A Christmas to Remember

This Christmas, morning begins at seven with a trip to the Methodist Hospital over at Stone Oak.

[material I probably shouldn't repeat on the internet omitted]

We are back at the hospital in the afternoon. Entering the lobby, we notice the man we saw earlier. It was about eight and he was sat in a wheelchair at the main door with a couple of bags across his knees, presumably containing his clothes. He's black, about my age, and with the kind of mutant dreads you associate with homeless people, matted flaps of hair jutting out from the back of his head. He didn't look too happy, but nevertheless muttered a Merry Christmas as we left because it was Christmas morning.

That was seven hours ago. He's still here in the lobby and it's now three. He's stood by the phone, no longer in the wheelchair, and I recall my own checkout from a hospital a couple of years ago. They sat me in a wheelchair and wheeled me to the door. I could have walked but it was something to do with insurance, fear of patients tripping and braining themselves whilst still in the care of the hospital.

[more stuff excised]

Back in the lobby, Charlie is still there. He never gets around to telling us his name so I'm calling him Charlie.

'We can't leave him here,' I suggest. 'It's definitely the same guy.'

Bess can see no member of staff, no-one we might ask about Charlie or what's going on with him. Christmas has transformed the hospital into a ghost town.

We approach him with caution. He wears a military shirt and is almost certainly a veteran. His eyes are a bit wild, but it's to be expected after such a length of time spent in the lobby, presumably waiting for a lift home. His stomach hangs from the lower part of his military t-shirt, a weird slab of flesh, a flap draped like a curtain with a really unsettling central crease, something you don't want to see. It's as though a mad scientist has grafted an extra bum onto his front. For me at least, it rules out the possibility of asking what's wrong. I probably don't want to know, and he probably wouldn't take much pleasure in telling anyone. He has teeth missing and speaks softly with a brutal lisp, just muttered words - something about a taxi or a phone not working. That's why he's still here.

'What are you doing at the hospital?' Bess asks, and he mumbles something about pain killers.

We deduce that he's from the eastside. That's where he would go were a taxi available or if the phone were working.

'You want a ride?'

He shuffles after us. He isn't so quick on his feet.

'Maybe you should drive the car around,' I suggest, and Bess goes off across the parking lot as Will and myself wait with Charlie. It's hard not to wonder whether or not this is such a great idea, but the fact remains that the guy is clearly in a bad way and we're able to help, so that's what we have to do. Bess pulls up to the kerb, and I open the front passenger door.

'You're going to have to give us directions, so you probably need to be up front,' I tell our man, and he silently folds himself into the seat, which takes about a minute. We have his bags of clothing, and Will and I get in the back. Charlie pongs a bit, nothing specific, just the bouquet of not having washed in a while.

'So where do you need to go?' asks Bess.

'Rigsby,' he tells us.

'That's the eastside?' I ask.

'It's a bit of a way,' says Bess, 'but not too far, I guess.'

We drive in silence.

'Are you from San Antonio?'

'Yes,' he says.

We pass the Cornerstone Church, then take a left heading back towards the city. We're presently on the northside, I remember.

'Where does Sid live? Isn't he on the eastside?'

'West,' Will tells me.

'Oh that's right, over by Hollywood… er Holly —what's the name, you know that lake out there?'

'Woodlawn Lake,' Bess says.

'He used to run all around that every morning,' says Will. 'You remember that?'

We talk about Sid and his running for a couple of miles, and how we need to go over and see him because it's been a while.

'You know I spoke to him the other night?' Bess says.

'How is he?'

'He's good. He was asking about my mom.'

'Going into a bit too much detail,' I remind her.

Bess laughs. 'You know, old people stuff…'

'He was asking about MI5 and Scotland Yard.'

'What?'

'He asks me every time. I suppose it's because I'm from England. He asks me about MI5 and Scotland Yard. I don't know what he wants me to say, or why he thinks I'll know anything.'

'Well, it has to be better than asking about the Royal family.' Will laughs. He has a fine laugh, soft and high like the cooing of birds, and very genuine. There's a gentle, Carl Sagan quality to him and he laughs a lot. He has a bone dry sense of humour and apparently not an ounce of malice in him.

We drive on, attempts to draw Charlie out of himself, even to put him at ease falling flat, so we talk amongst ourselves. We pass Fort Sam. Will indicates the opposite side of the road. 'We used to live there. There was an apartment complex before.'

'I thought it was—'

Will laughs. 'We did. We lived everywhere. We used to move around so much.'

'You were in the army,' Bess tries. 'Were you at Fort Sam?'

Charlie makes a noise in the affirmative but nothing further.

We turn left onto South New Braunfels.

'It's some way yet?' I wonder out loud.

'Rigsby is over there. Still a ways to go.' Bess asks Charlie where he went to school, then mentions her own schooling. She knows the area east of the city. She's trying to put him at ease because the silence is getting weird.

We cross a major bridge, one that I recognise.

'Stephen has his garden - like his allotment thing, here some place,' I say.

'What's that?' asks Will.

'Our neighbour, Stephen,' says Bess. 'He runs some garden.'

