Found in a Notebook #3

The sun rises. Then it sets. Rises and sets. Rises and sets. All oin all, not a lot changes. Sun rises. Sets. Comes back for more. Brave old sun, eh?

In our midst, there are those for whom the endless risng and setting are but commas in another story - one of persistence, growth, betterment and hope. There are those whose path never crosses ours - then again, there are those who path must corss those who live more, for one reason or another.

Quite how these 'people' are remains a mystery, and is in itself surrounded by heresay, but exist they do, move they must, and arrive they will, in our lives or just outside them.Lots of poeple thing they've seen them, be they suddenly 'brilliant' friends or strangers you've met  on a train who have suddenly said something cutting or pertinent without knowing the full you - for some reason they've picked something hidden out of your personality that - on at least some sort of basic level - makes sense. Not to say that these pepel are necessarily magical or in posession of guidance from a higher power, but they are, in a wierdly elemental way, ebetter than us and seem to have us sussed. The sun rises, sets, rises and sets. On it goes.

I met one of these people once. It was a hot day, the kind of weather that gets on the news. My train journey was taking longer than usual, but the denouement  of The Catcher in the Rye' was taking my mind off the worst of it. After a while, I realised that the  guy opposite me - who must have been eighty, giben his shjock of white hair, receding gently at the temples, the quality of the briefcase he was carrying and the depth of the lines on his face - was checking out hte well-thumbed copy I was reading. I thought nothing of this for a good twenty minutes or so,  as after all, it's a very popular book. Holden's brush with the hoker with just playing out when a soft, discernably Australian lilt broke my concentration:

"That's a fabulous book - but you'll know that by now."

The moment the first syllable left his lips, I was utterly stunned. Such warmth, directness and, behind it all, insight in the tone and the calm confidence of the way he spoke. It was almost as if he was speaking directly to my subconscious. A deeply odd feeling, and not one I'd felt before.

"It's fabulous", I stammered, trying to make sense of the piercing blue eyes that now fixed on mind from the other side of the pile of dead coffee cups and magazines on the small table that separated us. "I have to say, it's not my favourite, but I can understand its value, I suppose."

The next senence nearly knocked me off my chair:

"If you understood anything about what real travel was, my man, you'd appreciate little fairy tales like that one all the more."

"What do you mean?" Still unnerved by those blue eyes, beautiful in their own way, but empty, too.

"That book's changed many a life, son. You'd do well to understand it - brilliant prose often reveals certain things to all of us."

I was more than a little stunned by this. I've loved the Catcher since my teens, for one reason and another, but never really given it much thought. Interested by the old duffer's take on it, I persisted:

"What do you mean?" Quite blunt. Waiting.

"It's yours," he continued, warming to his theme. "That and every book you've ever read will give you the story you've been looking for."

A strange kind of silence broke over the carriage.

"I don't really understand", I said.

"It's yours to find, young man. Understanding is not something I care about or can help you with. Belief, on the other hand, is a different matter.  Anyway, this next one's my stop, so I'd better be off. I trust you'll have a good day, and a good life, full of good moments and interesting interludes such as this one. And if you're ever in Australia, I recommend you visit the Gold Coast. There's some great places to see there, if ever you find yourself back there."

"Thanks, I'll bear that in mind", I said, wondering what the old man was on at this point, but oddly transfixed nonetheless.

As he left the train, and my journey continued, I found it increasingly difficult to forget the face, the voice and the strange manner of the man who had introduced himself. As the train finally pulled into my stop and I collected my things, I realised he'd left an old, leather-bound volume behind. Roughly the size of a bible and clearly very old, it was locked shut at the spine in the style of a diary or notebook, and bore the monogram 'PL' on the front cover in small, exquisite script. I looked at the book for a couple of seconds, and put it in my case without clearly understanding why. Perhaps I could trace the man and return it to him?

Makes you think, dunnit

Some of these are just extraordinary.

London Pubs: A Diatribe

I just posted this to a thread about pubs on the Guardian, because I’ve had a long day and fancy shouting at something. I feel better, and some of this is quite funny, I think:

I live in London, (not by choice - long story) and I love pubs. Love them.
London has some fabulous ones, but most of them are either dull or complete rubbish. It's not the price of beer - that's going up steadily in most parts of the UK since I've been drinking it. The thing that ruins pubs for me is the profound lack of space in them.

The lack of space in London pubs can render even the quaintest, most interesting or most historic venue a nightmare. I have had a long day. I want a pint, and a whinge, then another and a laugh, then another and some tunes, then I'll go home. It's not much to ask. Central London's pubs are, however, literally awash with half-dayers by about 3pm, so by the time I arrive at 6-ish, I have to settle for a handheld pint of warm lager stood by the gents, because the place is already rammed. Cheers!

The problem extends outside of modern boozers, too - now that we're all metrosexual, sophisticated arrivistes with complex tastes, teased hair and a burgeoning interest in 'craft' ale and 'artisan' this, that and the other, we can't get enough of al fresco drinking. Even before you get into the place, the outside of a pub is covered in gangly aesthetes braying about themselves from early afternoon onwards. Farringdon, I'm looking at you here.

In a damning indictment of this, I saw a bunch of blokes outside a crowded pub the other day. They appeared to be in their mid-Twenties, and were sharing a portion of chips, drinking beer and smoking. Nothing amiss, really, except for the fact that the pub of choice was so oversubscribed, they were balancing their pints, chips, fags etc on the top of an overflowing bin. Because there was nowhere else to put anything. Because of everywhere being crowded. Everywhere. All of the time.

How can balancing your shit on a bin while drinking in the gutter for £4.50 a pint be deemed acceptable? What can we do to stop this?

Full ego-mirror here.

Oops, sorry

Didn’t have time to write for the last few days. You’ve not missed a massive amount. The Royal Mail shares I was seconds from buying at £750 are now worth £1100, but I’m not going to cry into my keyboard over it – might play along the next time a decent opportunity comes along, but I actually find the whole IPO thing a bit risky and distasteful. Free money, however, I’ve never had a problem with.

You may have noticed that the second epic essay in the 50/5000 series is a little on the tardy side – again, this is down not necessarily to a lack of time, but more likely a lack of planning and scheduling prowess on my part. I’ve set aside Thursday night to knock this off – T has to go to Bristol for work on Friday so is quite rightly staying at her mum’s over the weekend. Let’s see just how much creative-type stuff I can get through while I’ve got no distractions, eh?

Important music-geekery news! I’ve FINALLY managed to isolate the problem with Logic around monitoring of output /and/ recorded tracks, and can now record multiple tracks of guitar/vox/whatever over previous ones, studio style. This paves the way for ridiculously precise, complex and layered guitar pieces, similar to the ones I’ve had wandering around my head for the last few months. Quite how they’ll fare on the vocals front is another matter entirely, but with enough scotch and an empty house, I may even give it a whirl.

Work is fine – I have a few case study visits to do end of this week/beginning of next, which will see me wandering distractedly around post offices and a big hole in the ground they call Crossrail. Could theoretically prove interesting I suppose. Things on the escape front are looking more promising, with a contractor of ours talking quite seriously about offering me a job in Bristol/London/home-based (and fully commutable from Plymouth). It would be a hike in salary from here, but I’m ready for that. Inertia doesn’t suit me, frankly.

