Yule Log

When did sawing logs ever become a euphemism for repose? I spent the best part of the last day of the year sawing logs and stacking them in the greenhouse and it was anything but restful. We got the logs gratis from a local tree surgeon – uncut and unceremoniously dropped in the front garden (well, what did I expect?). The whole exercise to date has taken around two days – first, getting them from the front garden to the back of the rear, then sawing them into sections so that they can be stacked in the greenhouse to season for a year before we can use them on the fires. It’s telling that it’s the first time in ages that I’ve got that mediaeval bloke feeling and that with a chain saw to help me. The greenhouse is now full and the Walter Mitty in me had me trudging through the snow, clad in skins of feral animals, back to the thatched cottage after a day of gruelling toil to be served by the wench, as it were vicar. Too much Christmas tele perhaps. Instead, the double glazed door squeaked open to reveal P and J noshing on the final, final, final remnants of the Christmas selection of meats, P having completed the first coat on the bathroom and J having completed his thank you letters for early despatch (I should say ”first draft” in one or two cases that caught my eye – it wasn’t so much the heartfelt sentiment about the generosity, it was the bare faced suggestion that we’d forced him to bank it unspent).

I feel OK for a new year’s eve – it’s never my favourite day of the year. The guilt rises like an unpleasantly high tide – all those things I should have done and said, all those resolutions that I’ve failed to achieve – but let me say to anyone who’s reading this that thinks for a minute that I don’t think of you often, you’re wrong, all three of you – ie, my total audience (posts passim). I have the same love, affection and esteem for you that I always have, but distance and the demands on the mind of a fantastically disorganised bloke by more local yokels inevitably results in a quietness that might imply otherwise.

My resolutions this year? To start my own business (bold, you cry); to get better at the smaller things that matter; to keep this diary alive; to laugh more; to be better at keeping in touch with friends and family – all three of you. Happy New Year!

Write on

I went to see a talk by Robert Thompson, the editor of the Times, in eary October at the Ivy restaurant in Covent Garden. The Ivy is the restaurant of choice of C List limpets - mostly those who are famous for being famous - and the odd "celebrity" like Victoria Beckham.

He's a slender, stooped shouldered man of indeterminate age with a melange of machine tooled vowel sounds and vocabularic characteristics that betray a Sydney upbringing and education. The Times is a regular employer of Aussie expats, betraying the proprietor's (as Thompson calls Murdoch) origins and Robert has reached the top of the tree at the world famous daily.

His speech was all about new media and the impact that the internet is having on the newspaper profession - the complexity of making money, the changes to newsroom deadlines, the death of old patterns, the new competitive environment and the changing power structure in news media. He also spoke for a bit about blogs and how the internet was full of a billion blogs, all with a readership of one, ie, the author. The absence of any evidence to the contrary suggests, Hamish, that this blog is a classic example. Still, I intend to persevere and hopefully double or triple that readership this year. At that rate of growth, everyone on the planet will be reading this in.....

Second in a series of suburban textures

Spiky, eh? Looks like a long lost relative of where we all live. Or something. Looks a bit like a dull audience maybe. Collective noun? An audience of houses?

Tell me this isn't the world's finest love song

"Casimir Pulaski Day" by Sufjan Stevens

You'll find him performing this on YouTube. It is sheer brilliance. Here are the lyrics:

Golden rod and the 4-H stone
The things I brought you
When I found out you had cancer of the bone

Your father cried on the telephone
And he drove his car to the Navy yard
Just to prove that he was sorry

In the morning through the window shade
When the light pressed up against your shoulder blade
I could see what you were reading

Oh the glory that the lord has made
And the complications you could do without
When I kissed you on the mouth

Tuesday night at the bible study
We lift our hands and pray over your body
But nothing ever happens

I remember at Michael's house
In the living room when you kissed my neck
And I almost touched your blouse

In the morning at the top of the stairs
When your father found out what we did that night
And you told me you were scared

Oh the glory when you ran outside
With your shirt tucked in and your shoes untied
And you told me not to follow you

Sunday night when I cleaned the house
I find the card where you wrote it out
With the pictures of your mother

On the floor at the great divide
With my shirt tucked in and my shoes untied
I am crying in the bathroom

In the morning when you finally go
And the nurse runs in with her head hung low
And the cardinal hits the window