'He teaches kids, that sort of thing,' I say casually, and in my head I'm leaning forward to explain, Stephen is our friend, and he's a black man like you. That's because we're nice white people, not like those others. The situation is getting weird and awkward, and my imagination has turned Charlie into the grim-faced black dude in a Robert Crumb cartoon, just waiting for the ordeal to be over. He probably thinks we're going to take him somewhere, fuck him and eat him. I seem to recall reports of racist attacks made by random white yahoos emboldened by the thought of one of their own presently stinking up the White House. Maybe that's why he's so quiet.

'Left here,' Charlie says, which is confusing because Rigsby is straight ahead another couple of miles; but Bess makes the turn.

'Pull over,' he suggests, then almost barks, 'Stop right here!'

I get out.

He gets out.

I hand him his bags and he stumbles off without a word, back the way we came rather than towards Rigsby.

'Take care,' I suggest, somewhat redundantly. 'Happy Christmas.' I get back in the car.

Bess turns us around and we head back towards our own neighbourhood.

'Well that was something,' I suggest. 'He didn't even say thanks.'

'Rigsby's in that direction,' Will chuckles as he points. 'You think maybe he had enough of us?'

'Perhaps he thought we were abducting him,' I say. 'Tonight we'll turn on the news and see his photograph during a report on three white people now wanted for questioning.'

'Did you hear him?' Bess deepens her voice for the impersonation. 'Stop right here!'

'Maybe he didn't want us to know where he lives. I still can't believe he didn't even thank you.'

Bess laughs rhetorically. 'Oh I'm sorry - did I just drive your ass twenty miles out of my way across town for free?'

'You think he even had money for the taxi?' Will wonders.

'Naaah - that drive would have cost him a bunch.'

We speculate on what Charlie's deal could have been, how come he ended up in a hospital on the other side of the city. We even consider that Charlie could be making his way back to Stone Oak right now, returning like some nutty salmon for another day of hanging around looking like a guy who needs a ride, for reasons only he will ever understand. Maybe he didn't even need a ride. Maybe someone dropped him off and he was just hanging around, unable to communicate his need of medical attention.

'Well,' I say, 'it's certainly been a Christmas to remember...'

Some Spider Grandmothers Do 'Ave 'Em

Aliksa'i. People were living at Oraibi. Lots of people of the Hopituh Shi-nu-nu were living there, but our story is concerned only with the family of Hawiovi, that is Hawiovi himself and his long suffering wife. Her name was Honovi which means Strong Deer, which was lucky because the name of her husband had the meaning Going Down the Ladder and it was said that this seemed appropriate only because had he gone up the ladder, he would certainly either have fallen off or dropped something on the heads of those stood below.

One day it transpired that the Spider Grandmother had given Honovi a child. Her belly was a little bigger than usual, and it is also true that Hawiovi had recently found her thighs to be a little more pale than usual, because that is how such things work. All the same, being with child, she continued to grind her corn and to weave her mats. Many times would the moon pass before she had to seek a blessing from Tawa, the sun.

'You should be careful,' said Hawiovi full of concern, because he was ever full of concern. On this day he seemed to be full of a quite unusual quantity of concern. He stood at the entrance of the dwelling and it seemed as though he was dancing upon the spot. He held his headdress in his hands, mashing it and spinning it around as though it were a wheel. His face was like that of a child looking at the moon for the first time. He looked all around. 'Ooh Honovi,' he said for no obvious reason and bit his lower lip.

'Honestly, Hawiovi,' said his wife, 'sometimes I think it is you that is having the baby and not me. You do worry so. Tell me what is on your mind?'

Hawiovi's face became full of blood as the truth was divined, or at least as it was divined that there was a truth which might be uncovered. He started to laugh and his laugh was like the gurgle of a child, but then he held up his finger as though about to make a point. 'I cannot tell a lie,' he said. 'I've been having a bit of trouble.'

'Trouble, Hawiovi? What can you mean?' It seemed that although Honovi had asked the question, she didn't really want to hear the answer.

'Well, I don't like to say,' said Hawiovi with difficulty. 'Can we just say that the Spider Grandmother has not wished to speak with me in a long time.'

'Oh dear,' said his wife. She knew the ways of her husband, how he would say one thing and mean something else. She understood his problem very well.

It is known that sometimes when the Spider Grandmother wishes to speak with us, she makes us feel as though we want to defecate. She then talks to us once we are about our business, because this is the time when we are nearly always alone.

Hawiovi went to see Wikvaya, the medicine man.

'What seems to be the problem, Hawiovi?' asked Wikvaya as he prepared a pipe. 'Is everything well with you at home?'

Hawiovi stood at the entrance of the sweat lodge and it seemed as though he was dancing upon the spot. He held his headdress in his hands, mashing it and spinning it around as was his habit. His face was again like that of a child looking at the moon for the first time. He looked all around. He made as though to giggle, but instead said, 'Having a baby.'

'Well, that is good news,' Wikvaya said, casting his eyes upwards in silent thanks for such blessings as are given by the Spider Grandmother, then before he could ask more, Hawiovi was already speaking.

'I've been having a bit of trouble, but I don't really like to say...'

'Come, come,' said the medicine man, 'we are both men of the fourth world. There is nothing you could possibly tell me which might cause surprise. I'm not some Navajo, you know.'

'It's down there.' Hawiovi pointed with a finger, indicating his personal areas. 'It won't come out.'

