Red Christmas

I sometimes wonder whether it's really fair to preserve the anonymity of a former partner specifically by referring to her as either Dora the Explorer or Edna Mode from The Incredibles, cover identities chosen because she resembled both and I take cathartic pleasure from the admittedly venomous intent of such references. Perhaps, on consideration it is both childish and unfair, and after all, neither Nickelodeon nor Pixar have ever said a bad word about me, at least not so far as I know. Perhaps I need to take a different approach to this...

I met Dora Mode from The Explorables during the summer of 2005 as I was delivering her mail. By October we were romantically involved, and by November I'd been asked if I would like to spend Christmas with her at her mother's house in Richmond, Surrey. I was overjoyed and I said yes, taking the invitation as an indication that this relationship would be going somewhere, or at least that it would probably stop being quite so shit at some point in the near future.

The mother in question was old, frail, and in her nineties. She came from a wealthy upper class family, and had once worked as secretary to someone significantly ministerial in France. I had the impression she may once have been the just sort of girl to catch the eye of Cary Grant as he played the fruit machines of Monte Carlo, a giggling débutante who could probably knock back her own weight in cocktail olives on one bar tab - for all of her possible failings, an ultimately good natured soul. Unfortunately she was also the cause of everything bad that had ever happened to Dora Mode of The Explorables, at least according to the whining testimony of the endlessly wronged child.

We stood on the doorstep late Christmas Eve. The door opened. The old woman was clearly delighted to see her only daughter, but the feeling was less than mutual.

'Hello Mum,' Dora Mode of The Explorables chirped with the weary resignation of an Ealing comedy policeman catching a serial safe-cracker once again up to his old tricks. She breezed through to the kitchen and began removing things from the fridge, checking the sell-by date on each and registering trace elements of disgust with tutting noises. 'Oh Muuuum,' she whined, barely able to conceal either her revulsion, or the pleasure she took in her revulsion.

Christmas morning came as a welcome distraction from Dora Mode of The Explorables' seemingly endless round of complaints and observations regarding the myriad ways in which the frail old woman had let everyone down - the numerous criteria by which she had apparently failed as both a mother and a human being. Of the many criticisms expressed, there were few I could really see as being either justified or worth worrying over, or as necessarily having any bearing on anyone other than the old woman herself. My girlfriend ground her teeth with unalloyed rage over the state of the vast mansion which was her mother's home. The place could have been in better shape: a cracked window pane here, maybe a careless splash of paint intruding upon a skirting board there or a washer requiring replacement. I had the impression that Dora Mode of The Explorables was mainly concerned about how much work would need to be done before she could sell the house once she had inherited it, and the rest of her testimony was just the usual passive-aggressive coercion by which she interacted with people, that being her principal means of communication; but as I say, Christmas morning had come.

Dora's mother beamed and clapped her hands softly together like a charming Victorian child. 'Oh goody!'

I opened one present. Dora Mode of The Explorables had bought me a green and black knitted woollen sweater with matching gloves and hat. I liked the sweater but the gloves and hat seemed weird, something that would be worn by a website designer named Toby as he dropped Jessica off for her violin lesson, a man who was like really into Dylan at the moment, yeah?

A few weeks after the relationship had been declared official, Dora Mode of The Explorables had told me that she was not going to try to change me because - in her own words - she had learned from past experience that it never worked. I had foolishly said that I didn't really mind, and so she took this as an enthusiastic invitation, and I became her project.

At the time I favoured plain white shirts with a suit, a little worn but not actually scruffy - dark jacket and trousers and occasionally with a tie if I was feeling a bit snazzy. I never felt comfortable with any sort of affected Bohemian look, and still believe that a person who is truly able to express their personality through the way they dress probably doesn't have much of a personality to express. Additionally, the suit had worked well for me in Mexico. I guess I didn't look so smart as to suggest I was worth robbing, but neither did I seem like a tourist - smart but not officiously so. This was what a couple of people told me in any case. Dora Mode of The Explorables said that I dressed like an old man and that I needed to get with it, and it didn't seem worth arguing because I was usually either wrong or just plain stubborn.

I liked the sweater, but at the same time it made me feel sad. My one true love had given me a present which could quite easily have come from one of those aunts seen only every few years, usually at either a wedding or a funeral. It didn't say much for our relationship.

The other present was a box about the size of a packet of Jacob's cream crackers. This seemed more promising, more suggestive of possibilities. The present turned out to be four short lengths of curved track for a Hornby clockwork model railway of the 1920s, still in the original slightly dusty box. The track was, so far as I could tell, made of tin and was a little rusted. At some point during the previous three months I'd told Dora Mode of The Explorables how I had loved model railways as a child.

'I hope it didn't set you back too much.' I was trying to work out why someone would shell out what I presumed would have been steep collectors' prices for something of such esoteric interest, something which made no sense in isolation.

'I found it in the store cupboard at the back of the toy shop. It seemed a shame to throw it out, but I could never quite work out who to give it to.'

Merry Christmas. Here's something I stole from work.

She elaborated, returning with relish to the recurring theme of how she felt she had deserved a little payback from that place. She often spoke of the one previous job I recall her mentioning in such terms as the sort of grinding shit we all have to put up with from time to time as we work the post, the buses, security guard, canning factory, on the bins, street sweeper, or a couple of months behind the till of a toy shop in West Dulwich. We've all been there. We've all had to carry that weight.

Christmas dinner came and went, most of it taken up with Dora Mode of The Explorables' commentary regarding how her mother had ruined Christmas dinner in addition to everything else.

'I would have enjoyed some bread sauce,' the old woman sighed quietly to herself as her only child launched into further critical discourse punctuated with resentful mouthfuls of turkey.

Christmas came and went, and then came and went again. The second year was at Dora Mode of The Explorables' home, with her mother being delivered by taxi on the morning itself. The day was about as festive as its predecessor and by this time I realised that the old lady and myself would have enjoyed it more without the presence of the one person we had in common.

The last Christmas was preceded by my announcing that I was looking for a flat of my own. I had moved in with Dora Mode of The Explorables because there didn't seem to be any other option, and I hoped it might be the detail our relationship had been missing, the element which finally got everything working. Nevertheless I had also feared it would prove to be a mistake, and sure enough it was. After about six months I felt like killing myself, by which I don't mean that I was having me a big ol' sad, but that some days I would lay in my hot bath after work and consider all that I had heard about its benefits as a crucible in which one might open up a major artery or two. Life with Dora Mode of The Explorables was dark and joyless beyond anything I had been able to imagine, and I knew that escape could only be affected by means of gargantuan effort. I wasn't sure if I had the willpower left to do so.

It turned out that I did. I reasoned that a leap in the dark would land me in a better place, because nothing could be as terrible as the present; and so I began looking at horrible flats the size of rabbit hutches for which I could barely afford rent. I told Dora Mode of The Explorables that this would be the best thing for our relationship, because we would no longer be living on top of one another. We would have room to breath.

The first few places I saw were unbelievably bad, but I kept on looking because I knew that once I was gone, I would never have to see Dora Mode of The Explorables or deal with her aggressive and psychotic insecurity ever again. All I had to do was keep her happy for another couple of weeks, or if not happy, at least disinclined to hump all my shit out onto the street and set fire to it.

I had already ruined the last Christmas with my stated desire to move out, but regardless of this, I bought her a tin opener and a stuffed owl. I had, against all expectations, found a flat in Camberwell which if extortionately priced and tiny, was at least clean and had not recently been used as a shooting gallery. I was on the home stretch, just a few weeks left in which to sit and wait for the end of my sentence.

Dora Mode of The Explorables had once phoned me at work, asking me to come home and open a tin of cat food. For some reason she was unable to open this particular tin of cat food under her own steam, so I had to suspend everything and cycle back because this was the sort of thing a truly loving boyfriend would do for his sweetie, and because I had no choice, and my obstinacy and selfishness had been noted.

'Pringle is meowing,' she informed me testily, apparently adding animal cruelty to the list of my crimes.

So I bought her a tin opener for that last Christmas, an expensive model from a pretentious kitchenware boutique that had recently appeared at the lower end of Lordship Lane. It was well made, an ostentatious precision tool by which even Dora Mode of The Explorables' feeble hands would be able to open the toughest, craggiest tin of Whiskas. It was to be my replacement.

