SUMMER RAINS AND NATURE'S UMBRELLA

Trapped in the rain again. This time though, not in the car, but under a beech tree in the park.

I was taking an evening stroll, when the sunshine hid behind a grey cloud, and then the grey cloud showered the park with lovely rain.

So... I'm under a tree, waiting for the shower to pass, and also... absolutely loving it.

Trees make pretty good shelters. There is an occasional drip from the leaves above, but mostly the downpour patters the green canopy like the canvas of a tent.

A droplet splashes cold onto my jeans. It grows dark, then it fades magically, as it dries into my knee. Another falls onto my phone screen, warping and bubbling the letters as I type. Still more tap me on the shoulder and rattle onto my baseball cap.

I'm under-prepared for the park tonight.

It's cool though. For one thing, I seem to have brought a packet of Oreos with me. For another, this wonderful tree is nature's umbrella.

"D'oh! I forgot to ask you about my umbrella!" I texted Mike, who had picked it up for me at the end of camp last week.

"I know." he replied, enigmatically. He definitely has it, Kathie told me so. Perhaps he still remembers last Monday, when I woke him up at 11:30pm.

Then, suddenly, as the trees crackle and splutter with falling water, the sun comes out again and lights the grass with summer evening warmth. I'm quite content, and remarkably dry. Thanks, nature!

I like a rain shower on a summer's day. It's a very British thing, especially at this time of year when a lot of us are on school holidays. It's warm. It's raining. It's okay. We're on hols. It'll all be alright.

And when even nature provides you with an umbrella, you know it will be.

HELLO THERE, I'M A GOLDFISH

Hello There, I'm a Goldfish

Hello there, I'm a goldfish

And you're a goldfish too!

I've been swimming here for ages

How's it going? Are you new?

Well hello, Mr Goldfish

Think I've been here for a while

But it's nice to be acquainted

With a golden, friendly smile

So, is that thing there, your castle?

Over there behind the trees?

Yes I think so, would you like to

Come and see it...

Oh yes please!

I'll just get myself together, and 

Then join you in a mo

Ah no problem, I'll be ready

Then the two of us can go...

-

Hello there, I'm a goldfish

And you're a goldfish too!

I've been swimming here for ages

How's it going? Are you new?

Am I? What? I'm sure you said that,

Are you feeling quite okay?

Quite okay, of course I am, but just 

Who are you anyway?

I mean it's nice to find a friend

And then to chat with someone new.

But you haven't even said hello

Despite emerging from the blue!

I think I did sir, think I did,

Politely say hello.

You asked me who I was

And then you said that we should go

To see the castle by the trees and
Have a look at where you live...

What, I live inside the castle?

Oh but what I wouldn't give!

But you're joking surely joking,

With this talk of taking tours,

For I am almost certain that it

Isn't mine, it's yours.

This isn't fun, you horrid fish

You've pushed me to the end

I never want to see your sneering,

Smirking, goldfish face again.

Don't try to tell me anything!

I simply couldn't care!

I'm swimming far away from you,

Don't follow me, don't dare!

-

Oh brilliant. I've lost her and I

Can't quite work it out

She's really strange and moody

And she flaps and storms about

But It has to be her castle!

She was first to swim here too!

I'll never understand them really,

I just haven't got a clue.

Oh here she comes, a-swimming

With her pretty goldfish eyes.

I wonder which of us she thinks

Should first apologise.

Hello, I start to say, but then

I see her looking blank

She swims a little closer

And she giggles through the tank:

Hello there, Mr Goldfish

I am a goldfish too!

I've been swimming here for ages

How's it going? Are you new?

PILES OF DISORDER

Back home then, amidst the piles of stuff that prop up my life like flimsy pillars.

I'm tired, but I'm also in that post-camp bubble, where all the fun and hard work of it has ended, warm showers and comfortable beds are back, but the real world has yet to hit.

A lot of my things are in piles. Even Malcolm texted me about the setup for church today:

"All DI boxes and microphones tested. Oh and there is a pile of Matt-Stuff at the back."

Of course there is. It's turned out to be the Nord With No Name, its empty box, a stand, and a couple of cables. I've ended up playing guitar.

So, does life always compartmentalise itself into these columns of stuff? It isn't deliberate. It just happens! Even my desk at work has piles of books and graphs and old forms, oh and my scrum-master certificate of course.

Oh work. It'll hit me on Tuesday in another vertical column, a pile of emails to trouble through.

Until then though, there are many other pillars to demolish, in an attempt to get my flat and my life back into order.

APPLES FROM NOWHERE

An apple materialised on my piano this morning. It just appeared. I looked round and there it was, green and red like something from a fairy tale - the apple from nowhere.

I have eaten the apple-from-nowhere.

Of course, it wasn't really a magic apple. Emmie had sent it with a small child, who had placed it on the corner of the Nord Stage 2 EX (it really needs a name) and then walked off.

