Boys on film

This Saturday I’m going to my first football match since arriving in America when the New York Red Bulls play the Colorado Rapids at their home stadium in New Jersey. Before the kick-off arrives I’ve found myself musing over how my first game in the land of milk and honey may differ from my last experience of professional football in Britain – a windswept, bitterly cold, extremity-shriveling, Bovril-hugging afternoon spent in Aberdeen. I mean, will it be all hotdogs and hooting? Will we be called to “all rise for the national anthem”? And, if there’s a lull in play, will a monkey be introduced to jazz up the proceedings?

Probably not. In America football seems to exist in its own distinct ecosystem, tucked away from the razzmatazz and bombast of other mainstream sports. The fans that I have met so far are all knowledgeable and serious about supporting their teams, and for a sport that’s still burgeoning and coming to terms with its own identity (long muddied by the negative and, well, mumsy connotations of the “soccer mom” tag) this can only be a good thing. It’s almost as if football is the cool, rebellious upstart cousin of the established franchise sports like baseball, basketball, crash helmet rugby and ultra-violent ice skating.

Still, those stock premonitions of a rally monkey being brought out to appease a restless crowd are intriguing. If British sports fans conjure up such limited images of their American counterparts, then what on earth do they think of us? If we were provided with a portal into the mind of, say, a Chicago Bears fan and asked them to imagine a “soccer” crowd from across the pond then what would we see? Cloth caps? Wooden ratchets? Pies like pastry shot puts? Or, would they see them through the prism of darker images borrowed from football hooligan films like Green Street?

It’s impossible for me to say, I don’t know any Chicago Bears fans.

I do know a bit about football hooligan films though. In fact, I published a bit of a mini-thesis on them here in First Touch magazine. And here it is again, but with embedded clips so that those of you who are uninitiated in the world of top boys and firms and Stone Island jumpers and Stanley knives and always standing your ground will be able to form your own misguided opinions of British football crowds.

Enjoy.

 

Film Crews

It’s notoriously difficult to predict what moviegoers will want to watch. Who could have foreseen that one science fiction film concerned with the plight of blue aliens would prove to be so phenomenally successful while another, concerned with the plight of Eddie Murphy, would turn out to be such a monumental failure? For film investors there would seem to be no such thing as a sure thing, only a game of chance on a played out on a board full of ladders like Avatar and snakes like The Adventures of Pluto Nash. Unless they happen to put their money into a low-budget British football hooligan movie that is – then they seem certain to see a return on their investment. If there is one thing that UK audiences are certain to pay money to see, it’s forty angry hooligans trying to puree one another with iron bars.  

But where did this love affair with the beautiful game’s outlaws begin?

Spool back to the late eighties and you’ve got Thatcher’s Britain – miserable, greedy, wearing shoulder pads. A life of miners’ strikes and mournful Morrisey lyrics. It was in this petri dish that the football hooligan film grew.

In 1988 the BBC screened an hour long drama titled The Firm, a jarring, unflinching look at the exploits of a gang of football hooligans. This film was a revelation because it slayed the prevailing media caricature of hooligans as angry men with tattooed knuckles, shaved heads and underbites. The Firm taught us that they are people too – hooligans have jobs and families and are prey to the same kind of issues that afflict us all. In fact, they blend in so well that your next door neighbour could be in a gang, there’s just no way of knowing (unless you peer over the garden fence and see him taking a bat to a Millwall supporter’s head).

Not that it was director Alan Clarke’s intention to give English footballs’ bogeymen an acceptable face. Clarke, who so expertly portrayed the destructive nature of young men in his earlier films Scum and Made in Britain, wanted his audience to see brutality in the cold light of day. Stripped of almost all non-diegetic sound, the violence in The Firm is prosaic and grim. There’s nothing romantic about getting your head panned in after all, and that’s exactly the point that Clarke wanted to make. The camera lingers on the violence not because it’s cool or glamorous, but because it’s intended to make us recoil in horror.

Despite Clarke’s intentions, The Firm was widely criticised for granting thuggery so much screen time and denounced as a tactless attempt to view hooliganism objectively. Television watchdog The Broadcasting Standards Council decried the film, accusing it of “using violence to sustain the audience’s interest”, and few bought into the idea that this was the cinematic equivalent of your father giving you a drag of a cigarette when you’re eleven – the hope being that you’ll cough and splutter and realise that, even if it looks glamorous, the truth is that it’s a filthy habit. The problem is, of course, that regardless of how dreadful the first drag tastes, many of us end up hooked. And this proved to be the case with The Firm – audiences wanted to see more of the same. The football hooligan film genre was born.

