Arse Camera Revisited

It's that time of year again, the time when a member of the medical profession is paid to shove a camera up my bum. I was on a five-year schedule until the aforementioned medical person found a polyp which he described as almost cancer. He took it out, and apparently in the nick of time, then proposed I switch to a yearly colonoscopy schedule, so here we are.

I've been dreading it - not the insertion of a Kodak Instamatic on a spring, nor even what horrors it might reveal because they're not yet sufficiently real as to induce concern. I'm dreading the preparatory day of fasting and shitting myself, and I'm dreading it because Suprep®, the medication by which I am to cleanse my bowels in readiness, is the worst thing I've ever had in my mouth. The prescription comprises two six fluid ounce bottles of the stuff and costs eighty fucking five fucking dollars even with medical insurance chipping in. You dilute the contents of each bottle with a further ten fluid ounces of water to make a pint of the stuff, then down it in one, or at least as quickly as possible. It's something involving magnesium but the manufacturers have attempted to render it more palatable by flavouring it to resemble Dr. Pepper, a drink which tastes like cheap perfume and reflects nothing found in the natural world, hence its being named after a scientist. I've never liked Dr. Pepper and now, thanks to Suprep®, the smell alone makes me gag; and having paid eighty fucking five fucking dollars for this vile shit, then spent an entire day squirting rusty water into the lavatory bowl, I'm expected to complete this course of treatment by making up a second pint of the stuff with the other bottle.

This time, once I was through to the doctor's office and had made an appointment, I begged for some alternative to Suprep®, and begged at such length that the technician who answered the phone actually seemed to find it a bit weird.

'Okay,' he said. 'You have a couple of other options. There's a similar drink with a different flavour, or a course of tablets. I'll put you down for both, then we'll see which one gets sent to your pharmacy. It all depends on what the medical insurance will pay for.'

Next day, I dropped in at my pharmacy.

'Here you go,' said the young man handing me a paper bag. 'That'll be eighty-five dollars.'

'Eighty fucking five fucking dollars!' I screeched like a figure in an H.M. Bateman cartoon, unable to contain my horror whilst knowing it was hardly the fault of the guy behind the counter. I called my wife to make sure I had the funds, then popped my debit card into the slot. 'You know,' I told the pharmacist, 'I wouldn't mind but I'm sure I could get pretty much the same result eating an out of date curry for about a tenth of the price.'

He seemed sympathetic, amused even.

I got the bag home and discovered it to be something called Clenpiq® which seemed suspiciously similar to Suprep®, thematically speaking, and the promise of it being cranberry flavour wasn't massively reassuring.

'Next time, we'll get you the tablets,' my wife said from the other room. 'I don't care what it costs.'

Clenpiq® wasn't great, but the not-quite six fluid ounce bottles could be downed in one without my being required to turn each into a pint, and the taste wasn't quite so appalling, and was significantly easier to wash away with black coffee and ginger ale.

Monday comes and I remember that the technician to whom I spoke asked that I call back once I've picked up my prescription to let the surgery know which I've been sent. This is so I can sign consent forms or something of the sort, which sounds ominously like it may lead to a patient portal, one of those ingenious online solutions to having an actual human being do the job, and for which I will be expected to create my forty-millionth new password this year.

I call and it's a recorded message.

All of our representatives are busy right now…

I am on hold and in a queue. Weirdly, the queue comprises zero calls awaiting the attention of one of their many representative - according to the automated voice. I'm not sure if this means that I'm first in line, or that there are literally no calls awaiting the attention of a representative because I don't exist. Minutes of low resolution corporate jazz pass before the message repeats. Now there are three people in the queue, then a few more minutes and we're back to zero. It's difficult to work out what's going on, and I give up after thirty minutes.

Next morning I call at 9AM determined to beat the rush.

The voice tells me, 'our office hours are 9AM to—'

'It's nine right now,' I protest.

'No it isn't. It's 8.57AM.'

'Are you seriously telling me to call back in three minutes time?'

'There's no-one here,' she says. 'Not even me,' she could have added without significantly elevating the surrealism of the scenario.

Three minutes later, I call back. The phone is answered by a person with an impenetrable accent, which feels sort of deliberate. I try to tell him that I am simply attempting to pass on a message, a message of just one single brand name comprising seven letters; but he insists I call back later for reasons which aren't entirely clear.

Later, I spend another thirty minutes listening to low resolution corporate jazz whilst pondering over whether or not I really exist before I get through to a human being who is able to take my call.

Next day I fill in the online consent forms.

The day after, I receive umpteen text messages and two phone calls reminding me of my appointment. One of them is a courtesy call regarding insurance details which are wasted on me because I don't understand any of it, and the other is a technician asking whether I received Clenpiq® or whether they sent me the tablet form. I tell him the former, and that I've already spent an hour on hold trying to relay this information to his office, apparently without success. I don't suppose they received the multiple text messages I sent suggesting that they employ someone to answer the fucking phone either.

Diarrhoea day arrives and is relatively painless, just boring because I can't eat anything; then the day of my colonoscopy - early morning which makes a nice change from last time.

I take a book with me. It's actually one of my own books which I'm in the middle of proofreading prior to vain attempts to fool strangers into buying the thing. This time last year I spent a couple of hours hooked up to an IV drip waiting for the doctor, so I figured I should make use of the time. The technicians are amused that I'm reading my own book. One of them asks what a book is in jocular fashion. They seem like a decent bunch of people.