In the morning in the winter shade
On the first of March on the holiday
I thought I saw you breathing

Oh the glory that the lord has made
And the complications when I see his face
In the morning in the window

Oh the glory when he took our place
But he took my shoulders and he shook my face
And he takes and he takes and he takes

"Pork and Separates"

It's been quite a nice day today. I spoke to my brother Matt over the occasional wonder that is MSN. He's all the way in Australia, on the Queensland coast, and yet here I am on webcam waving at him and talking. He has a microphone and I can hear him, but I can't see him yet because he doesn't have a camera, but he'll have one next weekend and we'll talk again then. I spoke to his son (my nephew) Jack yesterday. Jack lives in New South Wales. I could see Jack, because Jack has a webcam, but I couldn't talk to Jack because he doesn't have a microphone. I could ask him questions and he could nod for yes and shake for no. Which is OK, but it can get a bit one-sided, eh Jack?

The other good thing that happened today was that I managed to go for a run and make it the whole way - a glorious four or five miles. J cycled alongside me and I ran down past the golfcourse, along the side of Verulamium Park, up the hill to Waitrose, along to the horrid roundabout, down past the Abbet Theatre, up through the center of town, took a right by Devda's (the indian restaurant), along the side of Bernard's Heath, then left into our road. And all that with largely functioning tendons and scarcely a twinge in my calves. It's the magic new shoes - well overdue - that made it OK.

I (14yo) has been out at the rugby club, her new-found passion, just back and she's drenched to the bone. It's that lovely limey soft rain today, warm enough to entice you out into it, although I'm concerned that the lawn is going to need yet another mow before the season draws in. The trees are still largely green and I'm half expecting the apple tree to bloom again at any minute.

I'm on meal duty on Sundays. Last week's two gallons of chicken soup wasn't popular and to stem the wails at the excess quantities, I promised to eat it all myself over the course of the week. I got through it by Thursday night. J, especially, is not partial to "all in the pot"-style meals. He prefers to have each part as a clear entity. When we go for an Indian meal, J will want Tandoori chicken on its own. So, J's spirits soared when I told him it was "Pork and separates" tonight, the separates being each veg, with no messing about. I think this is probably indicative of some sort of organisational competency. J's room is tidy and he organises his time. I (14yo), however, has an "all in the pot"-style room. The door, on the few occasions that it left ajar, releases the smell of a sort of slow cooking, or perhaps more accurately, composting, from within. P found a half-empty jar of pesto under an old pile of clothes in I's room recently. When I do the rubbish on a Thursday morning, it is largely an academic exercise as to whether or not I pay I's room a visit. I likes "all in the pot"- style food - and so, as I look around me, so do I.

What I believe but cannot prove

There's a very interesting book, a compendium of views by a whole bunch of scientists and writers, in which they set out some ideas that they hold to be true but can't provide the evidence to support. You'll find it here:

http://www.amazon.com/What-Believe-but-Cannot-Prove/dp/0060841818

I think we all have loads of these.

My main one is that I don't think that there is such thing as a straight line. Most ideas of the universe are based around the idea that if you travelled in one direction, you could go on forever. You might go on forever (which is a different thing, it's about time), but you would always come back to where you started from, having travelled in one big circle. I think the idea of straight lines limits and frustrates our understanding of space. Assuming that you could line up a lot of people in order of size and that the smallest person could be amazingly, atomically small and the tallest amazingly, galactically tall, if you asked them to form a circle, the tallest would be smaller than the smallest. I think everything is made of circles. Everything that has gravity wants to be circular. I think that our thoughts go round in circles. They come back to us as deja vu. I think our sense of existence, being and comprehension is based on the circles of thought. When you think about it, what are straight lines for? Light bends as it yields to gravity. Even the straightest thing isn't really straight. Perhaps that's why pi is so magical - it because it's the secret of the circle which is part of absolutely everything.