On that subject, I have a bunch of shit to organise, so had better skidaddle. England-based flutters are placed for tonight (four easy ones, a total of £4, nice and easy). I also have another small flutter linked to the success of the first one but including Bayern Munich’s walk-in-the-park in the Champions’ League the following week for another £10

Cat Cafe: Lunacy Beckons

This is now a thing: http://now-here-this.timeout.com/2013/09/10/were-so-cat-sited-the-location-of-the-cat-cafe-is-revealed/

I would love to go, and inevitably, probably will end up going. I was about to protest the idiocy of such an escapade, but resistance is futile. Instead of saying ‘I told you so’, I’m just going to articulate my concerns in the silent void of the internet.  

Assumptions: Lots of girls read TimeOut, and want cats, but can’t have them because London is shit and their jobs take too long.  Girls also like coffee, and the strange mix of companionship, soft fur and lack of responsibility that comes from playing with a friend’s pet, perhaps over a coffee at their house, then going home.

Some clever ladies have come up with a Cat Cafe, having seen a Cat Cafe in Japan. Geniuses, those two. What inventive people they are.

Timeout has mentioned this to its largely female and pet-affection-starved readership, and some people very close to me would like to visit said establishment. I am felt compelled to issue the following:

TIMEOUT OVER-EXPOSURE CAVEAT: Now that everybody knows where it is, and the weather’s foul, it will be:

FULL of people getting in the way and not finding anywhere to sit, and

FULL of people standing near people who are sat near cats

It may even be so over-exposed that the beleaguered owners have to give those intending to sit cat-adjacent a time-sensitive ticket, reducing the crush between the Cat-Approach Area and the cramped Non-Cat Area of the Cat Cafe. This may even lead to the existence of a Cat Queue.

Such a crush will be encouraged by the owners, as it will allow them to maximise revenue generation and ‘buzz’ around the Cat Cafe, so I expect the Non-Cat Area to be extra-narrow, hot, loud and uncomfortable, and by design, forcing us into the apparent comfort offered by the Cat Approach Area.

Despite all this, we should go. Could be a laugh, and who doesn’t like cats?

Found in a Notebook #2

There’s another snippet of something here, too – this one lurks between notes for meetings in my work book, and looks like it was hammered out on a train, given the state of my handwriting. Brevity abounds, if that’s possible.

The ground beneath Sally’s feet was warm – baking powder-fine dust rubbed between her toes, her sandals keeping the worst of the stones on the verge from bothering her. Another car passed at speed, whipping her Sunday dress as it went. She scarcely noticed, starin instead at the small, dull metal disc in her hand. Not long now, she thought.

The knapsack’s dumb weight was just beginning to bother her when the needle started twitching, then speeding.

It spiked, unequivocal. Into the field on her left, it said. On she went.  Sally instinctively checked the road for cars, just as Miss Foster had taught her and the rest of the class back at St Beatrice’s since she could remember. She turned. The needle nodded in approval. Sally started at it, willing it to talk or otherwise enlighten her. The needle bobbed sarcastically, wavering again, then reiterating its latest instruction. Sally complied, weary.

On entering the field, with cicadas keeping time for the high noon sun as always, Sally passed an old elm tree that had seen many days better than this one. She reached into the only pocket on her dress for the last piece of paper she owned, and read it to herself yet again – just as she had every day at this time, since finding it in the street four days hence. The calm, old-time handwriting was already familiar. The foolscap old and classy, just starting to yellow. It said:

And then it ends, fucksake! This is so much better. Definitely something in that. Don’t remember writing it, but so many questions. Who is Sally? Where are we? What’s with the needle? Will Philip Pullman mind if I’ve ripped off the Golden Compass?

There is something in this, somewhere. Needle in a fucking haystack it may be, but at least there are traces of haystack.

Found In A Notebook

Found this in a workbook at the bottom of my bag. One can only imagine what the hen party got up to next.

The day ended much as it had begun, with a rush of bags, coats, passes, beeps and doors, people and half-shouts, “excuse mes” and platform alterations. Finally, Morton Glennister and his assorted baggage – a rucksack containing dirty washing and a small laptop bag he picked at of the corners of when he was waiting on platforms, and contain at least a pound of assorted stationary, tobacco and other detritus sure to clog the sockets of his iphone and ruin anytyhng that had the misfortune to find itself trapped in its murky depths.

Slumping into the nearest empty table seat, Mort – 28, nondescript brown hair, browner eyes – exhaled and gazed out of the window for a few seconds, and with a little affirmative nod, reached into the smaller of the two bags, fishing out a typically unkempt copy of JD Salinger’s overrated student stable The Catcher in the Rye. Mort had several hours of rain-based monotony to blot out before his train eventually limped into the small provincial station that was close enough to his parent’s modest cottage for you to smell dinner from the platform if the evening breeze was so minded.

Engrossed in Holdens brush with the law after the business with the hooker, Mort ignoed the landscape’s judder past his window, featuring increasingly decrepit stations. The cast of faces and pasts around him shifted, too. He did look up and sigh outwardly when the hen party from Tredegar at the end of his carriage, emboldened by pints of Asti...

And then it tails off. You can almost smell the Berkeley menthols they’ve been cadging in the train’s disabled loo-cupboard, can’t you?

This is actually a draft of a draft of the real-life story of when a strange man on a train appeared to either (a) be a version of me from the future or (b) be a relative of mine from a different universe. Really perceptive old guy, seemed to know me really well, had a very strange, oddly timeless look in his old blue eyes. I like to think of him as a time-traveller. In fact, The Book is based on there being a load of people like him among us, if you must know. Quite how it will differ from all of the other time-travel books in the world is beyond me at present. Then again, the main reason it’ll differ from the other time-travel books is that I’ll have written it. I’m reading some Gael Garcia Marquez to get my head around this Magical Realism thing and hopefully some of his beautiful imagery and wordplay will rub off.

There are more snippets of stories I found in notebooks, too. Maybe I should put them all here, and then interlink them in some way.

Ramping up/music writing

The Work has got far more extensive and fast-paced since taking the New Job, it seems. I have to say I initially enjoyed the old-school buzz of /having to/ produce words on an almost hourly basis. In truth, it’s not a job I’ve had to do full time before. In the past, I always thought of myself as a frustrated writer, cruelly run off the road of full-time scribbling and labouring on the hard shoulder reserved only for put-upon subs. Tortured metaphors aside, it’s all getting a little bit frantico. Still, better that than the underemployed mess I have been in past lives eh?

 

Trouble is, now that I’m the Internatonal Go-To-Man for data about this company, I’m finding it hard to find the time to write the case studies and other shit everyone else is so keen to nick and stick in their bids. I’m also really easy to pick on if the bundle of stuff we have already is in any way not up to snuff. But hey, I’m workin’ on it, dammit.

 

Quite excited about seeing The Death of Pop – Thom and Angus’ new noisy adventure, upstairs at the Garage tomorrow. I might even interview them, stick the result here and then sell it to Music Radar, Line of Best Fit, the Quietus or something. We’ll see...

 

Having something on the Quietus would be awesome, but they’re weapons-grade pretentious arseholes, so I doubt it’ll get that far. There might be a nice piece about the differing fortunes of Joe (who will be there in support/van-driving capacities) and Thom. Family Fortunes: A Story About Committment, I could call it...