It seemed as though there was the sound of riotous laughter in the air, and it continued for several minutes. Wikvaya wore an expression of great shock on his face. His mouth was open and his eyebrows were set high upon his forehead. He seemed to think that Hawiovi had claimed to be with child, but Hawiovi's complaint was that he temporarily found himself unable to defectate. That was the root of their misunderstanding, and the two men spoke at crossed purposes for a long time. Had the misunderstanding been resolved sooner, they might have seen the funny side, but instead they experienced only frustration. And here the story ends.

A Cheerleader for My Teeth

It's cold and windy in San Antonio, which is strange and depressing. I'm cycling to meet a dental appointment which has been brought forward an hour from four to three for some reason. Additionally annoying is that the Texas hill country seems to begin right at the end of my road, meaning my thirty minute ride comprises a sequence of exhausting humpbacks; and yet somehow I make it, bang on three o'clock. The waiting room contains many more elderly people than I am accustomed to seeing here. Usually I'm the only person waiting, but then usually I see the hygienist at four.

Prior to my moving to Texas, I was on the verge of losing most of my teeth. I had pockets extending down into my violently receding gums of over a centimetre's depth, which most dentists will tell you means you're screwed. My gum disease was raging out of control and most of my teeth were loose as the bone support crumbled. Happily, I was treated by one Dr. Stalker soon after I got here, a miracle worker so far as I'm concerned. He operated on my gob, removed those teeth which were beyond hope - mostly from the back - and performed some kind of dental magic by which the bone support was restored to those remaining. I am left with sufficient quota of newly stabilised choppers to be able to eat and to chew. The gum disease I've had most of my life is entirely gone, and those pockets have all closed up - which another dentist once told me would never happen once they were beyond seven or eight millimeters depth. Now all I have to do is to keep them in shape, to brush and floss, and to come back for a proper clean every couple of months, just to be on the safe side and to keep on top of things.

I sit in the waiting room for fifteen minutes. One of the staff emerges from my usual treatment room, presumably a hygienist. I don't recognise her, which is odd. She escorts an octogenarian patient as the woman's husband rises from the chair next to mine. They talk about Christmas, the usual stuff. It emerges that the couple have been married for sixty years.

'So what's the secret of a successful marriage?' the hygienist coos. The old guy mutters some reply and they all laugh.

'This is very nice,' observes the old woman, touching a branch of the miniature Christmas tree on the reception desk. 'Who did this?'

'Some of the staff, I think,' says the hygienist.

The old couple leave and she turns to me. 'Mr. Burton?'

I follow her to the treatment room as she tells me how she just loves old people, then explains that Rebecca - the woman I usually see - left a couple of months ago. She introduces herself as Sabrina. This troubles me because I liked Rebecca. I felt we understood each other, and she seemed like a genuinely interesting person. One wall of her office was hung with one of those digital picture frames which displays a cyclical sequence of snaps. Rebecca's photographs were of herself and her husband on holiday in Arizona, France, Spain, England, Mexico, and other places. The slide show provided a pleasant distraction from the metal spike she would work around my gums, chipping out the tartar which my brushing hadn't been able to reach. The digital picture frame is gone, and Sabrina seems significantly younger. She talks like Regina George from Mean Girls. Her voice is such that I expect to hear her say oh my god I mean I was all like seriously? and she was all like whatever, but instead she asks, 'Where are you from?'

'England.'

I take to the chair and Sabrina gets to work.

'How are you with the sonic?' She means the device with which she intends to remove my tartar build up.

'I'm okay, I guess. I prefer the manual thing, you know?'

'Raise your left hand if I cause any discomfort.'

'Okay,' and we're off.

She hits a sensitive spot every few minutes. Each time I jump so much as to make the raised left hand a redundant statement of the obvious. Sabrina talks as she works. She has a face mask and I can't understand a fucking word. It sounds as though she just said something about a skeleton cap, whatever that is, and I think it was a question. There's an irrigation pipe hooked into my mouth drawing out the liquid, but right now she's holding it in one hand.

'I can't understand what you're saying.'

She pulls the mask down. 'You need to suck on it like a straw.' She sticks the pipe between my teeth. 'Now close your mouth.'

I do so and the vacuum is such that it sucks my cheeks in as it removes all the blood, saliva, and whatever else. The sensation is fairly unpleasant.

She pulls out the tube and I sit up, looking for the glass by which I would ordinarily rinse out my mouth. It's not there. It hasn't even been replaced by anything. The space it would customarily occupy is empty. 'What happened to the,' - I wave a hand because I'm not sure what it's called.

'Those are gone now. They were unhygienic.'

I think about this, a future with no more rinsing out my mouth in the usual way, just Regina George stood over me with her tube. Still, I suppose that's progress, and it makes sense. I always wondered about those people from the local leper colony forever wandering in and having a cheeky swig from my glass.

Sabrina tells me she has a friend from Mexico who went to a job interview, and somehow one of the questions was whether the woman had ever put her foot in her mouth. Sabrina's friend was apparently at least as bewildered as I am right now, because she hadn't interviewed for the position of contortionist. Sabrina is telling me this in relation to my having failed to understand what she was saying when she seemed to be telling me about a skeleton cap. The story illustrates how there can still be misunderstandings between people speaking the same language, particularly if they are from different countries. Sabrina apparently believes herself to be the first person I've met since I moved to America six years ago, so I gather that must be why she's explaining all of this. She doesn't seem to have realised that I can't understand her because she has the shrill voice of a hysterical contestant on Family Feud, all cobra head and oh no you din't, girlfren' and Steve, I'mma have to say at the dollar store…

Dr. Stalker stops by as is his habit. I find him a reassuring presence. He knows what he's talking about and isn't prone to hyperbole. He looks in my mouth.

