Cacophony

'Adolf Hitler,' I roared laughingly as I bit into my roast steer, 'don't compare me to that puh-puh,' - the word tasted disgusting in my mouth. I couldn't get it out, and feared I might lose my lunch of chicken fried steak fried chicken. 'Don't compare me to that damn liberal pantywaist!'

Grand Dragon McCarthy chuckled at my remark, embellishing it with one of his own, although it was difficult to tell what he was saying beneath the hood. That's the problem with our rallies. It's not so much the being denied decent conversation, as that it's often difficult to hear what anyone is saying even without the spit and crackle of wooden crosses ablaze upon adjacent lawns.

I set the remains of the steer back upon my platter and beckoned to one of my many, many slaves.

'Yes'um,' he gollumed up to our El Camino, eyes rolling and hands flapping as was his habit.

'Bring me gasoline, serf,' I barked. 'My hunger is sated, and now I fancy I shall set fire to an abortion clinic, some homosexuals, and Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, although perhaps not necessarily in that order.'

The slave rattled his chains happily, knowing his place, but adding no comment on account of the fact that he didn't exist, and none of this happened, despite my writing this whilst sat here in the United States of America, and in Texas of all places; and as we have established by now, Texas is the only state where anything bad ever happens.

This week's bad thing actually happened in Florida, but let's face it, the guy was probably from Texas or something, or he's been here or he knows someone. That's all it takes, and if you can't trust the word of a commentator who may indeed live five hundred miles away but has read a scathing article in a newspaper or on the internet and had a little bit of a think, then what hope is there for any of us? I mean really?

Besides, last week's bad thing was in Texas, specifically in Austin the state capital, so the general rule still applies. Some may have chosen to praise Wendy Davies and her thirteen hour re-enactment of Kenneth Williams talking about elves without repetition, deviation or hesitation on BBC Radio's comedy panel game Just a Minute, but that isn't the point and besides she probably isn't even from Texas, in fact I'll bet she's from Maine or somewhere nice and civilised like that. The point is that the wrongness transpired in Texas, and that the ethically anointed of far and wide therefore felt the customary moral obligation to assert that with this being Texas, perfidy most foul was certainly abroad as sure as eggs are eggs, McDonalds is McDonalds, and all Americans are fat and voted for George W. Bush.

See, here in Texas we hate freedom, non-Caucasian ethnic groups and improvised jazz, and there are no exceptions. Every last one of us - we're crazy, and we really are all exactly the same - you can ask anyone. You've all seen us in your mind's eye, sat around polishing our guns and hankering after the good old days of slavery. Well that's what it's like in real life too, and I know this to be true despite the unreliable evidence of my own experience because someone from England told me so; and he should know, what with England being the land universally acknowledged as the one untarnished source of all culture, all that is wise and good. So he'd never been here, but he met an American about eight years ago, and goddammit do you really think someone like that would have lied to me?

Sarcasm aside, I have come to the understanding that there really are people in the United Kingdom who believe the world would be a better place if each action could only be prefaced by somebody tracking down an English guy just to see what he thinks, whether it seems like a good idea. So often are regular Americans somehow conflated with the foreign policy of their government by the United Kingdom's frontline of keyboard warriors, every last one somehow missing the irony of discussing arrogance with one matronly eye asquint in this direction. If it's an unfortunate truism that America as a whole feels it has the right to act by virtue of being America, then being English, at least for some, means that your wisdom is so culturally entrenched as to dispense with the need for experience because whatever comes out of your flapping mouth will be correct by definition. This is something you really begin to notice once you spend some time outside of the mother country and come to realise how little you miss it - at least in my view; and also that of D.H. Lawrence apparently:

She thought again of going back to Europe. But what was the good? She knew it! It was all politics or jazzing or slushy mysticism or sordid spiritualism. And the magic had gone. The younger generation, so smart and interesting, but so without any mystery, any background. The younger the generation, the flatter and more jazzy, more and more devoid of wonder.

- The Plumed Serpent (1926).

The cacophony is exhausting, so I'm attempting to withdraw from any internet venue in which the uninformed feel duty bound to share their one-size-fits-all opinions with and concerning people they have never met who reside in lands they will never visit.

San Antonio is neither the most peaceful nor crime-ridden city in the world, but nor is it significantly better or worse than any other place so far as I am able to tell. I have not yet seen much of America, and I get the impression that most places will be similar, differentiated mainly by climate and geography rather than consumption of McDonalds freedom fries and degree of unquestioning reverence for whichever President people in England currently hate the most. I live on a quiet street in an average neighbourhood with the occasional dope dealer or welfare recipient as a moderately more typical resident than doctors, dentists or Tommy Lee Jones. In my daily existence I encounter people of all ages and ethnicities - roughly speaking - and we all seem to get on, contrary to that which may be gleaned from the imaginations of those who feel the need to express righteous anger about whatever is available at time of going to press. In my two years here I have heard not a single gunshot, nor witnessed any violent incident, nor overheard a racist remark. Texans in my experience tend to be kind, well-mannered, and mostly liberal because it's too hot to be much of anything else; they are not uniformly enormous from a diet of McDonalds, root beer, and barbecue sauce, and neither have I met anyone holding significantly unpleasant racial or political views. You might suggest I'm living in a bubble, but the chance is more likely that you have neither idea nor understanding of my circumstances beyond a general impression that either my adopted country or state probably needs a good telling off as a matter of principle.

I'm not saying that terrible things never happen here, in either Texas or the USA, or that our foreign policy is necessarily without fault, but that the hysterical views of those who don't actually know yet who nevertheless feel compelled to comment really ain't worth a hill of beans, as the saying goes.

