METALLIC GLIMMERS OF SHINY GUITARS IN A WORLD I CAN'T BELONG TO

I woke up this morning with a cat staring at me. Somehow in the night, the animals had changed guard and the miniature ball of bichon frise had given way to the warm curling velvet of the cat, whose bright eyes questioned my very existence in this world.

That's a theme I've fallen into today, here in Birmingham. This strange landscape of wide sprawling carriageways, crumbling buildings and metallic glimmers of shiny guitars, is the world in which I do not belong. The cat knew it at the start of the day; I knew it by the end.

Ben took me to his band's lockup. He thrust an acoustic guitar into my hands and got me jamming over the top of his looping, mellow bass lines. It felt a bit like painting by numbers in an artist's studio - I couldn't play that instrument well enough to bluff my way through. He was inventively switching and modulating and I was fat-fingered and awkward. It was fun though.

We took the dog for a walk along the impossibly straight Wolverhampton canal. I felt queasy, walking under a high-arched bridge. The green water reflected weird patterns across the diagonal brickwork.

Ben's obsessed with metal music. I feel like he's got me trying to listen to all kinds of things today. In fact, I will probably dream of long-haired growling Scandinavians and shredding guitars. The last time this happened I just asked if the people I was with had any Michael Bublé. I can't help liking easy listening, I suppose. It's not my fault if these serious chaps find it all a bit bland. It, like me, is from a different world to the one they love.

Nowhere was the dichotomy of worlds clearer than in Scruffy Murphy's, our venue for the evening. Three bands played for our delectation. I was informed at the end that we had heard metal, death metal and progressive death metal tonight. That's not what I got as the bass and the drums thumped right through me. In fact, I did my best to transcribe the lyrics as I heard them...

Your feet are innocent

Yoda tells it like it is

Bacon, bacon, write the bacon

Black ice is me

Black ice is you

Your feet are innocent

There's not much progressive about that. All I heard was grunting and growling and intricate, almost classical patterns being thumped out by the instrumentalists. It is clever, perhaps even entertaining and important as a genre, but like Picasso's Guernica, just because it's good doesn't mean you'd want it on your wall. I came out of that basement with my ears ringing as though I'd just been caught in an explosion. I felt very much alone in a world of people who seemed to like it. It was just well-organised loud noises, plus somebody unnecessarily angry but unable to express themselves with real words who has returned to screaming it out in as low a voice as possible.

"You alright?" asked John, who was with us in the crowded basement.

"Yeah," I said, "Just a bit overwhelmed."

He wrapped up some headphones around an iPod of some sort. I came close to asking if he had any Michael Bublé, but I did think it unlikely.