'Is this morphine?' I ask as the general anaesthetic is added to my drip. Morphine is the one I've heard of, even though I'm not actually sure it can be used as an anaesthetic. It turns out to be Propofol, which I've never heard of. I feel suddenly warm and dark, as though I'm within a cave looking out.

'I think it's working,' I say.

I wake. It's been over for ten minutes. About half an hour has passed and my slumber has been deep and powerful. They removed one tiny polyp, nothing to worry about and I'm probably good to leave it for another five years, by which time I'll be in my sixties. I could have lived without a full hour of low resolution corporate jazz, but otherwise I came through and it feels great.

Our Friend, the Couch Panther

 

I don't know if it's ever either fair or meaningful to say you have a favourite cat in cases such as our own, where my wife and myself have lost track but suspect the feline head count is somewhere north of fourteen; but Bean was my favourite cat, at least for a while. He was one of four kittens we rescued from a local crazy person back around June, 2019. Mark, who is generally a lovely guy despite his brain occasionally sending him down some very strange avenues, feeds the feral cats which turn up in his garden and doesn't get them fixed; so kittens come into being in large quantities and we rescue them on the grounds that, as Mark will himself admit during his more lucid moments, his cat husbandry is cranky and intermittent. We had noticed a fresh bunch of kittens springing around his yard a couple of times, mumbled the usual concerns to each other, and then Bess came home with all four of them cradled under one arm like hastily gathered fruit.

Junior gave them names almost immediately, but nothing too headachey for a change, nothing from a console game or Disney. Sylvester was the little black and white tuxedo cat whom we initially thought was a boy; Muffin was the traditional female tabby; Bear, so named because the kid thought she looked like a tiny bear, was all black and female; and Bean was the runt of the litter, an all black male about half the size of the other three - named for his being of leguminous volume in comparison to the rest. Bess was worried he wouldn't make it due to being so improbably small, but I'd seen him in action at dinner time and had a feeling he would be fine. At first I plopped a single tin of cat food in a foil tray and let them all go at it. Bean's technique was to dive right in, roll around in the food pushing the others away, then combine the subsequent clean up with dinner, eating until he became spherical, resembling a small black tennis ball with legs.

They grew and we found homes for Sylvester and Bear, but kept Muffin and Bean because we couldn't stand the thought of parting with them, and two more wasn't going to make a whole lot of difference. Both of them bonded to me to an unusual degree, possibly due to my being the human who was usually around as Bess didn't switch to working from home until 2020.

Bean climbed onto me each evening as I slouched back in the couch, digesting my dinner. He'd make himself home on my chest, purring away and occasionally licking my nose. He followed me everywhere and was my little buddy. Strangest of all, or so it seemed at the time, was his smell. Bess has told me about the smell of a new baby, how it's positively intoxicating and pushes all the motherhood buttons, or was in her case when she had Junior; and finally I felt I understood because Bean smelled amazing - a scent to his soft, silky black fur which remains difficult to describe but is maybe something in the vicinity of fresh cut hay.

I began to notice something which hadn't quite occurred to me before, or at least to piece together parts of a pattern I was only just beginning to recognise as such: there really is something special about black cats. Of course, they historically have a reputation associated with the occult and are typecast as the familiars of witches and wizards, and I began to wonder if there might be a reason for this, at least beyond the hysteria and general misogyny.

Bean had certainly cast a spell on me by some definition - not least by the release of oxytocin as I stroked his improbably silky fur to induce purring, and those eyes looking out from the solid black seemed to know something. He seemed hypnotic somehow.

Bean wasn't even the first.

Our first and currently oldest black cat is Nibbler, whom the boy found as a kitten hiding under a car back in 2012. Since then there has been Jack - who was black and fluffy and therefore amazing - Enoch, Tony, and Jessie - all ferals from our yard who eventually - presumably and hopefully - found other homes, or just moved on; and also Ava, another alumni from Mark's garden who still hangs around but rarely comes inside the house.

Nibbler was the first cat I've seen play like a dog, fetching something thrown for him, bringing it back and dropping it in your lap for another throw. Nibbler also made himself the feline equivalent of a teddy by pulling the stuffing out of the sofa and forming it into a lump which he then slept with in his paws.

Ollie, our latest black cat also fetches things and has that amazing scent to his fur, and has now learned how to open the kitchen door so he can go out into the garden. This is a door held shut by a heavy spring when unlocked, so heavy that one has to physically shoulder it open when carrying a laundry basket. Ollie - who is presently about three or four months old and is still small, has learned to not only push the door open, but he's worked out how to get back in again. We still haven't witnessed him doing it, and presume he must hook a paw under the door and pull, which seems like it really should be impossible given his size and the strength of the spring, but it happens nevertheless.

This isn't to suggest that any of our other cats are necessarily idiots, but it really seems that whatever gene is associated with black fur brings other features to the party - which I state as a general observation rather than an actual scientific thesis. Perhaps we are witness to the birth of a genuine feline master race.

We lost Bean around July 2020, the same time as two other cats - Squeak and Holly went missing. We still don't know what happened. We have at least one shitty cat-hating neighbour, but he really doesn't seem like he would have the balls to do anything horrible. Holly definitely had a second home somewhere and was in the habit of staying away for days at a time; and another kitten had just turned up, which always puts everyone's noses out of joint, so it could be an unfortunate coincidence, strange though it may seem, and in the absence of any actual information whatsoever, that's how we've thought of it because the alternative doesn't bear thinking about. Needless to say, eighteen months later I still miss Bean and I think about him every day, but there's probably not much point in beating myself up over what may or may not have become of him.

We still have Muffin and the others, and Ollie is doing very well at carrying the traditions of his people forward.