A few weeks ago as I was watering the grass I saw our next door neighbour working away on the other side of the fence. Frasier is a tall, skinny fellow, slow moving and softly spoken with something of a fixed smile - which is simply his face at rest. You see Frasier, and before he's spoken a word, you find yourself liking the guy. I waved and so he stepped back from his lawn mower.

'How are you doing?' I asked.

'I'm fine,' he smiled, probably not on purpose. 'Just mowing the lawn - goofing around.'

I don't even know why, but just that combination of activities struck me. The idea that someone could regard mowing a lawn and goofing around as one and the same was somehow pleasing. We spent some time talking about the heat and what types of grass we were both trying to grow, and it was a calm exchange. This, I decided, is the sort of conversation I like, just a guy telling you what he knows. It wasn't intellectually stimulating, but then at the age of forty-seven I've come to realise that 99% of supposedly intellectually stimulating conversation is just piss and wind, the hoots and territorial wails of those who can't get enough of the sound of their own voices wrapped around an authoritative phrase, those who have never understood why sometimes it's good to just shut up and enjoy the silence.

I have taken to saying nothing when I have nothing I wish to say, and in future I am going to avoid listening when nothing is being said.

Please feel free to follow my example.

You're very welcome.

Ten Good Years

Around the beginning of 1995, the relationship I'd been in for the previous eighteen months was drawing to a natural conclusion. The association hadn't been without its moments but it wasn't really going anywhere, unlike my girlfriend who was off to Norwich to study fine art. We were living in London, sharing a flat in East Dulwich, and the question of whether a long-distance relationship could work hadn't been raised for the obvious reason that even our living together under the same roof had been a bit of a mixed bag.

Whilst Mandy had at least some of her future worked out - in terms of direction if not necessarily destination - I was beginning to worry. My work was based in East Dulwich, and being as I'd never learned to drive, I would be obliged to either remain in the area or change jobs, both options which seemed to presage a possible slide from poor circumstances to slightly worse. Furthermore, I liked London, or at least I liked East Dulwich, and hoped I might continue to live in the area despite knowing it probably wasn't going to happen. My weekly postman's wage was slowly being overtaken by the average cost of rent in the capital, and to make matters worse, Time Out had recently published an article pinpointing East Dulwich as the hot new place to live south of the river. Time Out is a weekly listings magazine aimed at that specific breed of cultural vulture who, lacking any real interests, seek to pass time with a regular intake of vaguely classy shit - TV Quick for people who think Damien Hirst is probably saying something important, even if they're not quite sure what it is. So, with all of the really good schools conveniently identified and the confirmed presence of at least one gastropub serving food au jus on square plates, the flood of overmoneyed braying morons began - web designers and new media consultants flocking in from Nottingham or Guildford inspiring a flurry of wine bars, latte troughs, and boutique shops which didn't actually sell anything; and the cost of living in East Dulwich became prohibitive as the locals were gradually driven out of the area.

It didn't look good for me, but Mandy's flight to Norwich was  months away and so in preparation for my resumption of bachelorhood I began to look around for somewhere I might live, refusing to be put off by the almost certain knowledge that I would fail. At the time I had a regular delivery route, the odd numbered side of Lordship Lane running from the launderette on the corner of Pellatt Road right up to the last block of houses bordering the Horniman Gardens in Forest Hill. As a point of interest, the block in question can be seen to the left of the railway line in Camille Pissarro's Lordship Lane Station, Dulwich painted in 1871, and there was for me a strange thrill in delivering to such a vaguely historic address.

Camille Pissarro, Lordship Lane Station, Dulwich, 1871.

Further down the hill, just past The Plough - the pub which briefly and ridiculously became The Goose & Granite once house prices started to bloat - was a terrace of twelve four-storey and possibly Edwardian townhouses of which all but a few had been converted into flats. About half of these had flights of steps running up the outside of each building for, lacking a communal entrance nearer to the surface of the planet, most flats had their own front door.  This was therefore a massive pain in the arse in terms of mail delivery, and particularly in the case of Michael Johnson who lived on the uppermost floor at one address, and who was guaranteed to receive something in the mail twice daily, even if was just an extremely poorly targeted advert for car insurance. I had a testy speech prepared for the day we finally came face to face, something making use of the sort of profanities which can be yapped out whilst still breathless from the previous ten minutes of climbing. These fucking steps, I would begin...

When at last we met, Michael - or Mick as I believe he preferred - turned out to be effectively paraplegic and only roughly mobile with the aid of crutches, which somewhat sucked the pleasure out of my proposed tirade. Being differently abled - as I suppose is one definition - turned out to be amongst Mick's lesser distinguishing features, for he was also of Asian ethnicity, amusingly over-educated - that fourth floor flat being stuffed with shelves of terrifying philosophical texts from university days - and Liverpudlian with an accent which might have been used to thicken custard. Above all, he was a blabbermouth and very, very funny, and we hit it off immediately. By the time my relationship with Mandy had begun to wind down, I knew Mick well enough to look forward to our occasionally scurrilous conversations as we encountered each other in the street - comparing notes about his neighbours, which addresses had recently received discreet brown magazine sized envelopes and that sort of thing. On the off chance, I asked if he knew of any flats available in the area. He seemed to know everything that went on, so I guessed it was worth a shot.

'You should speak to Bill,' he suggested in fluent Jimmy Corkhill, indicating the next house but one, 'although you'd better not tell him I said anything. He thinks I'm a Paki.'

I was glad of the information, whilst also being a little shocked by the racial term, which was of course Mick's intention. I'd spoken to Bill Edney only a few times as he was one of the older, less outgoing residents of the terrace. He was a compact little man in his late seventies, but with a sparky, almost youthful quality, quick-witted and with a full head of snowy white hair which lent him a distinguished appearance.