The stuffed owl was something to which she had specifically directed me with the words I'm going to tell you what I want for Christmas this year so that you don't mess it up again. We had seen the owls in one of Dulwich's many gift shops, suppliers of pretentious knick-knackery to the overmoneyed and vacuous. They were hand sewn from recycled materials, and each one sold funded the travel expenses of either Sting or Bono visiting a deprived village in Africa, or something of the sort. Dora Mode of The Explorables resembled an owl in a certain light, and seemed to have a thing about the creatures. I suspect she regarded an owl of some description as her spirit animal, but had probably decided I wouldn't understand and so had never deigned to discuss it.

Her world was informed by all manner of personal esoteric beliefs, mostly derived from wishy-washy new-age sources and self help literature - feng shui, the power of positive thinking, whatever drippy motivational crap was filling column inches that week - which could be adopted without having to think too hard about any of it. Anything which provided an explanation for why her life hadn't turned out quite how she wanted besides that which involved her own agency was always welcome. If she appeared unemployable, it might be a misaligned chair blocking the flow of ley lines emanating from the front room. She once took all the doors in the house off their hinges so as to allow for the free passage of positive energy, then had to put most of them back on when winter turned the place into an icebox. One element of this custom mythology was the colour red. Its apparent significance explained a home-made motivational message handwritten on a piece of paper and blutacked to the wall behind the telephone:

I am the red light that calls people to stop what they are doing, to come out to play and have fun.

Dora Mode of The Explorables' life coach had probably drawn this one up for her, or out of her or whatever. Unfortunately, Dora Mode of The Explorables' presence was not something which caused people to have fun in my experience, quite the opposite in fact; and no amount of motivational mantras were going to change that. I often wondered if it ever occurred to her that the associations of red lights were generally quite different, mostly serving as a warning or else prohibiting some action, both of which struck me as greatly more suited to her personality. Anyway, the point is that she liked red so I coughed up the twenty quid, bought the owl, and wrapped it in red paper.

The last Christmas came.

She opened the package containing the tin opener, and regarded it as though I'd bought her a butt plug for Christmas. She had taken it as a token of my sarcasm, which surprisingly it wasn't.

'That isn't your main present,' I squeaked, trying hard to appear confident, or at least to avoid sounding like I was delivering the apology she would almost certainly soon demand.

She opened the second box, carefully so as to avoid tearing the precious magic red paper. The stuffed owl sat inside its clear plastic packaging. Dora Mode of The Explorables stared at it for a moment before speaking. 'Did you keep the receipt?'

I tried to work out what could be wrong, given that she had specifically asked for this one. I felt a surge of panic bordering on terror. 'Yes. Do you not like it?'

'I wanted the red one.'

There had been a number of owls in the shop, all different colours, and I recalled that she had been looking at a red variant when we were there on the browse. The one I had bought was the last owl left, and was pale blue in colour.

I handed over the receipt and we didn't discuss it again. The next day I noticed that the red wrapping paper had been carefully flattened out and pinned on the wall as though it were a poster.

Months later, once we had separated following one of the most enjoyable rows I've ever had the pleasure to inspire, she admitted that the tin opener had come in very useful. She had grown determined to view our split as a trial separation at the end of which we would surely be reunited, all the stronger for the experience. She may simply have been scratching around for whatever she thought would make me happy, or she could have been telling the truth.

Years later, once the nightmare was finally over, I sold the vintage model railway track on eBay. It turned out that it wasn't in great condition, despite having the original box, and two lengths of the track that would have originally been included were absent.

Some bloke gave me a fiver for it.

Maybe I should have bought her a butt plug.

The Bat Problem

One of the more aggravating aspects of being a postman - as I was for over two decades of my life - is dealing with dissatisfied members of the public, and managing to keep from losing one's rag in the face of severe provocation. Those to whom we deliver mail might find themselves justifiably aggrieved at a perceived drop in quality of service, in which case it always seemed important to listen carefully, and to reach for a full understanding of the nature of the complaint in order to resolve it. On the other hand the supposedly injured party was often simply some nutcase lacking the intelligence to spot when something was actually their fault and who, ill-suited to anything resembling responsibility, has decided that the most sensible course of action is to pick a fight with some poor fucker in a blue shirt. Generally such nutcases were easily identified by either the available evidence or basic common sense, and at least a few Royal Mail employees have held to the view that under such circumstances a little retaliation is sometimes justified because, contrary to the popular business mantra, the customer is not always right. Sometimes the customer is very much mistaken; and sometimes the customer is a complete arsehole.

With regard to giving back a little of that which one has received, at the lowest end of the scale we have what might be termed permissible sarcasm, as deployed in situations where the complaint rests upon some factor beyond anyone's control.

'Excuse me, Postman,' the woman calls from her doorstep as torrential rain sluices across the garden path in sheets. She holds in her hand an envelope which has just come through the letterbox. 'Could you please tell me why my mail is wet this morning.'

Charlie Carr, a gentle old alcoholic presently soaked to the skin, having been working in the pouring rain for the previous hour and a half, smiles with the patience and good grace of John le Mesurier as he explains, 'I do apologise, madam. I really have no idea.'

Others have occasionally taken a more proactive approach, notably John Haddock who routinely told disgruntled members of the public to stuff contested or otherwise contentious items of mail up their arses, often reiterating the suggested direction of insertion with a helpfully illustrative hand gesture. Sadly, he had usually been given good reason for the suspension of the conventional etiquette of the complaints procedure.

Whilst certain complaints may be justified, others have ranged from the misinformed to the just plain annoying; for example, the albino gentleman in Crystal Palace Road who would regularly traipse up to the sorting office to complain that his mail, once through the letterbox of his front door, had landed on the wrong side of the hall he shared with the other tenant. After the third or fourth time he showed up to make the complaint, the boss himself went to the front desk and told the guy to piss off and to not bother coming back if he wished to continue getting any mail at all.

For some reason, I myself rarely had any significant trouble with enraged members of the general public wishing to know what was keeping the postal order that had been mailed to them back in 1963 or the like. Most times when people complained directly to me, it was usually something I was able to resolve, with a couple of exceptions.

There was the woman at the upper end of Lordship Lane who began to receive abusive mail from an unbalanced acquaintance, and because the unbalanced acquaintance was concerned that the abuse should reach the one to whom it was directed, had written additional instructions and advice on the back of the envelope for my benefit. By this means she informed me that she knew what was going on with the mail, and that I had better pack it in because she was watching, and she knew where I lived, and she was personal friends with the postmaster general, despite the fact that he hadn't existed since 1969 when the position was abolished under the Post Office Act.

The first of these letters was quite entertaining, at least for me, but they came every few days, each time with a weirder and more threatening message scribbled on the envelope for my benefit. Eventually I told the boss, and he had some Royal Mail internal security people investigate. The letters stopped.

The next campaign of this kind came a few years later, written upon the envelopes of mail addressed to someone living at 2, Glengarry Road. The messages implied that I consistently misdelivered this mail to some other specific address, and the person living there was reposting the mail with helpful words of advice scribbled across the envelope: Why don't you learn to read?, in the crabby handwriting of someone apparently shaking with anger, or buy a pair of glasses!

The problem for me was that, regarding setting this one right, the mechanism of whatever postal screw up had inspired these messages was unclear, although it seemed reasonable to assume that I had accidentally delivered these letters to an address other than 2, Glengarry Road. I rang the bell at 2, Glengarry Road and the door was eventually answered by a woman of considerable age. I explained that I was apparently in the habit of misdelivering her mail and apologised for the testy annotations written by some anonymous third party. I tried to assure her that I would do my best to make sure that it did not happen again. I had been delivering to this particular route of around eight-hundred houses regularly for at least a couple of years. I knew most of the people to whom I delivered mail by name, and it's not like I ever had days where I thought to myself, you know, I don't think I'll bother reading the addresses this morning. I'll just stick this crap in any old letter box. I doubt anyone will notice.

The old woman didn't seem to quite know who I was or what I was talking about. She held the letters in her shrunken hand and stared at them. 'I think these must be for Donald,' she said eventually. 'They aren't mine.'

I could see past her that the house had been divided into two flats, upstairs and downstairs, as were a few dwellings of this type along the same road. She was not the only occupant.

Still, despite my best efforts, the letters kept coming back to me every couple of months, the same address and the increasingly abusive comments: It's no wonder Royal Mail is failing so bad when they employ idiots like you, and then the bewildering have you got a bat problem? in furious upper case. My eyesight, intelligence, and parentage had been called into question and it was beginning to piss me off.