Three Birthdays

 

Debbie is our neighbour, or at least she's the ex-wife of our neighbour. Our neighbour is a lovely guy, tall and dark with the haunted expression of an amiable ghost. He talks and moves real slow, as we say in Texas, but he never says anything when there's nothing to be said so my wife and I like him a lot. We're not entirely sure how Debbie managed to move back into his house, but assume he never intended it to be any sort of permanent arrangement given that their relationship seems to be only vaguely platonic, bonded by nothing more than previous association.

Debbie is small with raven dark hair suggesting some distant familial relation to Johnny Cash, which I state with authority as my wife's stepmother was the daughter of Johnny's cousin. Many of her family members have that same raven hair and hawk-like appearance, and Debbie is originally from Tennessee, so who knows?

I tend to think of Debbie as rootin' tootin', which shouldn't be taken as an insult so much as an indication of her being a certain type - white, working class and not averse to country music, although she recently revealed a love of techno, which was confusing. She's chatty and chirpy with a disconcerting habit of delivering terrible news with a big smile.

'You two going out somewhere nice?' she chirps. 'You're such a cute couple. It makes me happy just to see the two of you. The doctor told my pappy he has cancer and now he has to have his arms and legs amputated. Y'all have a blessed day now, you hear.'

At other times we'll hear all about her plans. She has a job interview. She's going to have money and she'll be able to afford an apartment and everything's going to be just fine once she's moved out, away from that man; and always the interview falls through, or they take against her for no reason, or she realises she ain't gonna be able to get there if she takes the job, but the good news is she just bought her some boots at that fancy place. They were seventy dollars. Those boots usually cost more than a hun'erd.

The job interviews come along, often two or three a week, and there's always a reason why she can't take the job. We get the impression that she's just telling herself she wants to get some money and move out, but it's not really our business.

It's Debbie's birthday and she says she wants to take us out to dinner to celebrate. Bess pays because she knows Debbie is on welfare and can't really afford it so it would feel awkward. We go to Las Palapas, which is actually pretty great, much better than I remember. Debbie picks at her food because she doesn't eat much, drinks margaritas, and tells us about her life and her family. She's interesting and a lot of fun, and as with her ex-husband, the impression is formed that it would be difficult to dislike her.

Weeks pass and it's our birthday. Bess and I were born on the same day of different years. Debbie again proposes to take us out for dinner, to return the favour; but Bess insists on paying because it doesn't seem fair otherwise, that elusive first paycheck still having failed to appear for some reason. We go to Charlie Brown's because it's a bar which serves good food and we expect Debbie will like it and feel at home, which she does. We feel we owe it to her. Every other week she's at the door with brisket or cookies or carne asada or the best jalapeno poppers I've ever eaten, because she made too much and figured we might like some, that being the neighbourly thing and all. We sort of wish she wouldn't. It's not that the food isn't appreciated, but we're both on diets - nothing absurdly stringent except that neither of us eat during the day, usually fasting until the early evening; and the one surefire way of knowing when a person is on any kind of diet is to take a look at the line of friends and relatives stretching all along the block and around the corner, all waiting their turn to offload an extra cake they made or a tray of deviled eggs for which there was no room in their own fridges.

We drive to Charlie Brown's and Debbie pipes up about illegal immigrants and how sleepy Joe Biden just ain't doing nothing, which isn't a good start. I don't mind people having political beliefs which differ from my own providing they're not simply downloaded verbatim from Fox News. I have friends who voted for the orange billionaire, and for the most part they've had reasons I've understood even if I don't agree with them, so it makes me uncomfortable when someone threatens to unveil contentious opinions or biases.

We eat and we drink, and somehow the evening lasts much longer than either Bess or myself intended. Debbie nurses a margarita for the best part of an hour, both of us watching the glass like it's a steel mill clock on Friday afternoon. She orders another and the evening extends.

'This is fun,' she chirps. 'I'm having a real blast here. We need to do this more often. Are y'alls having fun?'

'Yes,' we tell her each time she asks the question.

'I got you a cake,' she tells us as we drive home.

'You shouldn't have,' we say, both smiling the smile that hurts.

It takes ten minutes to get the candles to stand up straight, then lit, and the cake is huge and sweet, so sweet it makes our teeth itch. We keep smiling.

Once she finally goes home, the rest of the cake is shared with the raccoons in our yard.

We're not doing that ever again, we tell ourselves, and the sense of guilt feels nevertheless kind of good, even liberating.

Lost Masterpieces

The title is ironic, obviously. As tireless archivist of my own work, I've retained a reasonably thorough recall of all my creative dead ends - undertakings which never really came to anything, or which at least stumbled before achieving whatever fruition I had intended for them. Sometimes I simply ran out of steam, but more often than not I recognised the enterprise as bollocks before I'd fully got into the swing of it; or sometimes it was just something I had to get out of my system before moving on. Here, mostly from memory are projects - for want of a less twatty word - which deflated in the manner of a premature souffle before I could get them out of the oven. These are works on which I spent sufficient time and energy as to forge a memory of my labours, as distinct from anything less intensive such as doodles on the back of a phone book whilst enjoying the Post Office dial-a-disc service. The best that can be said of any of them is that they made sense at the time, so there are no lost masterpieces here. If Kevin J. Anderson is reading and feels inclined to finish off any of this shit after I'm dead, he's welcome to give it his best shot.

