Goths in the Sunshine

...and why the chicken crossed the road

I had to find a Western Union to get my money from Philadelphia. It’s a long story, and you can’t, at your great remove, keep me from telling it.

For several months, I was keeping feelings of purposelessness at bay by doing almost half a million dollars’ worth (by the sponsoring organization’s reckoning) of pro bono graphic design work for charities. It was foolish of me to expect that those with whom I liaised at the various groups would have better taste in graphic design that the general public, but they generally did not. The world is full of horrid graphic design, with which most people are just fine. Close your eyes and turn 1440 degrees. Open your eyes and you’re likely to see an example of awful design. But shut up already, Johnny.

There. That’s better. One of the minority of people who appreciated my incomparably gorgeous work contacted me several weeks ago hoping I’d design four event flyers for her organization. She was ever so sweet, and I, in the midst of one of my periodic visits to the bottom of the abyss, thought obliging her might take my mind off life’s cruel futility, so I said yes, and designed four flyers. She wanted two changed. Thinking, “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I told her I didn’t have the time. She asked if some remuneration might find some gaps in my busy schedule. I was briefly speechless, but then mused that I might be able to find a couple of hours. I was right, and she was pleased with my revisions, but then my bank rebuffed her attempt to transfer my payment electronically. Which was where Western Union came in.

There was one seven-tenths of a mile away, in Teddington, according to Google Maps, but those seven-tenths seemed to be as the crow flies. It was in the mid-70s Fahrenheit in southwestern London. It turned out that Kingston was probably closer, so off my bride and I trudged, only to have one of our moments when we reached the edge of the town from which the Yardbirds and Psychedelic Furs had emerged in decades past. The missus is a fervent obeyer of Walk and Don’t Walk signs, and I, a rebel to my core, am not. I very commonly cross streets, say something to her, and quickly deduce that the reason she isn’t replying is that she’s back there waiting for the bright green pedestrian to grant her permission. On catching up to me, she commonly says, “What’s the point of doing that when you’re going to have to wait for me anyway?” I find this a little controlly.

I find it a lot controlly.

Yesterday, I didn’t wait, but just kept walking, and when she finally caught up to me, we had a little snarlfest. “For years,” I said, “I’ve been waiting on the other side of roads I’ve crossed because it was perfectly safe to do so, while you waited for Green Pedestrian.” One of the protest singer Phil Ochs’s most famous songs had come to mind. “Well, I ain’t waitin’ anymore!” I declared.

The storm passed, and the proprietor of the little supermarket that is one of Kingston’s three WU offices took me to a little back room, where he booted up his Western Union laptop, copied information out of my passport, and finally handed over the £97.20 my $150 was worth. Got brass in pocket, for the first time in a couple of years. No one carries cash anymore, and I am somebody. I am! A real boy!

As I exited the supermarket, there were two young female goths at the till, all dyed black hair and ghoulish makeup and fishnet and lace. One of them, the less pretty and less ethnic, had a peaked officer’s cap. I’ve always been a sucker for a woman in a peaked officer’s cap, but she didn’t know I was alive.

(I won’t pretend I wasn’t grateful for the opportunity to trot out my 2021 song “Little Goth”, to whose end please listen.)

I should probably have asked if the missus could take a photograph of me with them, but I did not, and on the 371 bus back to Ham, who and what should board at the Latchmere Road stop but another member of the tribe! The missus and I agreed that it was curious that we should encounter more goths on the sunniest day of 2025 than any other day of the year.

Late in the evening, having smoked some cannabis, I decided that I will compose a pub singalong song called “I’ve Got a Crush on King Charles”, and wrote the first verse:

I’ve got a crush on King Charles
I don’t think he has one on me
nor that he can envision
how handsome a couple we’d be

The idea made me chuckle. Watch, or at least listen to, this space!