then I owned it for a reason other than pure sentiment. After twenty years of carting Stuff around, you tend to hang onto the things that repay your investment.

Anyway, to gradually approach the purpose of all this, in 2011, I had sold about as much as I could on eBay, and all the immigration papers had come through, so I crammed a couple of suitcases with books and compact discs and flew to San Antonio, Texas. For nearly two years I lived with access to just a small percentage of my Stuff, specifically that which I was able to bring back as luggage following two return visits to the United Kingdom. As for the rest of it, I hadn't even started the process of packing and shipping before I left England, there having been too much else to do; and Bess and I had not at the time agreed upon where we would live once married, so there hadn't even been an address I could have given the shipping company. After a year, I went back for a few weeks and discovered that this wasn't really sufficient time to sort out the shipping, so I ended up spreading all the paperwork, handshakes, and shoving things in boxes over two visits, the second of these occurring in November 2012. As it happened, I didn't actually get all of my Stuff in those forty boxes of approximately 20kg each, but I got most of it, enough for what remains at my mother's house to constitute luggage following the next few visits.

So after nearly two years of getting by on a bare minimum of Stuff - just a few essential Ice Cube albums and Clifford D. Simak novels - the van has been and gone, dropping off forty boxes packed three months earlier in cold, wet England. I haven't yet built the shelving to accommodate all of this Stuff, so it remains in the garage for the moment. So far I've opened just one box out of curiosity, mainly to assess the chance of everything still being in one piece, and so this week has been soundtracked by old favourites not heard for at least two summers: Dandy Warhols, Dizzee Rascal, DJ Rap, DMX, Tha Dogg Pound, Dresden Dolls, Električni Orgazam, El-P, Eno, Eminem, and Eels - who for some reason I've only just identified as being Nirvana directed by Tim Burton, which probably accounts for why I was never too sure about that album, but anyway...

It's been great having all my Stuff once again under the one roof, although at the same time it's been quite strange. Another one of those massive jobs that has been years in the planning no longer requires my attention, and at the same time, I realise there's no longer anything like so much of me left back in the old country; and strangest of all, opening up just that one box felt somehow like going through the house of somebody who died. Whoever I was two years ago, there's probably an argument for my now being someone slightly different, and certainly less pissed off.

At a push, Stuff might be considered an extended phenotype of sorts. Ownership of No Limit compact discs or the novels of D.H. Lawrence probably isn't encoded in my DNA, but it might be possible to trace a line back in that general direction, at least allowing for a major diversion through nurture and the like. Birds make nests, and chimpanzees poke sticks into holes in the ground, and as my mental faculties aren't quite up to eidetic recall and replay of the entire Scarface back catalogue, I have these material extensions of memory which I carry around from place to place.

This is what I meant by there no longer being much of me left back in England. If I am by some definition comprised of all this Stuff, most of it's now here in Texas.

To possess Stuff is only human nature. We like to have things around us, and anyone who regards that as necessarily bad is probably an idiot, or at least not someone with whom you would want to spend an entire weekend. I appreciate love, friendship, wildlife, cats, thought, a beautiful sunset and all of those things that you can't stick on a credit card without feeling the need to use my appreciation to score points; but I can also appreciate a lovingly maintained vinyl copy of Led Zeppelin's Physical Graffiti album, or Philip K. Dick's novels arranged in chronological order; and if you can't understand that, then you have my pity.

Like water being wet and the rest room facilities of which bears traditionally avail themselves, it always struck me as self-evident that a man lacking qualities beyond the contents of his wallet cannot, by definition, enter the kingdom of heaven; although as for why anyone would wish to thread a camel through the eye of a needle - I never really got that one.