ON THE THIRD DAY OF BETWIXTMAS...

Name a Tudor warship. Go on: I'm laying down the leather gauntlet. It's a challenge, a jousting contest, a quest of which I consider you worthy foes. Can you think of the name of any bona fide sixteenth century, English-built hulk of oak timbers and iron cannons, of fluttering standards and golden sails, heaving and creaking across the English Channel to do battle with France? Can you name her? Can you retrieve a magnificent barque from a glittering age?

Did you say the Mary Rose?

Yep, me too. I went to see her today; or at least, what's left of her. On the 19th of July, 1545, just a mile or so into the Solent, the Mary Rose turned upon the waves and listed in a sudden gust of wind. Taking in seawater through her open lower gunports, she toppled and fell. Within minutes, she was under. The French fleet, purring from the Isle of Wight, cheered as she sank below the waves.

I peered through the thick glass at the cavern of wrecked timbers. It is a cathedral of sodden oak, ripped to pieces, yet unmistakably the hull of a once great ship. A feat of astonishing engineering in 1982 had lifted the silted wreck from the sea. For 437 years the starboard side of this great ship had been wedged beneath the sand, buried, preserved, protected while the port side rotted away in the salt-water. Now all that's left is the fragile shell of half a Tudor warship in all its eerie magnificence.

You could have said the Henry Grace a Dieu or perhaps the Peter Pomegranate. You could have gone for the Regent or Sovereign: all fine examples of Tudor seafaring in the time of Henry VIII. However, none of these illustrious names are as famous as that of the raised wreck of Henry's flagship.

And that's interesting don't you think? That a lost wreck, missing for almost half a millenium should be here with us now, when those other vessels have long since disappeared? Had it not sunk on that blustery summer's afternoon, to gasps of shock and horror from those who watched from Southsea Common, we might not have heard of the Mary Rose at all. In a curious twist of irony, had it not sunk, it would certainly have disappeared forever.

Sometimes in life, it looks like hope has been lost for good. I've seen it flicker out like the final candle in a darkened room. I've felt the loneliness pull me beneath the waves and shuddered at the terrible, overwhelming darkness of depression closing in around me. Perhaps though, like the Mary Rose, there is a hope, there is a rescue, way off into the future, or perhaps not that far, when someone remembers your name and comes to find you; when a light you never expected overwhelms the darkness of the deep and lifts you to the surface and the daylight.


I'm really tired. It was such a lovely trip to Portsmouth today. Usually, by the third day of Betwixtmas I'd have gone a bit crazy, but a day out has sorted me out. It was the Intrepids' idea. They really wanted to go up the Spinnaker Tower and see the Solent stretching out to the Isle of Wight in the winter sunshine. I wanted to see the Mary Rose, HMS Warrior and the Victory. Where the Mary Rose represented a famous tragedy at the beginning of the Royal Navy's great history, the Victory returned to Portsmouth in tatters at the height of its finest hour. I like Portsmouth. There's lots to go back for.

ON THE FIRST DAY OF BETWIXTMAS...

I've had a brandy. Well, it seemed like the right thing to do when I felt the tingling beginnings of a cold. As Boxing Day draws to a cosy end and the wind whips itself up outside for another storm, the moment seems right for a little reflection, and perhaps a little anticipation too.

Reflection and anticipation are the buzzwords at this time of year. It is (what I've started calling, anyway) Betwixtmas, the lost few days that linger between Christmas and New Year. Dad has a jigsaw puzzle stretching across the dining room table, covered by a cloth for mealtimes; Mum is surrounded by fancy boxes of chocolates like the Queen of Hotel Chocolat, and I slump around in my pyjamas watching old movies and flicking through the brain-teaser books I've inevitably been given, while the fire glows and the teapot glistens. None of us know what day of the week it is and the telephone remains gloriously silent.

Reflection: the delicate art of looking back, of realising where you are and how you got there. My family are experts at nostalgia. Today, at my sister's house, two Darth Vaders were racing around with plastic light-sabres while Batman was leaping from the chairs into a crumpled pile of wrapping paper. I was quietly sipping a cup of tea while my sisters told stories about their wedding days that I had never heard. My nineteen year old niece was perched on the arm of a sofa, intertwining her fingers with those of her new boyfriend, who was staring mistily into her eyes. My Dad was asleep. It was rather like a pastiche: a scene from one of the old masters, where each stage of life, each figure had been carefully crafted together in some clever, rosy painting.

Like Christmas itself, today was a lot noisier than a painting.

On Christmas Eve, at the barn service, the Bishop of Reading softly lamented the fact that the Victorians had somehow made Christmas a little too comfortable and cosy. Where's the noise, the dirt, the smell, the screaming baby born into a world of unimaginable pain and darkness? Not very Christmassy is it? Yet you and I know full-well how to clean up a Christmas to make it Christmassy, even without thinking about that un-silent night! Family's not always that smiling portrait of faces that beams from the laminated pages of the photo album.

"Whatever is it?" asked my Dad, clutching a curiously-shaped garden ornament. It looked like a dragonfly on a ski-pole. "It's um, it's very... interesting," he said, perfecting that curious grin of bemusement and disappointment. He hated it. That curious grin is usually reserved for visitors who talk over the weather forecast, light entertainment programmes featuring Graham Norton, or a plate of  unexpected seafood.

My Mum got an iPad. It's always a risky move getting my Mum anything too technical, but this time my Dad had banked on it being easy to set up and even easier to use. This is the reason then, that I was summoned to install everything she needed. I really could have done with a sleep, but it worked out OK in the end. Will it join the ranks of the digital photo frame and the DVD recorder as a thing she never uses? Time will tell.

This setting-up procedure of electronic gifts is one of the pitfalls of 'working with computers'. I'm sure lots of people tumble accidentally into this hole: someone asks your gran what it is that you do again. And your gran lights up like the Cheshire Cat, "Oh yes, he/she works with computers," she says proudly. From that point onwards you are the family expert when it comes to anything with a circuit board! Everything from trojan viruses to corrupted hard drives has your name on it. Excel's crashed? You're getting a call. Nobody knows where the Save As menu is, or how to get an email out of the trash can? You'd better be on standby. And you'd better have some patience.

