THE TALK OF THE CUL-DE-SAC

I’m in Stockholmhaven. A TV has just told me: “In Sweden, whenever you top a dish with dill, it’s a party.”

Really, Sweden? Really? Who knew that herbs could be so exciting that they immediately draw the neighbours in from far and wide bearing bottles, gifts and their finest dancing shoes? Maybe that’s where I’m going wrong in my cold, quiet flat. Stick a little dill on my marmalade toast and I’ll be the talk of the cul-de-sac! Well, maybe if the cul-de-sac were in Sweden.

Sorry. I shouldn’t be sarcastic. It’s not very befitting. Lowest form of wit, they say - and I seem to make an art form of extracting the wit from it. Rock on, Sweden. Just let me know when the party starts.

I don’t really know what I’m doing here. I don’t want to go home; Stockholmhaven was closer, and warmer. Plus I need to measure a thing called ‘Kallax’ at some point to see whether it will fit at the end of my bed and still give me room to shuffle past and open the curtains.

I’m deciding whether to have a cup of tea. The TV is painting a picture of Sweden for me that I can’t believe all of Sweden is like. They can’t all be fishermen on windswept tug boats, or mums spooning through bowls of juicy red lingonberries, can they? Surely some of them go to work in cities and have office jobs in skyscrapers? Surely some live in cold, empty apartments and eat marmalade on toast at night in front of YouTube?

Anyway. I’m pretty sure I’ve had dill, and I don’t remember it. I don’t even remember the taste, let alone the party it was supposed to inspire! Does it have a strong flavour? Is it potent? The TV is showing a Swedish chef twisting it into a pan of boiling potatoes and it looks exactly like someone disposing themselves of an old Christmas Tree. It has a ‘distinctive aroma’ say the subtitles. 

I might go and get a tea then. There’d better not be dill in the teabags.

SUPERMARKET ADVENTURES

Life’s full of wonder, packed with mysteries and marvels of the universe. Scientists have uncovered so many, yet for each discovery, the questions of life, the universe, and everything, still expand and grow exponentially, simply to fill the deep, dark uncharted reaches of the unknown...

Virtually all my life I’ve been going to Sainsbury’s - so how come I still (aged 40) manage to get lost in it, most weeks?

My Mum tells the story of how I panicked once when I heard my name called out over the tannoy. I was looking at the big TVs and she’d lost me. I don’t really remember it, and I certainly don’t recall running to the checkouts as fast as my ‘little legs’ could carry me when I heard my name... which is weird because I was 26 at the time.

Joke. Though that did actually happen! I could have been 5; my Mum would know, but she’s in Australia. And Sainsbury’s wasn’t even called Sainsbury’s then - it had a much better name, which anyone over the age of 30 who lives here (or grew up here) will tell you with a nostalgic glint.

Anyway, tonight’s confusion was me looking for ginger beer, which is entirely not where you’d expect it. Then I completely forgot which aisle I was in, went round the corner and got bamboozled by the tea... which seemed to be in the wrong place altogether! What is going on? Before long, I got myself together and found myself asking a pretty shop assistant about the difference between squeezy Marmite and original glass-jar Marmite.

“My friend told me that if I lay it on its side, it’s easier to get the last bit of Marmite out...” I said, enthusiastically, “But with the squeezy stuff, you need to be some sort of Mr Muscle to get it all at the end, even with scissors, and that’s messy.”

I thought that was funny. She looked at me blankly and then pointed me towards where the cleaning products and the polishes were. I smiled, sighed, and said thanks.

That reminds me! After my spoon-fed salad in Waitrose yesterday, I picked up a new jar of marmalade from Waitrose (I move in all the right circles, me). While I was standing there marvelling at all the middle class marmalades with their gingham-cloth lids and swirly writing, an old man tapped me on the shoulder.

“Scuse me, son,” he said, politely. “Could you open this for me.” He thrust a jar of Robertson’s jam into my hand. Without thinking I said, “Certainly!” and set about twisting off the lid. It popped satisfyingly.

“There you go, enjoy!” I said.

It was only afterwards that I wondered whether he’d gone round the rest of the shop eating it straight out of the jar. Of course, he probably just knew it would be a struggle to open when he got it home. That made me feel glad to have helped, and a little sad to think that strength so often abandons older people so cruelly, and leaves only arthritis behind. One day that could be me. Though I kind of hope not.

So anyway, after 35 years I’m still getting lost in supermarkets, confusing attractive shelf-stackers, and possibly aiding and abetting elderly marmalade thieves.

Life really is full of wonder sometimes.

TUNA NICOISE

I’m eating a Tuna Nicoise salad with a soup spoon. I reckon they’d kick me out of Nice for this. “Monsieur Anglais! Buffon!” they’d cry as they threw me just the wrong side of the ‘Bienvenue’ sign with a shrug and a wipe of the hands.