'Funny you should ask,' Bill told me in answer to a slightly different question, at which point I noticed the hearing aid, 'but he's just moved out, so if you want to have a look...'

He led me down the alley at the side of his house to the basement flat, and I recalled that the resident, somebody or other Wilson, had not been getting much mail of late.

'Who told you it was going?' Bill fumbled with a set of keys and unlocked the door.

I've never been that great at telling lies so I spilled the beans because oh I just heard about it somewhere seemed like a terrible answer to give to someone so advanced in years.

'Michael eh?' He rolled his eyes and batted a dismissive hand like an amused game show host. 'He's a funny bloke.' Everyone was a funny bloke to Bill, which was the strongest character assessment I ever heard him make, even when it came to the dreaded George Ramshall to whom I shall refer later. As I would come to realise, Bill was not really given to strong opinions of the kind which can't be shared in reasonably polite company.

The flat had a kitchen, front room, bathroom, bedroom, hall, and separate toilet, not to mention a rear door with access to the garden. It was furnished, clean and in a good state of repair, and Bill had recently finished redecorating following the exit of Mr. Wilson. The house had originally been a single dwelling, but Bill had converted the ground floor into a self-contained flat for his sister - since deceased - back in the 1950s or thereabouts. It was perfect but obviously out of my league.

Bill and friend forging what would eventually become my kitchen.

'Fifty quid a week,' he said.

I tried not to choke, having anticipated a figure three or four times as much.

'Okay,' I squeaked. 'I'm interested.'

Bill told me that there was no television set, reluctantly confessing this like it would be the deal breaker - the rats in the wall or the body buried under the kitchen floor. He seemed almost to be expecting a frosty good day to you, sir as I stormed off to spend my fifty pounds a week rent money elsewhere.

I explained that it really wasn't a problem.

Later that week I showed up at the house following my morning delivery and met Florence, or rather Flo, Bill's wife. She would be my landlady and was the manager of all their financial affairs. Like her husband, she was small and an enthusiastic smoker. Bill was on about eighty a day and I assumed she was keeping pace. I entered their home, which occupied the two uppermost floors of the house, took one lungful of oxygen flavoured smog and understood that these people were serious about their ciggies. Each intake of breath in their deeply tanned front room was equivalent to smoking an unfiltered extra-tar Marlboro, and I could not help but be impressed. Flo brought out a photocopied rental agreement, apologised for the fact of there being no television set in the flat, and offered me a cigarette.

I moved in about a month later, migrating gradually with a couple of bags of all my crap taken up to the flat each afternoon. Bill and Flo had decided they weren't bothered about rent until I was actually living there, and this became characteristic of how they ran things, with an informal approach, their being more concerned about having a reliable tenant than raking in the money. By May 1995 I was all moved in without the usual rigmarole of unpacking and sorting everything out as I had been doing this daily during the weeks in transit; but it was not all good news, and the first few months turned out to be a little rocky, contrary to expectation. Mandy had moved with me, despite our scheduled separation, the reasoning being that her course didn't start until September, and so for the present she was otherwise screwed in terms of accommodation. It was awkward, but there weren't really any other options; and it was awkward mainly because I'd had no idea she would be moving in with me until I'd already signed the contract, and it turned out that the fifty pounds per week was per head rather than all in.

Flo called me upstairs for an interview, sat me down, offered me a cigarette and said she was very disappointed. I explained as best as I could that it wasn't my idea, and that Mandy's residence would only be short term; and thankfully, she believed me.

Bill and Flo in the garden, 1980s.

Then came the fact that we owned a cat, something else I had neglected to mention when moving in for the honest reason that I believed Buster would be going to live in Norwich with Mandy. I had a hunch that Bill and Flo weren't keen on cats and wouldn't want one in their flat, and being reluctant to have my hypothesis validated, I never asked. Tragically, the problem solved itself when Buster was hit by a car. Mandy believed he had been shooed into oncoming traffic by our landlord, but I strongly suspect it was simply a combination of bad luck and the fact that we lived on a main road; and this prompted my second interview. Flo was again very disappointed. I had the impression that Bill preferred to let his wife do the arguing as she was better at it with that formidable headmistress quality of someone who never raised her voice but would have you killed if the situation demanded. She offered me a cigarette, then explained that although she was sorry about Buster, they had a strict policy regarding pets. My heart sank, imagining I would soon be looking for some other place to live, but as she explained and offered me another cigarette, I realised that this was simply a warning. I guessed that renting out one's basement could be a bit of a minefield in London, particularly for a couple in their late seventies and preferring a quiet life; and despite everything, I hadn't yet thrown an all-night party, set anything on fire, or turned the place into a crack den, so I was on probation.

It was a difficult summer. I was upset over Buster, and the situation with my girlfriend was becoming weird and uncomfortable, but by October it was over. Mandy was at last where she wanted to be chasing that great big art rainbow, and I was happily single and  paying peanuts for a flat that was better than any I had known. No longer was I crawling from one gloomy bedsit to another, struggling to pay rent in the certain knowledge that the future would be worse, and I felt suddenly and profoundly unburdened for the first time in my life. It seemed like things were starting to work out.

I became comfortable, enjoying the flat and the garden and having a traditional landlord rather than some faceless agency. I had found a tiny pocket of decency left over from the 1960s when Tony Hancock or Michael Caine would pay rent in shillings to Irene Handl and they would all have a cup of tea and a smoke as she hung out the washing. If anything needed fixing, Bill would usually get onto it within the week, either doing the job himself or getting his friend Jim, an affable Irish D.H. Lawrence whom I gather had worked for Bill back when he'd been in the building trade and ran his own company. Repairs made weren't always the greatest in terms of craftsmanship, but the service was excellent. When I suffered an outbreak of mould - dark patches of grey and black spreading in circles across my kitchen ceiling - Jim painted over them with Dulux white emulsion before departing with a cheery, 'there you go, Lawrie. That should all be fine for you now.'