The Burps (1975, possibly earlier)
This was my first attempt at drawing a strip cartoon series, and I seem to remember churning out hundreds of these, each one a single A4 landscape format page rendered in whatever biro I happened to have to hand. The Burps were spherical aliens with antennae resembling a stove pipe topped with a conical rain cap growing from the tops of their heads, which were also their bodies, much like the Mister Men. Each strip ended with one of them doing a massive burp, possibly emphasised with green felt tip. I don't think there was ever much of a story and I remember my granddad leafing through the stack then commenting, 'there seems to be rather a lot of burping in these.' I think he approved of my productivity but was a bit disappointed by the repetition of the same punchline. To my way of thinking, the repetition was what made it hilarious.

Tiny the World's Biggest Hitler (1976 or thereabouts)
I'm not even sure what I was aiming for here, but it was my own one off magazine, or would have been, created mostly using material snipped from either the Sunday Times colour supplement or back issues of the Topper and inspired most likely by either The Goodies File or Spike Milligan. Of what little I can remember, the oddest detail was my apparently having decided to make my own artisan paper by coating A3 pages cut from a scrapbook with glossy brown parcel tape onto which I glued my vandalised images and text. I wrote the text on regular writing paper, and then cut out each individual line and typeset it with Uhu, so with hindsight it was all a bit Jamie Reid. I'm not sure how many pages I managed, but the only one I remember was Tiny the World's Biggest Hitler, which was Tiny the World's Biggest Dog from the Topper rendered more sinister by the addition of a toothbrush moustache, swastikas, and cruelly slanting eyebrows to make him look angry. I don't know if I ever gave the enterprise a formal title, and I was very much a fan of Tiny the World's Biggest Dog so maybe I couldn't take the guilt.

Robot funnies (late seventies)
I drew eight or nine of these and although I don't recall a specific overall title for the series, I had some vague idea about submitting  them for publication and perhaps even syndication. They were mostly two or three panels drawn on landscape format A4 with plenty crosshatching inspired by Paul Sample, usually some laboured gag involving robots - two robots regarding a petrol pump with concern, one saying I think he's trying to commit suicide in reference to the gun-like nozzle seated against what our boys have apparently mistaken for the pump's forehead. This particular joke, such as it is, was shamelessly recycled from the funnies pages of Doctor Who and Star Trek annuals, as were most of the others. I had some vague idea of producing definitive versions of the gags in question. A couple of them made it onto the walls of the school art room, which was thankfully about as far as it went.

Poo Corner (1983)
I'd been reading Sounds music paper for a couple of years, and particularly enjoying Savage Pencil's Rock 'n' Roll Zoo strip. Alan Moore's The Stars My Degradation - which was also a significant influence - had come to an end so I figured there was an opening. I drew about ten episodes of Poo Corner, each some self-contained tableau taking a wry sideways glance at the lighter side of either the music industry or being a teenager - only one of which I had any experience, resulting in what was more or less a recycling of Rock 'n' Roll Zoo combined with stuff other kids had said at school which seemed hilarious. I sent them in to Sounds explaining that I was ready to start work immediately but the reply must have been lost in the post or something.

 

Twenty Pages (1985)
Once I realised that I would probably never be able to afford to have anything printed, I resigned myself to the photocopy as the principal medium for my visual material; and because the double-sided photocopy was likewise beyond my means, I concluded that single-sided copies loose in a plastic wallet - actually the protective PVC covers which could be bought for 7" singles from WHSmith - seemed reasonably artistic in comparison to single sided sheets stapled down one edge like some shitty school magazine. Because my visual material was, at the time, mostly news items about local murders cut from newspapers and therefore underwhelming, I enlisted contributions from fanzine, tape and weirdy music people of my postal acquaintance - just a page the same size as a 7" single, artwork, text, whatever you like, I told them. Andy of the Apostles wrote out an imaginary interview with a generic punk rocker, which was quite entertaining, and a couple of the collages were quite good, but by the time I had twelve of the proposed Twenty Pages I realised that the thing was a bit of a waste of time on the grounds that I probably wouldn't have bought it had someone else been trying to flog it to me for the price of a stamped addressed envelope.

 

Newspaper strips
There were several attempts, mostly the same format as Peanuts, George & Lynne, Fred Basset and the rest. Having obtained my fine art degree in 1987, I soon came to the realisation that I was more or less unemployable and that strip cartoons seemed to be about the only working string to my bow in terms of making money off anything - a realisation informed by the fact that most newspaper strips were bollocks while everything I drew was hilarious. The first was a series of unrelated comically surreal vignettes abandoned before I could come up with a title (1986); then Mr. Temper (1987), a sharply-dressed curmudgeon who went about beheading anyone he didn't like the look of while politely explaining the essence of their supposed transgressions; and The Rock (1988) which was me thinking, well, if Alan Moore can get paid for Maxwell the Magic Cat then I'm quids in, and which may as well have been the Mister Men but with more sarcasm - a formula which apparently failed to make much of an impression with the editor of the Chatham Standard.

 

Avanti! (1987)
This would have been the third and final weirdy music cassette compilation from my mail order tape label, Do Easy. While the first two had failed to set the world on fire, they had featured some genuinely great music from the likes of We Be Echo, Irsol, the Unkommuniti and others, and had sold fairly well by my standards - somewhere in the region of thirty or forty copies each, often to people I didn't actually know. I'd already been sent new material by We Be Echo, Virrullex, ESP Kinetic, and Man's Hate, and it could have been great but I simply ran out of steam, enthusiasm, and disposable income; which is probably for the best given my edgily deciding to name the thing after the newspaper which first got Mussolini up and running.