Fast forward to the mid-nineties and the next hooligan film appears, this time decked out in bomber jackets, ill-fitting jeans and Doc Martens. It’s easy to trace I.D back to the genre’s wellspring – director Phil Davis played The Firm’s villain, Yeti. Behind the camera Davis deserts the documentary-like style of Alan Clarke’s film, depicting a more hackneyed brand of hooligan. In one memorable scene actor Warren Clarke, jowls billowing like boat sails, announces that he is off to “kick some bleedin’ heads in. Are you up for it?” Clearly the main character John (played with scary-eyed intensity by Reece Dinsdale) can’t resist such an offer – he’s an undercover policeman who becomes so immersed in the heady brew of violence and camaraderie that he never resurfaces.

Where The Firm evoked fear and whimpering with its gritty portrayal of violence, I.D was, conversely, criticised for appearing to lack realism. It appeared that the big screen hooligan was still searching for the elusive winning formula that would please fans of the burgeoning genre, while also appeasing critics quick to condemn frivolous head stamping.

That formula appeared to be found when, after being on pause for about ten years, the noughties’ incarnation of the football hooligan crashed onto our screens in The Football Factory. This time he wasn’t just tooled up with baseball bats and Stanley knives, he was also brandishing a nihilistic message. But, as you would expect, it’s not a particularly subtle one – in fact it’s made clear from the very moment that lead actor Danny Dyer (glistening with hair gel, brimming with East End charm) marches onto our screens and declares that he leads an unfulfilling and meaningless life, besides “occasionally kicking f**k out of someone”.

Despite some pretty coarse dialogue and gaudy fight scenes, director Nick Love does do a reasonable job of explaining the mayhem. Love’s hooligans aren’t criminals and psychopaths, they’re just bored. It’s a simple and somewhat shallow explanation for taking a boot to another person’s skull, but it rings true all the same. Critics praised this effort to examine the hooligan psyche, with a favourable review in Empire magazine urging any undecided moviegoers to “discover a film that’s less concerned with football violence and more intrigued by the destructive nature of male bonding, the male ego and male discontentment”. As well as garnering favourable reviews from many critics the film also become something of a cult classic when it was released on DVD, shifting more than one and a half million units – not a bad return for a film that was produced on a shoestring budget. This success soon turned heads in Tinseltown.

The sense of truth found in The Football Factory was sadly absent when Hollywood finally got its hands on the football hooligan in 2005. Green Street has easily the most implausible plotline of any of the films in the hooligan stable – disgraced Harvard student comes to England, falls in with feared firm, learns valuable life lessons, and then leaves with all limbs intact. Worse than the chimerical plotline was the bizarre decisions to cast elfin actor Elijah Wood in the lead role (although it has been suggested that this curious casting decision was actually a masterstroke as it gave us all the opportunity to see Frodo Baggins get his head panned in). Despite the film’s shortcomings it gained worldwide attention and garnered some favourable reviews from Hollywood’s elite (legendary critic Robert Ebert gave the film a favourable review, praising it for the “kinetic energy unleashed in the fights”). The English Disease had now captured an international audience.

It was in 2007 that the genre truly scraped the bottom of the barrel. Rise of the Footsoldier, tells the story of notorious hooligan Carlton Leach, charting his journey from the terraces to becoming top boy. Like Green Street, it’s a film hamstrung by the physical improbability of its male lead – actor Ricci Harnett bears an uncanny, and unfortunate, resemblance to Jimmy Krankie. If you can imagine a sexually insane Krankie marauding the streets of London with an iron bar, making obscene gestures and destroying parked cars then you’ll have a pretty good idea of how strange this performance looks. Harnett aside, the rest of the film is also a farce. With the unconvincing acting, bad wigs, hackneyed dialogue and cloying melodrama the whole thing plays out like an ultraviolent episode of Eastenders. Rise of the Footsoldier was also savaged by critics who scrambled out of theatres to hunt down the choicest adjectives to describe how dreadful they thought it was (one, from the BBC Movies website, wrote that the film left her feeling “violated”).