We do all get on though in our family. There are no feuds, no explosions, no petty arguments. Everybody is quite alright with everyone else and we do enjoy being together... for small periods of time. Alright, my oldest sister is louder than an air-raid siren, my nephews are fond of pushing the naughtiness envelope and two of my brothers-in-law support football teams whose fans traditionally despise each other. However, we do all get on really very well. Having decorated my Christmas list with the words: AMAZON VOUCHERS, I was quite amazed to see that whoever was my secret santa had thought much more carefully about it than the list dictated. I got a model of the Mary Rose, a bag of jelly babies and a box of Russian Caravan tea... in addition to those much requested vouchers - genuinely three of my favourite things.

So, as Betwixtmas begins and the brandy slips warmly down, it's nice to look back and be thankful for this season. The wind is stirring outside, whooping through the trees and whistling down the chimney. It isn't a silent night by any means, but something about this time of year reminds me that it's Love that makes it calm, and that it's Peace that makes it bright. And those things can burst into our wintry world just as much today as they did two thousand years ago.

BEER & CAROLS

I've played at a fair few carol services and events this year. In fact, more than any other year that I can remember. Oh I don't mind too much; I like a carol or two, as it goes. That is after all, why I agreed to do all these events in the first place! For work colleagues and drunkards (and the often indistinguishable boundary between the two); for shoppers, boppers and elderly methodists, for friends, family, singers and ringers, I've bashed out some Hark the Heralds and Once in Royals like nobody's business.

Yesterday, for event 7 out of 12, I went and helped out at something called Beer & Carols. It isn't the most natural pairing but it sounded fun. It was essentially an evening of carol singing... in a pub. Beer & Carols was arranged by a local church who've never really done this kind of thing before and were tentatively stepping into their community... without a confident (or available) pianist I assume. I'm all for seeing church do stuff in the community, so I was quite keen to help out when they asked.

"You're alright with taking requests, aren't you Matt?" said the Minister, thrusting a copy of the Bethlehem Carol Sheet at me. The pub was filling up and I was perched on a bar stool behind my keyboard. I flicked open the carol sheet and scanned through the finely printed words.

"Um, yes, I should think so."

There were carols on the sheet that I had never heard of. Anything outside of a Silent Night or an In the Bleak Midwinter and I was in trouble. Requests eh? At the last carol event I went to on Wednesday, the methodists had requested things like The Twelve Days of Christmas and the quicker version of The Holly and the Ivy. I'd had to think on my feet, but that was in a methodist church, with people who smiled sweetly if they didn't like me playing a jazzed up Jingle Bells. Here in the noisy atmosphere of a local pub, behind a piano and a solitary microphone, I could imagine things getting thrown at me.

It didn't come to that. Thankfully the requests stretched to the more familiar carols only. One guy just kept shouting "Number 18" at me. Number 18 turned out to be the delightfully worded Ding Dong Merrily on High, which, when we sang it, seemed a little more complicated than he'd realised. He very loudly sang:

"Ding dong merrily on 'igh... the holly bells are ringin..."

over and over.

-

I carried my bag of pedals and switches out to the car. Whether it was in contrast to the rowdy singing of the locals in the pub, I don't know, but I could hear what sounded like angels singing through the crisp night air.

Hail the heav'n born prince of peace, hail the son of righteousness...

The descant shimmered above the perfectly harmonised voices of the Thames Vale Singers. Across the road in a barn, these highly-trained voices were filling the rafters with precision-perfect carols. I shut the boot and wandered across for a closer listen. The tenors resounded, the basses boomed, and floating ethereally above the tune-carrying altos, those rippling sopranos added the pitch-perfect trills that only certain middle-aged ladies can.

Mild he lays his glory by, born that man no more may die...

I pushed an ear against the wooden door. It was all so... polished! It could not have been further away from the little pub I'd left on the other side of the road with its imperfections and beer-swilling regulars. I found myself wondering which of the two Jesus would have preferred - the stirring sounds of a practiced choir singing words they don't mean, or the rowdy ragtag bunch of revellers having a good time together at their local.

I crossed back over to the pub. Someone was carrying round a plate of sausage rolls and mince pies; someone else was leading a drunken chorus of Fa La La La La without knowing the words. I smiled. The Minister saw me and smiled back.

"Thank you so much Matt," he said, "That was really great."

"Any time," I replied, politely. "And please do let me know if you guys do this again; I'd love to be involved."

I meant it.

FRIENDS ON ALL SIDES

Somehow or other I've ended up with all kinds of friends. If I were to work out what makes them friends, I think it might give my head a bit of a spin. As I realised today with a choked up-throat, some of them absolutely hate each other; or at least, they cannot bring themselves to tolerate each other's opinions. And there is a subsequent confusion about what that means for how they view each other as people.

I saw it today. I saw the dark side of facebook, pushing them apart, providing a platform to be used to draw up the lines of passions. An argument erupted from almost nowhere about parenting.

As I've said before, parenting is one of those landmine topics and I won't go anywhere near discussing it online, especially after today. Passions boiled over, ideologies clashed and prejudices were painfully exposed. There was bile, there was insult, there was the foulest language and above all, a colossal lack of wisdom.

I found my heart sinking as I watched it unfold. It was a boxing match with no rules and no referee. Slog went the left, 'How dare you!' shouted the right. 'Me a hypocrite?' said one, incredulously, limbering up for another punch. 'Pathetic,' replied the other. 'What would you know? **** you for judging me!' I felt as though somehow it were me that both were ripping apart, caught in the crossfire, lost and alone in no-mans-land, unable to side with either. And I felt terribly sad.

There used to be a popular paradox puzzle. What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object? I've thought about this a lot over the years. I've concluded that because each of these are defined in terms of other, they can't co-exist in the same universe. One will always submit to the other and prove itself the traitor. It's like a cosmic game of Chicken.