French coast

Summer

Long time, no write, so here’s a catch-up on the summer which bore fruits in the most literal sense like never before. The cherry tree, the apple trees and some sort of red berry tree that we don’t understand, and don’t dare try, have been hunched in agony beneath the weight of the multitude of fruits. Pigeon poo within a mile of our house is purple; every morning throughout July and August, plump birds sat on the relatively undersized cherry tree like some sort of exorbitant, unseasonal and lavishly mechanised Christmas decoration. Our courgettes, in their abundance, were the size of fat arms, the beans like hundreds of arthritic fingers, and the tomatoes, though disappointingly leather-skinned, profuse. The garden also suffered from a very hot spell in July, which turned the lawn into coir matting. Now, in mid-September, it is coming back again, and the balmy Indian summer has tempted out some soft shoots that make it a bliss to walk on. Meanwhile, there are regular Newtonian thuds from under our largest apple tree as the unreachable cookers fall to earth like short-haul cold-green comets.

The summer turned up little that was new. The world of work was uncharacteristically consuming, with hardly a week without some grand project or other, mostly delivered with some languid success or other. The annual holiday, this year a misplaced fortnight in Brittany, was a learning experience. I, now 14, is a determined networker and socialite, known to the entire under-16 population of the semi-urban town that we inhabit. From the moment we set off for the 2 ½ hours drive to Dover, followed by ninety minutes on the ferry and an eight hour drive to Huelgoat, she pined. Her mobile phone had been emptied of its usefulness by mid-month (we fathers impose limits you see, much to our profligate daughters’ chagrin) and the house had no PC (“how cwap is that”, she opined), thereby robbing her of M-S-N-ery. The rain is another matter. The heavens broke as we broke and we spent the first week and a half indoors or under cover. By mid-week 2, the sun emerged and we mild-footed it to the south then north then south coast of Brittany for three consecutive days. I’s mood did improve – whether it was the sun or the relief at not being dragged off to look at sculptural adornments on a gothic façade, I’m not sure.

Three week gap between this and the last sentence and the holiday actually feels like it was OK. They’re a bit like wine or marmalade or Christmas puddings – the best bits out after a while and the less than satisfactory episodes fade into the background.

Now daylight is the remnant of each 24 hour spin as the winter gets nearer, Sunday roasts are back on the agenda and the prospect of a Saturday evening closing in is an idea to be welcomed rather than feared. There is a point in the Autumn when it all seems OK again – the dimmer switch being twiddled downward and the days when the garden goes stationary and what we cut away doesn’t race back in the space of a week. I moved the compost to its new place this weekend, moving the old decaying pile of logs and upsetting a few dozy frogs in the process. The spiders are at full fat now, having dined on Crane flies, which have been pathetically abundant and abundantly pathetic this year – stupid airborn prawns. Billie the cat has been having his fill as well.

Back to Tae Kwon Do tonight after a lay-off for a week. My ageing knee got a knock last week, but has more or less mended. We'll be going for our black tag exams in December and then our black belt exams next year – most likely October, but perhaps April. I’m determined to get there, even if have to hobble.

The office is settling down for the evening now, the rush and hum of the airconditioning more apparent than the voice of my closest neighbours who by now are the accountants down the end, worrying their calculators endlessly. What a life it must be to be constantly asking how much. The fluorescent lights and the apple green walls give this place a sense of anywhere and nowhere and with my senses now attuned to what happens next, Ill close this down, go and sweat and kick for an hour before settling back to look this over briefly and then plant it.

Goodbye to all that (as any fule kno)

Here's my boy, struggling to avoid the camera's gaze, as I have the privilege of dropping him off on the last day of his primary education.

"Not many people know that"

A quick bit of advice from Michael Caine:

If you click on any of the photos in this blog, it enlarges them so that you can see them in all their glory.

England's shot at redemption

Won't last for long, but it's 30 degrees today (Sunday) and set to build to 35 degrees by Wednesday. There are threats of stand pipes in the streets due to the drought conditions, the cat is panting and it's taking me 90 &%@x£" minutes to water the garden every day. Hallelujiah.

Basil, and it isn't Fawlty

Proof that England has been towed 1,000 miles south this summer. This grown outdoors in the back yard.