A slew of movies soon followed as the hooligan appeared to be a bankable commodity (if Rise of the Footsoldier managed to attract an audience then surely anything would). In 2008 director Jon Baird’s film Cass presented the hooligan film in standard biopic form. Then the following year Pat Holden’s Awaydays tipped everything upside down by making one of its principle characters a homosexual, causing thousands of men to share in the same shocking epiphany – maybe there is something a little gay about all of this male bonding.

Despite these worrying revelations, hooliganism secured its status as perennial film fodder when the genre’s fountainhead was retrofitted. In 2009 Nick Love remade The Firm, bringing the thug on film movement full circle in a little over twenty years and proving that there is such an appetite for these films that the public won’t stop at seeing them just once.

As long as demand remains so high it’s surely only a matter of time before the next hooligan film hits our screens. Let’s just hope it’s not Rise of the Footsoldier 2.

More texts with ‘mericans

My last post chronicled the bizarre text conversations I was having with a group of ‘mercians who were trying to contact some dipshit named Kyle (Verizon, also dipshits, gave me his recently cancelled number).

That was nearly a month ago, but my phone continues to erupt every few days with messages and calls from people wondering where Kyle is or where his penis has been (Kyle, I have learnt, is New Jersey’s answer to Errol Flyn).

Below is an aggregation of the best, worst and most terrifying text conversations I’ve had with people who were trying to contact Kyle.

 

 

Texting with ‘mericans

In life there are so many variables, things that you can never truly rely on, like the weather or public transport or the effect that Mexican food is going to have on your bowel movements. So it’s nice to have something that you can always have faith in, something to assuage the capricious nature of life, something that will never let you down or make you shart.

Something like a smartphone.

To be honest with you, I don’t know where I’d be without my iPhone. The chances are I’d be lost though, wandering the streets aimlessly, trying to find something without the aid of Google Maps. I mean, how the f**k did people get anywhere before Google Maps? I can’t think about the ‘80s or ‘90s without envisioning some kind of pre-digital dystopia, a wasteland of lost souls drifting listlessly up and down the wrong street, endlessly  winding down car windows and asking for directions.

That’s why my phone is always by my side (that and the fact I keep it in my pocket). I need my phone. I rely on my phone. I can’t live, if living is without phone. In 1999 Welsh indy band The Super Fury Animals recorded a song called ‘Wherever I Lay My Phone (That’s My Home)’. Well, I’d go one step further and say that mobile phones are our homes these days – without them we’d be hopelessly adrift of the Digital Age.  

That’s why getting a phone call or a text from a wrong number feels a lot like home invasion. And over the past few weeks I’ve been ram-raided on a daily basis.

It’s all because my network supplier, Verizon, gave me a number that was so recently disconnected that the previous owner didn’t have time, or couldn’t be arsed, to update his contact information. So I’ve been constantly receiving calls and messages intended for someone named Kyle. Mostly my response to these consists of me telling callers I’m not Kyle and please tell Kyle that he should tell everyone that he has a new number because I’m not being paid to be Kyle’s personal assistant now am I? Usually they just hang up, which is quite rude and tells you something about the calibre of Kyle’s associates.

But sometimes, when I’m bored, I strike up conversations with these people who think I’m Kyle. Would you like to read some?

I thought you might.

I'm the green bubbles

Here's a conversation I had with someone slightly more aggresive than Storm.

 

And finally, this nugget. Cheers Kyle (you f*****g s**tcock).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The real househusband of New Jersey

The househusband's best friend

I’m a househusband.

Now, when I say that I don’t mean that I gave up my career to tend for my children (I have no children). What I mean is that I am, quite literally, a husband inside a house. A house spouse.

It’s not by choice you see, I haven’t willingly turned my back on the world of work. It’s just that when you come to ‘merica on a fiancée visa (which takes around a year to secure), get married, become a permanent resident and then apply for a work permit, things don’t just happen instantly. There is paperwork to be done, photocopies to be made, questions to be answered. Questions like these:

Have you EVER been a member of, or affiliated in any way with, the Communist party or any other totalitarian party?

Do you plan to practice polygamy in the United States?

Have you ever called for, incited, committed, assisted helped with or otherwise participated in the killing of any person?