'Great stuff there, Lawrence. You're keeping it clean, and that's what we like.'

Sometimes he tells me he can scarcely believe the transformation, how well my mouth has recovered from the state it was in when I first showed up at his door. He says he wishes he had taken pictures for use on the lecture circuit, before and after.

'Keep doing what you're doing and we'll see you again.'

He leaves and Sabrina gets back to work. She chatters as she grinds the pick around below my gum line. The words I understand are mostly to do with how much calcified tartar I have down there.

Eventually she finishes, and as she fixes up the next appointment, she asks about my brushing regime. Then she tells me I need to start using an electric toothbrush.

'I don't like them,' I say, although it's only later that I recall this is because I find the sensation of something vibrating against my gums really unpleasant.

'Well you need to start using one,' and she says it with a smile like that should be enough to win me over. She begins to talk about what we need to do to get my teeth into shape. I'm confused, partially because it's been years since I heard this speech, and partially because I distrust suggestions of what we need to do when there is no we that I'm aware of. I listen to her telling me about why we brush our teeth.

'I don't wish to take a negative tone,' I say, 'but I've been through all this. You didn't see my teeth before Dr. Stalker operated on them. He's the reason I have teeth, and he seems to think I'm doing fine. They used to look like a row of tombstones so,' - I open my mouth to grin in illustration - 'this is as good as it gets, which suits me fine. I don't really care about having the teeth of an Osmond brother.'

She delivers some shrill response, something which scans like a motivational poster, something along the lines of how we don't settle for second place; then she adds, 'I'm going to be a cheerleader for your teeth,' and she says it with a big smile.

'We don't have cheerleaders in England, so that doesn't really work for me.'

'What do you have instead of cheerleaders?'

'We just get on with it.'

Later I realise I should have pointed out that all previous appointments have been distinguished by both Rebecca and Dr. Stalker commenting on how well I've been doing, and how with each visit my teeth seem to require less and less attention on their part; and suddenly I'm back to being the naughty boy who doesn't brush right, and who could do better, and it's not enough to just want the bastards cleaned, you have to aspire to be fucking president too.

It has been a shitty day.

Genuine Pro-Life Baseball Cap

We're driving to Mansfield, which is a little way south of Dallas and probably shouldn't be confused with anything described in a Jane Austen novel. I'm looking at the map to see if Mansfield has a park, so we can go there and take photographs of ourselves grinning in front of the sign for later posting on social media accompanied by a variation on the joke in the first sentence. Mansfield has a Katherine Rose Memorial Park and a James McKnight Park, but no actual Mansfield Park so far as I can see. Never mind.

A couple of months ago, Andrea asked for a stylised drawing of a spinning top, something which could be used to promote a spinning top convention, a design you might see on letterheads, banners, t-shirts and so on. Andrea collects spinning tops. If you're now thinking about that big round thing you had when you were a kid, made of tin with a succession of circus clowns painted around the circumference and a handle you pump to get it going, then we're probably about the same age, but that isn't the kind of spinning top to which I'm referring. The tops Andrea collects are small, precision tooled creations of copper, brass, zirconium, and other metals. They're not really toys, at least not in the same sense as their larger, cheaper cousins. They're objects of beauty in their own right, and a decent one will set you back at least fifty dollars. Andrea collects them, as do people all across the country, and every so often they meet up to talk about it, to compare notes, and to spin tops. So I came up with a drawing of a generic metal top spinning across the state of Texas, because Texas is where this year's get together is to be held, specifically Mansfield.

Beyond agreeing that they're nice objects, neither Bess nor myself have any strong feelings about spinning tops. The distance is 259 miles heading north up I-35, which is a long way to go in pursuit of something for which you have no strong feelings, but we were invited, and it's a day out, and it's a bit of Texas I don't know. Also I'm the guy who drew the design so that makes me about as much of a celebrity as I'm ever likely to be. I've imagined myself seated at a table with a line of spinning top enthusiasts queuing for my autograph.

The journey is about four and a half hours, allowing for a couple of stops. We drive through Waco, a town which achieved notoriety when the local cult got itself blown up by government forces. The most remarkable thing about the place is that you can drive through it without even realising, just another vague urban sprawl somewhere out beyond the burger joints which have accumulated along the route; and then we're in Mansfield, eventually. We book into the Marriott, or at least we book into the Marriott after twenty minutes of pounding the bell at the front desk, requiring that I go off in search of the receptionist who turns out to have been otherwise engaged in the laundry room at the other end of the hotel.

The convention is held at Smoky Mae's BBQ, which looks as though it was a saw mill or an iron foundry or something of that sort up until quite recently. Conversion to dining establishment has been effected by the addition of a bar, tables, and stools. We queue in the part which still resembles a saw mill or an iron foundry, then make our choice from a selection of brisket, sausage, or chicken from a smoke blackened grill, delivered to our trays with tongs by a guy who may as well be the local blacksmith. Through the inner door and into the bar, we add potato salad or coleslaw and select our drinks. They've never heard of Newcastle Brown so I take a Dos XX, which is served in a ridiculous goblet of inch thick rustic looking glass that I find difficult to lift. Booze should never be such hard work.