At fifty pounds a week, I wasn't complaining and besides, I'd endured a succession of genuinely dodgy landlords and letting agencies over the years, and had experienced real housing problems. The occasional spot of damp which inevitably comes with a basement flat really didn't seem like anything to worry about. When the wallpaper began to peel from my living room ceiling - prompting the question of why anyone would paper a ceiling in the first place - I applied drawing pins, matching them to the decor with correcting fluid; and if my repairing and regrouting of the tiles that had begun to fall from the kitchen wall was a bit of a lumpy job, at least the things stayed in place. If the job was serious, Bill would hire an electrician or a plumber. Everything else was handled by the ever-enthusiastic Jim.

If the mechanics of my tenancy seemed eccentric and potentially unreliable, legislated by goodwill and handshakes, the arrangement was preferable to any I had known before. Previous landlords and letting agencies had been marginally more efficient, but in my experience the more secure the legality, the greater the likelihood of getting screwed. I'd show up at the office with the customary sense of unease and as I handed over my cheque the secretary would tell me that the property was being sold in three months and I would be receiving notice to piss off in due course. With Bill, I would ring on his doorbell every Monday afternoon, wait the five minutes it took for him to get down the stairs, and then hand over his fifty quid in cash - essentially his spending money for the week as it turned out, and we would stand there on his doorstep and talk rubbish for a while. It was generally the same old jokes, but they were comfortable and always funny.

'I hope you're behaving yourself,' he would say with a twinkle in his bifocals.

'You know me, Bill. I just keep myself to myself.'

'That's the best thing. If you don't go nowhere, you can't get in any trouble.' He'd consider this, then frown and direct a pointed gaze at my rounded belly. 'Are you sure, you're behaving yourself?'

'Of course.'

'It looks like you've been interfered with to me.'

It was like living in a gentler Harold Pinter play; and with this being - as I already mentioned - a small pocket of 1960s decency somehow preserved like one of those Antarctic valleys full of dinosaurs, most of our neighbours knew one another, and of course they knew me because I was their regular postman. Next door but one was Mike Johnson, the funny bloke, with Candy and her son Joe in the flat below; on the other side were Carol and Dave - whom I got to know quite well because both Dave and I were of West Midlands extraction, and they once let me have a bath at their place when Jim was around repairing my plumbing with a roll of selotape and some chewing gum; then there was the seventy year old deaf Jamaican guy and his conspicuously younger Thai wife whom I helped one afternoon by breaking into their flat through the second floor bathroom window when they found themselves locked out; and there were the Borellis with all their cats, the lovely Lucia who shared my fascination with both frogs and carnivorous plants, and her theatrical brother Dominic, an actual star of stage and screen.

Other neighbours came and went, but these were the ones I knew best, the ones who held their ground against the engulfing tide of property development. We were an island, surrounded by economic predators thirsting to buy and transform everything into flats to be farmed off to wealthy events organisers and consultancy analysts who really needed to live somewhere with a bit of a vibe, yeah?

As I settled, it gradually dawned on me that my rent-to-wage ratio now left me reasonably well paid, and that I was relatively contented for what might almost have been the first time since childhood. I took up painting again, went back to recording my own music - activities with which I had not engaged myself in a while. I started writing, and began living, if you'll pardon the generic inspirational soundtrack music you may be able to hear in the background at this juncture. Of course, being practically minded, I was aware that mine hosts were  getting on in years and this relative idyll could not endure indefinitely, but as Damoclesian swords go this one seemed presently blunt.

Mortality entered the equation during my second Christmas at the flat when Flo succumbed to cancer. Inevitably and selfishly, I couldn't help worry about what this meant for my own situation, but equally I felt for Bill who had become something like a grandfather substitute. As a small man approaching eighty in years but sometimes exceeding that figure with his daily intake of snouts, he was as active as you would expect and still hobbled up to the shops for his Daily Mirror each morning; and he could still manage stairs well enough, even if he wasn't running many marathons. I imagined him more profoundly aged, pining away following his wife's passing as so often happens, but he carried on pretty much as usual. He was upset, but I guess it hadn't come as much of a surprise. Some mysterious relative apparently began to suggest that he move into a retirement home, but as he and his wife had been in that house for fifty years, he couldn't see the point and had told them to get stuffed.

With Flo gone, I tried to make myself useful with the occasional bit of DIY if the job was within my capabilities or involved ladders. Bill began to show up on my doorstep with a packet of biscuits or a yoghurt he thought I might like, seeing as he just happened to be passing. 'Don't want you wasting away to nuffin',' he would inform me, contradicting earlier observations made in regard to my suspected pregnancy. Suffering from arthritis in his hands he sometimes had difficulty writing, and it became a fairly regular ritual, my popping upstairs to fill out the trickier details of a cheque for the insurance or gas. He would offer me a cup of tea and a cigarette for my trouble, occasionally sharing excerpts from an autobiography it would never have occurred to him to write.

He was born in East Dulwich, just a bit further down the road, on the 16th of February, 1920. He served in the Royal Navy during the war - this detail emerging when he leant me a VHS copy of the 1953 production of The Cruel Sea, telling me there wasn't much difference between his experience and that of the character played by Jack Hawkins in the film. Florence, his wife, had lived only a few streets away, and I believe they got married soon after armistice was declared. They were never really what you would call well-travelled.

'I went abroad once,' Bill told me when I first went to Mexico, 'didn't really like it much.'