I wonder if people approach conflict in the same way, without thinking it through. I am right. I am fully persuaded. If I shout loudly enough, argue convincingly enough and blow hard enough, you, my sadly mistaken friend, will have to concur with my exalted position. It results in a checkmate. The immovable object of your opinion must bow the knee to the unstoppable power of my righteousness. The trouble is, you are equally as convinced that you are right. You are equally as determined to stand your ground, confidently safe with your three little pigs and your brick-built house while I huff and I puff outside.

Stop and think about it though, and we'll both realise that there's a roaring fire big enough for all of us to settle our differences. No-one wants a collapsed house and no-one really wants to boil a wolf in the pot, not when it comes down to it. That's what made me so sad. It seemed today like somehow the power of friendship itself was just not sufficient to stop the horrible tide of a turbulent argument.

In the end, the thread was very sensibly deleted without comment by the owner, who like me, must have watched it swarm out of control as her phone constantly beeped with notifications. At least somebody had some sense.

DINOSAURS AND JELLY BEANS

I had a really good sleep last night. I think it's down to two very important factors.

1. I didn't go to work yesterday
2. I am not at work today

I don't always sleep well. Sometimes, dreaming is a bit of a luxury for my tired brain. However, I'm not convinced my brain is being honest with me. As soon as I switch off, it seems to switch itself on.

Here's an odd little poem I wrote about being asleep.

Dinosaurs and Jelly Beans

Last night my brain refused to think
And told me it was on the blink
It made my eyelids flutter shut
And gave my world a power cut
My senses twitched with phantom doubt
My brain had switched my body out

But then as I was fast asleep
My brain woke up within the deep
And painted coloured dreaming scenes
Of dinosaurs and jelly beans
Of bravest knights and evil queens
And playing jazz in New Orleans

For somehow while we slumber by
Our brains are free to think and fly
Unfettered by the daylight hours
Of working out these lives of ours
I wonder what I'd do if I
Could let my thinking reach the sky

THE QUESTIONABLY SCULPTED STATUE

Did a little Christmas shopping today in the old centre-ville, the CBD, the urban wonderland that is Reading town centre. As promised though, I decided to take a trip to my first port of call on my tour of Reading's notable places: the Forbury Gardens and the famous Maiwand Lion.

A couple of weekends ago, I was in Ely, telling people that Reading was a little dismal compared to their leafy city with its rich history and quiet atmosphere. I felt that I should be more of an ambassador of my hometown than a dismissive critic, and I resolved to find those places in Reading that we Readingenzians should be proud of. That was where the idea of my Tour of Reading's Interesting Places began.

There's no better place to start than the Maiwand Lion. This is the Questionably Sculpted Statue. Here's a little history:

Back at the end of the 19th Century, our country was trying quite hard to fulfil its role as Ruler of the Waves, conquering distant lands and dividing the spoils. The Russians weren't particularly fond of us (they thought they should have some spoils of their own) and didn't agree that that's what we should be doing. Squabbles ensued, as they always do. One hotly disputed part of the world was a country called Afghanistan, which was big business if you liked opium. A lot of people liked opium in those days, and Afghanistan was the place to produce it. War, as it still is today, was mostly about business and national economies.

In 1878, Britain engaged in a difficult war in Afghanistan, after the Aghans sided with their Russian neighbours. One of the most famous battles of that war (the Second Anglo-Afghan War in fact), took place at a village called Maiwand.

It is this battle, and the heroic deeds of the 66th Berkshire Regiment that the Maiwand Lion commemorates. The statue is one of the world's largest cast iron memorials, weighing 16 tonnes. It stands proudly at the centre of the Forbury Gardens on a pedestal displaying the names of the men who bravely died defending Maiwand at that famous battle of 1880.

I was there today. The Forbury Gardens I mean, not Maiwand. I looked up at the questionably sculpted statue as I've done countless times since I first saw it as a small boy. It's quite frightening from the underside.

It's not really questionably sculpted. There is an urban legend that the sculptor, George Blackall Simmonds committed suicide when he realised that he'd crafted the legs in the wrong formation. Wracked with guilt, the story goes, George threw in the towel and took his own life. It is tough to believe when George Blackall Simmonds lived for another 40 years and even designed later memorials that you can still see... in Reading. Somehow that myth persists.

But if you thought that the wonder and mystery of the Forbury Gardens starts and stops with a cast iron lion on a terracotta pedestal, you would be dead wrong. There's an older treasure here that you might miss if you spend too long by the victorian bandstand.

For somewhere beneath the luscious green grass and delightfully cultivated flowerbeds, there lies a medieval king, the fourth son of William the Conqueror who probably birthed the idea of English law and founded Reading Abbey in the long-forgotten Twelfth Century. More about him I think on my next Tour of Reading's Interesting Places...

Today, I sat on a quiet bench for a while in front of the lion until the light faded. Those men died standing up for what they believed in. They were men of resilience, capturing the guns that the enemy had taken from them. The lion: brave, bold and silently growling for one hundred and twenty five years was a perfect picture of that fighting spirit, woven into the hearts of our Berkshire-born forebears. The men of Reading, I speculated, stood firm when the time came, growled proudly at their enemy with teeth bared and a roar of national pride behind the Queen's uniform. What would I have done?

The light always fades. In a strange way, those men, long-dead; George Blackall Simmonds; Victoria and King Henry Beauclerc, buried, unaware of the Britain they helped to forge; of the Reading which sprawls across the Thames Valley. I wonder what they would make of it. I gathered up my shopping and made the short walk to the station. Queen Victoria stared sternly down at me outside the town hall. A pigeon fluttered down and sat on her head. She didn't move.

WHAT I LEARNED FROM MY DAD'S CHRISTMAS JUMPER

Last year it was onesies: full-size all-in-one pyjamas, rather like a festive romper suit for grown-ups. Oh you couldn't move for onesies: plain ones, reindeer ones, stripy ones, santa ones, onesies with hoods, Superman onesies, Batman onesies, tartan onesies... Everyone wanted one, then everyone had one, then in a great ironic laugh-at-us-aren't-we-funny way, everyone wore one. For a few weeks last December, Britain was suddenly the land of misshapen, multi-coloured tellytubbies, bounding about in their front rooms and curling up on their comfy sofas like overheating caterpillars. Onesies were most definitely in.