We take our food and drink through to the convention, which is  outside on a covered veranda. There are twenty or thirty in attendance. Most of them look like bikers, or people who have no problem hanging around with bikers, which is a relief because I was expecting the cast of The Big Bang Theory - at least based on the thirty seconds I saw before I felt like shooting someone.

Bess and I occupy the one free table. The others are covered with tops, displayed in the protective foam of open flight cases, or being spun upon specially made spinning surfaces of concave glass. The top people mill around, comparing notes, admiring the workmanship and so on. Some of them are manufacturers, some just people who like tops.

A realisation occurs to me. At least some of this lot probably have a workshop in their back yard, some place where they hand forge bike parts on their own lathes, and turning out a spinning top is probably not so much of a leap from a custom cylinder, or whatever it is that motorcycles are made from. The top people suddenly make sense. They're sociable, outdoorsy types, probably good with their hands, and the pursuit which has brought them together, some from as far as Michigan or Ontario, no longer seems quite so cranky.

Bess and I eat our brisket and catch up with Andrea, who arrived yesterday. Some guy called Caleb is going from table to table, offering samples of his homemade jerky. He has a huge beard, dungarees, and the denim cap I would expect of a man called Caleb, and naturally his jerky is seasoned to volcanic intensity. I try a little out of politeness but it's too much. I've never seen the point of food so hot that you can't taste anything beyond the thermonuclear capsaicinoids and end up in hospital, but each to their own. Andrea explains that we missed the hot chilli eating competition which was last night.

Oh well.

I am introduced to the main guy, the one who got all of this going. Andrea has had my illustration framed and she presented it to him last night. He's very pleased to meet me, but I guess no-one's that bothered about getting my autograph after all.

Bess and I submit ourselves to one of the competitions. She spins a top which keeps on spinning for two minutes and thirty-five seconds. I manage three-ten, but the winner is some kid called Daniel who makes four minutes. The top is made of wood and doesn't have the momentum of the metal ones, which can keep going for more than ten minutes.

We take our leave of all the excitement and have a look at the local branch of Half Price Books. I find a copy of John Boorman's novelisation of his film, Zardoz - fifteen dollars, which is exciting as I had no idea the book existed until about a month ago, and I certainly never expected to find a copy.

We return to the convention around six, eat some more brisket, and I attempt to pour beer from the stupid giant glass goblet into a styrofoam cup as preventative to giving myself a hernia. It's a bit of a disaster, and then the entertainment arrives to further reduce the fun quotient of the evening - a boring man with his guitar, amplified just enough to make conversation difficult, delivering the usual bloody awful covers. We leave after dark.

We drive back next morning, taking the more scenic route down 281, avoiding Austin altogether, which means we get to look at cows, goats, and horses in fields at the side of the highway. We stop at a gas station in Hamilton. I go to take a leak and find a baseball cap which someone has left in the restroom - all white material with a bright pink and purple photograph of a human foetus developing in the womb printed where one might usually expect to see the logo for either a feed company or a sports team.

Wow, I think to myself, a genuine pro-life baseball cap!

Cat Café

For the uninitiated, a cat café is essentially a feline adoption centre which provides refreshments. I assume it's a mostly American thing but I could be wrong. Bess and I went to one in Austin. It was a large room, like a small department store filled with cats and furnished for the comfort of the same. There was a food truck parked outside but it was closed up, so that day we saw a load of cats but weren't able to get anything to eat; which was okay because we saw a load of cats and the shortfall is pretty much what we have come to expect from Austin which, for all of its admirable qualities, amounts to Texas for people who don't like Texas, in our experience.

The San Antonio cat café introduced itself through a facebook group promising that it would be coming soon to a then vacant premises very near where my wife works. We drove past a few times but there was nothing doing. Bess sank some money into the endeavour by paying in advance for a cat party. As should be obvious from the description, a cat party is simply getting the cat café to yourself for a couple of hours so you can invite friends who also like cats, and everyone gets to sit around petting felines while drinking tea and eating tacos or whatever. This kind of deal is central to the whole raison d'être of a cat café. The money goes towards the upkeep of the place and the care of the cats which have ended up there, everyone gets to hang out with the aforementioned cats, and hopefully one or two of them will find themselves adopted as a result.

We kept driving past, but the place remained vacant.

'I want my cat party,' my wife growled form time to time.

Summer turns to Autumn, and eventually the place opens, but in a different building a couple of miles down the road. We go along to the opening night. The new venue is a converted industrial unit divided in half with a wood partition. The café element constitutes the conversion of the space on one side of the partition to catering purposes. There's a small kitchen and a coffee machine. This being the opening night, they have ordered a stack of pizzas from Papa John's or one of those places, of which about three slices are left as we arrive, despite that we have arrived on time.

'Help yourself to nachos and popcorn,' our hostess suggests, breezily indicating bags of chips and one of those things dispensing the bright yellow chemical sludge everyone refers to as queso.

You are spoiling us, Mr. Ambassador!

Well, never mind, because we're here for the cats.

Through the partition, the other half of the place is large with chairs all around, tables, cat trees and related fixtures. There are cats everywhere, all shapes and sizes, all ages, regarding us with bemusement as cats do. They look healthy and happy, and there's no weird smell about the place which seems like a good sign.