That summer feeling

Lyrics copyright Jonathan Richman

When there's things to do not because you gotta
When you run for love not because you oughta
When you trust your friends with no reason notta
The joy I've named shall not be tamed
And that summer feeling is gonna haunt you one day in your life
When the cool of the pond makes you drop down on it
When the smell of the lawn makes you flop down on it
When the teenage car gets the cop down on it
That time is here for one more year
And that summer feeling is gonna haunt you one day in your life
If you've forgotten what I'm naming
You're gonna long to reclaim it one day
Because that summer feeling is gonna haunt you one day in your life

And if you wait until your older
A sad resentment will smolder one day
And then that summer feeling is gonna haunt you
And that summer feeling's gonna taunt you
And then that summer feeling is gonna hurt you one day in your life

When even fourth grade starts looking good
Which you hated
And first grade's looking good too
Overrated
And you boys long for some little girl that you dated
Do you long for her or for the way you were?
That summer feeling is gonna haunt you the rest of your life

When the Oldsmobile has got the top down on it
When the catamaran has got the drop down on it
When the flat of the land has got the crop down on it
Some things look good before and some things never were
But that summer feeling is gonna haunt you one day in your life

Well when your friends are in town and they got time for you
When you and them are hanging around and they don't ignore you
When you say what you will
And they still adore you
If thats not appealing, its that summer feeling
That summer feeling is gonna haunt you one day in your life
Its gonna haunt you
Its gonna taunt you

You're gonna want this feeling inside one more time

Its gonna haunt you
Its gonna taunt you
You're gonna want this feeling inside one more time

When you're hangin around the park with the water fountain
And there's the little girl with the dirty ankles
But she's on the swings where all the dust is kickin up
And you remember the ankle locket
And the way she flirted with you
For all this time how come?
Well that summer feeling is gonna haunt you one day in your life

You'll throw away everything for it

When the playground that just was all dirt comes hauntin
And that little girl that called you a flirt
Memory comes tauntin
You pick these things apart they're not that appealin
You put them together and you'll get a certain feeling
That summer feeling is gonna haunt you one day in your life

Oh well, it's only a game, eh mum, dad?

1-0

Let the baking begin

The sun arrived this weekend. The mud wasteland at the rear of the garden has now become a baked and cracking plain and a magnet for bees who seem to have a thing for making subterranean hives in the most unhelpful of places (right beside the step on which I most like to sit. Billy, our cat, sees them as sport, and tries to catch them whilst in an aspect of bored repose in the shelter of the wheelbarrow.

Garden jobs this weekend (you know you’re interested) included keeping the young lawn from scorching, half excavating the circle that will be a small patio at the back near the greenhouse, transplanting a struggling clematis, putting some sage and Doone thyme in and getting some basil, chives and cornflower seeds on the go. Oh, and staring at the patch of soil where the sweet peas are planted and wondering why they aren’t coming up. I also replenished the slug traps (empty margarine containers, submerged like dug in swimming pools and filled with Morrison’s value bitter). Try it – I guarantee you an ugly mess the next day and perfectly protected young courgettes.

I went for the longest run I have done in probably 15 years today – all of 10 miles, from here to Redbourn, up past Batchwood golf course and then out into the fields, past what I think is the drive to Stanley Kubrick’s estate, past the weird clump of thirties houses with racing green doors, around by the failing gastro pub, fields of sheep, the watercress beds, down to the roundabout and then, urgh, back. It’s now 9.50pm and I’m feeling OK. Nearly dark outside – the longest day is approaching – and thunder clouds are looming.

Yesterday I had an MSN video conference with a dear old friend of mine, D, who lives in North Carolina. Great to see him and hear him after so long – largely unchanged. We last met up in NY about six or seven years ago. I’m looking forward to catching up in more detail now that we’ve established contact again.

P and I are watching Big Brother downstairs and J is now sawing logs. The kids have been on half term for a week and they’re back to school tomorrow. J’s last half term at primary school – amazing how the time is travelling.

The Green Man

Rain stopped play

So, rain has stopped play here for a few weeks, despite all the talk of droughts and hosepipe bans. I was told the other day that it would have to rain constantly for two years for the water table to reach an acceptable level, which, to look at the verdant sponge outside the window, seems totally implausible.

Scotland, we discovered last year, is made of water, so even if we had a fairly dry time down south, we could always wring out Scotland a bit and we’d be fine.

J and I watched the final episode of series two of Lost last night, entertaining programme about a group of people stuck on an island full of wierdos and monsters. A bit like a warmer version of Britain. We’re now in mourning because the series is off air until September.