There are lots of 'apples from nowhere.' Sometimes we call them 'miracles', especially when we can't figure out the mystery behind them. I think that's okay. Money through the letter box that matches that exact bill you have to pay? Cool. Petrol gages that move towards F instead of E? Awesome. Apples from nowhere.

But here's a thing: I reckon apples-from-somewhere can be miracles too. It's just a question of timing.

For example, the rain and the sun water the soil, an apple pip germinates into life and suddenly shoots into the Spring sunshine. Many years later, that same green sprout is now a tall apple tree, and its own apples begin to weigh down its branches. Then an apple is picked and thrown into a truck with a tonne of other apples. It's cleaned and washed and measured and taken to a supermarket, where my friend Emmie picks it up, brings it to camp and gives it to a small child to carry to me while I'm rehearsing with the band.

In the context of a pretty lifeless solar-system, galaxy, maybe universe even... I'd say that's something of a miracle.

So, my thought for the day today is probably that we should be thankful for the good things that happen, and not take them for granted, however they got here.

Because really, being here at all, blessed from above and content with below, is all something of an extraordinary miracle in the first place.

THE TRACTOR-BEAM OF LIKEABILITY

I'm just going to present two facts here, and leave it at that.

1. Aluminium was adopted as the internationally recognised name for the element in 1990. Then in 1993, the international union of pure and applied chemistry added Aluminum as of an equivalent status.

2. Association Football was abbreviated to 'soccer' in England first, presumably to differentiate it from its cousin, rugby football. In effect then, 'soccer' is a more accurate name for it than 'football' will ever be.

Now then. I've been thinking about this today: I have never met an American I didn't instantly like. There's something about them, gregarious and warm-hearted, hilarious and explosively funny, that gives them that likeability tractor-beam. It draws me in, anyway, making me realise how free I would certainly like to be.

I did a personality test once. It was one of those ones where you came out as a different animal, based on your personality. Oh I longed to be an 'otter', full of life, sociable, funny and outgoing. I answered the questions truthfully. Out came the result...

"You are a golden retriever. Faithful, dependable, loyal and consistent."

... and all I saw was 'boring'. I don't want to be predictable! I want to be an otter! I want to be fun. I want to be... like the Americans.

Take my friend Chris for example. He's from Florida (and sort of Ohio I think) - Otter. All day, he is a classic otter. Then there's Erica. She's from California. Otter - she makes everybody around her feel totally at ease and she makes people laugh!

And then there was the table of Americans last night, hilariously diving in over conversations, bubbling and laughing and praying and booming with the Brits about the funny differences between our two cultures. The tractor-beam was on big-time, and I sat quietly being magnetised with awe, into the roomful of otters, sparking each other into new dimensions of hilarity over cheese and wine.

Anyway, I am a golden retriever. I will always be there and I'm hard to budge. I am quiet, determined and faithful, even in a room of swirling fun. I don't like interrupting and I wait for spaces.

I did go home though. I was also very tired. 

STORYTELLING IS THE THING

I think I'd like to learn how to tell stories.

It would be so useful! Not just to entertain small children (more on that later) but also because... everything is a kind of story.

Songs are stories. Listen to a ballad of verse and chorus; the best tell a story of problem (verse) and solution (chorus).

Work too, is full of stories! Once upon a time there was a customer who bought a product and it didn't quite do what they thought it could, so they phoned the support desk, who said 'Yes! You can do that. Check out the online help, I'll walk you through it.' And lo, the customer did follow the steps dutifully and lived-eth happily-ish ever after.

True. This blog is also stories, and one continual story of course, itself part of a much larger story (my life). Everything is story-telling.

It would also be useful, for the moment when I find myself suddenly surrounded by small children and someone else (Emmie) says: "Now uncle Matt will tell you a good story!" and I have to wrack my brain for one that I can remember, won't be boring, and isn't about the accidental discovery of cosmic background radiation.

Shame too - that's a corker.

So, storytelling is the thing. Problem, problem becomes a big problem, problem gets solved. Simple, right?

I should hope so! I feel like I go through that cycle every day.

THE NEXT JAMES BOND

I see they're looking for a new James Bond. I'm thinking of throwing my hat in the ring.

Well why not? I'm sophisticated, suave, cool under pressure, and smart, right?

Oh who am I kidding? Last night I got locked in a car park. Trust me, Daniel Craig, your job is pretty much safe.

It's our annual camp, The Gathering, and for the first time (mostly due to last year's experience) I decided not to camp but to drive in from home.

And drive out again at the end of the day... provided somebody hasn't locked the gate and, crucially, gone to sleep with the key, in their tent.

My heart plummeted as I stood there rattling the chain, illuminated by the headlamps. Why do these things keep happening to me? I asked the stars.

The stars didn't know. They were as silent as always when I lose my keys, call the AA guy to check whether they're locked in the boot and then find them somewhere else, or when I drop my phone in a muddy field and comb the rainy campsite for it, or when I accidentally drive into a farmer's field and get mistaken for a 'traveller' while staring at shotgun. The stars have no idea.