This year the shops are fine for onesies, thank you very much. You can still see them hanging full length from displays in large department stores. Many of them look a little forlorn. Antlers flop wearily from furry hoods and the thin, cheap material looks worn before it has ever even been worn. They hang like curtains, pulled over Christmas 2012 as though it were just a memory in the minds of the bustling shoppers.

How has this happened? Well, those bustling shoppers, smiling sweetly at these coloured drapes have grown somewhat fickle and are looking for something else this year. They're looking for Christmas Jumpers.

How do you define a Christmas Jumper? Like last year's onesie, the Christmas Jumper derives its popularity from its irony. Under normal fashion rules, just like the all-in-one pyjama, it is not the kind of thing that is cool at all. Alright, it's designed to be warm, but I mean it is ludicrously uncool.

I know because my Dad has one: I mean an old one. He has a Christmas Jumper that's older than my sister (she's 28) and he wears it... all year round. Oh it's not festooned with knitted penguins or reindeer baubles; there are no snowflakes or happy xmases on my Dad's Christmas Jumper. No sir, wearing that to the gardening would be a little odd. This one's just terrible patterns and awful knitted stripes airlifted straight from the 1980s.

No Christmassy accoutrements? What makes it a Christmas Jumper then? Good question. If you saw it, you'd agree that it is beyond doubt a 'Christmas Jumper', but you might struggle to put your finger on exactly why. And then, like me, when you realise the defining quality, it would probably make you feel a little uncomfortable.

For the answer is that it's authentic and it's awful. My Dad's Christmas Jumper comes from a time when your Grandma knitted everything she could think of with arthritic fingers and fading eyesight. The result was a homemade mesh of knitted eyesores gathered round the Christmas Dinner Table with Grandma beaming at one end, and everyone else looking sheepish.

It is these embarrassing jumpers that the machine-made, mass-produced, deliberately appalling Christmas Jumpers of 2013 are emulating. The manufacturers know what they're up to. It's Christmas. Irony sells. After all, the onesie craze proves that people will wear anything so long as everyone else is wearing it. It almost doesn't matter how ridiculous a thing it is. Somehow, irony became cool. Cool, whatever it means, has always been both marketable and lucrative.

This then is the reason why you won't find any Christmas Jumpers in the shops. They've sold out and everyone is wearing them as though it's some grand experiment in national irony. In this digital age, where a picture of you can be seen by all the people you know, faster than the time it takes for a polaroid photograph to develop, these gaudy sweaters are all the rage.

I don't have a Christmas Jumper. I don't have much desire to wear a onesie. That's alright though isn't it? I mean, I don't want to come across as some sort of Scrooge: Doesn't like Christmas lights, won't wear a onesie, hasn't got a Christmas Jumper. I really do love Christmas. I just want it to be about so much more than these peripheral trends and fashions. What will it be next year? Indoor bobble hats? Cardigans? Apres-ski-wear?

If I were to have a Christmas Jumper I'd want it to have come from the heart of Christmas itself, the love that's supposed to permeate this season of good will: I'd want my Grandma to knit one for me. Unfortunately though, I don't have one of those either.

MORE CHESS AND A DIFFICULT CONVERSATION

Part two of the company chess tournament. I discovered that it's now a league and everybody has to play everybody. My flukey checkmates last week will count for very little with this system.

Rather than play a final today then, I found myself up against Mr Legal, who beat me in a way that seemed almost inevitable from the start. As he swiped his queen into the corner that I'd castled myself into, he quietly said, "Mate." I smiled in a resigned sort of way and pushed my chair back. We shook hands and the stress evaporated. This was the lesson I needed.

Back in the old days, in the fervent league of the Berkshire Under 15s, my snobbish opponent would have pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose, smiled smugly and wandered off without a word, only to be patted on the back by his grinning teacher. I have vague memories of resetting the clocks, packing away the pieces and taking that final forlorn sip of Lilt from one of the school mugs. Mr Whitfield, who had been hovering round the board would then say things like: "You really blocked yourself in there, Stubbsy," and, "Why didn't you take the bishop with your knight?" which was less helpful than he'd hoped.

Mr Legal was a much more gracious victor today. He outsmarted me at every turn. He was quicker in the opening, cleverer in the middle game, more prepared, more insightful, better equipped towards the end and ruthlessly efficient. In fact there was only one move I made that came close to baffling him and even though it must have looked like it came from nowhere, he was more than capable of matching it with a clever solution. Yet, despite all that, there was no smug grin, no victory dance and no dismissive snobbishness. We both put the pieces away and we chatted about castling and playing against computers; he told me that he regularly plays his seventeen year old son (who must be some sort of prodigy) and I told him that I used to play a long time ago, in a diffident kind of way. And that was that.

Plus, brilliantly, I think I know what I can do to improve for next time.

-

What I can't improve at it seems, is facebook debates. I had a discussion with someone today about Christmas lights: you know, the ones people string across the front of their houses. I don't mind writing about the discussion here because, after all, the thread evolved online in the first place. That person still has the right to reply, just as she did several hours ago.

In the end I had to sigh and give up. I've always been a fan of teasing out logical loopholes in somebody's argument by the simple strategy of asking questions. It's not aggressive, it doesn't assume anything and it prevents me from bombing off on some personal rant. Plus it gives me the opportunity to work out whether their argument puts me squarely in the wrong, which could end up being a huge personal improvement point for me. Additionally, it sometimes leads to people contradicting themselves with their own argument, forcing them to stumble into a startling conclusion and importantly, helping them to think about why they believe exactly what they believe. And everyone should ask that question.

Perhaps I'm just in chess playing mode tonight. It does all seem a rather strategic way of constructing a defence, when I write it down like this.

I stopped the conversation when she mentioned that she wished some people were homeless at Christmas-time. Again, there is nothing new here. This is precisely what she herself wrote online. Her argument was that Christmas lights were a waste of money and self-indulgent luxury items. People who live in poverty, she reasoned (like herself), would probably see this as a disgusting injustice; it would be a better world if some people were homeless, if they lost everything; then they would truly know what's important.