Garden is coming along OK, under the influence of the natural sprinkler system. I was holding off planting the lawn at the back, fearing that the drought would hamper its growth. By Wednesday I was out in the deluge raking in the blood and bone and scattering the seed. Alan Titchmarsh says that it takes fourteen days for the first signs of green haze to float above the soil. With the amount of rain it’s getting, it should be fourteen hours.

World Cup fever is upon us, with a matter of weeks to go until England’s first game. Flags are flying from one car in seven, according to the straw poll I did the other day on the way to work. A faith healing nation is concentrating on Wayne Rooney’s foot. I was lucky enough to meet Jack Charlton last week – I hired him for the launch of a promotion in one of our stores in Oxford Street. He was telling me how much things have changed, how he used to have to clean his own boots, how the tongues of the shoes were so thick and well padded that there was no question of a player breaking a metatarsal – that nobody would have heard of them when his team won the World Cup in 1966. And today, it’s the de rigueur bone to break. Beckham’s done it, so has Owen.

P has just taken I to do some clothes shopping. I’m hoping that jeans will feature and that they’ll be of the sensible full-cut variety. I can’t really get in to this icecream cone look that seems to be popular these days – jeans a good two sizes too small, low cut, so that the upper arse oozes out like whipped icecream. Coupled with vogue for tattoos that spread just above the “builders’ cleavage” and it makes for a monstrous concoction.

J, I and me had our first “art day” yesterday, out back in the new shed. We made a green man, the stuff of legends, using what we could find in the garden to assemble him. The eyes I like especially – both I and J arranged groups of twigs and petals and then photographed them. Here they are:

Suburban textures: first in a series

The suburban '30s house, with its traditional render, has the same coating as a raw fish finger. Some might suggest that one begat t'other.

Note the spray-on moss

Sorry, if sorry is called for. It has been a while. The office has been all consuming, slowly chewing me and time for several weeks, and consequently sububman's opportunities to type (some would say stereo-type) a few words have been few and far.

Yet suddenly the mercury rises and the pigeons engage in unspeakable ribaldry on the guttering of the double-fronted semi opposite; the grocery delivery van brings higher quotas of airmiled fruits to the neighbours; the milkman exchanges his wolf family QVC fleece for a light-weave "tennis shirt" that exposes his veal calf arms. Yes, spring arrives in the suburbs.

And here's my first piece of springish handiwork - yes, it's crazy paving suburbman-style (my first ever) with a the stylish embellishment of fragments of willow pattern plate shards. Let it not be said that this suburbamn is lacking in finesse - oh no, here is a man whose aesthetic decisions are worthy of the most discerning of mid-week makeover shows.

Spring has sproinged

Evidence that spring has sprung in the suburbs. These are the flowers that redeem this place to me.

The hatch

Here’s the interior of the shed. Suburbman cognoscenti will be pleased to note the presence of the guitar on the sofa. The shed is draining the house of much of (but not all) its clutter.

Easter (and Spring arrives in the suburbs)

Here's the view from the back of the garden, looking towards the house. We've put a shed in (the orange building with the blue roof) and we're about to embark on a mammoth dig to put a patio in front of it.

Eleven, no longer elven

I sat looking at J, who turned 11 yesterday, over breakfast. There's something in his face suddenly that suggests that he's edging the boat away from Childhood. His eyes have a wider vocabulary, suddenly the jokes are wiser, and I'm starting to see the sketch of a man.

Suburban Homeboy

Tune of the month: "Suburban Homeboy" by The Sparks. Perfect for tapping away to - knits together the everyday with the musical - it's enough to make you want to stand up from your sugar-free macrobiotic muesli with soya milk in unison with the other 3 members of the household, each of you with a prop in hand (bag of bagels, eco friendly bleach, home made sword and cat respectively) and dance in synchronicity around the house. I recommend it to all suburbanites and it's a snip at 79p at iTunes.