It’s not my fault. I’m at Waitrose, where they seem to have run out of everything except patience, and even that’s a matter of time. Forks there were none. The knife basket is empty and the teaspoons are flung far afield. So short of stuffing the leaves and egg and tuna chunks into my mouth like some sort of pescatarian squirrel, I’m left with chasing olives around a plate of drizzled rocket with a scoop.

This is interesting: a woman opposite has just been given a plate of scrambled egg on toast. I’m not sure what might be about to happen.

I guess there’s much to be said for using the right tools for the right job. While this is probably a little less frustrating than trying to eat a French onion soup with a cake-knife, the task doesn’t really give me the usual satisfaction of eating something tasty. I guess it’s a bit like if I tried playing a lovely bit of Schubert’s piano sonata with celery sticks strapped to my fingers.

Though, some might argue what difference the celery makes in that example.

Anyway, this is an interesting thought: what if there are things that I’m doing where I struggle, because I’m not the right tool for the job? It might be the case! I can do a satisfactory job of chopping up bits of potato, I can gather leaves together and balance olives, but I’m still a soup spoon. I might belong somewhere else.

Worse still, what if a brand new fork comes along and sees me handle deep in the Tuna Nicoise? What if they think that that’s just the way it is, that spoons are for salad forevermore-and-a-day-so-shall-it-be and maybe I should have a go at ‘stabbing some bread into slices’, or stirring some gravy or something.

I think that would be terrible. I wonder how you figure out what you’re designed for, and how to get on with it? I wonder how you help others to do the same without making them feel that because you like doing something, it would be terribly disrespectful of them to ask you to shove over so they can have a go.

The lady opposite has sliced up her scrambled egg with a spoon and a pencil that was previously applied to the Mail-on-Sunday crossword. She doesn’t seem too bothered. We’re all improvising well with the cutlery shortage; pulling together with that same British resilience that got us through the War.

Funny how no-one’s complained, actually. Perhaps no-one feels as though it’s their place to; or maybe we all feel distinctly ill-equipped and too reserved to moan to the frazzled staff in the kitchen who are desperately trying to wash everything up.

The irony isn’t lost on me.

FELT-TIP MEMORIES

Another old school pal at the gym this morning, plus a teacher.

“It’s like a reunion!” he said as I flicked open my locker and pulled my bag out. I was bleary-eyed.

Tell me this: why couldn’t everyone have been as civil, as polite and as friendly then, as they are now, 25 years in the future? School would have been lovely! It’s okay though, I already know the answer. Maturity, innit.

“Course, miss, or Becky as I can now call her, she would have been about 20 when she taught us but you don’t think of that when you’re 15 do you? Your teachers seem much older than you but it was only ten years difference or so, funny innit Stubbsy, how that happens I mean my boy now, he gets an iPad - can you imagine - I mean he already cracked it like but still, technology eh, s’unbelievable...”

“How old is your boy?” I asked, smiling.

“He’s 12. And my daughter’s 15.”

“Wow,” I said, thinking carefully about that. Civility, politeness and friendliness take time to grow - from event to event. Where I had been disconnected from everyone else’s life since the day we all signed each other’s shirts, what must be clear is that each of us is connected to our own sequence of history, ours and ours alone. And on that journey, maturity makes sense.

Of course having kids changes us, of course relationships that form and fail change us. And of course losing people close to us rewires our perspective. It’s just that on the whole, I don’t feel that much different to the way I did then. At least not as different as everybody else. But that’s kind of the point.

I kept my school-shirt on the top shelf of my wardrobe for ages. It had felt-tip rude words written on it and I didn’t want my Mum to see that. I don’t know what happened to it in the end - it probably went in the bin some years ago when my parents moved.

I am different: of course I am. I have my own sequence of interlinked events to look back on to explain that. It’s quite likely though that other people can see it a lot more clearly than I can.

“Makes you think doesn’t it?” he said. He smiled in a way I hadn’t seen since somewhere in the middle of the 1990s and then he raised a hand and said it was nice to see me.

“It sure does,” I replied. “And it certainly is. Take care, man.”

I clicked my locker shut and headed for the showers.

THE THINKING MAN’S CROCKPOT

“Marmalade toast, hot chocolate, pack a gym bag, go to sleep,” I said to myself as I drove home. I rounded the corner, swung into my road, and parked up, beneath the lamplight.

I think I might be processing the world too slowly. Everything moves so fast, and hardly anybody seems to stop and listen any more. Or if they do, perhaps they’ve worked out how to hear and talk simultaneously, or just to work things out by starting to speak.