Have you EVER been a member of, or affiliated in any way with Boyz ll Men?

When all is said and done it takes the average newlywed immigrant 3 months to secure a work permit. And that’s a long time to be indoors.

***

Living as a househusband can be a discombobulating experience. The extended periods spent dwelling indoors and the absence of natural light can easily lead to the stay-at-home spouse losing track of time. You see, the indoor man is not tethered to temporal measurements as, in his domain, time has no real meaning. Instead he is bound to the great Biological Clock – it’s either before breakfast, before lunch, before dinner or after dinner. And then it’s time to sleep. The househusband is governed by his natural urges and things that no big or little hand can ever point to.

Handily, television is also there to place a hand on the rudder and steer the inside man through these clockless days. He wakes up and sees that Live! With Kelly is on. A giggling skeleton with hair extensions. Then it’s time for the Rachael Ray show. Why is she hell-bent on adding cheese to everything? Next it’s The View. Whoopi Goldberg? Is that really you? Why aren’t you telling jokes or singing gospel numbers? And then, woosh, the morning is done. He’s been sat there for hours, motionless as a mannequin, arse cheeks indented in the couch. Maybe later he can rise up on his hind legs and empty the dishwasher or make a token effort at vacuuming. In some extreme circumstances he might even brave the elements and venture outside to empty the garbage.

You think I’m a lazy b*****d now, don’t you? Well, it’s easy to sit there and judge. It’s far harder to actually just sit there.

Here’s the thing – paradigms are shifting and, in this day and age, it’s getting more and more acceptable for the man around the house to be, well, just a man around the house. Post-war society, bombed to buggery, hungry and desperate, was quick to hack down gender barriers and allow women to flood into the workplace where they gradually began to replace men (slower, lazier, more hairy). It was in this petri dish that the househusband gradually grew. The man, no longer the automatic breadwinner, had to learn to go to the supermarket and buy bread to turn into sandwiches. Perhaps master some other rudimentary cooking skills as well (boiling and toasting mainly).

***

And so, in the spirit of househusbandry, I have started teaching myself how to cook. And I actually mean proper cooking here – not just plonking a chicken breast in a pan and pouring a bottle of sauce over it. Really making stuff from scratch.

Much to my surprise I have found that I actually really enjoy it. Cookery is, in a homely and not-very-avant-garde-way, a bit like art – you start with a blank canvas, choose the materials you want and then set about creating something. The key difference is that, for the most part, the end result is edible.

And it’s in the kitchen where the househusband really gets a chance to assert his masculinity – I cook exactly like a man. How? Well, like a lot of men I always think that I know best and have a real aversion to following instructions or taking advice. This manifests itself in a variety of terrifying ways when armed with a spatula.

I don’t follow recipes at all really. Sorry, but did Columbus discover the New World by following directions? No. He set sail and went with his gut instinct. Left a bit. Now right. A little more. Up past Brazil. It’s the same when I cook. In my kitchen, I’m God – a vengeful, wrathful, jealous God who takes a really dim view of false prophets (I’m looking at you here Jamie Oliver).

Picture me stood there in my apron, palms caked in flour, fearlessly eschewing all known wisdom, punching knowledge in the face and making an enemy of the cookbook. I am a brave alchemist, measuring my flour by eye and adding beer to stuff. Sometimes cheese too.

The end results have been mixed. Last week I made a tomato soup that my wife politely ate. It’s nice honey, I do like it. Honestly I do … but is it meant to be that colour?

Here’s the recipe.

Not Jamie Oliver’s Tomato soup

Ingredients

Onion – a big one

Garlic – one clove

Carrot – a big one (obviously)

Basil – you just want the stalks chopped finely

Olive oil – you can never use too much

Tomato – 1kg (about 5) super-ripe ones

Chicken stock – a litre or so

Miscellaneous seasoning stuff – as much as you want

Directions

Get the garlic and the carrot and the basil and the onion and throw them (violently) into a pot with some olive oil. Stir them. Don’t let the b******s burn or you’ll f**k up the whole thing. Just gently let them simmer away for about 20 minutes (with the lid on, obviously).