 

The Dovers comic book (1987)
This was probably my first attempt at drawing a vaguely coherent comic strip, or at least one which was only 75% crap jokes strung along an improbable narrative. Inspired by an unlikely combination of X-Men comics, Viz, and the work of Robert Crumb, it was a massively fictionalised account of the adventures of my band, the Dovers, featuring Carl Glover and myself, wherein Chris, the  drummer of our previous line up, is possessed by forces from beyond the dawn of time, our manager is former US President Richard Nixon - now living in Lewisham - and I find myself recruited by Professor Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters. I drew three and a bit issues of the thing - amounting to 72 pages - assuming that I would find an affordable means of getting it all printed and that it would be worth the effort. I eventually realised that I wouldn't and it probably wasn't, but it kept me busy for about six months.

 

Berserker (1987)
I had begun to tire of my own crap jokes, as exemplified by the proposed Dovers comic books, and recognised them as a deflection from the fear that any more serious undertaking to which I might apply myself would probably be drivel; so I decided to grasp the thistle and produce a really, really, really grown up real world superhero but not actually a superhero comic strip like all that Alan Moore stuff. The main character is some dude who gets diddled in a flying saucer and subsequently develops amazing psychic powers, influenced by X-Men comics, cranky UFO literature, and the work of Gary Numan. After fourteen or so pages of heavy cross-hatching, wonky figures with stern expressions, and ludicrously portentous dialogue, I realised there was still some room for improvement, possibly not even a room so much as an aircraft hanger.

 

Small World (1988)
Unwilling to piss away all the frowning and clenching I'd squeezed into Berserker, I revised the thing and came up with this when Charlie Adlard asked me if I'd written anything he could draw so that the two of us might make our first attempts at breaking into the comic book industry. Small World was the same thing but marginally better written - albeit not by much - and certainly better drawn, but it still wasn't enough. The slight improvement in quality only served to expose the fact that I didn't actually have a story, and oblique references to Richard S. Shaver weren't much of a substitute. We took the thing to Martin Skidmore of Trident Comics who correctly pointed out that I didn't actually have a story, although he was very polite about it. Charlie Adlard subsequently went on to international megastardom as artist of Image's Walking Dead comic, the rewards of which mean he now lives in his own hollowed out volcano with ICBMs and a fleet of flying Rolls Royces. When asked about the early days of his career, Small World never seems to warrant a mention - which is frankly understandable.

 

Three Empty Chairs (1991)
I'm still a little vexed that this one never came to anything. My friend John Jasper kept an exercise book of short stage plays which he wrote entirely for his own amusement, despite which they were fucking brilliant, slightly harrowing and genuinely hilarious - a combination of Alan Bennett, Samuel Beckett and Derek & Clive pushed to an uncomfortable extreme. One of the greatest was set entirely in the hallway of a council flat and involved two characters having an argument over a packet of custard creams with one side of the argument shouted entirely through the letterbox because the other guy refuses to open the door. I was still to blossom into the world's greatest comic artist in 1991, but had developed a sufficiently capable sense of realism for the adaption of John's Three Empty Chairs into strip format, partially on the grounds that he clearly wasn't going to do anything with his book of plays. I still believe I did a reasonable job, and showed him the first thirteen pages hoping he would be pleased, or at least somehow flattered. This is amazing, he told me to my face, then later told my friend Carl that he was massively pissed off by my having decided to illustrate his work. I had photocopied the entire book of his plays, and later lent the stack to a friend with stage connections who began to murmur about actually getting one of the things performed in front of an audience, but that also made John angry, so bollocks then.

 

Tract 002 (1995)
I'd started a religious cult based around the worship of Ringo Starr. We had about twenty members, all carrying nicely laminated membership cards. Tract 001, the first official communication of thee Church ov RINGO looked decent and seemed to have gone down well with everyone who read it, particularly existing members of the Church of the SubGenius - and I'd had about three-hundred printed. The second issue was coming together with contributions from people besides just myself and the other guy, when the other guy went into the sort of creative overdrive that results from quality control going out the window. The whole idea had been something which made us laugh because it appeared to take itself far too seriously in its obsession with the Beatles' former drummer, and one of Ringo's songs was playing in an episode of Pobol Y Cwm last month and here are seven VHS tapes of all the episodes broadcast since July tee hee hee seemed to be missing at least some of the point, and this was the general spirit of the barrage of Ringo crap the other guy took to sending me on a nearly weekly basis - jiffy bags bulging with ephemera found in charity shops and page after page of stuff printed off the internet. The final straw was the print out of a full length Robert E. Howard novel wherein our man had used his find and replace function to substitute every mention of Conan the Barbarian with Ringo. It really sucked all of the fun out of the enterprise, which had started off as something fairly light and silly. So I gave up and turned my back on the thing because I could no longer stand to think about it. Annoyingly, one of the other contributions for the second issue that never happened had been a highly entertaining article by Nigel of Nocturnal Emissions about depictions of Ringo found in the early neolithic carvings of Britain - complete with illustrations - so I felt quite bad about that. There always has to be one who spoils it for everyone else.