I don’t think I’m very good at that Internet-speed verbal conversation malarkey. I feel like I’m programmed to wait for a space in a real conversation where ‘so-and-so is typing...’ or chatting... rather than jumping in, one heartbeat before their full stop. Any more than two people and I’m done, it seems.

Same with prayer meetings. Once I’d gotten over the embarrassment of ‘keeping warm with menopausal hot-flushes’ as a starter, I looked blankly at Henry and tried to focus. Then one of the ladies told me that men go through the menopause too but not to worry about it. I stared at the floor.

Later, I had two things I felt I should say, but could say neither: not because I was afraid, not because I was doubtful, or even still shocked about the hot-flushes, but purely because I had processed my two downloads too slowly and there were no heartbeats between which to interject them. So where I had succeeded the other week and sounded pompous, this time I had gone home wondering.

Then, I’m caught in the balance again, aren’t I? This isn’t supposed to be about me.

Somebody once told me that if God gives you something to say then you should say it and discharge your responsibility; then it’s no longer yours to carry. The reverse is also true then. Yet I don’t know why God would give anything to say to a silence-loving slow-cooker like me if that’s the case! The fact that He does must mean there’s something for me to learn... or perhaps all of us, whether we’re crockpots or flash-fryers. “Either way,” I reasoned, silently, eyes closed, hands gripped together, “Please let what You’re saying be heard.”

How do you speed up your thought-cooking time? If you’re wired for deep, how do you communicate fast enough for the surface-waves? If your connection is slow and your bandwidth limited, how in the world do you operate at WhatsApp-speed?

Well. Perhaps I’ll just have to keep thinking about it, as deeply or as quickly as I can muster. For now though, it’s probably time for marmalade toast, hot chocolate, packing a gym bag, and going to sleep.

FIZZY TIME MACHINES

I had a can of Fanta today. First time in ages.

Wait, that makes me sound like some sort of addict, a ‘Fantasist’, perhaps, who recently kicked the habit, and then promptly fell off the Fanta wagon. That’s not what I’m saying.

What I am saying is that I haven’t had a can of Fanta for a long time - possibly decades. I know because as soon as I tasted it today, it transported me back through time and made me feel very young. I was just about ready to nip round the park on my green BMX and try the scary jump over the leaf-dip.

How do tastes and smells do this? It happened before - when I tasted Somerfield lemonade at some party or other, and was suddenly whisked back to our old camp in Cornwall (which was next to a Somerfield). If it’s not fizzy pop it’s my grandma’s old gravy powder, or the detergent they used to clean the halls at university. It’s Brasso, or lavender, or Lynx Africa, or one of those little trees that hangs from someone’s rear-view mirror - though I confess I’ve not munched one of those, or downed a pint of deodorant - I mean the aroma, obviously. How do these fizzy little time machines work, I wonder?

Anyway, I don’t know quite why I picked a can of Fanta today. It was that or Coca-Cola, and I just thought I needed something fruity rather than syrupy. To be honest, I should have gone for water - there’s no doubt I don’t drink enough of that! But Fanta appealed and so Fanta it was.

It might have been a reaction to my day. For some reason it was super-stressy. And by that I mean that for some reason, I was super-stressed.

“Do you know why?” asked Erica when I mentioned it.

“I’m still trying to analyse it,” I said as softly as I could. I don’t trust myself to emphasise or raise my voice when my heart is pounding and my chest feels like it’s about to collapse inwards unless I clutch my hair with my fingernails. I have the habit of increasing the stress levels of those around me when that happens.

It occurred to me that I might just have been... annoyed. I’d planned a demo, and then at the last minute I’d realised that the work I’d done was nowhere near ready. I had to cancel the meeting with one minute to go. That felt a bit embarrassing. In fact, it felt like I was tumbling into a rabbit hole, and from there, it was difficult to get back up. I took a break. I had a tea. I took some deep breaths and munched some flapjack. It helped a bit, but the feeling was still there.

Enter the Fanta, stage left.

Alright, it didn’t shoot me into the giggly stratosphere. It did make me feel like I was ten again though. And that at least made me smile.

CASCADING STYLE SHEETS

I've been going crazy today, trying to find a particular bit of CSS to correct. I feel like a computer, whizzing through lines and lines of code.

It's sent my head into a spin. As a result, normal things, the kind of things I do every other day, seem to be difficult; it's as though my brain has run out of energy to think about them.

For example, I stood outside the door to the cafeteria, wondering why it wouldn't open and completely forgot that I needed my access card. Then I asked Nathalie, behind the counter if I could get a goats-cheese tart to go, when I know full well that the idea is to use the plastic tongs to slip it into a paper bag. She looked at me funny and then told me what to do.

I've been opening the wrong projects, committing changes to the wrong branches and spelling words like 'available' and 'possibility' with too many Is.