While the veg are simmering you want to get the tomatoes and make little X incisions on their arses. That’s the end that hasn’t got a stalk coming out of it. Drop them into boiling water for 30 seconds (don’t worry, they won’t mind). Then you peel back the skin using the flaps created by the X (we don’t mutilate tomatoes for no good reason here). Warning – peeling tomatoes is an ungodly pursuit. Cut the naked tomatoes up. Dice their flesh. Feel like a serial killer.

Add the tomatoes and the chicken stock to the veggies. Let that simmer with the lid on for another 20 minutes. You don’t have to be exact though – all numbers in recipes are arbitrary and should be disregarded accordingly.

When the 20 minutes is up you get to the look-at-me-I’m-Hannibal-Lector part. Get a handheld blender, fire the f****r up and let rip. Massacre the pulp, obliterate every stray morsel of tomato flesh until everything is diced into oblivion.

If you want you can then add chorizo or parmesan. Jamie Oliver doesn’t say to do that, but f**k him.

In conversation with ‘mericans

I have been living in ‘merica for 44 days now. In that time I have had numerous conversations with the native inhabitants.

Bartender: Hey, is that accent from Scotland?                                                                  Me: Yes, yes it is.                                                                                                    Bartender: Is it true that they make all of the Scotch there?
Me: Yes that is true. We also invented telephones and television.
Bartender: Oh yah, wasn’t it that guy … Abraham something?
Me: Yes. Abraham Lincoln was also Scottish. We invented sideburns too.

On the face of it the bartender’s question sounds ridiculous (the one about Scotch I mean, the thing about Abraham Lincoln inventing the television is just flat-out insane), but she does actually raise an interesting point. The Scotch Whisky Regulations 2009 statute decreed that everything labeled as ‘Scotch Whisky’ must be distilled and matured in Scotland. Similar product protection measures are seen in the cases of Melton Mowbray pork pies and Roquefort cheese – only pork pies made in the town of Melton Mowbray can be dubbed Melton Mowbray pork pies, and the same is true of Roquefort cheese (both are afforded Protected Geographical Status under European Union law). So, in theory, they do make all of the Scotch in Scotland.

The problem seems to be that Scotch is something of a generic term, so the purity of the word itself is diluted somewhat by the average punter incorrectly referring to every whisky as a Scotch. For many people (myself included until I googled the s**t out of this thing) the terms ‘Scotch’ and ‘whisky’ are interchangeable – what you ask for at the bar depends on which you feel more able to wrap your tongue around after six pints. There are also problems when trying to impose sanctions like the Scotch Whisky Regulations and the Protected Geographical Status laws, as not every whisky drinking country recognises these rulings. It was only this year that India formally recognised Scotch Whisky as a product solely made in Scotland – meaning that, prior to this move, it would be possible to label domestic products as Scotch.

So, if the bottle says it’s from Bengal, you’re drinking the wrong stuff.

***

My wife: This is my husband, he just got here from Scotland.                              Verizon employee: (gives my wife a pitying look before turning to me. She speaks in a loud, slow voice and tilts her head to the side as if she is speaking to a small child or well-trained animal) WELCOME … TO … AMERICA … OKAY?

Similarly, while sounding ridiculous at first, the Verizon employee raises an interesting issue because Scotland does have its own native language – Scottish Gaelic. But the number of Gaelic speakers in Scotland is small, with the Scottish government reporting in 2005 that only around one percent of the population professes to have “some Gaelic ability”. The rest of us just speak English as best we can.  

***

Random man: I know that accent! Which part of Ireland are you from?

I’m often asked this question. Even when I’m dressed the most Scottish way possible (as I was on my wedding day).

Looking very Irish here.

Waiter: Hey man, I like your kilt. Which part of Ireland are you from?

Me: I’m actually from Scotland.

Waiter: (speaking in an American accent) Me too! My last name is Hendry!

Me: (trying to work out why, when he’s supposedly Scottish, he thought I was Irish)

Oh, Hendry. Like the Scottish snooker player Stephen Hendry.

Waiter: Wow man! You said it right. Everyone here says “Henry”. Awesome!

Me: Oh, thanks.

 

This scenario repeated itself not ten minutes later.

 

Man in toilet: Hey man, which part of Ireland are you from?

Me: Are you taking the piss?

Man in toilet: Yeah, I’m in here to take a piss. Say, did they hire you to come here and play the pipes or something?

Me: No, no, I’m from Scotland. This is just what I’m wearing.