Brighton/weddings/winnings

So we went to Brighton on Saturday, the events of which basically nixed my lofty ‘write-every-day’ ambitions. Thankfully some new ideas around worlds-within-worlds have started to bob to the surface in the absence of the thousand or so words I should have produced, like long-forgotten corpses on a moonlit lake. Purple simile use aside, Brighton was as predicted – inherently smug, full of crap vintage shops, but not short of a beer, so all was well. Chloe turned up, we bought her dinner in a US diner, we sent her home, the roof of her hotel room collapsed. The usual.

Yes, the roof of her hotel room had collapsed while she was out for dinner! Typically for someone who has only ever taken the cheapest available route to anything, our Chlo had needlessly placed herself in danger by paying under £30 for a night’s accommodation in a room barely wider than the bed at its end, with ‘bathroom on the second floor, showers on the third’, apparently. Jesus. Who does this in 2013, I hear you cry? Even as a witless borderline alcoholic idiot, I would probably have factored the cost of a decent room into the photography-course bottom-line before booking it. She lives in Newport, so three hours’ drive across the country (away from the outright ugliness of Wales, which isn’t worth photographing, obviously) resulted in a near-death experience. Fuck that.

Anyway, all was well – she hesitantly got a refund, and will be billing the OAP Chinese (!) people in charge of the hotel for ‘the cost of cleaning her camera’, in a vibrant seizure of her inalienable rights as a consumer, and not in a limp and half-arsed way, of course. Personally, I’d have been down the road in the Premier Inn for another £50 anyway, or at least gone there, explained the situation and then wrestled compensation from the fuckers on my return. To take being moved to another room in the same dilapidated shithole is to infer that it’s inconvenient, not outright dangerous. I hope she grows a pair as a result of this, I really do. It would be about time.

I may not have mentioned the nuptials of Andy and Sasha on here before now – a brilliant afternoon/evening in Bath, catching up with all of the Future gang (or those that are left, anyway). I’ll do a full post on the state of the old Alma Mater in due course. Suffice to say I seem to have put a bizarre, 7-fold spread on Barcelona, Real, Bayern, Chelsea and all kinds of other stuff, which all came in, meaning I’m into three figures off an initial stake of £5, in two months! £108.11! Who says gambling’s for fools (besides Lemmy)? This means that the round of international matches due tomorrow – which contains some seriously lopsided affairs such as Spain vs. Belarus – could be another bonanza.

A Future Beckons

This, from the Guardian’s eloquent, passionate and positive review of GTA V Online, is a two-paragraph précis of what I want from an online, open-world game:

“What the game definitely realises though, is the chaotic thrill of life in an urban sprawl entirely populated by gun-toting ne'er-do-wells. You can be cruising the streets looking for a convenience store to turn over (sorry mum) when in a flash, two other players in roaring muscle cars scorch past pursued by half the LSPD. At other times, there are weird moments of unspoken camaraderie – like Journey re-imagined by a 14-year-old action movie fanatic with attention deficit issues.

On Sunday night my female character was waiting at an ATM to cash in about seven grand's worth of stolen car funds; when I turned round there was a male player character waiting for me beside a motorbike – he sounded the horn and waited some more. So I got on. We spent the next half-hour riding around the city and ridiculous speedlike Tom Cruise and Kelly McGillis in Top Gun, zipping in and out of the traffic as the giant sun sunk behind the skyscrapers. Then some other player took a shot at us as we passed. We followed him to a tattoo parlour, where he got out of his car and walked in for some new ink. My new friend calmly stopped, got off his bike, pulled out a can of gasoline and poured it all over the car. He then poured a line all the way up to the door of the tattoo parlour. When the guy came out, my pal ignited the line and rode off; I looked back to see our victim attempting to get into his vehicle as it exploded. We just kept riding. ”

Sure, the servers are broken, and people are, in the words of John Connor, doing a whole lot of ‘running around in helicopters, learning how to blow stuff up’. But imagine a world beyond that. In a future world where servers don’t lag, and rank idiocy/mindless violence is an option, but not a massively profitable one, lots and lots of players will go straight and therefore coexist in a – largely – peaceful ‘online economy’ of new friendships, businesses and busty avatars. That’s what I want.

Unfortunately, this in turn will be fed by real-world cash in the form of seamless integration with our real-world bank accounts, and social interaction between NPCs and the real world will be arbitrated through Facebook or whatever follows it.

The immersiveness, the dreamlike omnipotence, the endless opportunity for - albeit virtual – self-expression will be utterly compelling for a while. Film, as a medium, is fucked once this goes properly mainstream, and massive, immersive adventures are mainstream enough to be downloaded in three seconds and enjoyed by your parents. Film is something you watch. This – whatever this is – is something you do, with friends, strangers, whatever. This therefore wins, long-term.

It is becoming an industry and a lifestyle all its own. This game (and others like it, let’s be honest) is a stepping stone on that road. How thrilling it could be. I don’t want to be living my life vicariously through a screen full of made-up people at any point in my future, but this stage, where it’s literally somewhere else to go, and virtual tourism is a real thing, is fascinating.

Fake nostalgia/pebbles

What’s it called when you’re nostalgic for a period of time or a sequence of events that never were? When you hanker to revisit a set of emotions and situations that you know, in reality, that you never had? I find myself periodically – particularly on Friday afternoons when all I’ve got to do is knock out case studies – experiencing this in regard to my first job.

Working at Paragon, for the 20 months it lasted, was a bit mental. My sister died, I fell in love, I fell out of love, I got very sad, I started a life-long distrust of senior managers, I began to understand the difference between hard work and dossing about, and defiantly backed the latter as a career principle.

It was so volatile, seat-of-the-pants and emotional that I effectively left in a huff (as discussed elsewhere on this blog). And yet, and yet, I find myself wondering how Nicky, Nerys, Lisa, Chandra, Martin, Andy H, Karen and Russell are – where they’re at and what they’re doing, like we’re in some way still friends. In some cases, i wasn’t even great friends with some of the names in that list, but that just serves to mystify even more. Why should I still care? It was very formative I suppose. In truth, true friendship survives when both parties involved want it to in equal measure. None of those people have spoken to me in anger since Ieft in 2002/3 – jeez – but here I am, absent-mindedly googling them. I ran across this: http://magazinesfromthepast.wikia.com/wiki/Special:Search?search=kimber&fulltext=Search&ns0=1&ns14=1#

...which is about my first boss, from some sort of half-arsed archive of old magazines I worked on back when I was funner. How things have changed. I miss those guys, dammit. I think. Some of them. Maybe.

Off to the home of raw-sewage enthusiasts, overbearing vegans and renowned homosexuals tomorrow – sunny Brighton beckons. I’ve always found Brightonians to be terribly interested in telling you how amazing Brighton is, despite it being a slightly naffer version of Bournemouth with a shingle bank where the beach should be, galloping heroin addiction rates and about 2000% more fucked Cockneys than my erstwhile stomping-ground. It does, however, have a lot of well-appointed places to get riotiously hammered in before weaving one’s way back to the comparative familiarity of Oyster cards and silent, faintly sinister nightbuses, which is why we’re going.