I'm blaming the color:transparent;text-decoration:underline}.cc-close{display:block;position:absolute;top:.5em;right:.5em;font-size:1.6em;opacity:.9;line-height:.75}.cc-close:focus,.cc-close:hover{opacity:1}
.cc-revoke.cc-top{top:0;left:3em;border-bottom-left-radius:.5em;border-bottom-right-radius:.5em} ...
....

CSS.

Honestly, sometimes it's like the Matrix. Every line does something; I just don't know what. And there are pages and pages of it, swimming past in a sea of curly brackets and colons and dots. This, I think, must be what it's like to be presented with a ream of sheet music when you only just about know what a treble clef is.

Anyway, my thinking's a bit screwy today. I just made a tea and left it in the kitchen. It's cold.

What do you think would be the last bit of the brain to switch off? If I run out of brain-power by diverting essential functions to decoding CSS, the Matrix, or whatever other complicated puzzle I've been given to solve, what part of my cerebral-engine would be the last and final flickering light in my head? The Kindness Centre? Capital Cities? Flags? The bit that controls hunger?  The part that knows where my keys are?

Actually, that part might not be the brightest anyway. That one's been twinkling out for quite some time.

Is this what happens as you get older? That would be depressing. I've got loads of half-finished theories I definitely don't want to forget! Quantum Overlaps, Why Time Slows Down, the Evolution of Cats, and the Victorian Rogue Theory of Bad Language, to name but a few!

Yep, dwindling and... half-finished, which now that I think about it, is definitely not the same in any way at all, as half-baked.

Still, this CSS isn't going to solve itself.

Urgh. What a day.

THIS SIDE OF THE KÁRMÁN LINE

I’ve been thinking about the atmosphere. It’s 62 miles thick. At least, that’s the agreed line that most people think counts as the edge of Earth and the beginning of space.

That’s a lot of air we live in - for planes, balloonists, mountain climbers, meteors, cumulonimbus, and the rest of us.

I’m sitting in a building that’s just a few metres tall, but above that, the clouds hang. Above their fluffy tops, the aeroplanes fly, and above them the air thins out to purple and black, where the satellites whizz past, beneath the stars and the planets.

It’s kind of incredible. But then, there are lots of incredible things that are vast, wild, free, mind-blowingly massive, and truly amazing, both this side, and that side, of that 62-mile-high ‘Kármán Line’.

This ceiling, the one above me, is not one of them. It’s a shoddy barrier between us on the ground, and the sparkling atmosphere out there. It blocks my view with tiles and insulation, and it makes me forget about what might be beyond. And for what? To keep the rain off? To contain the warmth pumped out by our stuffy heating system? Seems like a poor exchange to me.

I think there are other ceilings though, every day: things that box us in, that keep us short-sighted with a focal length that extends only to the furthest wall. 

And every now and again, I find myself catching a glimpse of something... further.

This is hard to describe. It’s a tiny moment of electricity, a micro-sweep of excitement, a scintillation, a flash of brilliance. It’s like remembering what Christmas feels like in the Spring, or imagining yourself, just for a moment on a summer holiday where nothing at all matters. Like an aroma I’ve forgotten, it only lasts for a moment and then I’m back in the practical, under the ceiling and staring at the wall.

I wonder how you grow those moments of wonder. I see them in art, particularly my friend Sammy’s work - she has a way of capturing them and releasing them. She’s not alone though; they are there in music and in poetry too: deep unspoken pathways into the great beyond. I really like it when God speaks to me through one of those moments.

There’s a lot of atmosphere out there. Sometimes I think I just need to get on with the getting-out-there and the breathing-it-in.

EARTHQUAKE

“You guys must both have been in earthquakes,” I said to my colleagues on Thursday. We were walking to the pub for a quick team lunch to celebrate my birthday.

“Oh yes, many!” said Junko. She went on to explain how buildings in Japan are built to withstand tremors but how it could still be quite scary.

Erica, who is from California, told us about how she’d been in quakes that had made the windows rattle and the ground sway from side-to-side. The longest was about 30 seconds, she said.

The sky was blue and English, the sun just carrying that faint warmth of Spring you get at this time of year. Bare trees were lit bright in the low sunshine, and birds were twittering over the fields at the edge of the village. We were about as far from a natural disaster as anyone could imagine.

“I’ve never been in one,” I said. “Although we do get them, but they’re extremely rare.”

-

Later that day, I was doing a bit of research for a quiz, when I stumbled on a really interesting article about parts of the world where gravity is actually weaker, particularly around the Hudson Bay where glaciers are somehow connected to the anomaly. I instantly sent it to my friend, Andrea, who loves nerdy science stuff, is an architect, and also lives in Canada.