All this, I noted, while she tapped away at her tablet on a social network in a comfortable chair in her council-provided flat. I asked her if she was considering giving away her Christmas tree, but she didn't twig - she didn't understand! that this could be considered a 'luxury item' (by her own definition) and therefore was analogous to the whole issue of Christmas lights. At that point I had to resign. Where can you go in the face of such flint-faced opposition? I felt like Cnut, standing on the shore of the English Channel, trying to hold back the tide. She is a friend, and although I fundamentally disagree with her, I quickly realised that the conversation would have ended in either a humiliating logical checkmate or a childish unfriending.

Sometimes, you have to know which battles to pick.

FRUSTRATION

I can feel it bubbling inside me. I'm a volcano: a hulk of silent rock on the outside, with a swirling mass of molten anxiety boiling within. I feel the pressure pounding as the frustration grows, belching and broiling, burning and bursting from the deep. The time is ticking.

This is not good.

I'm not an angry person - far, far from it! I'm not easily riled and I am afraid of conflict. I am passionate though, and it's in those tiny hidden passions, buried metres beneath the surface, that my frustration begins. But what should I do? Should I continue to bubble, slowly boiling like a pressure cooker? Should I find a way to vent my frustrations in a controlled way that doesn't hurt other people? Let off steam? Find a punchbag? Write about it... in my blog?

That way lies danger untold.

So for now I find myself swallowing my disappointment, rather like I had to swallow a difficult cough in a company meeting the other day. Our new glorious leader was giving a speech which involved picking on people, and I knew that if I lapsed into a coughing fit, I'd be toast. So I focused on the clock, closed my eyes tight and swallowed the scratchy, tickling pulse that was trembling in my windpipe as my muscles tightened and my torso shook. This is like that.

HOW POSH ARE YOU?

I've gone a bit strange tonight. I think I get cabin fever quite easily, which is not surprising as all my worldly goods exist in a small room in someone else's house... and the boot of my car.

This morning, the boot of my car was packed with stuff: two keyboards, a guitar, an extension reel, a small practice amp, cables, my rucksack with all my pedals in, and a box of carol sheets. I was off to The Range to sing Christmas Carols with some people.

"So basically," said Dale, the tall and impossibly young section manager, "You can sing from over here," he gestured to a small area by the doors. A pile of ghastly orange baskets were stacked up in front of a display of seeds. I had my doubts that even half of us would fit. "Do you want to go and get coffee first?" he continued. I checked my watch. There was time. I jumped on the moving stairs and made my way to the coffee shop.

I don't want to be snooty about The Range. Apparently, I'm only 45% posh, so, although the horsey-set of Yahoo-Henrys wouldn't be seen dead near the shop, I ought to fit right in. I sat thinking about this for a while, with a steaming cup of weak tea in a cardboard cup and a gooey slice of chocolate and orange cake. Am I proud I'm not posh or am I, well... secretly disappointed?

A lot of people posted things on facebook like:

"See! I said I wasn't posh! Lol"

"Only 30% Beat that!"

"I'm 52% apparently; I'm far from posh!"

"Oh dear, 55%! Mrs Bucket!"

... which suggests that most people are actually desperate to prove that they are not posh at all, even when the results put them higher than 50%! So here's my question. Think about it:

What's wrong with being posh?

It's a tricky one isn't it? The empirical evidence is suggesting that poshness must be socially avoided for you to be accepted; even if you do know how to ride a horse, your neighbours live ten minutes away and you refer to napkins and housecoats rather than serviettes and dressing gowns.

I think it's all to do with the perception of the way posh people treat other people. No-one wants to be lumped in with the condescending Arabellas and Tarquins of the world. Even the Arabellas and the Tarquins have a particular perception of the Cynthias and Hooray-Herberts with their tweeds and rifles, I suspect.

In this way, poshness is probably a bit of an illusion; a relative term to the way in which we perceive ourselves. Odd then, that the survey reinforced such specific stereotypes in the questions it asked. I didn't tell the world that I'm 45% posh, because I'm not sure I believe it.

I stirred my tea with one of those thin wooden stirring sticks. Then I popped the plastic lid on and walked downstairs to meet my carollers.

"Joyful all ye nations rise; join the triumph of the skies..."

Carols highlight some of the class differences of Christmas don't they? There we were, singing what is essentially high-church music in antiquated language, at the entrance of a low-budget supply store. I did wonder whether we should be going for Frosty the Snowman or Jingle Bells rather than The Holly and the Ivy and Once in Royal David's City. The trouble with me is, it's the second kind of Christmas that I really love, not the first. I think Christmas ought to be classy.

That's why I won't be covering my house in flashing lights, or lining the mantlepieces with singing santas. I won't be wearing a onesie or wrapping a plastic tree in tinsel. I'd much rather have a log fire and a glass of mulled wine in a leather wing-backed chair; a good book and a game of bagatelle, perhaps a classical collection of traditional carols in the background played by orchestras. None of these gaudy, brash gimcracks and illuminated snowmen! Christmas is about so much more than chimneys and turkeys and tinsellated trinkets. Away with you, cola swigging santas! Be gone ye ridiculous rudolphs.

You know what, you're probably right: I'm annoyed because I want to be more posh than the survey says I am.

A GAME OF DRAUGHTS WITH MY NEPHEW

I'm not going to go on about winning two games of chess the other day, I'm really not! It was a flukey lunchtime for me, and I didn't even learn the thing I'd hoped to learn about the value in losing.

In a neat reflection of the problem, I saw it in microcosm tonight when I played a game of draughts with my nephew. He's six years old and he fluctuates between the two binary settings of sweet and stroppy. Like a lot of children, he hasn't quite got the hang of losing. The idea of losing graciously is still a world away for him, just as the humiliation of losing at chess seems frustratingly distant from his uncle.

I was determined to do it properly.

"Pick a hand," I said, holding out two clenched fists. He tapped my knuckles and I unfurled my fingers to reveal a white plastic disc. "Right Ben, that means you're white."