Having married, he went to work for a building company, and - so far as I recall - eventually came to own the company. Amongst those for whom he undertook building work or renovations were minor Royals and Barry Humphries - whom he considered a true gentleman, despite being unable to recall the name and having to scrabble around describing oh you know, that funny bloke, dresses up like an old bird on the telly. One of the minor Royals had been so pleased with the job he'd done that she gifted him a few hundred pounds worth of pedigree rose bushes for the garden, having learned of his then recent marriage and purchase of the house on Lordship Lane.

As Bill grew older and less mobile, he found it increasingly difficult to work the garden that he and Flo had tended for the previous fifty years, eventually scaling down to pruning the aforementioned rose bushes - now grown large and quite regal - and getting Jim over to mow the lawn every so often. For a while George Ramshall took over care of the garden. George was a lodger who was renting the first floor flat - sandwiched between mine and the upper part of the house occupied by Bill. When I first moved in, the first floor was briefly inhabited by the reclusive Miss Tibbs, an ancient widow who went to live with her brother shortly after my arrival. 'She's a funny woman,' Flo had once told me, shaking her head and reaching for her cigarettes. The flat remained empty for a few years until George showed up.

Unfortunately George was stark raving mad and spent a year transforming the garden into a scene from The Killing Fields, then lost interest. I knew I should have stepped in before he offered his services as head gardener, but feared I might be impinging on one of Bill's remaining pleasures in some way. Once I realised how much it depressed him to see his once cherished borders slowly devolving into a dirty protest, I stepped in on humanitarian grounds. George, whose level of sanity is probably indicated by his once spending three days cutting the lawn with a pair of scissors, had during the course of a year sifted every last ounce of soil in order to remove all of the stones and pebbles. The garden now comprised an expanse of nodules of obsessive compulsive clay with the texture of diarrhoea, all offset by a six foot mound of rocks and a handful of dying plants. Bill gave me the key to the shed, so I took a shovel and began digging the whole thing over in an attempt to terraform it back to something in which stuff might grow. George took this act for the clawing back of territory that it certainly was, and kept out of the garden from then on, moving out about a year later. For reasons too numerous to list here, both Bill and I were hugely relieved to see the back of him.

The flat in Lordship Lane became the first place I had lived since leaving home in which I actually enjoyed living. When I went away, I always looked forward to coming home. It wasn't a mansion, but it was all that I needed. I liked my landlord, I had decent neighbours, and for ten good years it was perfect, but of course nothing lasts forever. In June 2006, Bill missed a step coming down the stairs and fell. He was taken to King's College Hospital with a broken hip which, if nothing else, at least silenced the inevitably gleeful chorus of doomsayers predicting a cancerous end for anyone who ever did so much as walk past a tobacconist without voicing some note of disapproval. Jim and his wife Anne went to visit him and the prognosis didn't initially seem too bad. I went to visit a day or so later, and although his situation had improved a little, the experience did nothing to inspire confidence. Bill was in a ward with twelve others, and was unable to communicate due to having had no replacement battery for his hearing aid. He was effectively stone deaf. I pointed this out to a nurse who told me, 'oh don't worry about him. We sort of wave our arms and he seems to understand most of it.'

It was horrible.

Bill died a few days later from pneumonia contracted whilst in  hospital, 28th of June, 2006.

He was cremated at a ceremony at Camberwell New Cemetery attended by a handful of neighbours and a throng of relatives who had mysteriously emerged from the woodwork. As a couple, Bill and Flo had never had children and I'd only ever heard him speak of one relative, a nephew whom he regarded as a waste of space, and due to my front room being situated next to the steps leading up to his part of the house, I usually recognised his few regular visitors as neighbours, mostly people to whom I myself had delivered mail at one point or another.

A stumpy woman with dark hair whom I had never seen before in my life - possibly Flo's niece - made her presence known at the wake. 'Dear old uncle Bill,' she sighed, explaining how she used to visit him every few weeks, but of course that was all over now. She was immediately set straight by an admirably abrasive Scottish woman called Angela, a friend and neighbour whom we all knew as Haggis. 'Get tae fuck,' or words to that effect. 'Ye've no set a foot inside that house in your life, ye wee shite.'

Bill had left the house to Anne and Jim in his will. They weren't related by blood, but they were friends and had seen him more than once since 1975, which the relatives inevitably thought unfair, so it all became legally unpleasant. I'd always intended to ask Bill what would happen to my flat in the event of his passing, but I never got around to it for obvious reasons; so I was astonished when he raised the subject himself a few years earlier as we pottered about in the restored garden. 'Anne and Jim will look after the house, so you'll have somewhere to live,' he said. 'I don't want you to worry.'

It didn't work out that way, and after nearly a year of legal bullshit, I was evicted. The house was sold to a property developer who subdivided it into desirable flats in an exciting area, would suit bearded twenty-something new media arsehole wearing ironic Pogle's Wood T-shirt and one of those Pete Docherty novelty hats which arseholes seem to think lend them the rakish panache of Sinatra gone a bit Jagger around the edges, rather than simply sending out the message that here is a person of no consequence. They gravelled over the garden I'd tended for two years, and ploughed Bill's treasured half-century pedigree roses into the soil.

It was one of the most depressing periods of my entire life, but I took comfort from the fact that I'd had ten good years, and I believe his friends took a similar view - inconsolable but glad to have known him. Whenever I'm back in London, if I get the chance I still visit the gardens of remembrance at Camberwell New Cemetery. There's no plaque to commemorate Bill Edney ever having existed - a provision was made in the will, but nothing came of it, and Haggis suspected that Flo's absentee niece had just kept the money, which seems consistent with the general theme of her grieving. I spend half an hour in the garden, telling the memory of Bill what's been going on since my previous visit. I'm not sure if it really benefits anyone, but it feels like the right thing to do.