I may blog from there in accordance with my stated aim of doing this every day for a month, but you never know, I might get my 4s pinched by a corn-fed seagull the size of a Dachshund. You never know.

Weddings, trips, football, gambling

The Wedding was at the top of our to-chat-about list last night. It’s been bubbling away at the back of our heads for the last two years, obviously, but living in London has kind of stymied/slowed decision-making. Knowing that we’re certainly leaving next year has galvanised our thinking somewhat and we’re close to a theme for the day. The prospective costs are a bit of an issue, but there are ways around these. I think once the end of the year comes around we’ll be in a good place to book venues, decide on decor etc etc. I don’t want anything too fancy, as we’re not really fancy people, and our friends and family have to love it, so it’s not going to be all about DJs and fireworks. Something cool in the West Country – where we met and fell in love, after all – seems the most sensible option.

On the whole, Autumn next year seems to be the best time, giving us enough of a window to put something together that ticks all of the above boxes and gets everybody who needs to be involved on the same page. I can’t wait to put some concrete in the foundations of this idea, which has been mere sketches for so long.

A quiet evening last night, after accidental after-work beers the night before. Did some writing (‘Apple’ is proving a lot more straightforward to knock out than ‘Age’ ever was, and hopefully won’t contain quite as much self-reverential nonsense). I think it’s a good discipline to aim for getting one of these things done a week, and the longer I spend writing something – anything – on a daily basis here, the more likely that is.

I emerged from steering an imaginary Arsenal side to European glory on PES last night to find Tam’s character in GTA in the grip of a post-Alien-induction acid trip, complete with phasing visuals, sitar’n’bongo backing music and all kinds of analogue-delayed vocals, as he fell serenely to earth. I’ll post some images of it here in due course, but suffice it to say it is easily the most out-there visual I’ve seen in any media – TV, film, whatever – in a very long time. 

Rockstar could be accused of shark-jumping at this point, as it feels that they’ve run out of better ideas and have opted for the fantastical, but it raises an interesting potential direction for future games on this model. Open-world games such as GTA seem to succeed because they represent a skewed or dreamlike version of the real world, while unapologetically ‘fantastical’ sandbox games revel in their unreality. Truly combining the two has probably been done – apologies, I’m no student of videogame history – but the idea that there’s another world ‘behind’ ours, in the style of Stephen King and Peter Straub’s book The Talisman – is compelling. It’s one of the ideas I’m toying with for my magnum opus. I wonder what a combination of Oblivion and GTA would be like, for example?

Before witnessing Rockstar’s latest fever-dream first hand, I’d been listening to a nightmare of sorts, as Manchester City were taken apart by a Bayern Munich side who are steadily usurping Barcelona as European football’s pre-eminent force. I only listened to the increasingly fatalistic 5 Live coverage, but from what Alan Green and co were saying, combined with the Guardian’s reaction this morning (http://www.theguardian.com/football/2013/oct/02/manchester-city-bayern-munich-champions-league) it was brutal out there. Their strikerless, endlessly shifting dominance of midfield and exploitation of space will probably even have Neymar and co shitting it a little bit. Even so, I had a good day at the office, with Real Madrid and PSG both winning at a canter. My latest foray into the world of high-stakes gambling reads thus, predicted winners in bold:

Wednesday 3 Oct

PSG v Benfica - won

Real Madrid v FC Copenhagen – won

Saturday 5 Oct

Liverpool v Crystal Palace

Levante v Real Madrid

Barcelona v Valladolid

Sunday 6 Oct

Tottenham v West Ham

Norwich v Chelsea

As you can see, there are relatively few risks here. I can’t say I trust Liverpool 100% to get a result, but Palace were so pisspoor against Southampton that I had to have a go. Real away at Levante might also come unstuck, but I doubt it given the form they’re in. Tottenham should be pretty safe against West Ham at home, and I assume that Chelsea will be able to overcome Norwich, even though the Canaries are tough to beat at Carrow Road. Sensible bets all, though, and if they all come in, that’s £50 on a fiver, right there. Two down, six to go. I’ll let you know.

On the strength of last night’s schooling of Man City, I may have to add Bayern to my ‘stable’ of regular bets, to (qv. Barcelona, Real Madrid, Chelsea) and remove Man United, who are getting a little better each week, but have clearly lost a lot of their potency and ‘fear-factor’ since Lord Ferg retired to the golf course.  

Housekeeping

Pretty uneventful day, really. I did some general thinking around what it might cost for us to buy a house (the price of surveys, legal shit etc etc). Turns out it’s between six and ten bigguns, which is a little more than I’d anticipated, but not that far away. The general feeling seems to be heading more towards renting somewhere lovely outside London for 12 months and then buying, enabling us to stack up a proper fund and not scrape every last penny out of the kitty before moving. Sensible, relaxed, no hurry. We really don’t need to rush.

Following on from my piece earlier in the week (Age, above) it dawned on me yesterday that October 1 was my grandmother’s 96^th birthday. Ninety fucking six. Sadly what with everything else, I forgot to send a card, and I can only assume no-one else will have done. This leaves me conflicted because she’s not in a position to worry about it, but I hope that when I’m that age nobody forgets. In many ways I’m glad her condition precludes her from thinking about endless empty days, loneliness and memory in same way I was forced to when I realised my error. She is effectively the last of the clan. I’m sorry, Grandma.

In other news:

There are interesting alternatives to the job I’m currently doing in the ether, and I’m wondering whether to jump, as ever. Really great, but for the brave only, I think. How brave am I, though?

I have written over 10,000 words since changing roles one month ago – roughly a half-and-half split between paid words and free words. This is unprecedented and probably a unanimously good thing. I’m certainly taking some pleasure in seeing them pile up on here, if nothing else. For the first time in my adult life, I actually /want/ to write. Distracted quite a lot by work and various other things, but still finding the time to jot something down here every day. I’m also inspired by Colin Greenwood’s diary around the increasingly fraught sessions for Kid A – a fascinating insight into the inner workings of the best rock band of their generation, by their bass player. How can I not be interested in that sort of thing.

I’m also pretty close to choosing another tattoo (lower right arm sleeve, since you ask). I’m posting this from work email, so no image just yet, but it’s pretty cool and worth sharing so I’ll ping it up here when I get the chance.

Generally positive, we continue.

Creating and waiting

So, I just read a piece on the Grauniad about how creative people are often at their most productive – creatively speaking at least – when they’re away from their chosen outlet, which I find really interesting, if only because I’ve forced myself to write something every day here for the foreseeable future. The main thrust of the story seems to be that (I’m paraphrasing) creative energies are stored up in rather the same way that KERS works – while the brakes are on, the ability to accelerate is increased.

In other words, you get your best ideas when you’re not trying to have your best ideas – or indeed any ideas whatsoever. It’s a theory that won’t surprise musicians (McCartney regularly opines that he ‘dreamt’ Yesterday, and one of the few evenings in 1965 that saw Keith Richards fall asleep was interrupted when the riff for Satisfaction crashed, unannounced and unbidden, into his beleaguered frontal lobes).