About twenty yards from 2, Glengarry Road was 2A, Glengarry Road, another house divided into flats stood upon the corner with East Dulwich Grove. It had occurred to me that the most obvious possible mistake was that I had been mixing up the mail of these two addresses, so I had been extremely careful to avoid doing so. I therefore assumed that if, despite my best efforts, I really had still been delivering mail addressed for one to the letterbox of the other, then I probably had a brain tumour or some major cognitive dysfunction. I called at 2A, Glengarry Road with the letter addressed to 2, Glengarry Road, the one which had been returned with the suggestion that I might have a bat problem. The girl who answered the door denied ever having accused me of having a bat problem and, to my surprise, recognised the name of the person to which the letter was addressed. He lived in the flat above her own.

At last I understood.

An individual living at 2A, Glengarry Road was sent mail by a person or persons who had assumed that the A detail referred to his occupation of a flat within a building rather than to the building itself, and was therefore wrongly addressing his mail to 2, Glengarry Road, which is where I'd been delivering it. Whilst I was able to remember the names of many people to whom I delivered mail, this tended to break down where multiple occupancies were concerned, there usually being too many names to recall, and so many tenants coming and going that it was difficult to keep track.

Therefore there was a person living at 2, Glengarry Road other than the old woman, and a person who had accused me of having a bat problem because his receiving incorrectly addressed mail was apparently destroying his life, and somehow this was my fault. There followed another few months of my keeping an eye on the names at the two addresses before I at last worked out who I was dealing with.

His name was Donald Jones. He was in his late fifties and had already distinguished himself as potentially seeming a little rude. He always wore a battered leather jacket and leather trousers, all fully zipped up as though having recently arrived by motorcycle. He had a sour, unkind face, and walked slowly as though having shat himself. I'd said good morning to him a couple of times, as I did to everyone because there's never a good reason not to, but he would never respond, instead regarding me with apparent disdain as though I'd greeted him with what's up, gangsta? I didn't bother after that. It's not like you have to be friends with everyone.

The day finally came. He shuffled towards me along the pavement, as ever in the leathers.

'Excuse me, might I ask if you've been having some problem with your mail of late?'

He spoke with the voice of a tiny rodent, a faint noise like someone drawing back a curtain in an old house. 'The letters for next door keep coming to us. Our regular postman—'

'I've been your regular postman for about three years now. By next door I assume you mean 2A, Glengarry Road.'

'No, I live at—'

'You live at 2, Glengarry Road. I know. You're getting mail for the house on the corner though?'

The uncomfortable half-smile faded a little. 'I know it's not you. When you're on holiday and they put another postman on—'

'Oh you see but it is me, because I haven't been on holiday since about September. You see the thing is that in situations such as this I tend to recommend that when a wrongly delivered letter comes to your house, a letter which should have been delivered next door, the best course of action is usually to walk twenty yards along the road and deliver it yourself instead of writing silly messages on the envelope before walking two-hundred yards to the nearest pillar box in order to make a point.'

His faint little voice began to crack, and I wondered if he was about to start crying. 'It happens every day,' he squeaked. 'It's too much. It's all the time.'

To my surprise, I was enjoying this. 'And that would be where you're wrong because, as I say, I've been delivering to both addresses uninterrupted since September, so I know that when you say every day you actually mean that it's happened maybe a few times, perhaps every six weeks or so.'

He made another noise. He seemed to be physically decreasing in size.

I continued. 'Whilst I appreciate that the offending letters of doom should have been addressed to 2A, Glengarry Road, they weren't and have therefore been correctly delivered by myself because that's my job, so all the shit you've been writing on the envelopes about how I need glasses or should learn to read has been somewhat off target, and I can really do without having remarks of that kind directed at me first thing in the morning, do you know what I'm saying?'

I paused for breath and to take stock of whether I'd said all that I had intended to say. I was finding this encounter strangely cathartic. Ordinarily I find myself tongue tied or babbling incoherent crap when speaking in anger, but for once it felt like I was channelling Peter Cook at his most acerbic. It felt great.

'As for whether or not I've got a bat problem - that doesn't even make sense. I mean I suppose you were once again trying to make some biting commentary about my supposedly terrible eyesight somehow based on my delivering letters to the addresses which are actually written on the fucking envelopes, but it doesn't really work, does it? Have you got a bat problem? You really need to get back to your team of writers and have a word with them about that one.'

He mumbled sorry about a thousand times and wilted off in the direction of Lordship Lane, shell-shocked by my righteous testimony. I had met his kind many times before in and around Dulwich, always the most vocally liberal until some underclass minimum wage functionary short changes them at the whole food joint and they turn into the Duke of Wellington horsewhipping a shopgirl. Donald had clearly imagined I would be chastened, perhaps even devastated by the force of his vicious satire, that I would wither as I faced the terrible truth of his learn how to read and have you got a bat problem? Being a shit-thick blue collar manual labouring schmoe I would be too busy thinking about beer, tits, and football to ever defend my crime, and so he had looked as though he'd quacked his pants once he realised I wasn't quite the thick working class tosspot he'd bargained for.

Years later I discovered that Donald was supposedly an artist of some note, or at least of some note amongst the sort of people who make it their business to note such things. He suffered from some kind of debilitating illness which was to account for the tortoisey quality of his shuffling gait.

Donald's partner was described by Edna Mode from The Incredibles - with whom I was romantically involved at the time - as my mate Steve, which meant that she had met him at a private view and they had exchanged pleasantries for about a minute. He and Donald worked together as artists, and as usual I was supposed to be impressed by this. My mate Steve produced mosaics and sculptures, and had been in Time Out or something of that sort. I looked him up on the internet, and immediately recognised the guy. I often passed him on the street whilst out on delivery, and we always said good morning to each other because I assumed he was probably someone to whom I delivered mail, and when you pass someone on the street every day, after a while it becomes more embarrassing to ignore them than to exchange a polite greeting. Of course I didn't realise my mate Steve was Donald's partner until I looked him up following some unrelated suggestion originated by Edna Mode from The Incredibles. This explained why I had seen my mate Steve with such frequency, specifically that he had been visiting his partner, and it explained the sculptures I had noticed in Donald's front garden on one occasion, two concrete pillars decorated with shattered fragments of colourful ceramics.

The pillars were, I suppose, totem poles shaped so as to resemble mugs and cups stacked on top of one another, because they had been commissioned by Blue Mountain Coffee in Northcross Road, so mugs and cups - coffee and tea - do you see? Donald and my mate Steve also provided the mosaic design at the front of the coffee place, yet more fragments arranged to depict cups and spelling out words like coffee and aroma, which is quite ingenious when you really think about it.

I'd almost made Donald cry, and now I saw him in a new light. He was a sensitive artist and there was someone who loved him. Yet still he was the man who had asked me whether I had a bat problem, who had asked me whether I was able to read.

More than a decade later and it seems that whatever was wrong with Donald got the better of him, and so he is no longer with us, and once again I find myself thinking ill of the dead. I'm sure he was a lovely man to those who knew him; but that isn't the same as saying he was incapable of being a dick; and in all honesty I don't think I've ever enjoyed educating someone as to the extent of their own petty, mean-spirited bullshit as I did during those few minutes.

That was a great day.

Gruts

Signing on for a three year fine art degree at Maidstone College of Art back in September 1984 was a big move for me. I'd just turned nineteen and probably had not previously been away from home for longer than a couple of days. I was loosely familiar with beer and the genitalia of one specific member of the opposite sex, but I was otherwise generally naive; and now I was living in Kent amongst complete strangers. Home was Warwickshire, which may as well have been on Mars, or so it seemed at the time.

Whilst I was doing my best to remain open-minded to new experiences, I had developed a general scepticism regarding poetry as something which really wasn't for me. What poetry I'd been obliged to read at school and then in further education would, so I believed at the time, have worked better either converted to prose or set to music, and poets themselves seemed a self-involved bunch. Admittedly I didn't have a great wealth of experience with poets amongst my vague circle of friends, but I'd watched The Young Ones on the box, and Steve the poet with whom I now shared a student house in Leeds Village was doing nothing to disabuse me of the impression fostered by Rik Mayall directing condescending odes at his enemies. Steve was both funny and amiable at a certain level, but I always had the feeling of everything being part of some larger chess game to him. He was barely able to buy a packet of crisps without it resembling strategy. His poems, so far as I could tell, amounted to everybody stop what you're doing and look at me. He almost certainly would have told me about the Medway Poets, about Billy Childish and Bill Lewis - these being people he clearly admired - but it wouldn't have made much sense to me. As I say, I wasn't really drawn to poetry as a medium.