One of Bill's friends described happier times back when Flo would regularly tickle the ivories in one of the local pubs; and when the pub closed down, a group of them decided to rescue the piano. Bill and Flo had been party animals in their younger days - hence all the cigarettes I suppose - and they spent the best part of an alcohol soaked night pushing their refugee piano through the streets of East Dulwich and then Forest Hill, pausing every so often for a song and an alfresco knees-up. It struck me as a bizarre image, and I thought of the sheer racket of Flo pounding out a tune on a street corner at three in the morning with Bill and the others, all puffing away, all toasting the street lamps and singing themselves hoarse; but then it wasn't such a bizarre image, because I could never recall Bill without the association of laughter, his gentle humour, and his generosity. It always sounds like hyperbole to say someone changed your life, but in my case, that's exactly what Bill did.

I will never forget him.

I, Column

Terrible news: Samantha has read last week's column in which I confessed my utter despair regarding her reaction to the column that was printed in the previous weekend's colour supplement. She is sat at the table drumming her fingers upon our copy of Teddy's first novel, Crime, Punishment, and Some Chafing - a terse and somewhat overwritten account of a young writer's struggle to get his first novel published. Samantha hasn't read it of course, but she's read my bloody column and God am I going to know about it!

'Perhaps you would care for some taramasalata,' I suggest in placatory mood. 'I'm rather peckish and it's very nearly lunch time.'

'Why do you do it, Hugo?' she asks me, quite directly.

There being nothing to gain from pretending to have misunderstood, I opt for brutal honesty bordering on sarcasm - always good to set off the pinot grigio with just a few drops of urine for the sake of texture. 'It's my job, darling. I'm a writer, you see.'

'You write about us,' she observes, quite correctly.

I say nothing although my forehead is cool with the sweat of the accused. Now stood, I seek sanctuary in the interior of our Smeg™ refrigerator, and it occurs to me that if I so choose I could quite literally seek sanctuary within its capacious inner space without the necessity of removing shelves, wine rack, or kumquat holder. I am looking for the tub of taramasalata but my eyes have fixated upon a plastic bowl wherein shreds of rocket marinade slowly towards the twilight of their useful and edible lives. Samantha served the salad when Francine and Toby popped in after Jessica's bassoon lesson, but I can't remember whether that was Monday or Tuesday.

It is killing me.

'My point is,' Samantha opines, snatching up the conversational gauntlet with a grip that clearly underscores my failure, 'that quite aside from the slightly lurid idea that your readers could possibly have the slightest interest in the existential angst of daily life in West Dulwich, I would just like to know where it will all end.'

I was braced for the thrust of the knife, but had not expected this innocuous and yet mysterious inquiry. I recalled the column in which I told of my midnight expedition to the Seven-Eleven on Lordship Lane, my witching hour purchase of Big Ones International volume eight, issue seven and subsequent frenzied onanism. Empty your shooters over my hooters, the tagline suggested and so I did without shame in the crushing solitude of my wife attending her weekend Reiki retreat. What compelled you to write about this?, she cried upon publication of the not-so-much-grisly-as-slippery details, why must you share every last narrative winnet in this way like some suburban Rabelais who never fully grew out of the delight taken in the contents of his own soiled nappy? Those were not her words, but that was nevertheless their meaning, and I saw it then, the infinite regress of the column about the column about my column, spiralling forever inwards.

'I am a writer,' I challenge, turning and wielding a container of lemon grass. 'Would you ask that I not write? Would you tell Waitrose to cease stockage of its pesto, spinach and pine nut pasta salad? Be glad that the bitter struggle of the creative troubadour is alone his to know and to suffer and send forth unto the world. Be happy that you know only his pain without feeling its sting.'

'Yes,' she says, eyes wearied with the burden of her own thoughts, 'and I wouldn't mind so much if you were actually writing about something other than the fact of your having nothing to write about. It really is terribly, terribly dull, Hugo, and no-one cares about the inner turmoil of a balding upper middle-class man or his self-conscious collection of Stone Roses albums.'

This cuts me to the quick, the mid-paced, and the slow; and thus do I buckle but not bodily, only psychically keeled over and there obliged to gaze into the howling wound of my own well-trodden fundament, that place in which I had sought comfort on so many occasions, my muse and my shame, the russet fount of inspiration; and I know in that moment that I shall write about this in my next column, and already I hate myself.

People You Barely Knew Reunited

Please don't hate me, Loz, she wrote in block capitals, you know I always loved you. I assumed the message was in response to something I'd said through the medium of facebook, the popular social networking conglomerate. I couldn't recall making any specific comment from which Marsha might have deduced herself the object of my hypothetical detestation, although that hadn't stopped her before. I'd recently left the words tolerance of morons decreasing as a status message, the import of this being that my tolerance of some specific morons on a particular bulletin board had recently decreased, which seemed roughly self-explanatory to me. I supposed it could have been that which set her off, but then it might have been almost anything.

The messages came around roughly every few months with depressing regularity, Marsha begging me not to hate her and referring to me by a nickname I strongly dislike when used by anyone outside of those five people who get special dispensation by virtue of genuine friendship; and she hadn't even spelled it right, typing out Loz as Los with an S, over and over, like in the phrase los idiotas que prueba mi paciencia, which means most of my facebook friends in Spanish.

I need you to tell me you don't hate me, Los, she would plead, please, I need it...

It's a myth that the heterosexual male is easily operated by means of treats in much the same way as a Cocker spaniel. There may be a few of us who respond to bouncing breasts with Pavlovian enthusiasm, but leaving aside the more helplessly mammotropic representatives of our vast global community, I would like to think that at least some of us have standards.