'Wait,' I say. 'Is this the cat party you were talking about?'

'No,' Bess tells me. 'This is the opening night.'

I realise this should be obvious from the fact that we're here with a whole load of complete strangers.

'So the cat party will be just us?'

'Well, we're allowed twelve people so there will be my mom and Andrea and a few others.'

'Okay.'

We stay for about ninety minutes, playing with the cats, petting kittens, getting to know them. Our favourite is called Max, apparently the alpha male. He's constantly on the move, patrolling the room, making sure everything is in order. He has a peculiar stumpy tail, like that of a bobcat, but apparently he was born that way.

Just as we leave, more pizza turns up.

Never mind.

Weeks pass. Bess, sensing that the proprietors of our local cat café seem lacking in respect to certain organisational skills, makes a phone call to ensure that they haven't forgotten about our cat party on the Sunday afternoon.

They haven't.

Of course they haven't.

It's written down right in front of me.

We arrive on Sunday, Bess, myself and the kid, and strangely the place is already full of people.

'We're here for a cat party,' Bess explains. 'It's already booked, and I paid months ago.'

'What's a cat party?' wonders Spotty, who seems to be the one in charge. I remember her from last time, helping direct visitors towards the nachos and the popcorn. She calls the boss.

'They didn't know we were coming?' I ask.

Bess pulls a face.

'You paid, didn't you?'

She tells me how much she paid, and the figure is such that I'm not going to repeat it in case it makes us seem either crazy or like we have far too much money; but whatever happens, it goes to the care of the cats, so that's what matters.

I look around. In addition to nachos and popcorn, they now have candy bars. I get up and head for the coffee machine. Spotty comes over to see what I'm doing.

'I take it this works like the ones you see in hotels?'

She concurs, and points to where the creamer is kept.

'You don't have milk?'

She shakes her head. 'It'll be a dollar-fifty a cup,' she smiles helpfully.

'Okay. Forget it then.' I return to my seat. 'Apparently whatever you paid doesn't stretch to coffee,' I tell Bess.

Spotty hands me a tablet, a disembodied screen like the boy's iPad. I don't much like these things. 'What's this for?'

'We need you to sign a disclaimer before you go in to see the cats.'

'A disclaimer?'

'It's just for the sake of insurance.'

I look at the image on the screen, boxes in which I am supposed to enter my name. It has no keyboard.

'What the fuck am I supposed to do with this? Do I just think my name at it?'

Spotty taps at the box in which I am expected to enter my details and a keyboard appears at the foot of the screen.

'I'm over fifty,' I can hear myself explain quite loudly to no-one in particular. 'Why would I know or care how these things are supposed to work? Seriously? I like to keep mainly just stuff which matters in my brain, and nothing of value has ever occurred within the vicinity of or by agency of an iPad.'

After five pages and the same count of minutes, I find I am required to suffix my petition with my signature, somehow written on the screen using my finger as a pen.

'Oh God - not this again.'

I sign. As usual the digital snail trail bears no resemblance to my signature.

The good news is that the woman who runs the cat café  has turned up. She explains what a cat party is to Spotty, her employee, then checks emails and text messages and eventually confirms that we have one booked. She suggests that it would have been helpful if we had phoned to check beforehand, but never mind.

By now the rest of our guests have turned up, Andrea, Bess's mother, aunt, brother, and grandmother, people from her workplace - Alex, Tristan and Alejandra.

We go in to see the cats. Some of those we remember from before have been adopted, but Max is still in charge. The chairs are mostly occupied by grumpy teenage girls playing with their phones. I suppose they too have paid to be here.

We hang around for our two allotted hours, as though the timetable means anything, and our hostess provides a tray of lunchables around ten minutes before we leave. Lunchables are packages of crackers which come with salami and squares of cheese cut to size. They're what your kid would take to school.

You are spoiling us, Mr. Ambassador!

We go home, happy to have spent time with unfamiliar cats, but glad to get back to our own. We find ourselves oddly glad that it's over.

After Five Decades of Christmas...

The earliest Christmas I can remember would have been on the farm in rural Warwickshire, the house heated by just one open fireplace. I came down the stairs, into the front room, and my parents were both sat on the couch awaiting my arrival with a little stack of presents.

'This is Huckleberry,' said my mother by way of introduction to a triangular dog. He was covered in orange felt, with eyes, nose, and freckles picked out in black and white patches of material. He had long flappy ears hung from the apex of his peculiar triangular body and a tail sewn on at the back. I thought he was wonderful. I recall him as being about three or four feet in height, most likely because I was small at the time. He probably wasn't that big, and I may have been as young as four. It's strange to realise I can recall something which probably happened in the sixties, and a time when my parents were still in their twenties.

I understood Christmas as the day of getting free stuff, possibly because, birthdays aside, we didn't get free stuff at other times of year. Childhood as a couple of decades spent happily beneath an avalanche of consumer goods seems to be a more recent development. Of course, I also understood the true meaning of Christmas as it's sometimes known, because I'd been raised to understand that not being an arsehole was a year-round deal, not just an act to be trotted out when you wanted something. I never bought into Father Christmas or the currency of any lists he supposedly kept. I appreciated the ceremony and the build up, everyone generally being a bit less miserable than usual and Slade on the radio. At school we sang carols - none of your happy clappy rubbish, and certainly no having yourself a merry little Christmas or any of that pish - and we made Christmas trees, Santas or snowmen from cones of coloured paper and tinsel like they'd done on Blue Peter, and all in preface to a wonderful day of good food, rampant acquisition, and usually something which you wouldn't ordinarily get to see on the telly. It was a simple, uncomplicated pleasure and served as an axis around which the rest of the year revolved.