“The glacial bounce back phenomenon is also creating earthquakes in the Ottawa valley, despite it being in the middle of a tectonic plate!” she wrote.

We then had a great conversation about earthquakes. She has done all sorts of courses to figure out how to design buildings to withstand a one-in-2,500-year event, and her knowledge of quakes eclipsed the little wave-mechanics I’d done at university. Andrea said it was a difficult science because ‘the earth surprises us daily’.

-

This afternoon, I was washing up. I was thinking about going for a walk. The neighbours were hammering something next door and I was cycling in my head through all the DIY jobs I can’t do because I’m hopeless with tools.

Suddenly, the windows rattled, there was a noise like an underground train and the house started swaying. It wasn’t anything dramatic - I actually thought it was next door, doing something with furniture. It lasted perhaps 6 seconds.

It’s on the BBC website now. 4.4 on the Richter Scale, somewhere in South Wales, but the ripples were felt all over England. You can read about it here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-43097113

-

What’s going on then? Two conversations about earthquakes, including me saying: “I’ve never been in one” and then two days later, there’s little doubt that I’ve actually experienced it, albeit an ‘underwhelming one’ by all accounts.

Synchronicity? Am I in tune with the planet? Are these things prophetic? Is there something I should be aware of? Is God doing something? Or am I just in a quite unlikely set of coincidences? It’s made me wonder today.

It has made me wonder...

Do you ever think what it must be like to write a best-selling book about a time-travelling technical author, live in a big house, and drive a Ferrari. No? Oh no, me neither, me neither...

THE MISSING POUND

The other day, I heard a radio presenter go on about how he’s spent thirty years trying to work out this puzzle. I’m going to try to reproduce it as he presented it, because as with most mathematical conundrums, the sleight-of-hand is all in the presentation, and where that slick maneouvre takes your assumptions.

It took me a while. See what you make of it.

Three people go to a restaurant and have a lovely time. At the end of the meal, the waiter presents them with a bill for exactly £30. They pay, and the waiter deposits the money into the till (cash register). Then, suddenly, the waiter realises that he’s overcharged the three diners by £5. So, he’s halfway back to the table... when he realises he could make himself a little profit by slipping £2 into his pocket. So that’s what he does. He returns the remaining £3 to the guests and keeps £2 himself.

The guests have now paid £9 each. £9 x 3 = £27. The waiter has £2 in his pocket. £27 + £2 = £29.

Where is the missing pound?

I bet it doesn’t take you thirty years. What’s interesting to me is the effect that puzzles like this have on my brain. As earlier, when I felt inadequate at reading, this kind of puzzle bends and twists my head beyond what I feel it’s capable of. It’s a lot like being in a second-year physics lecture. It sort of makes sense, and you’ve got a gut feeling that there’s some logic to it, but essentially the lecturer is using sleight-of-hand on the whiteboard with squiggles and numbers, and it’s just over the horizon of your understanding.

It could also be like being in a room with much cleverer people. That’s happened to me before - I had to fall back to my natural charm and charisma instead of intellectually debating, as I thought that might work well in a roomful of high-functioning super-engineers. I quickly realised how different my sense of humour was.

You know the feeling though. Puzzles sometimes make you feel like you’ve stumbled into a fraternity that you just don’t qualify for - where the atmosphere itself makes you feel inferior, and all you want to do is go home.

I hope this puzzle didn’t make you feel like that. Chances are you worked it out faster than I did while I listened to the radio presenter waffle on. Either that or you untwisted your brain and told yourself that this hypothetical fandango in a fictional restaurant just doesn’t matter.

And you’d be right - it really doesn’t. But then, maybe I’m like the sneaky waiter, trying to bamboozle you while I slip away. All I’ll say is this - think about where each pound is and what you’ve paid to whom.

Actually, that’s pretty good advice generally, isn’t it? Oh, and if you do find yourself in a roomful of incomprehensible brainiacs, be your funny, brilliant self and don’t let anyone make you feel inferior, or as though you’re lacking something. After all, if you can be confident enough to be you, there really is no missing pound at all... right?  

PHOTON TORPEDOES

I'm having one of those days when all the words in front of me are swimming around and not making sense.

Look at this:

The behaviour of DSNs has changed - Previously when requesting a DSN the DSN would be generated once the email leaves the system. Within [this release] the DSN is now generated on the inbound instance, once it relays to the inbound email relay, rather than once the [product] has delivered the message to an external MTA.

Any ideas? It might as well be in Turkish, or Esperanto... or Klingon. In fact, if it were talking about photon torpedoes instead of 'DSNs', and power conduits instead of 'email relays', I might be in with a bit more of a chance of getting it.