Pick 'n Mix

Longer despatch to make up for lapsed time since the last one. Have just come out of what is traditionally the “most horriblest week of the year”, which means interim results and Christmas trading update, and which in turn means interminable meetings, endless debates about words (should we say "strong" or "solid"? How about "robust"?), last minute hair tearing about getting everything done and then a 4.15am start on the "big day", in to the London Stock Exchange and a series of grillings on TV with the chief exec (I sit sagely beside him with my advisor face on), followed by analyst briefing, press conference and a multitude of calls with journalists over the course of the afternoon. It can be quite a nice day in the way that a long run or march can be after the legs warm up, especially when I get into my banterish stride. And there’s a definite suburbman level thrill when the press the next day is good – and it was this year, with a couple of minor exceptions, which I excuse away. We did our first ever podcast this year and the usual round of BBC, Sky, CNN and CNBC. All in the sparkly bright colour enriched TV studio. Woolworths were also reporting numbers and the studio prop was a bowl of Pick ‘n Mix (or Pick ‘n Nicks as they call it in the trade – it’s where Woolworth reportedly haemorrhage profit). Quite a bit of it seems to have gone onto the waistline of the Woolies CEO.

Security at the London Stock Exchange, which nestles in the georgian parody that is Paternoster Square right next to St Paul’s, is tighter than an airport and they have a special sniffer scanner for all bags. Last year a colleague was refused admission because the sniffer didn’t like the bag she’d bought at a souk in Morocco.

The pre-dawn journey into town is alright, too, once I’m up and showered and there’s a bit of caffeine in the tank. On the drive to the station, I catch the Radio 4 theme, which is the point at which BBC Radio 4 switches from the overnight World Service broadcast to Radio 4 daytime service. It’s blatantly patriotic and I’ll forever associate it with sleepless nights when J was a baby and P and me would take turns of kipping with him because he refused to sleep in a cot. The R4 theme would be the point at which the agony of the night was behind and we’d be resigned to the prospect of the day ahead. It managed to inject some energy and verve into the morning and somehow make the world seem alright even though it is naff factor 8. You can hear it at this link: http://www.sterlingtimes.org/music_themes20.htm

I had flagged by the evening, and as it was a Wednesday we had taekwondo, which was pretty hard to get through and I had a complete mental block which had me standing there like a dead tree while everybody else was going through the endlessly rehearsed motions of patterns chon-ji, dan-gun, do-san, won-yo, yul-gok and ti-geh (violent ballet). To bed by 11, too wired to go any earlier, listened to LOSTCAST as I drifted off. I’ll come back to Lost later.

Thurs and Fri were reasonable. Thurs was mostly spent reviewing the press, doing further follow up calls, unpicking a few problems and the rest of it.

On Fri I went into town mid-morning to meet a journo friend, T, for lunch at a Sushi restaurant in Wardour Street – one of the ones with endless carousel. At one point, something got stuck on the treadmill and a couple of dozen plates of raw tuna and gluggy rice ended up on the floor. T has worked as a foreign correspondent for a major news agency and, coincidentally, ran the Canberra desk for some years.

Afterwards drifted around town ("store visits") and made some calls, some with the Sundays and the trades following up on the Wednesday news (I killed the CRT television this week, which was the main news as the week wore on). Then home for a catch up with P, I and J and a much-deserved drink.

Saturday now and the rhythm returns. Out in the garden turfing what feels like an acre down the left hand side. The soil is so full of water that each patch I move weighs a ton. It’s not a great job, but up here from my study if I squint it looks OK and I’m about halfway through now that the sun, at 4.15 or so, has popped below the horizon and I’ve packed up for the day.

Now how uninspired is all that? I must be more tired than I thought. Still, a diary is a diary, and quality control shouldn’t interfere with the record.

A week or so ago…

Spoke to my dad via MSN this afternoon, using the video chat function. Pictures are better than the ones we used to get from Skylab, and somewhat reminiscent. I expect to see apples or drops of water floating into view, or somebody in the background wafting by. Technological marvel – 12,000 miles away and real-time video and audio. Whatever next?

Quiet little weekend here in the burbs. I took J for a swim yesterday afternoon (freezing day, so it all felt a bit Nordic sauna) while P and I went to see Edward Scissorhands at Sadler’s Wells (directed by the wunderkind choreographer whose name escapes me). Settled down to a log fire and celebrity Big Brother when a knock comes on the door. Him opposite asking us where we are. Slight cock-up in invitation and we’re due there, we suppose, for drinks. We thought it was Sunday. We don’t feel like it, but it seems neighbourly. They’re a period piece – locked in the 1970s – sort of Tom, Barbara, Jerry and Margot all in two bodies.