In the end, I messaged a load of people who (after expressing varying degrees of sympathy and hilarity) all told me whom I should wake up. It was Mike and Kathie. So Emmie (who was still up) helped me to do that. Mike opened the gate and I shot through like a rocket.

"It's all part of the richness of the tapestry of your life," said Graham this morning in the café tent. I silently nodded. Then Gareth walked by, beaming at me, hilariously.

I bet nobody needs to say that to Daniel Craig.

WHICH DO YOU WANT MORE?

My motives have been exposed to me again. Don't you just love it when that happens?

It's like that thing when you see someone acting in a particular way, and you quietly think to yourself: I know why you're being like this even if you don't. I can't tell you because you'd want to thump me (probably) but I do see it.

It's like that, only it's you, raising an eyebrow and getting ready to thump ... yourself... for pointing out what's going on... inside yourself. It is a moment of awful, but sort of wonderful, self-awareness.

Well anyway. I'm making a decision today, and I've heard myself say:

"I don't want to do That. I want to do This!"

and...

"... yes that's because really, if you're honest, you feel like... this. So, Matt, which do you want more? I mean really?"

I used the phrase 'cognitive dissonance' three times the other day in a conversation with Emmie, and I think that was an overuse, so I'm a bit reticent to use it again, but that is what this is, I think - my attempt to resolve cognitive dissonance (by choosing This over That) has revealed the truth about my motives.

So, how shall I resolve it? Well, thankfully, there's an Arbitrator who shows me that I should choose That because it's the right thing to do, and then deal with my dodgy way of prioritising things to protect myself from harm.

It's so interesting isn't it, how we mask what is, in preference to what we think is. But then, I wonder, how are we to know the difference?

How indeed.

THE TEMPLE OF THE GODS OF STUFF

So. What do you get a fifteen year old for her birthday? Thankfully, playing the role of the slightly-unhinged-uncle for fourteen and a half years has left me with a slim advantage - anything goes.

One thing she won't know though, is that I had to go all the way into the town centre, on a rainy Saturday afternoon, at the start of the school holidays, to get it.

"God," I prayed, silently, "Are you absolutely sure you love all people?"

I was slaloming between faces, an endless sea, seething towards me and around me: shopping bags, pushchairs, white trainers, ripped jeans, toddlers being tugged a foot from the floor against their will, and grumpy-looking dads slouching three feet behind.

This, after being in a lift that was so full it verbally warned us that we were overloaded. A giggling couple got out, leaving just a little more room for the guy in the mohair jacket to move away from my squashed nose.

And that, after queuing for half an hour to get into the car park in the first place.

So it was then I found myself au centre ville, and wishing I wasn't. The whole thing is like a temple-complex-to-the-gods-of-stuff. You crawl in, pay your tithe and then the gods of stuff promise you endless happiness in their shimmering window-displays and bikini-clad posters.

There are pilgrimage points to stop and be refreshed of course, while the Monks of Costa and Pret A Manger busy-body around you with a wet cloth.

There are yellow-vested priests who make sure you absolutely are worshipping correctly and are not going home with more than you deserve. And then, in each of the shrines there are long lines of people, just like you, clutching new things in one hand and the hope of the joy they will bring in the other, all on their way to the happily jangling tills, and the mantric chanting of 'next please' and 'can I help you'.

Anyway, I got my niece a copy of a study version of Macbeth, the Scottish Play. My Mum said she needed it for school, but hopefully it might awake a little passion for literature instead of cheeseburgers and oversleeping.

I picked my way back to the car and made my way down the spiral temple exit, feeling a little bit sad that I'm a part of the world owned by the gods of stuff.

"I'm sure," said a quiet voice, deep within, answering my earlier question.

I smiled in the mirror. I guess that's exactly why I'm here.

LATE NIGHT RADIO QUIZ

I'm stuck in my car outside my house again, listening to the rain. The rain... and the local radio station...

They're playing a quiz where the listeners have to phone in and play twenty questions with the presenter, who is pretending to be someone famous.

"Are you an actor?"

"Yes."

"Are you on TV?"

"Well I suppose I am, yes."

"Are you a newsreader?"

"A newsreader? No." He swallows a guffaw, "No, thanks for calling."

I chuckled to myself.

Another caller. Little bit of banter this time with a regular. From her cracked voice I imagine her sitting in a darkened room with old velvet curtains and a box of Milk Tray chocolates.

"Hello love, are you rolling a ciggie?"

"I beg your pardon!"

"Well the other night you said you liked a cigarette..."

"Yes. Well it's only twenty a day."

"Well if you like it, why not? Why not?"

Unbelievable, I think to myself. Um... maybe because it'll kill you?

She got nowhere useful with the quiz.

Scott from Gosport just phoned in. He asked whether the actor was 'non-British'.

"Yes!"

"Is it Michael Caine?"