The behaviour of photon torpedoes has changed - Previously when requesting a photon torpedo, the photon torpedo would be activated once the missile leaves the system. Within [this release] the torpedo is now generated on the inbound command, once it relays to the inbound power conduit, rather than once the [product] has delivered the projectile to an external M-Class target.

I don't much like these days. They make me feel woozy and thick, and stretch my brain like it's made of old elastic. I rub my eyes in front of the screen and try reading it word by word while the rubber bands creak between my ears.

I don't remember this kind of thing happening in Star Trek, actually. I don't think there was an episode when Spock was trying to flip open a tricorder upside-down, or accidentally set his phaser to 'evaporate' and disintegrated Ensign Redshirt. Neither do I remember Sulu looking puzzled as the Enterprise lurched backwards and shook the captain out of his chair.

Ohhhh my.

What am I doing here? I don't know. These are words on this screen, but I don't understand... any of them... Captain.

Actually, the Captain's gone home after a rough day, it seems. It's either that or one of her DNSs has failed to be sent by outbound relay to the MTA.

I might well do the same. It's better than struggling to figure this nonsense out.

PANCAKES AND REWIRING

I put my first 'gardening' exercise into practice last night - worship team pancakes. Rory is in New York (la di da) and was unable to help, so I bought a whole load of stuff (eggs, milk, flour, sugar, cinammon, you know the kind of thing) and made a pot of my usual Saturday morning pancake batter.

After a while as people started arriving, I found myself sliding quietly out of the kitchen and letting my friends take over the stove, while I chatted. Before long, they'd happily made another tub of pancake mix and we were off.

Brilliant. What evolved was one of the best team nights I can remember - and the most wonderful bit of all was that I had very little to do with it!

The idea of 'gardening' of course is that you let go of the strings and let things grow organically. You put seeds in the ground and watch what happens, rather than trying to control what nature is trying to do. You get out of the kitchen.

You can put beanpoles in. You can even choose the environment in which the plants grow, to maximise their chances, but there's nothing you can do about the sunshine, the rain and the beautiful unseen explosion of life.

I sat at home thinking it through. Our vision is to see an amazing team, leading amazing times of worship and writing amazing songs. Is it possible that we can cultivate all of that without making it all about us? I hope so. But what does that mean for the traditional idea of 'leaders'? Perhaps that word needs some re-thinking - no longer organisers, administrators, or speakers, or run-everything-by-me-ers... More cultivators, gardeners and question-askers, putting their feet up in the shed.

I still think I have some internal rewiring to do.

I'll say this for now though: the pancakes were delicious.

THE EDGE OF AN EXCLAMATION MARK

I’m drinking ginger ale out of a fancy wine glass. Don’t knock it. It’s 49p from the Co-Op and it’s nicer than Prosecco.

I know this for a fact, because next to it is a bottle of opened Prosecco, which I decorked on my birthday, and may as well have been a shapely bottle of finest malt vinegar. I stopped it up with the vacuum cork and now I’m afraid of pouring it down the sink in case it contaminates the local water supply.

So ginger ale it is. What a rockstar. It’s like I grew up and got kicked out of the Famous Five.

It’s been a bit of a strange day today. One of the symptoms of suffering with anxiety is that you do feel a bit like you’re about to be hit by a tidal wave all the time. It makes me wonder whether I actually am, and if I were, how would I ever know the difference?

I got a strange text from someone to say they were sorry that their birthday wishes were belated but they had been ‘very distracted!’ I found that exclamation mark significantly worrying - not because they’d forgotten to text me (far from it) but more because it indicates a major event, I think, and possibly one that I ought to already know about, and didn’t.

Swoosh goes the wave over the stones.

Then, I’ve always treated exclamation marks as a bit more serious than they actually are, haven’t I? “Have a nice day!“ is almost certainly more of a suggestion than a formal imperative enforced by midnight McDonald’s staff who pop round just as you’re switching your lights out, to check that indeed a nice day was had by you. Similarly I suppose, ‘We’ll help you get fit!’ isn’t meant to be a terrifying threat from the local gym with the hidden subtext: whether you like it or not. Unless you want it to be, and you do, of course.

I should probably just be thankful that my texter didn’t use two exclamation marks, or worse, the world-ending, apocalyptic level event that inspires the use of three! Then I’d have been really worried about what might have been so cataclysmically distracting.

Anyway, whatever, I do feel like I’m on the edge of something - and not just because of an exclamation mark - something sort of tough, but also that I might just need to go through. I’ve been here before, and if I’m right, then I’m grateful for the anxious warning and the opportunity it gives me to close my eyes, grit my teeth and let the whole thing wash over me.

Of course, I might just be imagining it. It could be all sorts of things going straight to my head; like this 49p ginger ale I’m swigging out of a fancy wine glass.

RUBIES AND SOLAR ORBITS

Back to work then, after the birthday weekend.