Traci Emin, a noisy Turkish girl in second-year printmaking was in the habit of scaling tables in the college canteen to announce some event or other, and she would do this roughly every two or three days. The events for which she evangelised were rarely ever anything which caught my interest, and I wasn't sure what to make of the girl, so I generally paid her no attention. She knew Carl, then Student Union president, one of the first people I got to know at Maidstone, and still a close friend today. Carl had briefly introduced me to Traci, just as she barged into our conversation to haggle over Student Union business of some kind. She scowled at me and observed isn't your 'air 'orrible! with her wonky gob, dropping the aitches like a younger, vaguely Turkish Irene Handl.

Charmed, I'm sure, I didn't bother replying as I began to weep bitter internal tears of self-loathing.

Now she stood on the canteen table bellowing like a lonely mountain goat, and the words resolved into something about a poetry reading in one of the lecture theatres. My curiosity outstripped my scepticism as I recognised the name of one of those who was to read - Billy Childish. I didn't know much about him, beyond whatever it was that Steve had told me, but apparently he was a local name of some distinction. I now realised that I had read about his band, the Milkshakes, in Sounds music paper a year or so earlier. I'd never heard their music, but it seemed like it might be interesting to watch some bloke who had been in Sounds reading out his poems, and it was something to do.

The hour came and the lecture theatre was dark with just a table at the front. Billy Childish had short, severe hair and wore what appeared to be his grandad's demob suit. He didn't smile. He didn't look like a man who had ever found any good reason to smile. In the midst of flourishes of artistic flamboyance, he appeared streamlined, efficient, even ruthless. He rattled off his poetry as though reading out a statement in a police interview room. He demonstrated neither charisma nor stagecraft, a deficit which seemed curiously highly charismatic in its own way. He sounded bored, as though he was trying to get through the fucking things as quickly as possible. The performance was, in spite of itself, incredible.

Then there was Bill Lewis, loud, theatrical, and intense. It was poetry performed more as I had anticipated it would be, and yet it was impossible to keep from being swept along by the force of his words and their delivery. He had a presence with which one could not argue.

Traci later made an announcement to the effect that she was selling various books of Billy Childish poetry. I had a hunch that I would regret it if I didn't go and see what she had, and so I did. I ended up buying the lot - Poems from the Barrier Block, Prity Thing, Will the Circle Be Unbroken and five or six others. Poems from the Barrier Block was a proper square bound collection, but the others were slimmer volumes of cranky dyslexic verse - if you could really call it verse - all hammered out on a broken typewriter. There were few concessions to grammar or spelling, but for want of a better qualifier, you could tell it was the real thing, the genuine article:

t.v. poetry scotch n piss

the t.v. said - 'we wanna make a film'
they said 'you read with this group of poets'
so i said 'yeah'
n they get us to do some readings
n this producer said to me -
'yeah great stuff - this is your program - you make it - we just film it' n i said 'yeah'

the contract said -
they give us a couple of qwid
for the filming then they could
use the film anytime they liked
with no payment
they said time place n the way to dress
this was ment to be a documentary about the real stuff

well a thew qwids a thew qwid so i said 'yeah' n signed
i got a cigar of one t.v. bloke n a double scotch of another
i went to the bog

i couldnt find the gents so i went to the ladys
i put me scotch down n had a piss
most of it got in the bowl
but some spatered in me scotch

it stank of piss but i drank it anyway

Reproduced without permission and probably (c) Billy Childish June 1982.

The oldest of the books I had bought was called The Man with Wheels, dating from 1980 and revealing Billy's formative interest in Kurt Schwitters, which made one hell of a lot of sense to me. I could see the progression. His poems were made of the dirt and the rubbish. They were unvarnished - raw and invigorating. Poetry had been men in silk cravats scoffing vol-au-vents and spicing overly elaborate love poems to unremarkable girls with a naughty word here and there, not so much to let us know that they were themselves from the mean streets, but that they knew at least one chap who was, and he was a really splendid fellow with his working class accent and leather jacket. Whatever Billy Childish was doing, it bore no relation to such distractions. It was not something in which he dabbled for the sake of something to do. It seemed like he was writing in an effort to keep himself from braining someone.

Some of the books were signed for Traci, with love - Billy, or addressing her more intimately as Dolli. The two of them had been romantically involved for a while, and I guess that this was around the time they began to drift apart; and so she sold me his old stuff, the books he'd had printed and had dedicated to her.

Over the next couple of years I became acclimatised to Kent, it being the county in which my adult personality was formed, adult in this case quantifying age rather than development. Finishing at Maidstone, I moved to nearby Chatham because half the people I knew seemed to live there by that point, and the town had some great bands. In fact the town had a scene in the sense by which Liverpool and Manchester have on occasion been described as having scenes. There were pubs which put on gigs, bands which played live and even put out records, fanzines, poets, artists, and people generally doing their own thing regardless of whether anyone else liked it.

Alun Jones of the Dentists said that Chatham, or specifically the larger Medway conurbation of which Chatham was part, was in some respects like a northern town transplanted to the south of England. At the time I rolled my eyes a little, having come to resent the popular cliché of the north of England as some sort of cultural Mecca inhabited by a friendlier, more down-to-earth, somehow more valuable people. I've never found people in the north of England significantly friendlier than those in the south, nor more culturally vital, and as for down-to-earth...

What would I need with your fancy book learning and your so-called toilet paper and indoor lavatories? I'm down-to-earth, me.

Nevertheless, Alun was right. Medway was a reasonably tightly knit community with its own distinct identity founded upon a major naval dockyard established in the 1500s and significantly expanded during the industrial revolution, around the same time as all those sprawling northern towns founded upon coal, iron, weaving and Hovis advertsing. Even in the 1980s Medway felt like the setting of Ada's Apron or some other typically harrowing television drama in which pramfaced chain-smoking schoolgirls made veiled references to men's cocks and disapproving matriarchs would address each other as chuck from across the washing line. It was the rain-soaked rooftops of utilitarian housing, row after row after cramped bricky row of hardened smokers coughing up their lungs in time to Herman's Hermits. You get the picture.

Within weeks of my settling in to the septic tank I had rented in Glencoe Road, I discovered Gruts café, a small establishment just before the railway bridge on Chatham High Street. A couple of summers earlier, my friends and I had discovered Ivor Cutler and had become so quickly and dramatically obsessed with his haunting monologues that by the time school came back around in September we were having trouble shaking off the soft Glaswegian lilt we'd developed during the holidays.

I walked past the café a couple of times, deeply impressed that there could be an eaterie named after one of my favourite Ivor Cutler pieces. Eventually I summoned the courage to go in, probably having at last spotted someone I vaguely knew sat on the other side of the glass. Being unemployed and without access to a television by which I could watch children's programmes and other daytime broadcasting at the taxpayer's expense, I became a regular customer at Gruts; and given the pitiful state of both my cooking and the cupboard which served as my pantry, the toasted ham and cheese sandwiches prepared and served by Gerald and Caroline - mine hosts - were probably what kept me alive long enough to see the nineties.

I had mastered the art of sitting around in pubs a few years earlier, and had reached the stage at which one realises that it can sometimes be fun to walk in a straight line or to wake in the morning without a splitting headache; and so I quickly adapted to the Chatham equivalent of café society because it was cheaper than the pub and better than sitting at home. Of the regulars I already knew there was the aforementioned Alun of the Dentists and Prez of the Martini Slutz, one of the most entertaining bands I've ever seen live. Tim Webster of the Sputniks and later Johnny Gash ran his own musical instrument repair business out of a workshop over the road, and would wander across for lunch with his apprentice, Tim O'Leary - lunch being one of Gerald's guitar maker's fancies, which Tim O'Leary recalls as being possibly the best egg mayo baguettes I've ever had.

Bill Lewis has written of Gruts as having been known as the poets' café. I don't remember this at all, although maybe that's because I was never a poet. The description is probably justified by the regular presence of himself and Billy Childish, and even Sexton Ming on a couple of occasions. I got to know Bill Lewis fairly well as it turned out that we were almost neighbours and had mutual interests. Any idea I've ever ripped off from an American underground comic artist can most likely be traced back to the huge stack of comics by Harvey Pekar, Robert Crumb, Skip Williamson and others that Bill sold me. Bill would drop around for tea and tell me about Sandinistas and his time in Nicaragua, tales from a world I was yet to discover. I tried to paint his portrait, but my efforts were so awful that I threw the thing away. Like Billy Childish, he seemed in some ways a man out of time, someone who always seemed like he should have known Allen Ginsberg and Lenny Bruce; but it was only that he contrasted so dramatically with the feckless apathy of our respective generations.