I discovered my own standards when Amanda Banner propositioned me back in 1985. I was a student, taking my fine art degree and living in a beautiful and possibly Elizabethan farmhouse in the village of Otham, Kent. The rent was twelve pounds a week and I had somehow ended up sharing with three girls which, if nothing else, at least spared me beer drinking competitions and conversations about football. Due to the antiquity of the house, the fifth and smallest bedroom could only be accessed by walking through mine, which I believe I found more awkward than did Amanda, the girl who ended up with a room that may as well have been my walk-in wardrobe. I was nineteen, full of testosterone, and I wouldn't have said no to any advances made by two of my housemates - advances which never came because they had more sense - so typically, it was the one I didn't really like who suggested the possibility of naughty naked nudity.

Amanda was bullish with a slightly upper-class lilt to her accent and a snorting laugh which came loud and with great frequency, somewhere between a horse and Lucy, the nemesis of Charlie Brown from the Peanuts cartoons. After about a month, I realised we would never have anything to say to each other, and then one evening as I lay in bed reading my Marvel comics, the door opened. It being Amanda heading for her own bed, I didn't look up until I realised she had tarried awhile afore seeking the comfort of her rest, as Shakespeare would probably have put it.

'I've been thinking,' she suggested with a sheepish grin that I found terrifying. 'We've known each other for a while and well I—'

'Yes?,' I squeaked, hoisting up the covers like Charles Hawtrey surprised by a randy Hattie Jacques in a Carry On film.

'Well, I like you a lot and I think we get on really well together, so I was wondering,' - I didn't hear the rest as I could already see where this was headed, and my mind was reeling at how the frosty silence I'd been cultivating could have been taken for anything even remotely amicable. I stuttered through something amounting to how I saw her more as a friend, which wasn't strictly true but seemed least likely to add to the poor girl's embarrassment. Amanda took rejection in her stride and within a week had met some guy in one of the pubs in Maidstone, a sort of counter-cultural Ronnie Corbett ten years her senior, and it became my burden to listen to the two of them banging away in my notional walk-in wardrobe, grunting and groaning every other night for a further three or four months. It was annoying, but I took strange comfort from the thought that it could have been me suffering in that room. I felt oddly proud of my restraint, my ability to keep a sense of perspective even when presented with the possibility of free boobs; and the appearance of Ronnie Corbett seemed to confirm my suspicion that Amanda had viewed me as the owner of a penis who was unlikely to receive any better offers, and who would therefore respond to flattery.

Going back about five years prior to Amanda's failed attempt to access the contents of my trousers, I was sat next to Marsha at school. As we entered the fifth and final year of the comprehensive, the line up of forms changed due to certain kids having become either more or less intelligent at the close of the previous term, and in all the chaos Marsha bagged the desk next to mine during registration. She seemed to find me entertaining, and although this puzzled me it was also quite flattering. I mean I thought I was hilarious and probably a genius, but I didn't really expect anyone else to hold the same view. I tended to be painfully shy around girls, but Marsha and her friends were okay, and our little group got on well enough. I would sometimes find myself bemused by her getting the wrong end of the stick, her tending to find lurid meanings in otherwise innocuous remarks. For example, the band I was in, the Pre-War Busconductors had recorded a tape called Little Blue.

'Is that because it's a bit blue?,' she asked, giggling. I knew the term from television comedy sketches with greasy old men sweating in strip clubs and talking about what they called blue films. I found the association unpleasant, not least because it reminded me that Marsha had reputedly had a boyfriend in his twenties, openly lusted after one of the male teachers, and was of the view that Don't Stand So Close To Me by The Police was a ballad.

The Pre-War Busconductors' tape was called Little Blue because one of the first songs we recorded was a sweary and purposefully ludicrous cover version of the theme to a children's cartoon. I found the misunderstanding unsettling, resenting that even the most basic and stupid jokes sometimes require an explanation which will inevitably undermine the point of telling them in the first place.

Sitting next to Marsha was fun for a while, but the strength of the friendship was probably revealed in our having no contact beyond the school gates. Once the year ended, we never saw each other again. I can't recall a single instance where it had occurred to me that there would have been any point to our keeping in touch, and I presumed it was the same for Marsha. We both had other plans, and very little in common beyond the fact of our knowing each other, and that apparently we both thought I was a genius.

Three decades pass and of course she turns up on facebook, as does everyone eventually. She has, it seems, had a hard life, and says she has been thinking about me for the last thirty years, and that consideration of my amazingness has helped get her through all the suffering and degradation. She tells me she will die if she doesn't get to meet me, and that she always loved me. So far as I can tell, this isn't even sexual, just intimacy taken to an invasive extreme, the sort of intimacy that could strip paint. I really have no answer for any of it. If I'm honest, I find the flattery unpleasant, but if it helps for her to unload, then I decide that the right thing to do is to take that bullet, to smile and pretend she didn't just write four hundred words in the name of clinging insecurity.

She tells me her child has a life-threatening but unspecified illness, and then later that she herself has been given mere months to live. In spite of how it sounds, I believe her, or at least I believe that whatever she's trying to say is based in reality, and that given how it looks, it's just an unhappy coincidence that some medical condition should have arisen concurrent to her mental health becoming dependent on my approval, on my being grateful for, as she says, all she has done to protect me - although I have no idea what that is supposed to mean.

During lucid moments she writes clearly, apologising for the mania of her affection, regretting that it has already driven away other mutual acquaintances of our childhood. She hopes the same will not happen again with us, but even if there were such a thing as an us, we both seem to know that it's inevitable. She has become an expert at the formulation of self-fulfilling prophecy.

We communicate for a year or so, on and off, sometimes just catching up which is wonderful because it's fun to connect with people from the past, to see how things worked out for them; other times it's just bouncing back and forth.