It would be fair to say that I had the best time. My friends went far beyond what I had imagined, and organised a spectacular treasure hunt, every last detail of which, was carefully chosen and brilliantly planned. I was overwhelmed, almost to tears.

With my parents being somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, I had imagined that I might get through my birthday without hearing the story of my birth... again.

Nevertheless, my sisters were kind enough to take me out for lunch and tell me how all the pipes froze, my grandparents had to get portable heaters from the garage, the girls made prams out of cardboard boxes, and I squeaked like a mouse until my Dad suggested baby-oil and everybody fell about laughing.

Of course.

I joke - we actually had a very nice time together. Then I went home and read all the lovely things people had written about me. It's nice to be loved. It's really nice.

Then yesterday, according to tradition, I went to London and absorbed the National Gallery. I think this might be the last time I do a birthday museum trip. I might change my mind, but it almost feels as though a new decade needs a new tradition. Quite what, I don't know - I love the anonymity of wandering around, separating myself from the present for a while, and gazing into the past. That seems fitting somehow.

At the National Gallery of course, the past gazes back at you - from every portrait, every enigmatic figure peering out with a closed-lip smile. I took a sketch pad this time and tried to draw a few of my favourites.

I don't want to go on about it, as I've already stretched it through four days, but I've been really blessed by turning 40. I saw friends I haven't seen in ages, I felt loved beyond expectation and I grew almost embarrassed by people's kindness, generosity and friendship - which has always been there of course, but was brought into the full light like a glittering diamond. Or perhaps I should say a ruby, what with it being 40 and everything. Like every precious stone, it's the light that makes it what it is.

40 is a big scary number in some ways. Yet it is only a number in many others. There's lots to be thankful for, even when there's lots of sadness remaining.

"Is it okay, do you think, to be happy and sad all at the same time?" I texted Emmie in Canada. She said it absolutely was and then reminded me to "be who you are and embrace every day"

That's terrific advice.

Whatever I decide is my tradition, my method and my attitude in my forties... I hope it's at least that.

-

"I completed another trip round the sun at the weekend," I wrote to my colleagues, "and as ever, this has somehow resulted in cakes in the kitchen.

I can’t eat them all without shortening my chances of making further solar orbits, so feel free to help me out."

Two seconds later the stampede began.

"Hapf bufmday Mtt!" mumbled someone with a mouth full of doughnut as they walked by.

I smiled and said thanks.

THE QUIET BOFFIN IN THE CORNER

I went to group last night and sat there silently thinking.

I don't know what to do.

What I mean is: I often feel as though I'm right on the edge of something deep and nebulous, and I won't be able to (as in I don't yet have the words to) explain it to anybody. The only option I have is to say something safe, or nod along with everyone else's comfortable thoughts and go home feeling as though I'm part of something.

I surely can't be the only person who thinks like this?

Half of Everyone rings in my ears:

"You should be free to be yourself, Matt. Say whatever you think! Let it out and never worry about what anyone thinks of you!"

And the Other Half of Everyone whispers:

"No-one will appreciate it, you'll go home feeling alone again, carrying that feeling that you've said too much. Keep quiet, say the expected thing and you'll fit right in."

So which half is right?

I looked around. What if everybody else thinks like this? What if all of us are locked up inside, deeply processing and thinking but always reducing ourselves to the safe let's-just-fit-in option?

In the end, I tried explaining what I could see. I sounded terribly pompous, but at least I gave it a go.

Perhaps that's it then: perhaps the real me is actually pompous and arrogant? Perhaps I'm secretly a bit of a smugtwit, always trying to be the deepest, the most profound, the outest-of-the-boxest, quietest boffin in the corner?

I hope not. I hope people are more important than stuff, even the stuff that goes on between my ears.

One of the things I should definitely get better at is listening to others and responding to the deep stuff that's hidden in their subtext. Perhaps that's the ultimate balance - listening carefully, then gently provoking the deepness in those around you.

It feels like the ultimate form of diplomacy - not dwarfing someone by volleying tangential thoughts at them until they shrug their shoulders and change the subject, not patronising them, but not squashing them either. I reckon I can do that.

In fact, I reckon I'd like that too. Plenty of people in my life think deeper, cleverer, smarter and better than I do - the last thing I would like is to feel as though those people are running rings around me, deliberately or otherwise. So I must not make other people feel like that either, intentionally or not.

I went home mulling it over. I definitely think I want to be myself, and I definitely don't think I can change the focal length of my thoughts. So I don't see myself trying to pretend to be anybody or anything else.

But before all of that, what I really do want to be is kind.

Somehow, that seems way more important.

FALCON HEAVY

We just put a car into space for fun.