"I don't wanna be white!" he remonstrated. Stroppy mode kicks in quickly.

"Well, that's how the game works. Alright, we'll say that white means you can choose. Which col.."

"Black,"

"OK, you're black. I'll be white. Now white goes first..."

"No! I wanna go first!" Arms crossed, lip out.

"That's not really the way you pl..." To save an argument that would have ended with me crawling under the sofa looking for scattered draught pieces and the draught board upside down on the carpet, I eventually did let him start this unusual game with an opening move from black.

It certainly is unusual. My Mum's not taught him about kings, so the aim of this variant is simply to get more pieces to the other end of the board than the other player. The rest of the rules are pretty much as you'd expect. You have to move diagonally, you can jump pieces to take them and you can't move backwards.

I am a firm believer in playing games properly and not allowing children to win on purpose. I don't think it does them any favours in the long run. However, in this instance, the draughts board might not have survived. Every time I took one of his pieces, he wailed and screamed that it wasn't fair. He wanted to change the rules, he wanted to put his fingers in the way, he wanted to bend every known law of physics he could, just so that he could be declared the winner.

Microcosm.

In the end, we ran out of moves with five of his pieces home compared to just two of mine. Sweet mode was suddenly back as stroppy mode switched off. The real victory though was that for the first time I can remember, he had grasped that he needed to really use his brain to think about what might happen as a consequence of his actions.

If I move that there, Uncle Matthew will take it. That's not good so I'll do something else.

And that I think, is a great lesson for life, right there. My next move has a consequence according to the rules of the game. We all learn this algorithm at some point, this critical analysis of future events. Call it Newton's laws of motion, call it the law of sowing and reaping or just plain old cause and effect. I was so proud of Ben, starting to get it through his tears.

He was happy he won though. Apparently he went home telling his Mum (my sister) that he 'won Uncle Matthew at giraffes'.

That'll do.

THE CHESS TOURNAMENT

It was the company chess tournament today; part one, anyway. I entered it thinking it would teach me a thing or two about losing.

When I was at school (sometime in the last Century) I was part of the Chess Club. The Meadway School Chess Club was very much at the wrong end of the Coolness Spectrum, languishing somewhere between Recorder Club and English Country Dancing.

Football it was not.

However, on those wet lunch-breaks when the windows steamed up and the rain lashed across the field behind room C25, when the footballers sloshed through the mud in their turned up school-trousers and had to drag soggy rucksacks through the corridors, we band of checkmating brothers, we happy few, knew where we'd rather be.

Mr Whitfield, professional geography teacher and amateur chess-enthusiast, did a great job in inspiring us to learn the game. We had a league, scribbled on a sheet of A4 paper and stuck to his notice board; we had piles of those old plastic sets that Waddington made with the hollow plastic pieces. We had teams and clocks and tournaments and challenges and some of us were even selected to play for the school against other schools. Their names still resound in my memory: Waingels Copse, Sir William Borlase, Leighton Park... all posher than us, and all the sweeter if we, comprehensive to the core, could beat them...

And therein lies the tale. Chess became something of a war, a battle, a clash of intellect; of wits and of concentration. To the victor went the spoils; to the loser went the humiliation of inferiority and self-analysis. These things can have an effect on a young man.

So this week, entering a chess competition, the first after all these years, I was anxious to find a lesson. Chess is after all, not a war. It's very much a board game. It takes a bit more concentration than Monopoly or Buckaroo, but it is essentially just an ancient and cleverly simple game of moving pieces strategically around a board. I wanted to remember that. I wanted to play well and lose.

Eight people entered. I was pitted in Quarter Final 2 against a developer I call Mr Proxy Junior. I imagined Mr PJ to be a strategic mover, a great linear thinker. One foolish move and it would all be over for me. I wasn't going to make a deliberate error, but I thought perhaps it would happen sooner or later. As it turned out, I sneaked in a checkmate almost by accident. The game lasted about twenty minutes. Then Mr PJ disappeared claiming he still had a massive pile of bugs he needed to fix.

I was more surprised than anyone. There wasn't really time to revel in the victory though as Mr Swish had just beaten Mr Legal and was itching to oppose me in the Semi-Final. He does everything in the world as though it's a piece of cake, Mr Swish. Furiously competitive and often super-proud of his great intellect, he swiped up two pawns in a fist with a flourish and made me choose a hand. I chose black. We were off.

I made foolish moves quite quickly - a poor opening left me weak from about the third move I think. He forked a bishop and a knight and I had to think on my feet. My other knight and bishop were locked in by an errant white knight and my own pawns which I could not move for trying. Before long, that pesky white knight was playing havoc with my defences, creating a knotty mess and a fork of two rooks. I castled on the queen side (which I don't like doing) and the king ended up hiding behind a single pawn. It was a shoddy defence. When the clock ticked beyond 1:30 and the kitchen was empty of lunchtimers, I sunk my head into my hands.

"I think maybe I should resign," I said. Mr Swish said nothing. He was thinking about a possible queen-swap (shudder) and I saw his eyes flick over to the pieces he'd captured. A quick tot up revealed that he was one rook up on me and it didn't take much to see that he'd exposed my defence wide open. Defeat was inevitable.

Then, as he moved in for the kill, I spotted something beautiful. There was a possible checkmate, right there, with my name on it. I moved my queen into position when I had the chance. He checked me. I groaned, still thinking that my defeat was almost certainly two moves away. Mr Swish paused for a little while, then drummed his fingers on the table. Had he seen it? Then he moved a rook into an attacking position. It wasn't a check. I slid my queen up to the back row he'd left open. It was checkmate. I had won.

Now, I still don't know how that happened. Furthermore, I genuinely don't think I've learned my lesson! In fact, if anything I've awoken that competitive warrior spirit of Fourteen-Year-Old-Me who swung so wildly between elation and dejection at the hands of plastic pieces in room C25.