No Marsha, I don't hate you.

No Marsha, I'm not in any personal pain despite having just posted a link to the video clip for Low Self Opinion by the Rollins Band. It's a song that I enjoy. It is not indicative of my state of mind, so please don't be concerned.

No Marsha, that comment was not about you.

Yes Marsha, I do appreciate everything you've done for me, because it's easier to just dish out the positive reinforcement than work out what the hell she thinks she's done for me and so risk the possibility that it will entail terms like vibes or psychic love emanations.

It becomes exhausting after a while, and eventually she catches me at the wrong moment, again asking for confirmation that I don't hate her. I tell her that I don't, but add that I'm getting tired of the same question over and over, and I ask that she kindly desist from continually expressing her love for me as I find it disturbing. I appreciate that she has problems, but problems so great as to depend on the fleeting approval of someone she hasn't seen for thirty years are never going to be set right by words alone.

Days later I discover that she has blocked me on facebook. In many ways it's a relief, although part of me finds it more than a little insulting. The worst thing is perhaps that I still can't really bring myself even to resent her, and hatred would be strange and pointless; my life is neither improved nor made worse by her self-imposed virtual silence, simply because my life is fine as it is and Marsha's crazy missives had very little impact on it either way. All that flattery was, as ever, wasted on me, not because I doubt my own status as the crowning achievement of human evolution, but because I dislike people who have nothing to say, but nevertheless expect me to pay attention whilst they vocalise something resembling meaning but for the lack of actual content. Somebody telling you that you're awesome over and over is not a dialogue, and after a while it becomes insulting because it presumes you to be as stupid as the mammotrope who drools and hoots and slaps his flippers because someone has let him have a go on some boobs.

It's a shame of course. There are plenty of messed-up people out there all requiring approval, often persons damaged through no fault of their own, and if one can spare the time of day or contribute in some way towards making somebody's life seem just a little bit less horrible, then that's a good thing. On the other hand, some problems just won't be fixed with a few simpering words scattered hopelessly across the neurosis event horizon, and sometimes it's more helpful to just shut up and say nothing.

If only I didn't have to keep reminding myself of this.

The Brilliant and Unauthorised Doctor Who Book of the Name Doctor Who Repeated 75,466 Times in an Assortment of Differing Fonts for No Obvious Reason

Hey reader, have you ever wondered how it would be to own a book comprising the name of that mysterious traveller in time and space known only as the Doctor repeated over and over, page after page, 75,466 times? Have you ever gazed forlornly at your bookshelf and noticed a void of solitude between The Unofficial Doctor Who Guide to Doctor Who Stationary and Office Supplies volume four 1976-1980 and Friends Call Me Toba: A Life of Kenneth Ives, a void which can only be plugged by the important purchase of your one-millionth Doctor Who book, perhaps even a fun book comprising the name of that mysterious traveller in time and space known only as the Doctor repeated over and over, page after page, 75,466 times? Well, wonder nor gaze forlornly no more nor further, fellow Whoist for Brilliant Publications can now exclusively convey unto you The Brilliant and Unauthorised Doctor Who Book of the Name Doctor Who Repeated 75,466 Times in an Assortment of Differing Fonts for No Obvious Reason by renowned typographer and devotee of the adventures of that mysterious traveller in time and space known only as the Doctor, Brian R. Pantaloon, beautifully presented in a numbered hardcover edition with colour cover and black and white interior, as a collector's hardcover. Inside you will be delight to have find of the name Doctor Who on many page in Arial, Consolas, Comic Sans, Gills Sans, Times New Roman, Tahoma and a wide range of three other popular fonts, all rendered in varying sizes and with a special section of italics and bold text, and all beautifully presented in a numbered hardcover edition which will be individually assembled one at a time as orders are received. You have bought the rest. Now you will buy this one too. You will enjoy it very much!

Keep Calm

Why Aliens Didn't Build the Pyramids

The question of whether the Egyptian pyramids were really built by mysterious visitors from beyond the stars has puzzled humanity since the dawn of time, specifically that small section of humanity who shun conventional wisdom on the subject for fear of being misled by the truth of the so-called facts. Aside from those people, I'm not entirely sure it has puzzled anyone else, and certainly not anyone you would want to know or meet in a social situation. In other words, it's one of the most stupid arguments ever set forth, the stupidity of which was rather neatly illustrated by my friend Urizen (possibly an alias but who knows?) on a bulletin board from which he was subsequently banned for controversially posting a Gilray cartoon, and which is reproduced here with his kind permission:

This is one of those things which is as baffling as it is annoying, to me. I mean no-one thinks this was built by aliens:

Tomb U-j, belonging to King Scorpion [I], c. 3150 BC, at Abydos.

No-one thinks this was built by aliens:

Tomb of King Den, 1st Dynasty, Abydos.

No-one thinks this was built by aliens:

Pyramid of Djoser, 3rd Dynasty, Saqqara.

No-one thinks this was built by aliens:

Maidum Pyramid, built either by Huni or Sneferu, 4th Dynasty.

No-one thinks this was built by aliens:

Bent Pyramid, built by Sneferu, 4th Dynasty.

HOLY SHIT, ALIENS MUST HAVE BUILT IT!!!!

Pyramid of Khufu, 4th Dynasty.

HOLY SHIT, ALIENS MUST HAVE BUILT IT!!!!

Pyramid of Khafre, 4th Dynasty.

No-one thinks this was built by aliens:

Pyramid of Unas, 5th Dynasty.




No-one thinks this was built by aliens:

Pyramid of Sahure, 5th Dynasty.

I just don't get how you can miss the progression here.

This was originally posted over at Ce Acatl but has been moved here in order to make more room for exciting conversation about the brilliant Doctor Who Man Telly Show.