I had never been introduced to Billy Childish and was slightly in awe of him. He was an imposing presence before which I was sore afraid, suspecting that whatever came out of my mouth would probably be dog shit.

Excuse me, Mr. Billy, I think your poems are really ace!

Happily the fears of my inner teenage girl fell by the wayside as Billy spent so much time in Gruts that my self-consciously marinading in silent awe whilst attempting to effect nonchalance in the presence of relative greatness became impractical, and obviously ridiculous. Aside from anything, it turned out that he was, if not exactly a nice guy by conventionally sappy terms, thoughtful, ruthlessly honest, and very, very funny. He was also pretty good at chess, a game I'd only recently been taught by Tim Webster and Prez one afternoon as we sat in the café slurping tea and smoking. The game became something of an obsession, and I took to playing every day, but unfortunately everyone else was better than me. I played Billy, and the match was over in about four minutes. He wiped me off the board. He'd spent most of that time staring out of the window or talking to Gerald. His matches against Alun, Prez or Tim Webster lasted longer, and were more enjoyable for the spectator. I seem to recall that he usually won, although I could be mistaken.

An exchange student from Germany named Andreas became a regular for a couple of weeks. He and Billy would talk about Hamburg, and he too was drawn into the never ending chess tournament. After one particularly long, drawn-out game he beat Tim Webster and Billy bought everyone a round of tea in celebration.

'I don't get it,' I said. 'It's not like this is the first time anyone has beaten Tim.'

'I know.' Billy sported the faintly disturbing smile of Harry H. Corbett. 'But this is the first time he's had an international thrashing.'

Gruts became much more than just a place to hang out with friends and talk crap. It became our place, almost a livelihood. Poets and writers sold their work from a small bookcase next to the counter, and Billy's own Hangman Records had taken to releasing an album more or less every month - beautifully pressed brand new long playing vinyl records of himself, Sexton Ming, the Pop Rivets, and others, and these were joined by releases from the Dentists' Tambourine label. Even the subject matter was locally sourced in Wally the 2nd Hand Salesman - one of the noisier compositions on Sexton Ming's Which Dead Donkey Daddy? album - being named for Wally, the proprietor of a junk shop just on the other side of the bridge. Billy had gone in there to give the man himself a copy of the record, so he told us. Wally had mumbled some token of potential gratitude and tossed the album into an open trunk full of rusting nuts, bolts, spanners and the like. He didn't really seem like a big record collector.

'Well, that's nicely filed away for future reference,' Billy observed, although I'm not sure if that was what he said to Wally or simply part of his account as told to the rest of us.

The albums were a fiver each, which meant that Gruts actually served as a better record shop than Our Price a few hundred yards along the road, not that Our Price was really up to much in the first place.

At one stage, I hung a load of my own pseudo-Futurist paintings on the walls of the café, following on from previous exhibitions by Billy and others. Mine weren't for sale, but the main point was that they were seen, and this even drew interest from the local newspaper, the Chatham Standard, who sent Judith Mullarkey along to do a short feature on me. The first entry in my comments book came from Billy:

I've seen this man's work before, and I said, and say it again - to the funny farm with him!

Sometimes we would watch the local crazy woman as she passed by outside, shouting mysterious accusations at the river. She too seemed to appreciate the art, and once dutifully came in to hand Gerald a drawing she'd produced of crabs at large on Easter Egg Island, according to the caption. Her technique wasn't great, but you had to admire the spirit in which it was done.

For a while life seemed to revolve around Gruts to the point that my friend Carl phoned the café on a couple of occasions, knowing I would be there, sat on my arse and weighing up my employment options. As I had no telephone, it was a better option than calling directly at my bedsit in the hope of my being at home.

It felt like being part of a family, and at the same time, because of all the stuff that was going on in and around Medway, it felt like we were part of history even at the time. It felt as though one day we would all be looking back and recalling where we were when we first heard Billy's calypso cover of Anarchy in the UK.

We were in Gruts, obviously.

He'd just bought in a freshly minted stack of the Blackhands album, and Gerald had stuck it on the record player so we could all have a listen. Some people remember seeing the Beatles at the Cavern Club, and some of us remember Gruts.

Naturally it didn't last, there being a limit to how much tea anyone could reasonably be expected to drink in a single afternoon, and although the place was nearly always full, or at least rarely ever empty, whatever Gerald and Caroline were making out of it wasn't enough. They closed, and it became the Bridge Roll, a well intentioned but similarly doomed tea room style café with laminated Gingham tablecloths run by a couple of middle-aged women, whose enthusiasm reminded me of my grandmother once harbouring an ambition of being known as good for a cup of tea and a bun amongst long distance truck drivers. The Bridge Roll wasn't terrible, but the new decor had the feel of something aspiring to the custom of a better class of diner, or at least better than we were.

Like all good things, it was over.

The Dark Side of the Moron

KHOU-TV is a Houston television station which hosted this news item on its website dated to the 18th of June, 2014.

WEBSTER, Texas — A Webster man says his apartment complex manager told him his American flag was a threat to the Muslim community, and that he has to take it down. But he's not giving up without a fight.

Stepping onto Duy Tran's balcony in Webster, one thing is clear: 'It means a lot to me,' he said.

He's talking about his American flag that he proudly put up when he moved in just a few days ago. But then an apartment manager at the Lodge on El Dorado told him he had to take it down.

'What really stunned me is that she said it's a threat towards the Muslim community,' said Tran. 'I'm not a threat toward anybody.'

The story can now be found at a number of different internet addresses, posted and posted again weeks and even months after the original report. One might imagine this repetition would run contrary to the function of news, which should surely serve to reflect that which occurs in the present, or at least which has occurred since the last time we either opened up a newspaper or were too lazy to find the remote when the news came on after whatever we were watching on the box; but of course news isn't really the point here.

I came across the saga of Duy Tran and his massive flag the day before my birthday when it turned up on social media, rediscovered by a friend who had previously given me no impression of having gone in for this sort of thing.

Soooo wrong, observed her friend Beryl the Peril in response, although I have omitted the pointless ellipsis of seven or eight dots which originally followed Beryl's offering for no apparent reason. Obviously it wasn't really Beryl the Peril from the English children's comic The Topper who made this observation, but I'm going to pretend that it was for the sake of preserving the anonymity and dignity of those involved.

Your mind on Liberalism, quoth Mickey the Monkey somewhat philosophically. Damn shame.

That's the flag of the country! raged Tiny the World's Biggest Dog, but with more exclamation marks. If Muslims are offended... fuck off out of the country! Grrr - this makes me so angry! Although he rendered fuck as f*ck just in case Nancy and Sluggo were reading, and out was capitalised for emphasis possibly in case any of those America-hating Muslims were reading and thought he might merely be joking around.

Clearly feeling this statement had articulated her innermost thoughts quite well, Beryl the Peril came back with, Thanks Tiny... you said it! and there were those three little dots again because free form poetry is always easier than forming coherent sentences in the language of one's own country innit.

Say what?!! boggled Desert Island Dick, startling Olly the Octopus with the force of his exclamation. I'm with you, Tiny. Muslim is a religion and if the country's flag threatens you, get the fuck out.

At this point I interjected with some of the typically incoherent Osama bin Laden-loving liberal shit that you would expect from a Commie faggot such as myself. My suggestion was entirely ignored by the next contributor to the debate, Splodge, Last of the Goblins who proposed, Yeah - what Tiny said. Go away.

That wasn't the end of the discussion, but I felt I had seen plenty and so withdrew my virtual presence from the thinktank. Regarding Duy Tran's claim that his apartment complex manager told him his American flag was a threat to the Muslim community, and that he has to take it down, the news report had this to say:

We tried to ask a manager if that's exactly what was said, but she just handed us a statement, refused to answer any questions, and called an officer to escort us off the property, before we could press any further.

The statement was then quoted as follows:

While the Lodge on El Dorado admires our resident's patriotism, we must enforce our property rules and guidelines. Such guidelines maintain the aesthetics of our apartment community and provide for the safety of all residents. The apartment community already proudly displays our country's flag in a safe and appropriate manner at the entrances to our community.

