BACK INSIDE TO THE OUTSIDE

Funny how quickly the last day comes around. It started with a bright blue sky and ended with me driving home through the city lights of Reading, feeling a little sad and very much looking forward to a warm bed.

I expect the sadness is connected to being exhausted. My mood always plummets when I'm tired, and as we filled out the final notes, switched off the equipment and started ripping cables out, the tiredness hit me like a train.

I've been to, and played at many camps now, and the last night is always the same. Everyone is on a high except the sound team, the musicians and the guy who needs to get the tent down as quickly as possible. I'm sure I had a whole load of conversations with people at the end, but I can barely remember.

Anyway, life changed inside is nothing without lives transformed outside, so it's onwards with the living. As I said last year, it's the end of one week, the start of another. Only instead of going on holiday to the Peak District, getting caught in a thunderstorm or accidentally insulting homeless people, this time I've ended up in Morrisons Cafe.

I'm waiting for my car to be MOTd. Yep I'm the guy who said 'Hey yeah, 8am, first of August; that should be OK, yeah no worries,' without remembering that it's just hours after the 31st of July.

"Oh Matt Stubbs," said Paul last night when I told him. I smiled meekly, imagining him shaking his head and chuckling as he told Heather on the way home.

The thing about being outside your life for a few days is that you eventually do have to rejoin it. Within moments of getting home last night I found out that my Mum is really ill and propped up in bed, the window men* had dumped all my stuff (and their own grubby tools) on my bed, my niece's birthday is cancelled because she doesn't want to come, and my Dad was asleep on the sofa, a Sudoku book gently rising and falling with his breathing.

I just collapsed into bed, trying not to think about having to get up and unpack the car. Soon I was drifting on a slowly deflating air bed through a sea of tents and gazebos towards a gigantic piano that stretched like a ladder into the clouds. Where does all of that lead to? I wondered as I fell softly asleep.

Morrisons Cafe so far, it seems.

*Not transparent stuff-shifting aliens; we had replacement windows while I was away.