The next decade was much the same, only with central heating in a different house and Micronaut toys giving way to albums by David Bowie or the Ramones; then an acoustic guitar and books about art, the great painters of the twentieth century.

The two decades after that saw a steady decline in my enthusiasm for the day of getting free stuff. This was because I had a job. I was a postman. People in England complain that Christmas starts too early, usually about half way through September, which is when its approach is first heralded in the larger department stores. For those delivering mail, it begins earlier, usually around June, that being when we'd be inundated with the first mail order catalogues directed at people spreading their Christmas budget across the second half of the year. The junk mail was horrendous in both its quantity and its banality, as customarily printed in garish colour on the outside of each A4 envelope and targetted at those with the least money to spend. Trudging about in the wind and rain with those same shitty envelopes, day after day, week after week, became really depressing. The most hateful were sent by a company imaginatively named Studio as though to invoke things of great artistic beauty which might come your way if you just kept up the payments. Each year, Studio decorated its envelopes with a different cast of characters designed to coerce you into buying their cheap tat, and worst of all were the Santa Babes, basically Care Bears in Christmassy hats, frolicking and trowelling on the corporate saccharine with the sort of abandon that makes Frozen look like cinéma vérité. The Santa Babes made me feel bad for everyone involved. There was something faintly disgusting about older and probably not that bright people screwed out of their meagre savings by directed application of cartoons from a nursery wall. It reminded me of the old biologists reduced to animals in tiny cages with just a bit of straw, renamed Big Ears and Tigger and fed on slops in Troy Kennedy Martin's harrowing television adaptation of The Old Men at the Zoo.

The Christmas advertising really kicked in at the close of August, and the volume of mail began to build around November, becoming a back-breaking deluge by the end of the month. Overtime would be dished out whether we wanted it or not, and an eight hour day of hard physical labour would stretch to eleven or twelve, leaving for work at five in the morning, getting home hours after sunset, six days a week, sometimes seven for that final week; and working on Christmas Eve, finishing around one or two then spending the rest of the day crammed onto buses and trains slowly crawling across London, making my way to Coventry, to the house of one parent or another when I'd much rather have been home in bed and sleeping through the whole fucking thing.

It was hard to keep up the Christmas spirit after all those Santa Babes, all those weeks of ending each day feeling as though I'd been run over by a truck; and Christmas with the parents felt stranger and stranger as I turned thirty, then forty. Nevertheless, it was nice to see my parents, albeit seperately, and it was nice to just not be at work, and to have someone else serve up a roast dinner; and those are the aspects of Christmas I like.

Now fifty-two, married, and no longer breaking my back for a living, there are still aspects of the whole deal which seem uneccessary and tiresome. We'll spend three hours watching the boy open presents he probably isn't actually that excited to receive, novelties and nick-nacks and crap mostly representing a faintly dippy adult's idea of what a fourteen-year old boy might want, when mostly he just wants non-physical things he can play on one of his games systems; and some of the novelties and nick-nacks will be more the sort of thing you'd give him if he were still about four, but we all smile and no-one says anything because we're just happy to have dispensed with the letter from Santa and the fake bootprints across the carpet using flour to simulate snow. He was getting a bit old for it at least seven years prior to the custom's discontinuation.

Then there'll be the novelty corn holders my wife recieves each year as part of a running joke she no longer entirely gets or remembers, and all that stuff for which we'll say oh you shouldn't have, because we quite literally wish that you hadn't - a set of novelty pint glasses featuring scenes from A Christmas Story and other items which lack any context beyond that of gifthood, all destined for some corner of the garage so we don't have to think about them or feel bad for the rest of our curmudgeonly, ungrateful lives.

We've all agreed to participate in the gift exchange through the agency of Elfster, a website which takes our names, shakes them up, then assigns each of us the person upon whom we will each spend one hundred dollars, selecting presents from their online list. It's not a bad idea, all things considered, although I can't help feel it sucks the spontaneity out of the occasion, reducing it to just acquisition, the model to which I subscribed when I was four and didn't know better.

Christmas is mostly greed and flashing lights, and in Texas it doesn't even come with a guarantee of the parts I recognise. Thanksgiving steals the emphasis from anything I'd identify as Christmas dinner, and without equivalent gastronomic pleasure, it being a plate of mostly soft brown food - turkey served with mashed potato for God's sake - which screams nursing home, at least to me; and then we get to see what Elfster brought us on a day which usually isn't Christmas, because it isn't convenient.

Regardless of all of this, I'll open a few presents on Christmas morning and watch my wife open whatever I've given her. I'll eat some of the pork pie I had to make myself because you can't get it in Texas unless you want to pay $70 for refrigerated postage. The Christmas morning pork pie is either an English tradition, or just something my dad thought up, but I like to keep it going and I make a pretty decent pork pie. Then we'll maybe go for a walk or a drive, and in the evening I'll cook a roast dinner with Christmas pudding and brandy butter to follow - more stuff I had to order online because you can't get it over here.