 

 

Grudge Bunny (1996)
Partially as a result of the genius who magically transformed a Robert E. Howard novel about Conan the Barbarian into one about the guy who played drums on all those Beatles albums, 1996 was probably the most embittered year of my life. The aforementioned genius who bombarded me with jiffy bags bulging with ephemera was simultaneously in correspondence with a million other fanzine or otherwise countercultural types and therefore ended up with a ton of DIY tapes and photocopied missives which he didn't want, or couldn't be bothered to keep, and he seemingly sent most of them my way just in case there was anything of interest. Occasionally there was something good, but most of it was pure shite which left me profoundly depressed about the state of the DIY counterculture; and whilst I nevertheless appreciated the freebies, it sometimes became a real chore just wading through it all. One of the good things, however, was Outlaw Trainspotter, an A5 zine about trainspotting. Regardless of the subject, it remains one of the funniest, and most gleefully acerbic fanzines I've ever read. I couldn't even tell whether it was taking the piss or not, although I heard a rumour that it was actually the work of the late Simon Morris of the Ceramic Hobs, so probably the former. Anyway, Outlaw Trainspotter combined with the weapons grade sarcasm of David Stubbs' wonderful Mr. Agreeable column in Melody Maker brought me to the realisation that it might be fun to do a fanzine dedicated to how much I hated almost everything else that was happening in 1996. I slapped Grudge Bunny together as quickly as possible so as to preserve the negative energy with paper, scissors, glue, typewriter, scrawled ink, and swearing, taking delight in ripping apart substandard fanzines, indie comics, tapes, and bands who needn't have bothered, and then ran out of steam after eight pages. It can be a lot of fun spitting righteous truths about creative endeavours which actually aren't much good, but becomes quickly exhausting, then even a bit depressing after a while.

 

Uuuuugh! (2002)
I had been obssessed with Doctor Who when I was a kid, then drifted away by the time I discovered fags, booze, and sexual intercourse. I rediscovered it in the nineties when my friend Andrew gave me a VHS copy of Terror of the Autons for my birthday. Being well disposed towards culty things, I discovered that the series had continued in novel form by the agency of Virgin publishing and thus was my enthusiasm reignited. I was surprised to learn that the show still had a substantial following of like-minded shut-ins despite having been off the air for nearly a decade, and so I came into contact with fandom. Because the worst aspect of anything is usually its stupid fucking fans, I began to feel like someone really needed to take the piss out of the whole thing and so Uuuuugh! was born, named after the noise made by a slow moving monster as portrayed by a guy in a rubber suit. Uuuuugh! was put together on a fancy computer, the very same one by which Ed Pinsent produced the early issues of Sound Projector. He'd upgraded and sold me his old one, so Uuuuugh! also served as a means of putting the machine through its paces. I churned out twenty-four pages of sarcastic material amounting to a conflation of Charlie Brooker and Viz comic, then realised that the only people who would get the jokes would most likely be the same people who actually wouldn't find them even remotely funny; so that was thankfully the end of that.

 

The Town on the Border

It's Saturday and we've found ourselves at a loose end, so we drive to Laredo on a whim and because we haven't been there in a while. Laredo is on the northern bank of the Rio Grande, and Nuevo Laredo - which is actually in Mexico - is on the other side. We leave before noon, drive for an hour but not quite two and park in the usual parking lot on the bank of the river. We can see a Mexican family on the other side, spilling from their car for a picnic and a couple of the kids with fishing rods. The hysteria attendant to the thought of people on the other side of the border and what they might do seems even more strange and stupid when you can actually see them with your own eyes. The river isn't even so wide as the Thames as it passes through London and the water is warmer which probably explains a couple of border patrol vehicles parked nearby - just in case.

We stroll a few hundred yards along to the bridge where both vehicles and pedestrians cross to and from Mexico, passing through an enormous Border Control center on the opposite bank. There's a guy fishing beneath the bridge, stood in front of a squall of graffiti which is too far away to be legible. I take a photograph on my digital camera and zoom in to read Tepito existe porque resisto, which amounts to Tepito exists because it resists, or similar, although I have no idea what it means. Tepito is one of the reputedly more fearsome neighbourhoods of Mexico City, which is nevertheless seven hundred miles to the south. Maybe there's also a Tepito in Nuevo Laredo, or maybe the name has accumulated some other meaning. In any case, the slogan is surrounded by graffiti footnotes suggesting that the artist really, really likes someone called Rachel, so we probably have a mixed message even before we get to the language barrier.

Laredo itself seems unusually empty given that it's Saturday afternoon. The stores are open but there's hardly anyone around, and I wonder if the traditional Mexican siesta has finally crossed the border. It really does feel like I'm back in Mexico again. The stores are distinctly Mexican - notably all the perfume outlets and a branch of Liverpool, the department store - although I realise they may simply be trading on the name rather than actually related. We pass a branch of Church's, the fried chicken franchise, and because this is Laredo the usual corporate hoardings and illuminated menus are hand painted on a piece of hardboard. The town even smells like Mexico City, which is uncanny - which I qualify by stating that Mexico City smells simply distinctive rather than actively unpleasant, unless it's very early morning for some reason.

Passing a clothing store, I see that the floor is divided into sections for women, ladies, and accessories - marker pen on squares of cardboard. The distinction, so my wife informs me, is that clothes for ladies tend to be regular sizes, whereas those for women apparently presume that the customer could stand to lose a few pounds - which seems somewhat judgey.

We enter what resembles a thrift store because I decide I need to buy a belt. I've been trying to lose weight and have succeeded in so much as that my trousers now fall down with some frequency due to my having reached the final hole on my normal belt. Their belts are a dollar each, which seems just a little too cheap to be trusted. There's a stack of comic books at one side of the store, which is organised according to some free-range logic, and uppermost is a reprint of a specific issue of the Incredible Hulk that I've been after for two years. I haven't bought a copy because the cheapest I can find presently costs several hundred dollars, even in terrible condition, and online searches have yielded no reference to any cheaper reprint leaving me to assume that there was no such thing. Yet here it is for something like fifty cents; except, having been looking for the thing since about 2018 or thereabouts, just this week I paid twenty bucks for a paperback collection including this specific issue - amongst others which I had no particular interest in reading - and which arrived in the mail just yesterday morning.