Nowhere is it stated that any residents of the apartment complex, Muslim or otherwise, had complained, and neither is there stated any official apartment complex ruling against the display of material which may offend Muslims, which suggests to me that such a ruling probably doesn't exist. Using the amazing powers of my imagination I can envision a scenario in which the manager of an apartment complex probably doesn't want tenants hanging whatever the hell they feel like hanging from the balconies of their dwellings - throw rugs depicting Axl Rose or the logos of football teams for example. Perhaps she therefore decided that exceptions could not be made, not even for the flag. Perhaps she simply didn't like Duy Tran as a person and was winding him up for kicks. Perhaps he's an arsehole who deserves to be wound up regardless of his being head over heels in love with the flag, or perhaps this manager is a woman who simply takes her job far too seriously.

In any case, it hardly matters because the job is done, and a complete non-story about a lady telling a man not to do something has got our sabres a-rattling. No actual Muslims were involved but still who the buggering fuck do they think they are telling us what we can do why I oughta wah wah wah...

A little over a year ago I left my local supermarket and found that somehow I had been charged thirty dollars for a watermelon that should have cost two. A mistake had been made, so I went back, explained the situation, and it was corrected. This event somehow didn't make the news, but then I had been erroneously overcharged by a Mexican lady rather than a person who believes in Muslim - as Desert Island Dick would probably phrase it - and no flag desecration had occurred.

I am depressed by stories of this kind, which aren't really news so much as poking at a nest of morons with a stick in order to get them riled up, either raising wrath against this year's popular hate figure, or just keeping everyone's eye on a ball other than the one which is really being played. I am depressed by stories of this kind because they have all the subtlety of war-era Nazi posters depicting Jews eating Aryan babies, and yet people are still falling for this shit because it's easier than thinking, and it's certainly easier than addressing oneself to real problems. I am depressed by stories of this kind because they are keyed to the primitive pseudobrains of individuals like Frank Silva Roque who, on the 15th of September, 2001 shot Balbir Singh Sodhi, a gas station attendant in Mesa, Arizona in retaliation for the destruction of the World Trade Centre. Sodhi had not been in any way involved in the destruction of the World Trade Centre but was of the Sikh religion and therefore wore a turban and a beard. One might perhaps cite Roque's low IQ and alleged mental illness as mitigating factors in the killing, but neither low IQ nor mental illness are exclusive to those with a rabid and irrational hatred of anyone different, persons who are into Muslim for example.

My view is that if you can't cope with multicultural society - something which will by definition include a certain quota of brownish people or darker - then maybe you're the one who should consider fucking off; and while we're here, if it were possible to convert irony into rocket fuel, we could probably get to fucking Mars on the strength of certain Americans making declarations about who owns this land and who has a right to be here. Regardless of the morality of whatever is going to happen with Syria, Iraq, ISIS, and everything else, can we at least try not to turn into drooling animals baying out for blood? Isn't that just the sort of thing we were supposed to be against, or was that all just another arbitrary justification we can no longer be bothered to maintain.

How did we get to be this stupid?

Perhaps it's because such an overwhelming majority of the populace of the developed countries are essentially children, or at best, teenagers. We dislike that which is unfamiliar, a category encompassing more or less everything. Someone gives us a taco, and we wrinkle our nose, take a reluctant bite and start crying because it isn't a McDonalds cheeseburger and life is soooo unfair. We are intrinsically pathetic, and we have just enough intelligence to understand this, and so we compensate for our overwhelming inadequacy by making demands in as loud a voice as possible and discussing everything in terms of absolutes because we believe it makes us appear decisive, as though we know what we're talking about. Worse, we take pride in our stupidity, wearing it like a badge as though it's some sort of achievement.

I don't need fancy books to tell me how things work. I studied common sense at the university of life. I am a plain-speaking man.

We watch crap television or films for entertainment, somehow equating this with imagination, having confused it with the same CGI explosions and spacecraft we've seen a thousand times before, and we pretend these things are important just as we did when we were five. If we even read books, we mostly read books that may as well be crap television or films. We are interested only in things which pass the time and provide distraction. We are not interested in anything external to the restricted sphere of our experience. Worse still, never mind those damn liberal know it all thugs tellin' me ah cain't say the word nigger no moh, how about it no longer being permissible to point any of this out just in case some inbred right-wing thickie experiences a sudden dearth of self-esteem? How is that fair?

At the risk of appearing pompous, over the last twenty or so years I've tried, where possible, to broaden the horizons of my own experience, or I've had the horizons of my own experience forcibly broadened by circumstance. I've tried to educate myself, to make myself better if only to stave off the potential horror of reaching fifty and realising that I'm still the same basic boring lump of shit as I was in my twenties. I would say these efforts have worked up to a point, in that I am now at least able to form coherent sentences, and I have a fairly thorough understanding of how little I actually know and how little I have really done. The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don't know, as Einstein said.

The depressing aspect of this is watching morons attempt to form sentences, to pass judgement on subjects which they don't understand, of which they have no experience beyond what they read in a transparently unreliable newspaper or what some bloke said in the pub or on facebook, or which they didn't actually read but they saw the film with Vin Deisel and it like totally ruled LOL.

Wisdom may as well be the courage to admit that you don't know, or just knowing when to shut up. Even this seems to be a difficult lesson to learn, and so many times I again find myself in discussion with someone who believes that actually knowing something is merely a different way of looking at the world, and they never seem to realise that it's basically dog shit coming out of their mouths, as Louis CK expressed it somewhere or other. Half of the time it doesn't even come out of their mouths in the right order.

Oh there we go. Another Obama dick rider defending his boyfriend! Lol your a loser!

If you love your country so much, at least learn how to conjugate one of its principal languages, you thick fuckers; and whilst we're here, there and their are different words with distinct and unlike meanings.

Read a book.

Have a conversation with a person whose views are different to your own.

Spend a few hours a day outside your comfort zone.

Don't be taken in by the bullshit you tell yourself because it's comforting. Stop treating facts as a fucking obstacle to understanding.

Shut up.

Think.

But mainly, just shut up.

Motorway to Roswell

Motorway to Roswell has always been one of my favourite songs by the Pixies. It serves as a great example of their ability to turn something weird and cranky into raw heartache of such power as to sidestep all possible objections, tapping directly into the seat of one's most basic emotional responses. It takes the folk myth of an alien spacecraft crashing at Roswell, New Mexico in 1947 and turns it into  a thing of crushing sadness without once acknowledging the potential for absurdity, specifically that no holiday ending inside a crate on some military base could be deemed a success. Maybe it is this very absurdity which invokes the profound pathos of the song, which in turn summarises the gulf between that which people wish to believe with such fervour, and that which is actually there.

For those who missed the four million docutainment specials on the increasingly dubiously named History Channel, the front page of the July 8th, 1947 edition of the Roswell Daily Record ran a story about the debris of a crashed alien saucer recovered from a ranch some thirty or forty miles north-west of the town it served. The next day, the same paper followed up the report with a retraction, claiming the wreckage had simply been the remains of a weather balloon; and so the mechanism of rumour, conspiracy, and implied cover-up went into overdrive, expanding the narrative to incorporate alien bodies whisked away to secret military locations.

My wife and I were heading north on Route 285, two lanes which could be considered the real Motorway to Roswell, at least aside from the fact of 285 being a highway rather than a motorway, and that motorway is in any case an English term which has little currency in the United States. Inevitably I couldn't get the song out of my head as we left the interstate at Fort Stockton heading for Roswell. It was our birthday, and this road trip was a present to ourselves. I use the plural rather than the royal we because my wife and I were both born on the 17th of September, albeit the 17th of September of different years, a coincidence which means that neither of us is ever likely to forget the other's birthday, and which additionally tends to support the thesis that astrology is all bollocks, should the thesis require such support.

This was the furthest west I had travelled and the longest journey I had ever made by car, a round trip of 1,200 miles, nine hours each way, roughly Land's End to John O'Groats and back in terms of the British Isles. I'd filled two vacuum flasks with iced tea and instant coffee respectively, packed coolers with the pasta salad and sandwiches I'd prepared - corned beef for myself and salami for my wife - and selected listening material for the trip - spoken word albums by Jello Biafra , Henry Rollins and David Sedaris plus some stand-up material from Lewis Black and Louis CK. It was to be an adventure. Travel is the closest I come to religious experience.