Quick third-class spruce up and we wander across (kids thrilled at prospect of clandestine MSN, phone calls, DVDs, illicit tele..), already a bit bladdered after a bottle of wine and full to the brim after chicken casserole. Nevertheless, we have some seasonal goodwill left and conspire to stay for an hour or so before exiting stage left.

Apparently unpromising houseguests when we enter (librarian haircuts, a few beards) and the air is curiously heavy and potatoey. Can’t even manage the olive I’m offered almost immediately. Why rush the snacks?, I think. Oddly formal set up – everyone sitting round, dentist waiting room style. Tom/Jerry appears avec apron. Do come through. Dawns on us that it’s a dinner.

Get sat between two nice enough guests – comprehensively briefed by one on Angola, where her son is doing charity work (I was lucky enough to have scanned an article in the Economist about “Dutch disease”, which afflicts oil-based economies - basic idea is that poor economies that find oil are disadvantaged because their currencies strengthen against the dollar and weaken their capacity to trade in any other commodities, so the rich get richer and the poor get a lot poorer). The other side was unintelligible – low voice and Scottish accent, but with a legible face, so after a few more wines I was able to just let her go into monologue and echo her smiles and grimaces without having even a faint clue what she was talking about. There’s an art to dealing with those awkward moments when she asks a question, and I pulled it off.

Played with a few runner beans and tomatoes for my “meal” and too much wine.

Managed to extract ourselves at around 1am, returning to the 21st Century, feeling just puzzled and a tad annoyed.

Grindstone Cowboy

So back to the Hamster wheel that is my little suburban life. The office, now two thirds populated after the several hundred of us were tipped out by the oil blast on the industrial estate, is like a large version of one of those snow globes, with everybody displaced, popping up in unexpected cubicles. Loads of meerkatting going on.

We’re on the fourth floor and I’m a bit amazed at how breathless people are getting as they struggle to get up to even the second floor. The lifts are out and should be for the next 10 weeks, thereby making a modest contribution to the fulfilment of some resolutions.

From the top floor you get a good view across to the scene of the blast and there lots of once impressive warehouses that look more like squashed or torn tins.

It’s sort of nice to have a desk again. Pianists are musical clerks or maybe clerks are tuneless pianists – take your pick. The month has filled up with this and that – the car is going belly up, so I need to drop J at school and take the car with my bike in the back to the menders, cycle home, pick up the other car, drive to work, come back via J’s school, collect him, drop the car at home, cycle back to the menders, drive back to work and then come home. Not the usual rigmarole, but I have taken charge of car maintenance this year for the first time. It’s going to be minus 2 tonight, so by the time I have cycled home, I will have a face like a board.

Other highlights to come: I have the dentist on Friday the 13th and it is some time since I have been. I have the business equivalent of the UN on Monday as I welcome my European colleagues to the UK for a two day conference. We have annual results the week after. P’s birthday is at the end of the month. We have an Epiphany Piph-up to go to on Sunday. It’s just go, go, go.

Celebrity Big Brother starts tonight and there’s a strong rumour that George Galloway is a contestant – compelling prospect of Gorgeous George gizzarding the others with his tongue.

Happy new year, by the way. We had a very nice new year. P’s oldest friend J came up from Devon with her new husband J (sorry, too many Js) and her boys, C and R. J (my son J) was mesmerised by the trampolining prowess of C. I cooked three gallons of curry and we started to imbibe around 5.30. Made it the whole way – not bad for a codger like me. Pacing myself these days.

Didn’t get the guitar out until 10.30, by which time it was too late, the hands weren’t operating and the kids (16, 13, 13 and 10 respectively) gave me looks of withering incredulity which made my voice go all tense and tight and put paid to any prospect of me trying out my new Bob Dylan impression replete with harmonica with any measure of success. Consider yourself spared my Glen Campbell / Jimmy Webb medley.

I have found Bob Dylan this year. For years I have failed to graft, despite recommendations that stretch back as far as old friend R in Canberra, but this year I have succumbed, largely due to a surfeit of alternatives on holiday in Scotland, the Scorsese film and (P’s stocking filler) Don’t Look Back. I now think he shows promise. Musical find of the year for me was Antony and the Johnsons. Sadly I don’t have the vocal range, but I do, increasingly, have the figure.