We keep walking and begin to notice how many stores have been boarded up - pretty much all of them. The heart of Laredo has become a ghost town with just two or three functioning streets at the center. The rest has been abandoned, and even the occasional spray of broken glass seems to have been left untouched as it would be were it a crime scene, which somehow it isn't. There's no telling whether this is a direct result of the pandemic, or whether old Laredo was always on the economic edge. The outlet malls which line the highway on the way in and out of town seem to be doing business as usual, so it's anyone's guess.

We return to the car and head home, hoping the place will have been restored to life next time we visit.

City resources have apparently been stretched by an influx of refugees from Haiti, and there's the recent discovery of a huge mass grave just across the river, but I have no idea whether either of these are really a factor in whatever has happened to Laredo. It's a great shame because it's a lovely town, one where it's still possible to walk down a street without feeling like there's a massive invisible hand squeezing every last droplet of money out of you, without feeling like you're just part of a financial equation; or that's how it was. I fear for whatever the future may hold.

Fare Thee Well, Pentagon Center

My first true mall was the Stoneborough Center in Maidstone, Kent, prior to which I knew the mall only as a place where American teenagers would hang out in movies starring Michael J. Fox. I grew up in the era of the shopping precinct. By the time I went to art college, the era of the mall had arrived. The Stoneborough center had a great record shop called Challenger & Hicks from which I purchased debut albums by the Dentists and the Apostles, amongst others; and Hayley worked at Miss Selfridge on the lower floor. I had entered Hayley one evening, a transaction facilitated by booze and Hayley's desire to annoy Pete, her boyfriend, but it ended badly. This left me mooning around outside Miss Selfridge trying to make it seem as though I just happened to be passing, until she emerged, took me to McDonalds, and explained the general concept of dumpsville - which was probably fair enough with hindsight.

That's all I can remember of the Stoneborough Center.

My second mall was the Pentagon Center in Chatham, Kent. I moved to Chatham in September, 1987 and lived there for the next two years. The Pentagon Center was bigger and Chatham had better pubs and I knew more people. My memories of the Pentagon Center are as follows:

• Andy Bibby shoplifting my Christmas present from WHSmith, the Monkees greatest hits on cassette. He presented me with this gift directly outside the Pentagon Center on the pedestrian walkway. I wasn't actually expecting a Christmas present from him because I didn't like him very much, and was never particularly struck on the Monkees either for that matter.
• Buying cheap records from a store on the ground floor. The shop seemed to be one big bargain bin of ex-chart releases and things which hadn't sold in the first place. Being on the dole and hence skint at the time, I picked up quite a lot there and even got into the habit of buying 7" singles seeing as they were something like twenty-five pence each. I'd only really bothered with albums and 12" singles up until that point for slightly cranky, pedantic reasons; but at twenty-five pence a throw, I felt adventurous and took chances on things I'd never heard if they seemed interesting. Inevitably I picked up a few duds, but also some pretty good stuff - Eric B & Rakim, early techno singles by Todd Terry and the like.
• Buying normally priced records from K2, the other record store, which I think was on the second floor. They had a couple of things on the Illuminated label, which was nice, and the first Lack of Knowledge album. I also encountered my first Metallica album in their racks. I hadn't heard of them before, and thirty years later I'm still astonished at what a pitiful name they chose - Metallica because they play metal, and so it presumably suggests things which pertain to the same. It struck me as being like a punk band calling themselves the Gobbing Pogoers or Punkerrific!
• Running into the French chef from the Blue Lagoon just outside one afternoon and him getting very excited and waving a newspaper at me, folded to the classified section at the back. The prison service was recruiting. He knew I was on the dole and somehow thought I'd make a great prison warden. He might have been Spanish, come to think of it.
• The Blue Grotto, which was a depressing pub on the lower floor as you made your way out to where the National Express coaches were parked, and tellingly possibly the nearest pub to the dole office as the crow flies - although it might have been Churchill's, I suppose. It felt like one of those modern pubs on a fifties estate, all stains, man-made fibre and broken dreams. I'm not sure I ever went in there, or if I did, I didn't stay very long. Its claim to fame seems to have been as venue for the Dentists' first gig.
• Ludicrously animatronic festive displays around Christmas near the escalators, although this is one of those memories where I can no longer quite remember if it was from life or something on TV.
• Pilgrimage to the associated coach station every other Friday afternoon - either every two weeks or possibly monthly - for transport up to London so as to stock up on X-Men comics and visit my friend Carl in Rotherhithe. This coach journey is probably what imprinted me with the idea of living in Lewisham, which I eventually did. The most memorable part of the route was through Lewisham, you see.

That's more or less the sum of my memories of the Pentagon Centre, although there's also the possibility that I may have bought a Talking Heads album from WHSmith, probably Speaking in Tongues. They're not great memories, and you'd be hard pressed to get a three hour feature film out of them, but they're my memories.

Recently I've learned that the Pentagon Center is to be redeveloped. Online articles seem keen to stress that it's a redevelopment rather than demolition, but the first image that comes up shows a JCB, rubble, and hoarding promising 1 & 2 bedroom apartments from ₤185,000. I'm not sure I've set foot in the place this century, never mind recently, and I don't doubt the truth of online articles bemoaning it having turned into a piss-stained urban purgatory of pound shops and loan sharks; but then it was always kind of crappy, even in my day, and it felt like our crappy. I don't have any real investment in the place, not after all this time, and arguably even less right to object to the coffee crash pads and mindfulness hubs which I'm sure will soon be setting up shop in whatever's left once they've housed all those web developers from Leicester who've heard something or other about at least one of the local schools; but I thought I should at least acknowledge the passing of whatever it is that's passing.