The hill country with which I have developed some familiarity over the last couple of years gradually gave way to the mesas of West Texas, a region of long, low hills with flat tops and steep sides spread across an expanse of semi-desert scrub. We were at the northern limit of the Trans-Pecos, itself representing the upper reaches of Mexico's Chihuahuan desert. I had seen this sort of land before, but only in films - mostly dusty westerns - and the experience of crossing it in person was so profoundly strange as to defy clear description - not quite like finding oneself on L. Frank Baum's yellow brick road but something in that general direction. The highway was busy in so much as we were rarely alone for any length of time, but still we had come some distance from the populated areas. In fact we had come so far as to have left the realms of ubiquitous billboards and associated signage for Buc-ee's or Whataburger or Geico or whoever, the gaudy visual kipple which clogs the automotive arteries of our urban sprawl. We were beyond advertising, although there was a downside in that we were screwed if we broke down out here, and it really was an out here in the true sense. The isolation was emphasised by our falling about a mile short of running out of gas before we came to the gas station at the Bakersfield turn. Bakersfield itself was nowhere to be seen. It could have been a small town, or the merest suggestion of one invoked only by its sign for all we could tell.

We stretched our legs and filled up on gas. I'm not sure quite when my vocabulary adapted to encompass these indigenous variants, but calling it a petrol station would have seemed wilful and eccentric given the environment, the verbal equivalent of a deerstalker; although I still switch between film and movie, depending on the context.

The land rose higher still beyond the mesas as we approached the New Mexico state line. The desert levelled out to a plain, more conspicuously revealing its ancestry as a former ocean bed; but it wasn't desert as I had anticipated from those old westerns. Yucca, opuntia, creosote bushes, and other dry plants held to the sand for as far as the eye could see; with pump jacks nodding away in the distance, scattered and grazing like mechanical animals, drawing oil from reserves so near to the surface that the ground wouldn't have been able to support any larger rig. Strangest of all were intermittent fires seen in the distance burning off the excess of some kind of gas which industry apparently considers useless, at least according to something I'd heard on NPR a few days before. Possibly excepting that of Corpus Christi, the Trans-Pecos is probably the strangest, most alien landscape through which I have passed. From one horizon to its opposite, the only shade to be had for most of the day was inside our car; gas flares blazed orange in the blue depths of desert sky, and we were heading for a town in which an alien spaceship had crashed, according to the legend.

We had set out from San Antonio just before nine in the morning. We stopped for gas as mentioned, and our watches had wound back an hour as we crossed over into New Mexico. Around four in the afternoon by Mountain Time - or five by our Central Time - we came to Carlsbad, driving up into the hills north-west of the town to the Living Desert Zoo & Gardens. My wife had passed the place on previous occasions and had always intended to visit, and we both needed a break. Most startling as we stepped from the car was the temperature, cooler than anything we had known in Texas since probably about March; and with light spots of rain, it felt wonderful. Even better was that, presumably through being a Wednesday, we were the only people at the zoo aside from staff. It felt as though we had been granted access to someone's private garden, albeit someone's private garden with elk, bison, bears, mountain lions and other native creatures. Not for the first time I was struck by the peculiarity of finding myself surrounded by casually grown plants of species I have seen preserved and pampered as foreign royalty in the greenhouses at Kew in London.

The animals seemed happy. They all had plenty of room and were of course in their natural habitats but for the presence of fences. We stood watching the elk for a while, particularly the bull because he reminded us of one of our cats, namely Fluffy who is enormous and has yet to master the art of walking through an open door which has been left open only part of the way. In Fluffy the Elk we felt almost certain we had found someone with a similarly uncomplicated understanding of the world. No less imposing were the indigenous mountain lions, reminders of this being a country in which nature can still kill you - a thought I find oddly reassuring.

Our favourite animal was Lena the Javelina, as she was assonantally identified. The Javelina - the j is pronounced as an h - is a small, cute, fuzzy pig, or peccary, and isn't related to Eurasian pigs in any way according to most of the internet. Nevertheless, she looked a lot like a pig to us, and we stood watching her rooting around in the mud, softly oinking to herself. Peculiarly this encounter at last dislodged Motorway to Roswell from my internal turntable, replacing it with another track by the Pixies - Havalina, basically a song about a piggy, unusually gentle by Pixies standards and seemingly quite suited to Lena's character.

Duly refreshed, we got back on the road, heading north through Artesia, a town characterised by having its name as a prefix to just about everything printed on a sign or billboard within the city limits - Artesia Taxidermy, Artesia Savings Bank, Artesia Gifts and Novelties, Artesia Public Convenience and so on. Earlier we had listened to Lewis Black describe a Houston branch of Starbucks built directly across the street from another branch of Starbucks, which he rationalised as a development catering to the needs of the amnesiac community. It seemed like this might also account for Artesia's somewhat forceful product placement of its own name.

Beyond Artesia, we passed into Roswell itself and out the other side. We were high up, over a thousand meters above sea level and crossing a plateau at the crest of the Sierra Madre Oriental mountain range extending northwards from Mexico; and it felt as though we were high up. The geology had about it a Welsh quality with grassland plains crabbed with bushes resembling gorse which probably weren't; horizon lost to the mists of low cloud cover, and still with a pump jack labouring at the ground here and there or lonely gas flares burning away like fallen stars. It was not difficult to imagine how the strange and dubiously explicable might quite easily intrude upon this ghostly plain so near to the heavens, a borderland at the limit of our familiar world.

Of course, as a kid I couldn't get enough of the flying saucer literature, and The Roswell Incident by Charles Berlitz and William L. Moore came as a revelation, mainly because its subject seemed just that little bit more substantial than the contents of all those other cranky, repetitive tomes bulging with tales of some bloke who knew this other bloke who said he saw something which had definitely struck him as a little rum, with endless blurred photographs to prove something or other up to a poorly quantified point. What if it's all true? I asked myself, as did quite a few other people, if the History Channel is any indication.

Growing up in a completely different country to me, my wife's interest seems not to have been quite so obsessive as mine; but she phrased it very well now as we drove along, suggesting our shared juvenile fascination with flying saucers represented a longing for a world in which magic had not been entirely banished to the realm of fiction. Thankfully we both grew up, in the process developing the intelligence to appreciate that there really is magic in the world, but none of it requiring the ludicrous qualification of constituting the truth they don't want you to know...

After about another hour and our second stop at a gas station, the road began its descent, winding down into mountains and valleys of conifers and babbling streams even more substantially Welsh in character than the plateau we had crossed, at least excepting the preponderance of log cabin architecture of distinctly Alpine flavour. To further compound the lazy comparisons, with the sun now low on the horizon, it felt as though we were driving into an Albert Bierstadt painting, or would have done had my parents not picked north Wales as a holiday destination with quite such frequency when I was a child.

Arriving in Ruidoso, we found a hotel, cleansed ourselves of automotive cheese and general travel glaze, and headed straight back out in search of food, a quest which briefly intersected with the forces of justice. The blue and red lights flashed in the rear view mirror as we peered out into the darkness hoping to find the turning for an eating place called the Texas Club. It couldn't be anything to do with us.

My wife cursed and slowed the car from crawl to a dead stop.

'What did we do?'

'I have no idea.' She wound down the window.

What appeared to be a twelve-year old boy dressed as a cop leaned in and began to detail our crime. He had blonde hair and pimples. He had a big nose and sticky out ears and his voice droned without any obvious display of confidence or excessive education.

We both sat absolutely still in our seats, and I tried to recall any positive story I had heard about the police here in the United States. I couldn't think of one, my sources being persons such as Ice T, Henry Rollins and Jello Biafra. Technically this was my first brush with the law in its American form, my impression of which has thus far been thin, and is hopefully wrong in being based upon the apparent contrast with the police in England. The thing is that whilst the English police forces may undoubtedly harbour a few wrong 'uns, I always had the impression that their recruitment at least involved a selection process followed by some sort of training, even in the case of those evil fuckers who didn't seem to think the murder of Stephen Lawrence constituted a crime; but here, I sometimes get the impression that police recruitment is based on whether you know how to hold a gun and fancy having a go. Hopefully I'm wrong.

The twelve-year old boy told us that we had a broken tail light, and that we had failed to come to a complete stop prior to executing a right turn. The first of these we knew as my wife had paid to have said tail light fixed mere months before, apparently to no avail. The second sounded like some crap which this funny little man had invented there and then. He gave us our tickets and told us to drive safely.

It was bullshit, of course. We drove back to confirm that, as we suspected, the location at which we had transgressed was not the sort of turn at which anyone with a brain would draw to a complete stop. There was no stop sign, aside from anything. We had been pulled over almost immediately after taking a right simply because the twelve-year old boy saw our out of state licence plates and correctly reasoned that we would be reluctant to drive all the way back here in two weeks time when the opportunity arose to dispute the charge. It would be cheaper and easier to pay the $150 - another night of successful fund raising for the city, and junior would no doubt be better able to meet whatever quotas his job obliged him to meet. He was a cop with a gun and we were a long way from home, so he probably could have given us a ticket for conspiracy to form sarcastic thoughts whilst driving had he felt like it. Similar bullshit fund raising traffic violations have been handed out to others we know who have crossed the New Mexico state line from Texas. We weren't the first.