I’ve experienced similar things when playing around with the music I occasionally create as a hobby – I’ll be tinkering around with something, trying to make it work in a way that’s in some way different or better than the stuff I’ve made previously, and nothing gives. No great leap forward is forthcoming, and in fact, more often than not, incremental, dispiriting hops backwards are more likely. If, however, I load up a bank of samples and progress into a new Logic project window as fast as I possibly can, the results are often more vibrant, more interesting and better to listen to.

Some of the best tunes I’ve ever made were hammered out in a couple of hours, and to be honest, I’ve never really developed anything from 6/10 – more work needed to 9/10 – ready to be pressed, by worrying about the whys and wherefores of individual signal fades or the position of the odd, errant snare. Barrelling into a new project works wonders, and at its best, the fuel for it – a half-formed idea for a blogpost or a song or whatever, is insanely fleeting, but creates longer-term, more substantial results, almost like the initial spark and its resulting bonfire.

In the case of this blog, I reckon that something concrete and manuscript-shaped could definitely come out of it. There’s the larger 50/5000 project, which I’ve promised myself I’ll finish, and is already one post strong (Yay!). Any undertaking that forces me to knock out a quarter of a million words by the end of the year has to be a good thing. 245,000 to go, and I think I’ll get there. It’s making me want to write, and in the last two weeks, I’ve created over 10,000 words, which is a PB all over the place. Intriguingly, it seems that the more I force myself to write, the more I’ll write, and the more I’ll like it. Just have to see how it goes.

On the subject of improvisation, creativity and weird noises, chief NYC blipster OneOhTrix Point Never’s new album R Plus 7 is shuffling apologetically onto my iPhone as I write this. I’ll do a bigger piece on OPN in due course (perhaps as part of a Musicians I’ve Met With Weak Handshakes feature?). Really looking forward to hearing it thanks to the Quietus’ review.

Age

I have never felt ‘old’. As a child, I was intrinsically aware of my own dumb childishness; youth and a profound lack of knowledge was just obvious, a part of the furniture no less surprising than the fact that the sky is blue in summer, or that grazing one’s knees falling off a Raleigh Burner is a painful and chastening experience.

It was obvious that a great many people in the world were immeasurably older and more equipped to do things than I was. I remember being struck by the notion that my maternal grandfather – an endlessly kind, brilliantly resourceful, witty and principled man, fond of tea and Araldite, if not a combination of the two – could possibly have been unimaginably ancient ever since time began. In actual fact he was a spry 62 years old when I was born – not even double my age now. As a kid, the fact that my grandparents had been alive during a war was distant and impossibly vague – in actual fact they met in a NAAFI up North when my grandmother sold my grandfather some fags, and what I imagine equated to a Brief Encounter-style crackle of heroically restrained ardour momentarily lit the air between them. What a world they had been teenagers in, I wondered occasionally when I was much older. How unfathomably distant it all seemed.

The signifiers of my grandparents’ seemingly ridiculous longevity were everywhere, from my Grandmother’s unwavering insistence that she could never, under any circumstances get her hair wet, due to the mysterious process of shampooing and setting that her ‘do underwent every five days, to their love of Gardener’s World, DIY and humbugs. The first time I realised that these two ageless entities were in anyway mortal was when I understood just how serious the heart attack my Grandfather suffered when I was five had been. This obviously momentous event, discussed in hushed tones for the best part of a decade after it occurred, barely touched me when it hospitalised him in the summer of 1985. It’s a damning endictment of the selective memory of youth, and a measure of just how protected my younger sister and I were from the news, that I vividly remember Back to the Future coming out that summer, but not my Grandfather’s near-death experience. At that point, I think my Grandfather’s age started to mean something to him, and its effects, both psychological and physical, stayed with him.

As a family, we were, as my Mother would modestly point out “comfortable”, but the sudden arrival in the middle of what was a very happy childhood of a ridiculously extravagant two-week family holiday to DisneyWorld in Florida stuck out even to my seven year-old mind. My family were used to a week in rain-lashed Cornwall, replete with picnics in lay-bys on the interminable journey down, not transatlantic travel, connecting flights, visits to the cockpit, root beer and LP-sized waffles for breakfast. This was the stuff of dreams, and I now feel that my Grandad’s “coronary” – the formal, oddly Victorian descriptor he chose whenever it came up in conversation later – drove him to finance the trip. I’m glad he did – it is still the best holiday I have ever had.

As I grew up, I noticed that my Mum was slightly older than the other Mums who dutifully turned up to the school at half three every day to collect their chattering offspring. When questioned, my Mum averred that she was 24, exploiting a basic lack of mathematical dexterity that left me unable to work out whether that was ‘old enough’ to have two kids in primary school or not. When you’re young, your parents’ word is a absolute; far less questionable that that of, say, the current Head of State, or a visiting deity, so when questioned by my short-trousered peers, I always used to tell them that Mum was 24. She wasn’t, but 24 was a right-sounding number. It turned out that she was a hardly-antique 32 when I was born, and nearly 35 when my sister arrived, but this was the Eighties – everyone’s Mums were in their early twenties when I was a kid. Or maybe they weren’t – maybe it was a national conspiracy. Anyway, I understand what she was doing now, even if I didn’t then. She was probably protecting herself from her own fears about how being a bit older than the other Mums around the school were, and saving us kids from feeling like odd-ones-out. It worked, too. It’s weird that the perception of how old women ‘should’ be when they have kids has changed so much in the intervening two decades or so. Thirty-five is nothing now.

My father, on the other hand, was always pretty elderly in my view. To look into those eyes was to understand that this was a man who had at some stages lived pretty hard, and probably had some stories to tell. He was well into his forties when I came along, with a strange ‘first family’ from a failed marriage that went belly-up before he met my mother. Tellingly we were never introduced to his initial clutch of children – all girls – only meeting one, a haughty and rail-thin thing called Anne when she came on holiday with me, my sister and my dad’s partner and children. Jesus, that was stilted.

My Dad’s early life - also discordant, under-explained and amorphous, contained considerable early tragedy. I only found out about the sister who died in infancy because I did a genealogy project at school when I was seven; I was once introduced to an astonishinglyold man at my Dad’s house who purported to be his uncle Tom, and must have been 90 if he was a day. Dad’s parents had died when he was in his twenties, which I could scarcely comprehend. He had inherited considerable sums of money as a result of these unfortunate events, and from the evidence available, seems to have attempted to spend a good couple of million pounds on the most frivolous things imaginable throughout the early-to-mid Seventies, seemingly cutting a swathe through the unmarried female population of the West Midlands in the process.

After meeting my mum in 1977, things were good: we owned a boat, ferchrissakes. He had a Ferrari that frightened me absolutely rotten when I was a baby, selling it in favour of a Volkswagen Passat estate when my sister was born in 1981, in an act of commitment to family life that, having met the man, he may still regret. The fact is that my father had had a life full of incident and adventure, success, failure, tears and joys even before I arrived. I found it difficult to imagine him younger than his prematurely bald, bulky frame would allow. He was shit at playing with us as kids, but loved us in his way.

He continued to love us even after he’d stopped loving my mother and had left her high and dry with two kids under five, and after the divorce, he just seemed to fade into advanced adulthood as the years went by. I can’t really explain why, but as the years passed, and I grew into adulthood, my interest in his opinion waned dramatically. Eventually, I was self-determined enough to realise that I didn’t need him and his influence, which was never all that good from a behavioural point of view anyway. I got older, he got less mature, and I started to see through him, through to the bitterness, the booze and the sadness behind all that bluster, noise and largesse. I thought he was a fake – out of touch and running out of time. Cruel it may have been, but I didn’t think I needed him any more. Between the ages of 12 and 33, no words passed between us.