After fifty-one reiterations of the allegedly happiest day of the year, these basic things are all that I require, and none of the rest matters too much.

The Gift

'I need to buy rhinestones,' my wife told me. 'I'm going to glue them to the pumpkin.' It was the most profoundly Texan thing I'd ever heard her say. She was decorating a pumpkin for Halloween. She'd painted it black with a grinning muertito skull on one side, embellished with floral patterns; and now she was going to cover it in rhinestones.

She bought a large bag from Michaels, our local arts and crafts superstore. It was a big pumpkin but she still ended up with some rhinestones left over, so she glued those to the novelty wooden plaque which Mary had given us.

Mary is my dad's partner. She would have been his third wife but he didn't want to remarry after the second one passed away. He didn't seem to think it would be appropriate. Mary means well.

In 2009, I packed in my Royal Mail job in London and moved back to Coventry. The plan was that I would stay at my mother's house, generate some money by selling off my accumulated crap on eBay, and apply for the fiancé visa which would allow me to move to America and marry Bess.

Mary was initially sceptical. 'Never mind, lovey,' she told me, as though it had already all gone tits up. 'You can always move back here if it doesn't work out in America, and I think you'll find Coventry has a lot to offer.'

Nevertheless, I stayed at my mother's house, generated some money by selling off my accumulated crap on eBay, applied for and was granted a fiancé visa, following which I moved to America and married Bess.

Mary was very happy for me, once it seemed as though it had worked out after all, despite everything. She seemed to like the sound of Bess, whom I had described as having blue eyes, reddish hair, and a generous build, because I don't believe in the ideal female figure, and if I did it wouldn't be a lettuce-scoffing stick insect.

'They're very jolly, aren't they?' Mary observed thoughtfully.

'Yes,' I said, scarcely able to believe my ears, what with it being the twenty-first century. I suppose if she had been black, Bess would have been praised for her natural sense of rhythm.

'Here,' Mary said. 'I bought this for you.'

She'd been shopping at Morrisons and had apparently called in at some sort of retailer of nick-nacks on the way home. She gave me a heart-shaped piece of wood painted white and embellished with the words Love laughter & happily ever after. I wasn't sure if it was missing a comma and couldn't tell whether the words represented a list or an instruction, although both readings probably amounted to the same thing. There was a piece of string at the back by which I would be able to hang it in my home in America, now that it had all worked out, despite everything.

'Thanks,' I said.

Mary went back into the kitchen and my dad leaned across to stage whisper, 'Listen - if that doesn't make it into your luggage when you fly back, I understand.' He glanced towards the kitchen. 'You know she means well.'

'Yes,' I said, relieved to discover that my father and I were on the same page of this particular book.

A few years earlier one of Bess's friends gave us a thematically similar piece of wood for Christmas. It resembled a wooden baton, about a foot in length, painted black with always kiss me goodnight printed along its length. I suppose the point is that you leave it on top of something as a reminder. If left on top of something near a doorway or entrance it could perhaps also be used to strike an intruder. I don't know why such a thing would need to exist. Were our marriage headed down the toilet, advice printed on a piece of timber wouldn't make much difference one way or the other; and because our marriage is going pretty darn well, despite everything, we don't really require physical restatement of the fact.

Love laughter & happily ever after was hung from the dimmer switch in the front room because I didn't know what else to do with it. I would have felt bad excluding it from my luggage because, as my dad pointed out, it was meant well; and I would have felt awkward just chucking it to the back of some cupboard for the same reason.

'Gross,' my wife commented, trying not to laugh.

'I know,' I said, and we left it there because it was sort of funny, and it saved us having to think ill of those who give freely despite having no taste, because that would in turn lead us to think ill of ourselves, ungrateful pair of snarky cunts that we are.

The dimmer switch in the front room connects to an annoying chandelier type affair of five lights, a massive lump of swinging metal with which I frequently brain myself when doing anything on that side of the room. I don't even know why we have a dimmer switch. Pissing about with the voltage seems to dramatically shorten the life of the bulbs, and at one point we seemed to be replacing one of them every couple of weeks. Furthermore, it's not like there's ever anything to be gained from having the lights low. We don't indulge in romantic dinners because we're not fucking teenagers and we usually watch Wheel of Fortune whilst eating from folding tray-tables at the other end of the living room; and for all its fine qualities, Wheel of Fortune is seldom arousing.

Then a month ago, the dimmer switch began to emit a worrying electrical fizzing sound, so we stopped using it. Bess looked at the cost of getting an electrician out.

'Fuck it,' I suggested. 'Let's do it ourselves. How hard can it be?'

We watched a couple of YouTube videos, bought a multimeter and a new light switch - the regular on/off kind, not a dimmer - and I made the repair. It took about ten minutes and the replacement switch cost something like sixty cents.

Love laughter & happily ever after lost its home and went to live in the garage, because otherwise it would have fallen to the floor whenever we turned off the lights in the front room. Then Bess rescued it and hung it somewhere else because she said it seemed right to do so seeing as how she'd speckled it with leftover rhinestones and all. We no longer have to spend so much money on light bulbs, and I've learned how to use a multimeter. I am now able to stick the prongs into electrical sockets so as to check the voltage with casual abandon.

That's your happy ending right there.