I don't know what's wrong with these listeners. I'm not sure they're actually listening.

"Are you a mayor?"

"Um... no, not a ... mayor. Phil in Norbury..."

I can't switch off. It's enthralling. No joy for Phil in Norbury either. Tony in Basingstoke just found out that he's dead. The actor, I mean, not Tony in Basingstoke.

Can Valerie do better?

"Are you Ronald Reagan?"

"Am I Ronald Reagan, Valerie?"

"Well are you?" I suddenly like Valerie a lot.

"YES! I am, Valerie! I'm Ronald Reagan!"

He trumpets his congratulations to Valerie who is relieved but also seems a bit miffed that the prize is only kudos and not something useful.

"I need a lie down, good grief!" he rattles on. "On television, not British, not a mayor (at least not currently anyway), a dead actor: Ronald Reagan. Well who else could it have been?"

Man alive.

"You did really well tonight, thank you for taking part. So it's just coming up to half past ten, almost time for the travel. And how about that rain out there, everybody..."

The car radio gets switched off with an anticlimactic flick of the wrist. It's hammering down. Time to make a dash for it.

THE VIEW FROM THE BUNKER

Right. Tin helmet on, armoured-plating intact, and bunker... secure. I'm ready. For today I'm going to talk about parenting...

"And if people see you behaving badly..." she said, pushing the trolley, "Do you know what they will think? They'll think that I'm a bad mummy..."

I didn't hear the little boy's response to that. I'd already moved by. I didn't see his face either,  but I can guess the expression. I have 'spirited' nephews with selective hearing - I've heard it and seen it before, and today's reaction to that bit of teaching, I would wager, was probably confused indifference.

First of all, it doesn't make sense to a small child. How does the behaviour of one person affect other people's view of another person?  It's quite a complex leap of reasoning, and it requires quite an adult thought - that responsibility is inter-connected.

Secondly, it sort of absolves the blame from him to her, even if it's a little subconscious. So it's her fault then that I'm misbehaving? Given that I don't even understand the link in the first place, this seems like an excellent motivator to do it again, next time we're in Sainsbury's.

Thirdly, it actually reinforces the disconnection between action and consequence. This is a classic hallmark of immaturity, I think: to imagine that 'someone else' will pick up my rubbish, will tidy up my mess and will sort out my self-created problem. I think, that if you want well-rounded, responsible grown-up children, you have to teach them this early - and I mean really early. It's Newton's 3rd Law of Motion, it's The Principle of Sowing and Reaping, and it's at the heart of our insistence on justice, fairness and equality.

I'm okay I think. I've survived so far. Phew.

KNOWING EVERYTHING

So my niece turns fifteen on Monday. I'm envious. After all (as is widely known by teenagers and parents alike) fifteen is the exact age when you get to know everything.

Yep - it's the year of omniscience: that moment of complete enlightenment, when nothing at all is hidden from you, and the great mysteries of the universe (the ones that have somehow passed those dreary old adults by) are revealed to you as though they were suddenly mere trivialities, unfolding in front of you in glorious simplicity.

In the light of all that, teachers must look like clueless simpletons; parents too, like aliens from another dimension in which nothing that is cool could possibly have ever existed.

I wonder whether she wonders what happens to us beyond that age. You know, when we stop listening to Radio 1 in the sunshine, imagining that life goes on forever. I wonder what she imagined happened to me after 1993 when I too, knew everything that there was to know.

How did I forget it all? How did it all slip away? What happened? When did I become so naive?

So, yes. Fifteen she'll be and temporarily the mistress of the Universe with nothing left to learn or know or fail to be able to (often sarcastically) point out.

Hope she enjoys it. It'd be terrible to be omniscient and not realise just for how short a time it lasts.

Then again, what do I know?

FRIENDS ON THE EXTRA MILE

I'm not a 'Friends' expert, but I think there's one episode where Joey tries to figure out whether any act, no matter how charitable, is ever truly selfless.

I might have dreamed it. Normally Joey was busy chatting up women, or eating cake, or pretending to be stupid.

Anyway, I thought about that phantom Friends episode today, because my friend Chris went properly out of his way to help me  - even though he absolutely didn't have to.

My Macbook failed last night, mid-rehearsal. It just stopped producing any sound. Unfortunately my rig (and particularly the Nord Stage 2 EX) really depends on the MacBook, so I had to mix my pads on the fly using the synth section on the Nord. I was annoyed - mostly because I didn't have decent presets I could bank on.

I told Chris about it later by WhatsApp. He cleverly deflected my whining and very gently made me feel a bit better about the gear-failure.

Then today, despite having a very stressful job, despite being right in the middle of a long series of 12-hour shifts, and despite being extremely good at what he does, Chris scoured the Internet for articles that might help me fix my problem.

"I really appreciate this!" I texted him. "I always like it when it's not something you have to do, or benefits you at all, but you go out of your way to do it anyway!"