This period of ‘radio silence’ between my father and I coincided with a phase of life that was defined by my age – the teenage years. Living in a nice house, with a lovely extended step-family and lots of friends, I was conscious perhaps for the first time of my independence of thought and deed. I have never felt quite as alive, as positive, as sad, as wildly unstable or as capable of everything and nothing as I did then. I was arrogant and insecure and drunk and sober and rushing and slow at the same time. Summers were amazing, everything was impossibly attainable and immediate; girls were ridiculously intimidating and amazingly aloof, but nothing really mattered, because everyone I knew was strong, lean, quick and sure of themselves – at least until they got out of public view and could safely lock themselves away and listen to their home-made TDK90 of sad indie, their eyes stinging in the dark.

Teenage boys, their minds buckling under the onslaught of new and dazzling cocktails of hormones, their thought processes derailed by unchecked emotions basically go fucking insane for about two to three years. It’s hilarious. During this period, not dissimilar to the Pon Farr – an accelerated and, if anything, even more hideous growth process endured by Spock in a particularly memorable episode of Star Trek – the older generation also plan their revenge. Our forefathers, somehow forgetting that young males in this state could probably obtain a ridiculously obtrusive erection browsing bathroom tiles in B&Q, think it best that they map out their entire adult lives – through the medium of increasingly difficult and lengthy tests, no less – in an 18-month period.

The older generation also decree that teenage boys should be made to sit the most important exams of their lives at the height of summer, when teenage girls are, for the most part, ridiculously beautiful. What kind of sadist arrived at this solution?

My memories of late teenage life are, it may not surprise you to learn, massively conflicted. I absolutely loved those summers: the football; the endless oceans of time in which to play the guitar or just hang around; the easy jobs, the lack of any real deadlines, bills or responsibility, and of course, the sunsheeeine. We were the masters of all we surveyed for two whole years, and it felt like we could dream anything up, and it would work. Sheer force of personality is the fuel of this arrogance, and it’s intoxicating stuff. You believe, outwardly, that you’re pretty fucking tip-top. You may not be – you may be able to appreciate when you’re not actually being very nice, or very reliable, but if anyone challenges you, they can fuck off, because they are not you or one of your friends, and hence they are at best wrong, and at worse, cunts. This is the mindset of the teenage boy-man as he lollops wonkily into the next, even sterner test of his wild opinions, unfounded self-assertion and untested mettle: University.

See, I thought I was ready. I was wrong. I thought that, because of my little band of blokes, my little world, my little ideas and my big plans, that I would move into University and would instantly overcome any problems whatsoever, in order to effortlessly continue my confident strut into grown-upness. Fuck me, what a pleb. University is the great leveller, and while I learned many interesting things about Journalism, photography, typography and writing while I was there, the main lessons I took from it were personal ones – how to talk to girls, how to deal with people who are older than you and not be intimidated by them, how to plan and be independent. University was like the shallows of adulthood, where you’re able to fuck up, fail and lock yourself out literally infinitely, until you’re deemed ready and capable of occupying a person-shaped space in the world of adults.

Funny thing is, the transition into ‘proper’ grown-upness, occurs really gradually once a series of milestones are passed (in no particular order: shaving, smoking, drinking, sex, driving, voting, suits, salary, documentaries, spare money). Passing these milestones, however, doesn’t change the person within. For example, as a man in his thirties, I still love playing videogames, perhaps more now than when I started doing so when I was 12. What’s that about? Is it some last-gasp gesture to retain childishness? Or is it that videogames, a ‘geeky’ and niche pastime when I started getting interested in them in the late Eighties – are now, at last, the valid artform that their greatest evangelists argued they’d always been? Have they grown up, or have I failed to? It seems oddly unavoidable that my generation will become the first to have children whose interest in this form of entertainment – which is now more popular and profitable than mainstream cinema, by the way – is matched by that of their parents.

Now that I come to think of it, videogames formed one of the cornerstones of my childhood, and every time I bang an absolutely ridiculous strike in from 30 years on PES 2013, my enjoyment of the moment is fortified by a thousand memories of my childhood. I remember doing exactly the same thing while I was the aforementioned hormone-addled teenager, and running downstairs to show my stepdad, an avowed Bournemouth and Southampton fan whose willingness to support the underdog in any televised match I still find curiously endearing. His delight was couched mainly in the ridiculousness of football games from the mid-Nineties, when 43-yard, swirling freekicks hammered in by the doyen of the prefranchised era, a man by the name of D. Becham. The joy of sharing those offside-free, fuzzy representations of a sporting world strangely detached from the harsh realities of a gritty 0-0 at Dean Court in December remains undiminished. What is that? Nostalgia already? Or apathy? Or just ‘the way of things?’ The older I get, the more ‘adult’ I feel, but at the same time, I can’t help thinking of that quote from Fight Club:

"Narrator: I can't get married, I'm a 30 year old boy. 
Tyler: We're a generation of men raised by women. I'm wondering if another woman is really the answer we need."

In many ways, I agree with this. As I approach an age at which my father had already left one family and would soon start another – an age at which my stepbrother, 12 years my senior, had three children and his marriage was shuffling towards its own end, I am still renting, sketching out plans to marry and am realistically no closer to having kids than I was five years ago. What is up with that? It’s by no means just me, either – my peers and I all come from similar, safe, fairly unspectacularly middle-class backgrounds, and have all edged our way into our thirties without necessarily buying houses or having children, and it’s no big deal. I was considering this when I read a piece online (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24173194) which avowed that, effectively, people in their early twenties were still dumbass teenagers, at least psychologically speaking, thanks to the softening of parenting styles in the last few decades, and the fact that some self-determining events, such as learning to drive, or buying a house, could be put off indefinitely. As a result, the psychologist quoted in the piece argued:

"The idea that suddenly at 18 you're an adult just doesn't quite ring true. Alongside brain development, hormonal activity is also continuing well into the early twenties. A number of children and young people I encounter between the age of 16 and 18, the flurry of hormonal activity in them is so great that to imagine that's going to settle down by the time they get to 18 really is a misconception.”

Laverne Antrobus, Child Psychologist, Tavistock Clinic, London.

At the risk of sounding like the ghost of Mary Whitehouse, what will become of the children? To be honest, most of the teenagers I bump into on a regular basis are massively self-obsessed wankers, too busy taking selfies, lowing and farting in eachothers’ mouths to understand just how primal and vital and brilliant being a teenager can be.

Waves of quasi-bitterness aside, and while we’ve already discussed my teenage wankerdom in considerable detail elsewhere, I think they’ve been refining it over the years. If my lot have been allowed to think it’s OK to not have jobs and ‘wait and see’ what we want to do with ourselves until our mid-thirties, what the hell are the next lot going to do with us as an example? If my parents had spent the first thirds of their lives sitting about playing Ridge Racer and trying to make it as flamenco dancers while living off my grandparents, I’ve no doubt that the olds, having dodged bombs for King and Country during their own youth, would have taken roughly three seconds to send them off to the workhouse, or whatever.