Some things were better when they were crap.

Warehouse

San Antonio has a problem with homeless people. I don't know how many homeless people we have relative to other cities, but we have them and they're fairly visible. There was some law passed a couple of years ago whereby one could be fined or otherwise made subject to legal action should you be seen aiding a homeless, even just giving one a sandwich or a can of pop. I don't know if this law is still in place because I don't actively seek out information which might facilitate my expressing indignation on social media, but I haven't heard about it having been dropped; and I have heard about House Bill 1925 which criminalises homeless encampments and which was winging its way to the desk of Russ Abbott, our state governor, just a few months ago. Given Russ Abbott's previous Trumpesque form whereby the value of a decision is quantified by how much it will annoy liberals, I'm sure he'll think it's a wonderful idea.

The notion of discouraging homeless persons by fining those who provide food seemed calculated to diminish vagrancy around the more picturesque parts of the city centre where tourists with big wallets might happen to pass by. I seem to recall that, in official terms, the law was intended to concentrate all those bums and park tramps in the general vicinity of recognised homeless shelters and soup kitchens - mostly at some distance from the Alamo by happy coincidence. I have become unfortunately accustomed to persons who think in this way, persons such as the genius who posted on Next Door to announce that he would be standing for election and would appreciate our support. He'd noticed a lot of homelesses along Austin Highway and was going to solve the problem by taxing them. I guess if those lazy homelesses suddenly found a chunk of their wages being siphoned off by the city treasury, they might buck up their ideas and start living in houses. I don't really see the logic in this proposal but then I've never read Ayn Rand.

In related news, my stepson occasionally engages in volunteer work for a homeless charity. This is something to do with his school which expects so many hours of volunteer work from him each year, and which somehow counts towards his 'O' levels or whatever the hell it is happens at the end. He's volunteered at the local zoo, which I understand mostly involves him standing around and lecturing complete strangers on animal facts and statistics regardless of whether or not they asked. This seems to relate to the sort of thing he wants to do when he leaves school, and is more or less what he does anyway, so that's handy. He also spent some time volunteering at a retirement community, either calling out bingo numbers or providing hand massages with moisturiser, but he wasn't quite so keen on that one for some reason. The work for the homeless charity is usually either parcelling up boxes of food and the like, or else working in one of the kitchens at which the homeless get to eat without anyone being fined.

It probably comes as no surprise that his various volunteer jobs have been somewhat thin on the ground during the pandemic, but things seemed to be starting up again, and so my wife put him down for packing boxes as soon as it became an option. She also put herself down for a shift, and me too. I don't remember exactly why, but it seemed like something to do.

We were given a time and place at which we showed up along with about a hundred others, possibly more, and were all herded into a warehouse of the kind with which I am quite familiar, having worked in many similar places over the years. The biggest difference was not so much that the boxes we'd all be slugging around contained food as that those present actively wanted to be there, presumably having lived lives which had spared them from working a conveyor belt. We were mostly teenagers or suburban housewives with big smiles, clean clothes, and a can do attitude; as distinct from employees of Parcel Force, few of whom had any better options.

The deal was that we'd each pick a place along the conveyor belt. One group of people were given the task of assembling cardboard boxes and setting them on the belt. The rest of us worked in teams, opening up packages of bottled fruit juice, breakfast cereal, tinned food - whatever had been donated or otherwise procured - and filling the boxes. Bess, myself and the boy took up position right at the start of the belt. My job was to collect newly assembled boxes from the people behind me and set them on the belt. Junior opened up packages of apple juice and set each bottle on a trestle table, and Bess transferred a single bottle to each box before shoving it along so that the next people in line could add a carton of breakfast cereal, and so on and so on until the box was full by the time it reached the other end. It was boring and repetitive but it was good exercise - the sort of task which becomes automatic after the first few minutes. There were seven or eight people working behind me, all pulling flat boxes from a pack, pushing them out, taping up the bottom, and stacking them ready.

I did this for about an hour and came to the peculiar realisation that I kind of miss this sort of manual labour. There's something satisfying about its sheer relentless physicality, although it doubtless helped that no-one was going for maximum productivity by overloading the workforce to its absolute limit as they did at Parcel Force - a job which involved more yelling than any I've done before or since.

We had a ten minute break after about an hour, then got back to it for the second half. Junior began to struggle, having apparently been thrown by the arrival of a different brand of apple juice, the bottles of which could not be lifted from the packaging with quite the same fluid motion as before. I told him to take over what I'd been doing on the grounds that I have more experience as a mindlessly labouring cog in a machine so it didn't make much difference to me. The new bottles were indeed a pain in the arse compared to the previous type, but it was otherwise fine, and so we all chugged away for another hour. Metal things cracked and banged and echoed around the vast, cavernous space, and the radio cranked out distorted hits of the seventies and eighties. It was all strangely familiar, but less depressing for being a one off deal.

Neither Bess nor myself recall how many boxes we made up at the end of the two hours, but it seemed like a lot, and it felt as though we'd done something good. I have no idea how much difference any of it will have made to those who'll receive one of our boxes, but hopefully it will be a help on some level; and it at least seemed more productive than any of the endless whining about people who live out of borrowed shopping carts making the place look untidy.