I guess this is what Jesus means by going the 'extra mile'. Roman soldiers could force anyone to carry their stuff, but only for one mile - Jesus says the new normal is to do much more than is required or expected. In the searing heat of the Middle Eastern sun, those early Christians were clanking around with the luggage of their enemies, two, maybe three miles at a time.

"No worries," replied Chris, "Always glad to help when I can. It benefits everyone in the team when all our gear works."

I suspect it was a bit deeper than that, but I was reminded just how thankful I should be that I have the friends I have. They all seem to have an unspoken commitment to go the extra mile and 'be there' for each other, even when it hasn't really been their day, their month, their week, or even their year.

Who needs that show anyway, when you've got the real thing?

A STORM INSIDE A STORM

I ran to the car, clutching a pack of macaroons. The dark sky exploded with fizzing, crackling light and the night erupted into thunder. Monsoon rain pounded onto the concrete, streaming its way around my feet.

Clunk. Rucksack in the boot. Clack, bip bip, leap in, slam.

Rain hammered onto the windscreen, streaming down the glass and melting the weirdly lit car park into something like an impressionist painting.

Then, suddenly, without any warning at all, I did something I had not expected. Sitting there, in the driver's seat of a Ford Focus, next to a thrown-about packet of macaroons, I placed my hands on the wheel, in the middle of the thunderstorm... and I burst into tears.

I did. I just started crying. It felt as though all the clouds of emotion within me had had enough, could no longer contain their rage, sadness, disappointment, or whatever, and had started sparking each other into a moody maelstrom.

I'm clearly going bananas. What is this? Where does this deep, irrepressible sadness come from? Why am I like this?

I pictured my dad, rolling his eyes and leaving the room. I thought of my Mum, helplessly trying to fix it but not knowing how. I remembered that I, in such times, usually swallow it and carry on.

The sky flickered with electric ribbons of lightning. I wiped my eyes, started the engine, and headed home.

KEEPING BEES

I went to see some bees today.

"I see bees all the time," said Tim, "They're always in my garden."

Perhaps. But I bet Tim hasn't seen the inside working of a hive, or held aloft a frame dripping with wax and humming with happy honey bees.

These creatures are amazing. An elite squadron goes out to find nectar, then, when they've found it, they buzz back and tell everyone else where it is by dancing. The angle they move indicates the angle to fly relative to the sun and the number of waggles they do tells the hive how far away the food is.

We saw a worker bee being born. She wriggled her way out of a hexagonal cell and popped through the waxy cap, ready to join the community.

We saw the queen too - long and langourous, surrounded by worker bees. She'd had her wings clipped (to stop them all swarming I suppose) and was milling about on a frame kept under the queen-excluder, a mesh with holes just too small for her to fly through, much like Windsor Castle I suppose.

Anyway, this was all another brilliant initiative from the people who run the business park. We've had honeybees here for a while, next to the lake, under the dappled shade of some tall trees. I guess someone thought it might be interesting for people to find out more about them!

And it was! My only regret was that there was no-one else from my company there - just strangers who all knew each other, which is (I'll admit) my least favourite social situation. Still, I'm less daunted than I used to be and tried to fit in, rather like a drone at the edge of a waggle of workers.

"How was it?" asked Erica when I got back.

"Awesome!" I buzzed, "I learned loads!"

I don't think I could keep bees but I'm fascinated by this incredible community of dance and survival. It seems, instinctively every bee in the hive just knows what it's supposed to do. Within seconds of emerging from the honeycomb cell, the baby bee we saw was cleaned up and got straight to work turning nectar into food and making honey with the hive-mind.

I sat at my desk and logged into my computer, thoughtfully, thinking about the queen, the workers and the drones - each innately aware of how they fit, of their purpose in the group.

Some days I can't even remember my Windows password.

I WONDER WHETHER DUCKS

I Wonder Whether Ducks

I wonder whether ducks...

Have any sense of worry?

Do they flap and curse their luck

When they're panicked in a hurry?

Do they lie awake at night

While the moonlit water bubbles,

Are they bothered in the light of their 

'aquatic' sort of troubles?

Do they scurry, do they fly, and

Do they panic through the sky?

Do they struggle, do they think,

Over-analyse and sink?

Yes, I wonder whether ducks

Have all, somehow got the knack, of

Letting all their troubles tuck and roll

Like water off their back?

THE EMPTY WORLD WITH US IN IT

It has occurred to me tonight that most of the world, most of the universe in fact, is just empty space.

Oh you'll have heard this. You'll have heard someone say that if an atom were somehow the size of the Royal Albert Hall, the nucleus would be the size of a tennis ball, sort of hovering above the stalls in the middle.

Sure, and the cloud of electrons would be swimming around those circular corridors, looking for the doors to the fancy boxes.

But there's a lot of space between the boxes, the stalls and the middle of that auditorium, isn't there? And while the Royal Albert Hall is often full of glorious reverberating music, laughter, emotion and applause, the corresponding 99% of every single one of the trillions of billions of atoms is not. It's full of nothing.