Personally speaking, I do consider myself ‘adult’, but not ‘old’. I’m ready for whatever the world has to throw at me, I think. I’m by no means gung-ho, though, and the fact that I can’t yet drive a car means that my aforementioned list of ‘adulthood checkpoints’ needs some work, but otherwise, I’m cool. I’m there. I no longer worry about getting served in pubs, despite having a face that places me firmly in my early twenties in the eyes of strangers. I don’t mind introducing myself to strangers, or telling them a bit about myself. To sound poncy for a minute, I have noticed and enjoyed  the fact that my taste in food and culture and music have developed as I’ve got older. I’m braver and better at things that I was as a youngster. And why? Because I’m a man, and I deserve to play in the adult area of the world.

I don’t really understand how I came to this conclusion though – at no point did I receive an email stating ‘congratulations on entering gainful employment and renting a little room in a city you weren’t born in – you’ve become One Of Us!’. Perhaps that would have been handy. A Welcome Pack (perhaps with some basic DIY tips, nappy changing instructions and a pictorial guide to decent cunnilingus) would have been a good idea, and could have been issued to all 21 year-olds, following the compulsory surrender of the keys to their parents’ houses.

I think the main reason I have no problem with the fact that I’m 34 and no longer a kid in any sense of the word is the choices I was given when, as a twattish wannabe journalist in my (very) early twenties, I decided to quit my first, idyllic job. I had loved it – I basically played videogames all day, had no bills to worry about, and got home to a homecooked meal at my parents’ house every night. I cleared £900 a month, paid £100 a month in ‘rent’, and my total outgoings were less than £300 a month. I turned up at work hungover fairly frequently, and no-one minded. I was able to sit in a nice office surrounded by lovely people my age and either edit articles about games I loved, or write things I fancied writing, and as long as they were funny enough to get a laugh out of my editor, they went in a magazine with 40,000 monthly readers. I wore combats and hoodies to work, and spent my lunchtimes down on the beach in Bournemouth, or marvelling at the fact that bikini-clad women would fill the shops in summertime.

I can clearly remember thinking at the time that I was constantly skint (this is a sensation that has persisted thoughout my adult life, regardless of income, savings or anything else), but I distinctly remember paying £40 for a really fucking cool t-shirt and thinking nothing of it, which I wouldn’t do now, nearly 15 years later. A cursory glance at my CD collection tells me that most of my tangible assets during this period were purchased from the music store around the corner from this ridiculously simplistic place of work. I had a lot of free time, a lot of toys and nothing to care about. I got bored, the lack of opportunities angered me, I resigned for no good reason, and was at once propelled into a very real, altogether different world.

As kettles of fish go, this was a new one. All of sudden, there was no pissing about; there was no hanging around with friends who were a little jealous of my stupid creative job. I was unemployed. Still living at home, and still a Mummy’s boy – nowhere near the grown-up yet – and I had thrown my first step on some sort of career away. I had no plan, either -  I just resigned out of pure childish frustration. “Screw this”, I said, “I’m off to London, where the proper journalists make the proper money.” And just seven months, roughly one hundred long nights of the soul and dozens of rows with my put-upon parents later, I was right – off to London I went, unprepared, unaware, excited and unlikely to succeed. I thought I was an adult, though. I thought I had the perfect blend of rock-star arrogance, talent, experience and sheer force of will to work out, but I had forgotten to take one quite significant factor into account before slinging the ol’ knapsack over my shoulder and heading to London: adults.

As a 20 year-old straight from university I was obviously cut considerable slack. As a 23 year-old making a large commitment to a new job in a city stuffed to the gills with identically-qualified copyeditors, I grossly overestimated my own abilities, and my alleged experience in the field of magazine journalism. I just went there, and continued to gad about like the teenager Dr Antrobus would no doubt conclude I still was. “London!”, my ridiculous inner monologue bellowed triumphantly, like some combination of Del Trotter, Loadsamoney and Liam fucking Gallagher, “we’ve fucking made it! It’s here! The lights! The music! The people! Look at his shirt! Look at your shoes! It’s all happening!” As you can see from this short but accurate transcript of those times, my inner monologue can be a right dick when it feels the need to be.

So, with this foaming, lunging idiot at the controls, I went to work in London. I moved into a quiet, unassuming little house with a quiet, unassuming girl (hello Cristina, how are you?) and that was all too quiet, so I moved to brash, noisy Shoreditch and lived with brash, noisy Jo, drank a lot, grew my hair and generally behaved like a massive teenage arsehole with no ties and too much cash. I became my own worst nightmare. I went out a lot. I saw lots of bands. I became a big, galumphing child again, and I liked it. Trouble was, after an initial period of getting-to-know-yous, work didn’t.

I forgot, you see, that I had purposely eschewed the unstructured, low-paid, fun job in order to be taken seriously in my profession, which given what actually happened next, seems similar to the bassist from the Courteeners going solo and releasing a six-side modern rock classic that in every way surpasses the unalloyed brilliance of Dark Side of the Moon, but that’s just hindsight. For a while there, my work was pretty good, but familiar problems surfaced: I didn’t like the bosses. I didn’t like conformity, or ‘the man’. Short of actually being in Aerosmith in the mid-Seventies, I couldn’t have had more freedom to write, to edit, to sit around holding court and being opinionated for a reasonable salary – but it wasn’t enough.

It wasn’t enough, because I was still, at heart, a child. In the midst of it all, I hadn’t grown up. The end, when it came, was sudden. I was sacked, properly, for ‘not being good enough’ at my job, despite being told two months earlier that I was doing brilliantly. In a way, the ‘corporateness’, the ‘grown-ups’ that I’d feared would always ruin things by getting their way, had turned up and done just that. Permit me this one aside:

"Poor little boy kicked out at the world, but the world kicked back, a lot fucking harder."
The Libertines, Can't Stand Me Now [Which was out at the time. Ooh, there's prescient.]

I look back on that day (18 December 2003) as a major turning point in my journey from childhood to adulthood. It was the first time I had my wings clipped – the first instance of the world being much bigger and more selfish than my aspirations and sheer arrogance would allow it to be. I was powerless for the first time – 100 miles from home, with rent to pay, no cash and the contents of my desk in a black sack next to me on the pavement (this is not an exaggeration).

After that day, I realised that doing a job that makes you feel like a kid is a kid’s game – I needed to be an adult, to live away from home, to earn my own money, however falteringly, and to make something of myself. I realised that journalism probably wasn’t the trade for me, long-term – even though I still love it and would probably return to it now. I realised that to be an adult was to face difficulties and work out a way around them, without constantly calling your Mum and begging for help. I realised that the world is, thanks to the millions of competing opinions and power struggles at play, probably unfair, but if you keep plugging away and get lucky you can go literally anywhere.

All of these themes, which had been building for months previous to the Unfortunate Event in Mortimer Street, suddenly hit me when I returned to my dingy, expensive and brilliant flat in Old Street and wondered what the fuck to do. I remember sitting in the lounge of that place, making a cup of tea, having a little self-pitying weep, packing a bag and leaving for my real home – the one I’d haughtily spun on my heel from 11 months earlier.