Man in toilet: (looking confused) They hired you from Scotland?

Me: (trying not to look at man in toilet’s cock, which he has unfurled during the course of the conversation) Um, no. I’m the groom. This is my wedding.

Man in toilet: It is! Awesome! Come to the bar, let’s do a shot!

 

Irish people do wear kilts, that much is true, so for two people in quick succession to assume that I was Irish isn’t brain-rattlingly strange, I suppose. But it is a little bit odd all the same as the kilt is – along with whisky, ginger hair and Mel Gibson’s grimacing face in Braveheart – synonymous with Scottish culture. Indeed, kilted Irishmen are a relatively recent phenomenon, with the garment adopted by nationalists at the turn of the 20^th century as a symbol of Celtic identity (perhaps somewhat misguidedly so, as the kilt is likely to have derived from clothing worn by early Norse settlers).

***   

Friend: (ushering me towards a large man that I have never seen before) This is Larry.

Me: (addressing the large man) Hello Larry. Nice to meet you.

Large man: (in a voice as loud as the big bang) OUTSTANDING!

 

Is this normal?

 

***

This definitely can’t be normal.

Me: Quit flappin’ your gums and pack the bags you gimp!

My wife: (speaking to Wegman’s employee) Can you believe that this is the way my husband speaks to me?

Me: (to Wegman’s employee) I’m not her husband. She just pays me to stand next to her.

Wegman’s employee: (laughing nervously) Ha ha ha … okay.

Me: (speaking in a hushed voice) I’m being held here against my own will.

Wegman’s employee: (now looking concerned) Okay …

Me: I’m being serious. You must raise the alarm.

Wegman’s employee: (somewhere between laughing nervously again and pushing the panic button) I see.

Me: I’ve been transported across state lines! This is a federal matter!

Wegman’s employee: You’re above age.

Me: How can you tell?

Wegman’s employee: Anyway, I think this is one for Interpol. By the sound of your accent you’re from Scotland.

Me: You’re the first person not to think I was Irish for about a month.

My wife: (pointing at four gallon tin of olive oil) Wow, I feel like we should give you a reward or something … like this four gallon tin of olive oil … not that you would want a four gallon tin of olive oil.

The Rachael Ray Show is terrifying

The last face you will ever see.

Occasionally I’ll switch on the television midmorning and there she’ll be, grinning inanely and clutching a knife or some other potentially deadly kitchen utensil.

But, if you discount the arsenal of lethal weapons, on first impression there’s something quite wholesome about the ‘merican celebrity chef Rachael Ray. With her chipmunk-like facial features, gravity busting bouffant, pastel coloured loungewear and relentless smiling she resembles a kind of idealised vision of the millennial soccer mom. And it’s clearly an image that Ray panders to – she rose to notoriety because of her rootsy, informal cooking style and down-home approach to preparing meals. The reason she is so popular is because she cooks exactly the kind of food that you wished your mother had made for you. And, with a daily TV show, a procession of cookbooks and her own brand of kitchenware, there’s every chance that you see a lot more of Rachael Ray than the woman who birthed you, or any other blood relative for that matter.

But you aren’t related to Rachel Ray. And, what’s more, you should be very wary about letting this woman infiltrate your home. Having seen her show three or four times now, I am convinced that Ray is a megalomaniacal, power thirsty, parmesan obsessed freak, hell bent on brainwashing daytime TV audiences.  

If you aren’t a naturally suggestible person and have never succumbed to a cheese-based addiction then I would advise you to tune in so that you can see for yourself. This is no normal cookery show. When I first stumbled across it, I instantly thought that there was something off about The Rachel Ray Show, it was like it was some kind of crazed, warped, nightmarish version of a real cookery programme. The studio is aggressively decorated with too-bold colours that collide with brain-jarring effect, the cameraman tilts and pans and zooms like a deranged World War II searchlight operator and, to be fair, the poor b*****d has a real job on his hands trying to keep up with Ray, who pinballs around the stage, one moment beating eggs, the next fondling an unnecessarily large wedge of cheese, only pausing momentarily to speak in tongues or say “parmesan” backwards.