Everything is nothing. There's a cheery thought.

I don't like Saturdays. Not sure whether you could have guessed, but there it is - especially dull, empty ones like today.

I tried to shake it up a little by going for a run. Phone in pocket, pink headphones (don't ask) and the Runkeeper app whirring away, picking random tunes out of my phone to match my pace.

The first track it chose was Debussy's Clair de Lune. Thanks a lot, iPhone. Sarcasm's the last thing I need from you, buddy.

So, after running, spluttering and finally coughing away in a bus stop for a while, I hobbled home and ran the bath.

Oh the bath, full of empty atoms of hydrogen and oxygen and calcium carbonate (I guess that's what's in Radox?) and me. I sank into it.

I suppose the beautiful truth is supposed to be that somewhere between the unending emptiness of the large stuff (you know, space and the universe) and the terrifying emptiness of the tiny things (atoms), there's us, filling up our lives with particles and bathwater and noise.

We aren't designed to be empty space; we're designed for life to the full, overflowing with hilarity and love and outrage and passion! We have music, art, conversation, literature, politics, landscapes, constellations, knowledge, and hopes and glorious dreams to fulfil. Oh and pink headphones...

But best of all, we have each other! Right? And as human beings, we're designed to create space, to use it to illicit emotion and splendour and awe, and then to fill it with music until our hearts burst with wonder.

Perhaps that's what my phone was trying to do with mid-run Debussy. Though I doubt it.

THE AA GUYS

"Hi is that Matt?"

"Yep."

"Hi, it's David from the AA..."

"Eh eh!"

A small pause, just big enough for tumbleweed ensued. I don't know what's wrong with me sometimes. Certainly David didn't.

He was phoning me to tell me that he was nearly here, and almost ready to fix my tyre. After my puncture the other day, it was obviously time to stop skidding round on the spare and get a proper replacement. David was the man to do it.

When he arrived, he was with another guy called Luke, who leapt out of the bright orange van and set to work.

"You alright then?" I asked David, who was leaning out of the passenger side window.

"Feeling a bit queasy."

"Dehydrated?"

"No, I've been drinking..."

It suddenly occurred to me that that could have meant one of two very different things, so I casually left the conversation alone.

When I went back out later, David (still fainting in the passenger seat) told me that Luke's van 'leans' and it was probably that that was making him feel 'sick'. I said I'd never heard of that before but I hoped it 'cleared up'.

Inwardly, I wondered just exactly who was taking whom for a ride.

Still, all my tyres are worthy of the road, even if the road is not worthy of them. I thanked Luke with a handshake, saluted David, and took the locking wheelnut, putting it safely back in the glove compartment.

THE LOCAL DODGY PUB

Ruth and Rory and I had a planning meeting last night in a pub with sticky tables.

I've long held the belief that you can tell the quality of a pub by measuring its fruit-machine-to-chairs ratio. If that number is high, it's probable that the locals will glower at you over a grubby pint while their ropey dogs lap lager from an old ashtray on the patterned carpet. If low, or even zero, you might be alright.

There might be more than just that ratio though. Sticky tables, yes. I wondered whether some of my skin would be left behind if I moved my hands too quickly from the wooden surface. I also think there's something about 70s artex type wallpaper, the massive blaring sports channel and the hovering smell of smoke that somehow still lingers, ten years after the smoking ban.

"Right, let's think about those eight points," I said, getting up, "I need to use the bathroom."

And so I did. I squeaked open the heavy wooden 'Gentlemen' door and was greeted by an apocalypse probably fit for, and created by, anything but 'gentle men'.

A dirty, wet floor reflected the single bulb that hung precariously from the ceiling. A pool of ... let's say water... collected in the middle, like a lake, seeping suspiciously under the stained, porcelain urinals.

I held my breath.

I'm coming across snobbish, I suspect. I have no idea how difficult it would be to run a pub, especially one with an established culture. And because this is England, where villages and towns grew around churches and pubs for thousands of years, it turns out that almost every public house in all the land has a deeply-established culture, which has been tough to change. And however awful or up-market it might be, it's home and it's safety to someone somewhere.

We had a great planning meeting. If ever you're wondering whether it's better to sit down and work everything out on your own, or to throw ideas around in a team, I can tell you that doing it together is a lot better. It isn't easier but it is better.

The rain swept past the windows. The sky grew dark and the street lamps popped on. It was pretty miserable out there. I was suddenly glad for the warmth and friendly atmosphere of this local dodgy pub. I expect we'll be back for next time's planning meeting.

Though I am definitely going to go to the toilet before I get there.

MR AVERAGE GETS A PUNCTURE

"Well, it seems as though you're quite average," said the man, staring at his laptop.

I slipped my socks back on.

I had had my visceral fat, my body-mass index, my muscle-fat ratio and my hydration-level measured by a tiny, imperceptible electrical pulse rippling through me from a pair of digital scales.