The final is next week against either Mr Spain or The Big Cheese. I'm in a curious position of wanting to win and yet somehow recognising that it would be good for me if I didn't: more cognitive dissonance then! I guess the question should be whether I enjoyed it along the way. I suppose I did. I bet you can tell from the way I'm writing about it, throwing the criticisms of Future Me to the wind. Oh well. I guess one thing about being 35 and not 14 is that I've got much more of an idea about what's important... and what isn't... I hope.

AN EVENING IN LITTLEPORT

Still in Ely. It's my last night here. Tomorrow I make the happy journey back to Reading, the land of my birth and the home of forgotten biscuits.

I spent some time today with my friends Tim and Jane. They live in a quirky house in Littleport.

The thing about this part of the world is that up until a couple of hundred years ago, most of it was underwater. Rising above the shallow marshes was the so-called 'Isle of Ely', a tiny city huddled together on a mound of dry earth. Just a few miles away, in view of the monumental cathedral and squashed together on its own promontory, was the village gathered around the little port.

Nowadays you can drive from Ely to Littleport without so much as a splash through a puddle. And so that's what I did today, to see my friends.

"We offer two types of tea," said Tim, eyes glinting with the firelight flickering in the wood burning stove. "Nice tea and nas-ty."

"I'll take a nice tea if you don't mind," said I with a smile. When it turned out to be Russian Caravan, I began to wonder whether I'd popped my clogs and floated into the afterlife. We chatted about music, about working in a software company, about Jane's experience as a professional artist and some of the difficulties that creatives face. A sumptuous fruitcake appeared almost magically, and disappeared under less mysterious circumstances. The tea flowed, the fire cracked and the music played. Beautiful.

Ah, but everyone's lovely here. When I got back to Billy and Anita's home in Ely, I was struck by how peaceful it is. They'd argue that family life is at odds with a sense of peace, that their vivacious trio of little misses sometimes exasperate their tranquility and exhaust the house of any quietitude it gained while they were asleep. I disagree.

Yesterday, Pastor Billy asked if my visits there had informed my view of the art of parenting. I said I felt unable to comment on the subject, which is not entirely true, but always seems like the safest answer from a happily unmarried and childless singleton. There are some subjects which have land-mine written all over them.

No, I disagree because I don't think peace has anything to do with volume or energy or behaviour or vivacity. I think it's a much more internal quality. I know because I can take it with me.

Down the M11, round the M25, along the M4 and into Reading. I could do with remembering how I felt with a cup of Russian Caravan and the grand piano.

MY KIND OF TOWN

I'm in Ely in Cambridgeshire, recently voted the 'kindest city in the UK' by those people who drive Santa round in his convoy of Coca-Cola trucks.

I'm not one to argue with the coke elves. It's pretty nice. Tiny cobbled streets interweave in a medieval fashion past quiet and quaint little shops and Tudor-fronted buildings. The magnificent cathedral rises above the rooftops and trees line the happy little avenues and walkways. It is the kind of place that generates kindness.

I'm here to see my excellent friends and their children, who are adorable. They say if you want to remind yourself of the joy life can bring, you should be around children. Talk about an imagination revolution! These kids have it by the bucketload. Thanks to today's adventures, I now live on the Moon and arrived in Ely by electricity, am a sort of puppet robot with an earlobe for an off-switch and I inflate like a ballon if anyone pulls the sleeves of my jumper.

You do feel the kindness here. However, a similar survey a few weeks ago pinpointed Reading (where I actually live when I'm not scoffing Gorgonzola on the shores of the Sea of Tranquility) as the 'nicest' place to live in Britain.

We Readingenzians raised a collective eyebrow at that; a town famed for a questionably sculpted statue and a street that smells so bad its nickname is more famous than its real one. As I pointed out to someone this morning, Jerome K Jerome describes it as 'dismal' at best.

But this has made me think. My town does seem to have a reputation in some quarters. Is it right for me to slag it off? Is it really any worse than say, Leiceseter or Dundee or Norwich? Alright, from a leafy suburb of quiet and quaint old Ely, the rudeness of Reading seems an easy target - but should I be acting as an ambassador rather than a kind of escapee asylum seeker? Should I be championing my town rather than agreeing with the chorus of dingbashers?

Weirdly, this has made me want to prove that Reading isn't all Smelly Alley and Butts Centre. Perhaps there are parts of our town that we should be a bit more proud of after all. It might not be the emerald city of the south; it seems unlikely that Santa will stop off for a coke with Reading Elvis and remember the old days when our most famous townsman was Lenny The Tramp.

However, it might be a start. It seems like a challenge, and I'm in the mood to be kinder about the place where I live. And I think kindness can be infectious if you let it.

THE IMAGINATION REVOLUTION

When I was at University I had a digital watch. It was a just a simple black Casio affair. One day, the strap broke. I carried the watch face around with me for a while until I could afford a replacement. I had entertained thoughts of hooking it to the end of a chain like a kind of 1980s Victorian pocket-watch, just to be bohemian and different.

I didn't do that though. Oh no. I did this:

I collected together a bunch of AA batteries, wrapped them together with a cable tie and stuck them to a circuit board. Then I wired in a few capacitors and resistors I'd borrowed from the physics lab, before completing the arrangement by taping the plastic watch face to the front.

Then, rather naively, I set the watch to count down from 6 hours to zero and stuck the whole device firmly onto my housemate's door with a massive lump of blu-tac.

-

I'm only mentioning it now because I can't quite believe I did that. Today, that kind of thing would probably get somebody arrested. I just thought it would be funny. No-one in their right mind would imagine it was an actual bomb, surely? I thought it might give the cleaners a giggle when they came round. They could have used a laugh.

That was 1996. Today feels very different. The world has grown paranoid and cynical and I feel old and boring; far from the young Machiavellian pranking of boisterous physics undergrads. When I suggested to our placement student here at work, that he could crown his final year by putting bubble bath in the fountain, he looked at me as though the idea had come from another world, beyond the stars, where anything was possible; or perhaps that I was mad, it's hard to tell now that I think about it.

-

I'm not advocating the manufacture of fake bombs (or of real ones). I'm not really suggesting that someone should pollute the city centre's water supply. I'm just saying that things are different and I think that's a shame. But what's changed? The world? Me? Both of us? My main task today is to move files from one folder to another. Where are the laser experiments? Where are the songs? the late-night piano moments? Where is the copse of silver birches that looked out over the city on sunset nights and made us dream?