On a holiday,
So many miles looking for a place to stay,
Near some friendly star,
He found this mote, and now we wonder where we are,
How could this, so great,
Turn so shitty? He ended up in army crates,
And photographs in files...

Okay, so it could have been worse. We gritted our teeth, found the restaurant, and ate our steak. My wife had told me that Ruidoso had a sizeable indigenous population. Their presence was manifest in the nearby Inn of the Mountain Gods resort and casino, and through a local artist who had furnished the restaurant walls with prints communicating Native American spirituality as a series of attractive women who, apparently surprised to have been discovered in a state of undress, push their large breasts together in supplication to some Amerind Goddess of Knockers and Gentleman's Interest Publishing. The pictures were oddly depressing, a weird conflation of Thomas Kinkade and Hustler, but the steak was great.

We slept well and began the next morning with the sort of breakfast you tend to find served in hotels of the kind we had chosen, the kind which serves breakfast on a paper plate with a plastic fork -  not unwelcome but there's a reason why it's free. I ate sausage patties and inappropriately robust scrambled egg whilst my wife enjoyed the entertainment provided by our fellow free food enthusiasts. Twin brothers were seated at the table behind us, one vocally expressing his hatred of motorcyclists and whichever loud, smelly machines they rode in on - a great many of which we had noticed in the parking lot as we arrived the night before, exotic and elaborate trikes and weird looking custom jobs of a kind favoured by people with travel plans ranging much further than the next town.

'You with the bikers?' the twin would ask each time someone new came into the breakfast room, before reiterating his hostility as each reply came back a no. 'I'd like to see someone step outside and push a few of those damn things over. See how they like that.'

His brother ate in silence and another guest came in.

'You with the bikers?'

This time there was a nod of the head.'Yes I am.'

The twin began to explain how much he loved bikes, how greatly he admired those who had taken to the open road.

We too took to the open road, reversing the route which had brought us here, back up through the mountains and valleys to the ghostly high plateau with its pump jacks and gas flares, and this time we stopped in Roswell.

As you might expect, the city hasn't been too shy about cashing in on its reputation. We parked opposite a row of stores, each with a huddle of enthusiastically painted lime green aliens adorning the frontage, the bubble-headed kind with the dark, slanted eyes popularised by Whitley Strieber's Communion, amongst other things. The aliens painted on the window of the bakery smiled and held out cakes for our consideration. They wore chefs' aprons and promised that their bread was out of this world, meaning I suppose that it was good. In Ruidoso we had passed a few places selling tree trunks carved into the shape of bears or other animals, or even the hokey figures of Native American warriors, totems which could be purchased and set up in one's garden or at the front of the home as either a mascot or a sentry. Here in Roswell the tree trunks were carved so as to resemble aliens, freakishly tall, average, or short and resembling dwarves, but all that same bright green.

In its time, Roswell has also been a typically average science-fiction television series in which pouting airbrushed teenagers descended from the aliens who may or may not have crash landed here serve as a cock-obvious metaphor for how awkward and alienated teenagers can feel, even the conspicuously styled, good looking ones who know how to use hair gel. It was Twilight without the humour, and somehow managed to make it to a third series. Thankfully all the hair gel and pouting in the world was not enough to dislodge the folk myth version of alien visitors from the hearts of Roswell's people, and the incident - whatever it was - receives its most thorough celebration at the city's International UFO Museum & Research Center.

For all its relative glamour, the problem with Roswell as an historical event is that what materials can be legitimately displayed in the glass cases of a museum are fairly limited without stretching the point, although it has to be said that the organisers have generally done a good job regardless of whether or not you're buying it. So we have all the relevant newspaper cuttings of the time, maps, photographs, and even a vintage Bakelite telephone presumably to illustrate the sort of device by which startled ranchers might have communicated their bewilderment. The newspaper articles describe debris from a crash of some sort, and so we also have examples of how that debris may have appeared. Unfortunately, as often seems to be the case with this sort of thing, what evidence there is tends to be either anecdotal or open to interpretation, and whilst it may be true that a government cover up would account for this lack of evidence, such a possibility doesn't really leave us any the wiser.

In short form, the legend has it that the remains of a flying saucer were recovered by the air force from a ranch seventy-five miles north-west of Roswell; and then the story was retracted because it turned out to be a weather balloon; and then this was viewed as a cover up intended to conceal the weather balloon having been a flying saucer after all; except that the weather balloon story was a cover up to conceal the wreckage having originated in some more secretive government effort to monitor Soviet bomb tests at long range; and then somewhere in there we have the bodies supposedly recovered from the crash site, and so on and so forth. All that can really be said is that something crashed, and something was found, and some people were more than a little freaked out by the whole thing. There seems to be an FBI memo declassified more recently and implying that yes, there were saucers and there were bodies although Roswell itself is not explicitly identified:

An investigator for the Air Forces stated that three so-called flying saucers had been recovered in New Mexico. They were described as being circular in shape with raised centers, approximately 50 feet in diameter. Each one was occupied by three bodies of human shape but only 3 feet tall, dressed in metallic cloth of very fine texture. Each body was bandaged in a manner similar to the blackout suits used by speed flyers and test pilots.

It nevertheless remains difficult to commit to anything stronger than who knows? My own view is that it almost certainly wasn't a flying saucer piloted by extraterrestrials, but as folk myths go it's still a thumping good story. You sort of want it to be true on some level.

Once we're done with the crash, the International UFO Museum & Research Center makes time with displays relating a more general history of UFOlogy and the almost inevitable diorama depicting an alien autopsy. This will probably sound peculiar given the subject but I'm not sure this aspect didn't cheapen the enterprise a little, reducing it all to Spielbergian spectacle; but I guess that's what the punters want and I suppose I'm probably overthinking this one.

For all that the UFO Museum may be viewed as a series of displays insisting on the existence of Santa Claus, only one aspect really bothered me, and this was a carved reproduction of the lid of the sarcophagus of K'inich Janaab' Pakal, seventh century ruler of Palenque in Mexico. The design on the lid was identified as depicting  an ancient space traveller by professional tosspot Erich von Däniken who claimed that the designs surrounding the carved figure of the dead king looked a bit like a spaceship. Five minutes spent familiarising oneself with Maya iconography at a rudimentary level should be enough to convince anyone with a working brain that it really isn't a spaceship. Those flames Erich saw belching from the rear of the craft as it soared into the heavens weren't flames but simply the stylised rendering of the jaws of the Mayan version of the Mexican Earth Monster, as can be seen on myriad other stone carvings, none of which have been mistaken for anachronistic rocketry. Of course ancient astronaut theorists tend to find their early spacemen in the iconography of cultures of which their audience will be otherwise ignorant, without any legitimately established knowledge to get in the way of a very specific understanding. It's the reverse of the cinematic caveman transposed to Washington DC who announces that the Lincoln Memorial represents a powerful God to whom one might justifiably offer sacrifices in return for a higher agricultural yield.

This will probably make me sound hopelessly cranky but I'm tired of seeing poor old Pakal trundled out again and again by ignorant fuckers seeking that truth which has been for so long hidden and yet who can't spare five minutes to do a bit of basic homework. I'm tired of it because it's disrespectful, and makes it difficult for me to maintain positive thoughts regarding the presence of intelligent life on this planet, never mind anywhere else.

A little further along from the reproduction of the lid of Pakal's sarcophagus was a painting showing how the dead king's spacecraft would have looked had he chosen to race it along a beach like a sort of flying dune buggy. I couldn't quite tell if the artist was sincere or extremely sarcastic. In any case I preferred the other paintings arranged in a line along the same wall, slightly clumsy but earnest depictions of saucers and their pilots by persons who had probably not bothered with art college but nevertheless really believed in their work. It was all a bit mad, but there was at least a kind of truth in there somewhere.

So that was Roswell, at least excepting a pleasant but largely uneventful excursion to the Bitter Lake National Wildlife Refuge. We came, we looked around, and then we started heading for the motorway, hopefully a little wiser than before.

 

I should probably mention that Dave Hirons, my former art tutor, had made and written about this same trip a year or so before me. His account can be read here. I guess I had forgotten about the photograph when staging my own unintentional tribute.

David Hall

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some details of his life and work here.