From Notting Hill to Hills, Iowa

I’ve got this marvellous free Google thing with information about traffic to this site and it gives a surprisingly precise location for each visitor. So, a warm welcome to my visitor from Hills, Iowa (pop. 679).

There are some marked differences between Notting Hill and Hills, IA. According to the US Census of 2000, of the 679 people in Hills, 658 were white. In Notting Hill’s Golborne Ward, where I live, of the 8,849 souls there in 2001, 4,957 were white.

In Hills, you can buy a four-bedroom house with two acres for $269,500 (£138,000) including a small winding creek, abundant wildlife, seasonal morel mushrooms and fruit trees. The cheapest four-bedroom house in Notting Hill that I could find is on Portobello Road and is going for £1.85 million ($3.6 million). It comes with a roof terrace just big enough to hang Kylie’s hotpants out to dry.

They have different gun laws in Hills, or the state of Iowa, as well. You need an annually renewable licence for a handgun and nothing at all for a rifle or shotgun. I sometimes think I envy the Americans their liberal gun laws. I like guns.

I was a reasonably good shot as a youth with a Lee Enfield .303 (as used by the British Army in WW2) over 1,000 yards, and I've shot with .22 rifles as well.

I’ve only used a handgun once, at a shooting range in San Antonio, Texas when I was living there some years ago. After a surprisingly short instruction period, I was let loose on the range with a semi-automatic Heckler & Koch 9mm pistol.

At first, the recoil was surprisingly strong but I quickly got used to it and was popping away with the gay abandon of gun nuts the world over. I was rather good at it. By my last blast of five rounds at 100 feet, four of them were in the inner ring and one just outside. It was enough fun to be slightly scary.

But then the story of Mike Pogue weakens my libertarian gun law instincts. He was an artist in San Antonio that I used to hang out with sometimes. I interviewed him once for a paper that went out of business before the piece was published.

Mike was a true San Antonio original, a man who found himself when he realised that being left-handed meant that his brain was wired back-to-front. He a drove a beautiful black ’58 Chevy Impala V8 Sports Coupe fast enough to scare the shit out of me when I was in the passenger seat. A self-styled ‘mean old hippy’, he liked to hang out at titty bars, smoke pot, drink beer and shoot guns. And he was a talented artist.

Then, around summer 1998, his pretty young wife left him and, later, started dating Mark Horner, the principal trombonist with the San Antonio Symphony. Mike’s reaction was to drive round to Mark’s house and shoot him dead on his doorstep with .45-calibre handgun. Then he jumped back into the Impala, parked outside his home and turned the gun on himself.

So, even although handguns are undoubtedly great fun, maybe it’s best if we keep them illegal.