Perhaps we should start reclaiming the imagination we lost. I've long suspected that the more you know, the harder it is to imagine. Imagination is an innate feature of the young - we're born with it, unrestricted by the boundaries of knowledge and age. Anything and everything is possible to our inchoate eyes... then as time goes by, the boxes grow smaller, the walls come down and the limits crush ever inwards like the sides of a trash compactor. We hear those voices that teach us words like 'impossible' and 'silly' and 'nonsense' and worse, we start to believe them.

What if we could claim it back? What if that imagining were still possible? What if, with all our grown-up skill, we could actually use that natural unlimited way of thinking and live in the overlap? I think that's what Einstein did. I think that's what Hendrix, Lear and Handel and Winehouse and Bohr and AA Milne and JK Rowling all learned how to do.

I'd love to be able to do that.

... still, these files aren't going to move themselves.

#TWITQUIZ13

Throughout November, I've been running something on Twitter that I called TwitQuiz. This is the second year I've done it and it's been a lot of fun to put together. I've always believed that if you're going to be creative you may as well create something that you would like, and then at least you know one person is happy with your output. The idea of TwitQuiz began as a kind of thought in the race against Google. I wanted to create logical, lateral puzzles that made me think in a way that forced me beyond a search term.  Puzzles like that have always given me a little tingle, rather like a mountain that's there to be climbed or a crossword that just begs you to complete it.

I've reproduced the questions as they appeared on Twitter during November. If you're the tingly type, maybe this will float your boat too. You'll need a little general knowledge and you can use the Internet if you think it will help.

The rules are as follows:

(1) Answer by Direct Message (or email)
(2) Clues are available but cost 1 point per clue
(3) One 'secret' bonus point for the fastest answer (you have to beat 9 minutes)

I'll post the answers in a later post. Have fun. The highest score is 55.

TwitQuiz13 Questions (pts)	Fastest Answer (hh:mm)	Average Answer (hh:mm)
Q1. What's missing from this sequence: blue, ____, yellow, blue, green, red? (1)	00:14	4:01
Q2. A Roman city, a southern county, a catholic country and an invaded island. What sends them into a state? (1)	01:52	03:15
Q3. Titania, Oberon, Miranda and Ariel are dancing in circles. Who's in the middle? (1)	00:45	03:29
Q4. Oxford-1blue=Green, Warwick+6brown=Oxford. Holland+6red=Liverpool-6red. Oxford-3red=? (1)	00:31	03:45
Q5. Which of these words is the odd one out and why? - life, seventeen, simply, beautiful. (2)	05:38	15:41
Q6. My friend Sherpa Olelo is trying to climb the world's tallest mountain. He's half way up. Why can't he eat his sandwiches? (1)	03:01	04:17
Q7. Where can you find a dove, a bunch of bananas, sugar cane and a coconut palm? (1)	00:13	03:55
Q8. Which of these is the odd one out and why: piglet, rabbit, tigger, eeyore? (2)	28:09	28:09
Q9. Bill & Paul are chatting. Bill has decided Utah is red and New Mexico is yellow. What colour will they decide for Colorado?	04:26	18:26
Q10. Where might you find a lamb, a primrose and a retired major, climbing a staircase? (1)	24:45	40:13
Q11. James has a collection of intriguingly named items. If Silverthumb is 3 and Lightningbat is 4, what number is Earthjump? (1)	01:45	24:05
Q12. Every day on Mt Olympus the amber nectar is passed from Selene to Ares; Ares to Hermes; Hermes to Zeus. Who gets it next? (2)	25:29	29:04
Q13. What two letters are next in this sequence: HeLiBNNa..? (1)	00:56	02:19
Q14. Which city is missing from this list: Montevideo, Rome, London, Munich, Buenos Aires, ____? (2)	04:47	04:52
Q15. Fill in the blanks: AB_OP_R. (4)	25:22	25:22
Q16. Which of these is the odd one out and why: São Tomé and Principe, Venezuela, Lake Victoria, The Pacific Ocean? (4)	00:28	01:06
Q17. EL + Joseph + Tweedsmuir - ((Enid x Jerome) - E) = ? (4)	01:55	11:04
Q18. Harry chugs out of the engine shed 18 minutes before an intruder tries to derail James. Who was in the shed at 6pm? (2)	03:34	26:28
Q19. Complete the sentence with an appropriate word: As anticipated, bunnies can't easily halt ___ (2)	25:31	25:42
Q20. Schneemann, Sam and Schuss are ski-ing in the Alps. Who's the odd one out? (2)	01:29	14:14
Q21. Where can you find four fathers who used to be six grandfathers? (1)	00:09	00:11
Q22. What links Massachusetts, Armageddon and a Pythian Prize? (1)	00:18	00:18
Q23. In my collection I have 23 players, 10 jumpers, 5 sparklers and a shooter. How many layers are there in total? (2)	12:43	12:43
Q24.Mr Pike and Mr Salmon are bigwigs in the city. They have a £10 wager that each of them can get the other's autograph without the other knowing. Who's likely to win and how? (2)	37:46	38:43
Q25. What 8 letter word should this remind you of: pine tree, show me, ocean, yellowhammer? (2)	11:43	28:16
Q26. If treasons maketh ten spiders, what must thou be to maketh me spirit miner? (1)	04:26	04:26
Q27. ^& > %£ > "^ > "£ > &. *( > *£ > ? > ? > ? > &. (3)	U	U
Q28. My old teacher, Mr Stonen, still thinks that RWs S the DBOM, the old duffer. What does he think SL has that is ATS? (1)	07:16	07:16
Q29. What can you do with Mr Livingstone, Parsifal, a Red Panda and a Long Journey? (1)	U	U
Q30. Mr Bean has lost the timer for his camera. Where is it? (1)	U	U

( ) points in brackets
U = unsolved. Nobody worked it out.

Follow me on Twitter @matt_stubbs.