BE A CATALYST, MUBBS

Well, apologies. Some poetry will be alright; some will be terrible. But we all learn how to make a pot of tea one way or the other, I suppose.

I cooked Spanish chicken in the slow cooker today. It was ready when I got home, filling the stairs with a succulent aroma. As you know, everything I cook in the slow cooker comes out sloppy, so I scooped out the hot chicken thighs from the slop and sploshed them onto a pile of rice. It looked good: olives and peppers glistening in the kitchen-light, steaming with heat around the tender chunks of browned, off-the-bone meat.

I fell asleep after I'd eaten the Spanish chicken. It might have been the white wine, lulling me into dreamland. More than likely though it was because I'd walked over 21,000 steps today and my body was falling into a sort of involuntary standby.

I woke up in the dark.

I washed up and ran a bath. What better way to end, I silently processed, than with a hot, muscle-relaxing bubble-bath? I did my usual - twenty minutes of hot tap, four minutes of cold. It's a tried-and-tested old formula and it does work.

Meanwhile, I scrolled through Twitter and thought about chemistry. Then I fixed the capo to the fourth fret of the acoustic and played a little blues guitar as though I knew what I was doing. The neighbours must be so tired of me.

I think you can either be a catalyst for change or a reactor when it happens. It occurs to me that I can be incredibly reactive sometimes, where it would be better if I just made chemistry happen by being myself in the right place at the right time. That's what catalysts do. Be a catalyst, Mubbs. Be a catalyst.

I put down the guitar, unfixed the capo, and refilled the wine glass. I read somewhere that every bottle of wine that's under £5 has about 37p of wine in it. This glass of crisp white was the last of the cooking wine; I worked out that I was drinking about 6p. I could probably have just swigged from the vinegar bottle for much the same effect. I thought about my recent attempt to go aquatotal and smiled to myself.

Oh well, at least the bath was ready. I screwed the taps tightly shut and tentatively stuck a hand in through the cloud of bubbles. Into the water it went. And out it came again straight away.

The bath was freezing cold.