And then there’s the audience. An insane bunch of gurning ghouls, frothing at the mouth and screaming for more ways to add cheese to things. There’s a frantically ecstatic atmosphere in the studio, the kind you only expect televangelists and Lady Gaga to engender. Rachel Ray crowds don’t applaud, they go f*****g apesh*t. Every time Ray stands at her flour flecked pulpit and mentions that parmesan might be a nice addition to the flavours we have here, there is a world-ending thunder of applause, it’s the kind of noise that, heard live, could easily rip the top of a man’s head off. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if, after the taping is concluded, Rachel Ray’s live audience members limp off into the darkness maimed and bloody, muttering something about cheese (still in a state of bliss all the same).

I have to admit that I’ve never seen more than five minutes of The Rachel Ray Show. I’ve always felt like I was having a brain tumour and had to change the channel. It’s like accidentally walking into a cult ceremony – you know that you have to leave before they start chalking out the pentagram and getting out the goat’s heads, but you want to watch for as long as possible without being sucked in yourself. Having only had limited doses of her show, it’s hard to work out what exactly Rachel Ray’s doctrine is or what the subliminal messages are urging her followers to do. It surely has to be something cheese related – perhaps she’s setting herself up as some sort of dairy priestess or, and this is a terrifying thought, as a kind of Cheese’s Christ. Whatever it is she’s trying to do, we can be certain that she means business.

You have been warned.

Down by the river

I nearly died to take this picture. What a waste that would have been.

Down by the riverbank two men embrace, their clinch lit by the dying embers of the day as the sun slumps below the New Brunswick skyline. One man passes the other a blue canvas bag. They nod to one another and pick up the bikes dumped by their feet.

I’m stood about 20 feet away from them, camera in hand, taking pictures of trees. I’m a real sucker for autumnal hues, you see.

One of the men starts to cycle towards me.

Oh f**k, he’s coming towards me!

I turn away, clench my buttocks and prepare for death, expecting the inevitable stab wound to come at any moment.

I’m going to get stabbed for taking a picture of a tree. This is so typical. He thinks I was taking pictures of him selling a sack of meth to that other man. And he’s going to stab me for it!  

In the corner of my eye I see the cycling man’s shadow approaching me purposefully, like a shark moving towards its prey.

What if he has a gun? He might just shoot me instead! I’d far rather he just stabbed me … getting stabbed just seems less painful … If I live I definitely have to google search ‘is getting shot more painful than being stabbed?’ … I mean, someone has to know.

The cycling shadow grows larger, its wheel spokes spinning the dark rider closer and closer.

Maybe I should just run … but if I run there’s a chance he’ll get angry and stab me more savagely … or shoot me more than once if he’s got a gun … if I just stay here and accept that he’s going to kill me maybe he’ll be more merciful? Perhaps he’ll acknowledge that I’ve tried not to inconvenience him and make it fast.

I glance to my side see and that the umbra is upon me, an ink black storm of pedals, handlebars, spokes and imaginary shivs. My muscles contort, anchoring me to the kill zone. I wait for the cold blade to pierce my kidney.

Why isn’t my life flashing before my eyes?

A metallic squall whirls past and the cyclist rips off into the distance, the blue canvas bag slung over his shoulder.

I’m alive! … But now I feel really foolish for thinking all of those irrational thoughts.

Slowly my buttocks unclench, my arse cheeks sinking like a pair of setting suns.

***

After this brush with death I went back to taking pictures, reasoning that the chances of stumbling into a second drug deal where slim. And I’m glad that I did because the truth is that, even if ugly things do happen here, the banks of the Raritan river are still beautiful.

Coming to ‘merica

Newark Airport. Border control. 11.1.11

“I wasn’t able to fill in the declarations form. I didn’t have a pen.”

“What were yu doin’ fu nine owas?” The customs officer responds gruffly in an accent as deep and thick as the soupy wetlands scattered across northeast New Jersey.

I shrug my shoulders apologetically and wonder if I should just come clean and answer his question honestly. The truth is that I passed the nine hours of my flight crowbarred into the foetal position because the f**kwit in front of me fully reclined his seat as soon as we’d taken off (I would have done the same but I consider it bad manners to drive my headrest into a fellow traveller’s skull). Crammed into this miserable seating arrangement, and for such a long period of time, I soon realised that ruthlessly ransacking the booze trolley would be the only sensible way to endure this journey. And so, tray table flipped down and jammed into my navel, I sat slugging mini-beers as the Atlantic zipped by below. When I finally trundled off the plane, half-drunk on free Warsteiner, I had totally forgotten about the customs declaration form crumpled in my pocket.