"Yes, your metabolic age seems to be roughly about the age of a 39 or 40 year-old," he went on.

Fair enough. And that was it. Mr Average zipped his boots, said thank you to the man with a laptop and left the medical room, heading back to his desk.

I still believe I need more exercise. I haven't walked to work in ages and I'm far from that twenty-minutes-a-day brisk stroll that's suggested as the minimum. Then there's the gym I haven't joined, the runs I haven't been on and the push-ups I haven't done. Not to mention the swimming and cycling I can't do! Typing, playing the piano and thinking up songs is not enough.

Funny then that a few hours later, I was on my hands and knees, red-faced with exertion, cranking a jack and trying to unscrew the wheel nuts of my passenger-side front tyre.

You won't need three guesses at what had happened. Flat. Puncturino. I rumbled to a stop in the High Street, dishevelled my boot, yanked out the spare and set about the age-old manly trick of tyre-replacement.

"Yeah, it's just that I don't have the thing that undoes locking wheel nuts..." I eventually found myself saying to the AA call centre.

"Someone will be with you in twenty minutes," said the lady on the other end. She had the tone of a woman who has heard it all before. 

I was left then, to contemplate the immovability of those wheel nuts and my distinct lack of upper-body strength. I was thinking about the gym and what it must be like to be one of those Schwarzenegger types, when my Dad turned up.

He told me I should have a thing that undoes locking wheel nuts. I told him I didn't have one. He told me it's usually in the glove compartment. I found it in the glove compartment. Then the AA man turned up and my Dad told him how silly I was for misplacing the thing that undoes locked wheel nuts. 39 years old I am.

Ten minutes later, the spare was on, I'd learned the correct place to jack up my car (well I was nearly right!), the grubby old wheel was in the boot and I was on my way home.

Maybe a little physical exertion in the summer heat did me some good? I certainly enjoyed getting my hands dirty, trying to solve a real-life, practical problem. True, I needed strength and tools. And yes, I certainly needed help. But I'm all the better for it, if not the stronger.

So then, about that lack of exercise...

BLACK HOLES OF UNDERSTANDING

I feel like this has happened a few times recently, so that means I can definitely talk about it.

It might be tiredness. Or it might be my brain slowing down. Or it might just be that I've become completely set-in-my-ways about the way I like to think about things.

The other day I went to Bracknell. My cousin Walty and I are planning our 40th birthday celebrations for next year and I was trying (really hard) to get my head around what in the world she was talking about.

I couldn't do it. She was leaping from detail to detail, not brainstorming but actually planning and deciding, but so quickly that I couldn't keep up! I needed to see the whole picture, so I constantly found myself having to rewind the conversation and think about what the entire thing looked like. I found it really uncomfortable. I'm a big-picture-person, she's a detail-wizard.

She's brilliant by the way. And I reckon she thinks the same about me, it's just that we're really different. And I had to try to cope with the things that were simple and quick to her, which were also black holes of understanding for me.

These black holes are everywhere. I get them at work too. I'll be fifty before I understand how Transport Layer Security (TLS) works. The words are on the screen in front of me; the mastery of it may as well be on Jupiter.

I feel my heart pounding with frustration. I ought to know this. It ought to be as simple as everyone else finds it. I'm bothered that I can't work it out. I'm scared by how slow or thick it makes me look, which is of course, just another way of saying that I am actually proud of how clever I am.

Dong! goes the massive bell of recognition. Yes, that'll be it. Pride.

Yet what these black-holes of understanding prove is that cleverness doesn't really exist. After all, if one person struggles with algebra or quadratic equations or Latin verbs, how is that any less valid than another person struggling with how to see the best way forward when planning a complicated party?

I think I've said this before - cleverness needs context, and that makes it subjective to the situation in which it's required. So my clunking pride has been a game of shadows and rainbows all along anyway.

You can't see into a black hole because light can't escape from it. It's a gravitational well that sucks in everything, including light and information - much like pride itself, I suppose, blinding you to the truth of the matter.

So, perhaps I should welcome those massive things I don't understand. Perhaps I shouldn't be embarrassed that I can't multiply two pairs of numbers in my head and then add them together without forgetting one of them. Who cares? I have to double-check how to spell 'occasion' sometimes because the letters get mixed up in my brain.

So what?

Oh and I don't understand TLS or how to plan the logistics of a party.

But I don't care because there are other people who do, and can. And their black holes of understanding are not mine, and mine are not theirs. That's rather a beautiful thing, isn't it, when we can all get over ourselves.

TWO MISSING BLOGS AND ONE MISSING TENOR

I think I've lost a couple of blogs. No bother - one was about time-travelling sushi and the other was about my different ways of laughing. Neither were as interesting as I've made them sound. Both are lost.

That's the last time I use that blog manager app anyway.