Two hours and a world away from that moment I was back in my local, deciding what to do next. It would take a year of indecision and a trip to Asia to teach English before I got my shit back together, but basically, I’d realised that you can’t pretend much past 20, because the world is too serious a place. Sure, there are fancy dress opportunities and stag-dos, there are theme parks, concerts and cup finals, but the world of the grown-up is more difficult, challenging and rewarding than the cheap, short-term thrills doled out to unsuspecting teenagers. It’s the lack of stabilisers that makes the bike’s wheels turn faster. Knowing that failure could be absolute makes success more desirable, and therefore more often attained. Adults can eventually learn to understand themselves and their personalities, using their time and skills to create the world they want to live in; younger people, knowing no better yet, wait for ‘cool’ shit to happen to them, and get arsey when it doesn’t arrive as they’ve decreed.

I really look forward to being older, in a way. The older people I know seem to be, generally speaking, fulfilled, full of life and experiences and somehow calmer about things than their pimply, hormonal counterparts. Is this perhaps because as you get older you steadily realise that, well, this is it, and rushing through it at 300 miles per hour could leave you prone to missing the good bits?

Deep down, though, we don’t change as people, I think. It’s said that we get more conservative in our views as we get older, and as a staunch non-voter who grew up in the teeth of Thatcherism, who comes from a Lib Dem family, that worries me.  I have no idea what I’ll be doing when I’m 67, but I have a good idea of how I’ll think about things, the views on I’ll hold, and the friends I’m likely to have. I hope one day to pass on my ‘wisdom’, such as it is, to a son or daughter, and hell, if that happens, they’re in for a busy half-hour or so. I hope I can grow old and stay fairly cool, in the manner of the late, great John Peel.

The fact that I’m in my thirties may have changed many things about me, physically, but isn’t it weird that I still feel the same inside. To get metaphysical on yo ass for a second, assuming that the body is a container (for some a beautiful vase, for others a battered cardboard box, whatever) the ‘essence’ inside that container remains the same. I am essentially still the same me that I was on the day after my 19^th birthday, for example, albeit minus the apocalyptic hangover. Inside, behind the eyes, nothing changes, and I find that deeply intriguing. I look forward to seeing what the passage of time does to my general world view, but I’m comforted that by and large my spirit, or ethos if you like, won’t change.

This might sound like the kind of nonsense peddled in the small shops you’ll find in the centre of Glastonbury, but I’ve seen it in action. Even in his early nineties, my step-grandfather Eric – a bafflingly fit man of six foot with an encyclopaedic memory and a love of pipe tobacco and brown cardigans, from what I remember – was casting admiring glances at Steffi Graf as she cruised to victory in the 1992 Wimbledon Final. No connoisseur of tennis, he was a lifelong cricket and football fan, really, but Eric Arthur Cranidge was still, in his mind at least, the same 19 year old he’d always been, surreptitiously checking out the girls on the TV like he and his mates might have done in decades past. I am heartened to think that in some ways, nothing really changes as we age.

Sometimes sad is good

Just listening to this thing by South London griefsters Stubborn Heart ('I Need Love'), and I'm struck - yet again - by how beautiful it is. It's also very slight in places - double-tracked harmonies barely held up by a clicking beat track Radiohead will be back for any second, and a lot of cooing. God, it's light on laughs, but then in come the pianos, and it develops a sort of strut, like it's just banged the phone down on the ex in question, thrown its coat on and headed for town.

Stubborn Heart: maudlin, but brilliant

It's in a similar mould to the stuff I've heard by Jai Paul - again, link below, folks - which pushes similar buttons to the above, only doing so while wearing a pair of crushed-velvet disco gloves on a lend from Prince. Despite apparently being so cool as to barely exist and having taken just over two years to release two tracks, South Londoner Jai is being given the come-hither by Jay Z, P Diddy and a taxi-queue-sized litany of great-and-gooders with lots of cash and spare initials. He certainly has the attention of They, and They want to see what he does next.

Jai Paul: more than just a sadsack bloke in a blazer

On the basis of Jasmine, which borrows a bit of the Purple one's guitar style, some Al Greenisms and a stack of crusty old reverb, he's spent most of the time between this and his first release pouring pints of unctuous distortion into the back of an assortment of amplifiers, which have then been thrown down a treacle mine and covered in moss. It really is a head-turning bit of production, this - genuinely unlike anything I've heard before, while at the same time being sufficiently familiar to make you wonder why the hell no one arrived at it previously. The future (heck, even the present) may be a little unclear, sonically, but this bloke has got something. Now if only someone could convince him to release some more songs, we might be getting somewhere. On this evidence, expect a brilliant, fully formed debut album sometime around late 2044.

Arcade Fire Return

So, the Arcade Fire are back, with David Bowie in tow. Well I never. The lead-off single, Reflektor, sounds like a disco in a Haitian after-hours drinking hole, attended by Talking Heads and Death From Above 1979 - which is exactly what I'd like Arcade Fire comebacks to sound like. The fact that James Murphy, the big-boned genius behind one of my favourite bands of all time, has manned the desk for this one means it's all the more exciting, basically.

The curtain-raising short film premiered on SNL the other night features Bono, Ben Stiller and a lot of neon horsing-around. Check this out.

Aren't they just awesome?

 I still haven't seen them live, but they are a cert to tour in the next few months, with a UK-based run of shows around Summer/Autumn next year I would have thought. This logic also raises the fevered prospect of AF playing Glastonbury. Eavis has already said that the headliners involved will all be newcomers to the Worthy Farm wellyfest, and if memory serves, Win and Regine's bunch of Canuck reprobates have already played there, so a headline slot is unlikely. I can't think of a better band to do it at this stage of their careers, though. I suppose the broad appeal is still missing - they're just a couple of steps away from average Joes knowing enough about them to buy a ticket on the basis of a headline appearance. Maybe 2015 will be their year, though? If the snippets that have come out around Reflektor are anything to go by, they're definitely on the way to the very top.

Oh, and there's a nice dig at Mumford and Sons in the longer video from SNL posted above, too. Always good.

For the Birds

No sooner did we return from Herne Hill Farmers' Market this afternoon with a chicken whose later life was probably a never-ending litany of drinks parties, massage therapy sessions and in-depth relaxation, given his price tag, than good old Anthony pops up on Facebook. He's only inches from shoving a plump-looking bird into a hot place himself, it seems. Given Welsh Nathan's advice on the preparation of said bird, it seems everyone's chicken-based this Sunday. Odd.

Anyways, ours is considering its fate in the oven as I type this, and will no doubt form the basis of a hugely entertaining evening, which seems set to include writing, GTA, weed, tea and Downton. Can't really complain, can I? Pay day tomorrow, savings on track, life is good.

50/5000 repost

Thought I'd update on the project I'd quite like to send to www.longform.org, one of my favourite sites. Topics are:

Age

Apple

Art

Aspiration

Babies

Beatles

Cool

Cricket

Dogs

Driving

England

France

Fashion

Festivals

Films

Food

Football

Finance

Friends

God

Guitars

Gyms

Happiness

Hate

Heroes

Holidays

Hope

Internet

Jazz

Literature

Love

Luck

Lying

Maths

Memory

Men

Metrosexuals

Newspapers

Parents

Pets

Posh

Public Transport

Pubs

Retro

Singletons

Villains

War

Women

Work

Writing