“Um, it totally slipped my mind. I’m really sorry,” I say, meekly. “May I borrow your pen?” I nod towards the pen on the kiosk’s desktop.

“Nah. I don’t gotta pen,” he says, ignoring the one lying next to his hairy knuckles. I look at the pen, then up to his face, all monobrow and malice. Doesn’t he notice it? Perhaps it’s a family heirloom and he’s just unwilling to hand it out to strange looking foreigners. I peer over the counter in search of an additional pen and notice that he has a handgun holstered to his side. F**k me, this man is armed! He’s armed and capable of blasting my head to smithereens before I’ve even stepped foot upon American soil. But still, I really need that pen.

“What about this one.” I nod towards his pen. “Can I borrow it?”

“Nah. This is my pen. I need it.” He taps his finger impatiently, starting to look even more pissed off. I wonder if he’d shoot me if I tried to grab it.

“I’ll just be a second. I promise. I write very quickly, I assure you officer.” I smile weakly, my hopes of charming him fading fast.

“You gotta go to the back uh the line. Go getta pen from the guy in the red coat. He’s at the endu the line.”

I turn to look back at the line, see it snaking endlessly across the vast expanse of carpet before me, writhing with tracksuited tourists and duty free bags. I’ve come too far to turn back now, waited too long for this moment. One year to get my visa and then one hour in this hell. It’s as if I’m a mountaineer a step away from Everest’s summit, poised at the threshold of glory, told he must return to base camp to retrieve a pen. A pen! There’s no way I’m going to give up that easily.

“Um, please can I have the pen?” I smile hopefully, wondering if politeness will win him over.

“No.” He furrows his brow and jerks his thick bowling ball head towards the back of the line.

***

“Have you got a pen I can borrow?” I ask the man in the red coat at the back of the line.

“You got 50 dollars I can borrow?” He replies.

***

When I finally reach the front of the line for a second time I’m the last person waiting to be seen. I decide to approach a different border patrol officer, thinking that my chances of getting through might be better. I go for a woman, a big haired smiling woman, smiling with those big American snowdrop-white teeth. Until she sees me.

“You gotta go to the next booth.”

I go to the next booth. Inside a stout Hispanic man shakes his head and thumbs towards the next again booth.

At his point I’m starting to wonder if I’m trapped inside some kind of fable and the officer at the third booth will embrace me, praise my perseverance and let me into America.

He doesn’t. Still, I’m thankful because the third officer only half grimaces when he sees me, as if I’m merely a case of mild indigestion rather than a major pain in the arse. I hand him the large white envelope containing all of my visa information that I’ve been clinching under my arm for the past hour or so. He tears it open, tilts his head and levels me with a withering look.

“K1 visa huh.”

“Uh, yes, that’s right.”

He’s giving me a kind of quizzical look now, like I’m a piece of abstract art that he doesn’t fully approve of.

“You like marryin’ a 90-year-old woman or somethin’?”

“Uh, no. No I’m not,” I reply, wondering if I should take this as a joke or if he genuinely suspects me of being a gerontophile.

“How old is she?”

“Uh, 26.”

“Okay. You gotta come with me.”

***

I’m held in a waiting room that seems to be some kind of immigration limbo. I sit on a leather chair, its upholstery mottled and warped by the wringing and gouging of hordes of nervous fingers. The room has two exits, each to the side of a central bank of raised desks where stoic looking customs officers stand like preachers at the pulpit, handing out passports and deliverance.

One of the exits, a narrow corridor to the left, appears to lead to a series of interrogation booths. Intermittent sobs and wails drift down this doomed passageway. At one point a Hispanic woman charges through, ink black mascara tears zigzagging down her cheeks. An officer, face blank as a taxidermist’s tiger, trails after her, shooing her into the women’s toilets. I hear the muffled echo of howling noises and something that sounds like Spanish.

To the right there’s another exit that, presumably, leads to America.

My name is called out. I walk to the bank of desks, trying to look as inconspicuous and law abiding as possible.

“You have 90 days to get married,” the officer says, handing me my passport. “Welcome to America,” he says, ushering me to the exit on the right.