It started because I was trying to write about how I somehow ended up taking two grandmas to a concert. I finished the post, read it back, realised I was being ageist (about who's allowed to like what) and deleted it. Only, the blog app mysteriously deleted the previous two instead.

Not my grandmas - although I think both of them would have loved it, had they been alive of course. Nope, this was someone else's two grandmas - one singing in the choir and the other, just enjoying the music of Faure, Rutter, Hayden and Franck along with me in the audience.

"This is Matt," said one of them, introducing me to somebody else in the interval, "He's our driver."

Chuckles all round. I had been invited of course, and had offered to drive. Plus, this was a choir to which I myself had once belonged. It was nice to see them again.

"Do you think you'd like to come back?" asked one of my passengers on the way home. I scanned mentally through the 24 grey-haired men who had stood sweating like bow-tied waiters on the back row of the tiered staging. There had been a gap in the tenors.

"I need to be really protective of my time," I replied, "Especially my evenings."

It would be nice to be part of something like that, I suppose. I just don't feel like I can give it the bandwidth at the moment.

Well, not when there's time-travelling sushi to write about and lose, anyway.

AN ENCOUNTER IN THE GARDEN

"Hello!" I exclaimed, pulling the garden gate shut behind me.

A pair of black ears were sticking out of the long grass. One of them twitched. I stood there motionless for a while. It was twilight. The sun had slipped beneath the trees and I had made my way home through the wooden gate that joins my garden to the park.

This must be what it's like to be a gazelle or a zebra, I thought to myself - transfixed by the danger, but unsure whether or not to run. Fight or flight, the law of the wild, the circle of life.

I stared. A pair of cool yellow eyes reflected back at me through the stalks. They were expressionless eyes: glistening, unblinking, wide and empty of emotion - the eyes of a hunter, fixed on its prey, ready for that perfect moment to pounce, to roar and to devour.

How long, I wondered, have you been living in my garden? Carefully, I began to move, one step, carefully swishing through the grass and finding the concrete of the overgrown path. The yellow eyes followed me. I brushed past the bushes. He glared. I made it to the shed, palms feeling my way across the splintered wood.

The ears twitched again. For the first time I noticed the sleekness and the blackness of his fur - a deep abyss of colour, the darkness of shadows, of unending wells and eternal, empty night - blacker than black in the darkening summer sky - the covering for powerful muscles, rippling beneath that ebony exterior. And those two glaring eyes, ever fixated upon me, burning and bright.

He yawned, lazily. Fangs, sharper than serpents' and brilliant white. A silent roar filled the air, buzzing, echoing, pounding through my head. I ran for home, bumbling through the wooden gate and clanking it shut behind me.

-

So, there's a cat living in my garden. I think I should give him a name - if I can be brave enough to go back in there, that is.

HALFWAY ROUND THE LAKE

I'm by the lake today. Miraculously (and by walking halfway around it) I've found a bench hidden in the shade, and out of the sniffing-zone of most passing dogs.

I sat here once before, I remember, just hidden by the brambles that tumble to the water's edge. A couple, who were very interested in each other, came and sat nearby, just by the bank, and didn't see me. In hindsight I realised I ought to have coughed or stood up straight away to avoid the embarrassment. But for some reason, I froze. Within just a few moments it was too late - I was trapped, a hostage of fortune in someone else's romantic moment.

Not so today. I'm noisily chomping away at my lunch, waiting for the perfect moment to go to my Dad's birthday party.

He's told everyone he doesn't want a birthday or a fuss. Naturally, my sisters have gone out of their way to organise him a birthday and a fuss. I am commanded to be there. 

So I scoured the shop for the perfect card - in my mind, the perfect card for my Dad is plain and says 'Happy Birthday, Old Bean' - the card makers have clearly not catered for my dad's simple taste - and then brought my lunch out here for a bit of respite.

I've bought salt-and-vinegar crisps for some reason. I don't like salt-and-vinegar crisps. Actually I'm not even sure I like crisps. What was I thinking? Hooked in by the Meal Deal.

Anyway. I'm by the lake. I can hear all kinds of strange birds, chirping and squawking. The sun paints the water like a silk canvas and the breeze slowly shuffles the clouds through the bluest of skies.

I feel a bit odd today. I'm not sure quite why, just sort of off-the-boil. Of course there are probably people who don't think I get much above 60°C anyway, but even by my usual lukewarm standards, I feel... subdued.

It will pass, this quietness. I just don't know how long it will last. And there's no real reason for it - I've had a great weekend, recording and moving music around a screen; I finally got a Nord Stage 2EX after all the babbling and procrastination. Plus I had a relaxed time on holiday. I ought to be more chilled and happy than this.

There's always a choice when you're halfway round the lake: forward, or back the way you came. It doesn't matter though; you always end up in the same place. In my case, going to the party of a man who doesn't really want one. Or, perhaps my sisters imagine that secretly, deep-down, he actually does? He's hard to work out after all. I do think though, he'd much prefer a quiet afternoon, halfway round the lake.