I say 'we' - I had very little to do with it, but 'we' as in humanity, or perhaps really 'we' as in a company called SpaceX, launched a reusable rocket with a massive payload, into orbit.

I watched it. I watched the enormous rocket propel itself in a burst of fire and dust, straight up into the bright blue sky. I watched it roar out of our atmosphere. I watched the reusable booster rockets retro-fire and land gracefully backwards on their launchpads in perfect synchronisation, and I watched as hundreds of people from all over the world, cheered together as though they were one. It was so cool!

We have the potential to be awesome.

More than that though, the billionaire at the head of SpaceX, Elon Musk, seems determined to explore, to innovate, to make a difference to this century, and to humanity. And he's not alone - Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, and even the Google boffins, are pushing the boundaries of technology and engineering to incredible heights.

"I'm sceptical," said a man on the radio this morning. "We're not going to get very far with this technology - the same technology we used to get to the Moon. We're never going to get further than Mars with rockets!"

I told the radio that that was a lousy attitude. These things happen slowly! Always one small step for mankind, at a time! We're not going to suddenly break the light barrier and teleport ourselves across the galaxy overnight.

I think what SpaceX have done is really cool. And worth celebrating.

I wonder if they need any technical authors.

RED BLANKET

I’m curled beneath a red blanket. My head’s on a squishy cushion and my back is cold. I’m at the Intrepids’.

“Are you okay?” asked my sister. She was in to open the post (mostly for her it turned out) and retrieve a parcel the postman had left ‘behind the green bin.’ She also loudly ticked off the itinerary sheet in the kitchen, next to where it said ‘at sea’ between ‘Nuku Hiva’ and ‘Papeete, French Polynesia.’ That is a long way away. I’m curled up in a red blanket.

“Just cold and tired,” I said as she put the pencil back.

“So you’re having a little sleep,” she replied. I nodded. “That’s a good idea.”

White sand, turquoise sea. The gentle lapping of the great Pacific, vast and free under a sky that makes you want to rethink your definition of blue. Wispy white clouds hang delightfully over the wide horizon, out beyond the swaying palms and the glistening ocean.

“You’ll be in the South Pacific by now,” I’d said in my last email. “Hope it’s warm and lovely, and less full of singing 1970s newsreaders dressed as sailors clutching mops, than I imagine.” 

I should unfurl myself and go home. My hip is hurting. I came in after work, made toast and set the dishwasher off. The next thing I remember is my sister waking me up, under this blanket. My phone has butter smears across the screen.

“Hope you feel better,” she said as she blustered out again. She didn’t wait for a reply. ‘I’m not ill,’ I might have reiterated, ‘just cold and tired.’ But she was gone. The front door snapped shut and the ticking clock returned, like waves rushing in to fill the sudden silence of an empty beach.

I should go home and curl up on my own sofa bed, with my own red blanket and ticking clock, I suppose. I should definitely do something.

CLOUDS AND MOUNTAINS

"How was your weekend, Matt?" asked Erica, cheerily.

"Well," I said, "I didn't talk to anyone from Friday night to Monday morning."

I'm struggling a bit. Anxiety, weighty old depression is heavy on me at the moment, and it obscures the truth, much like the clouds hide the sun.

You know that the sun is still there. You know that there will be sunny days again, and you know that life is so much more than the weather anyway. But there it is - oh and it's worse, because it's as though all the clouds are ganging up on you and telling you that they're all your fault.

I'm not crazy though. I'm not the cloud-whisperer. It's chemicals. I know this. My emotions are being pounded by tiny attackers in my blood-stream, pathogens trying to rewire my thinking, trying to get me to believe that I am something I'm not.

What causes them? I'm not so sure - one part spiritual, one part diet? One part over-thinking, one part loneliness? Everyone has a theory.

So.

All of this has made me consider whether I should be living alone at all.
True, I thought I'd be married by now: bombarded with the beauty and the bedlam of a family. But that hasn't been part of my blessing, and so I need to consider something else. What that is, I...

... Well, I don't know.

I do know this though: to climb a mountain, you first have to stand in its shadow. Facing it is the step, understanding its size, its enormity, its permanence. Only then can you start moving it from in front of you, one craggy step at a time, until it's under your feet.

And then when you do, when you show a little faith in your life and you've climbed it, you can look back with your face to the sun and realise that now... your shadow is falling on the mountain - instead of the other way round.

I don't know whether that's what Jesus meant by faith moving mountains. My guess is that he's trying to tell us that for disciples, anything can be unimaginable, but nothing can be impossible, no matter how huge it seems.

So, I hope I can take some positive steps - maybe move, maybe improve my diet, maybe get a lodger, maybe get a... cat? I don't really want to do any of that, but then, I don't particularly want to keep getting stuck under these heavy, awful clouds either.

Not when there are mountains to move.

GARDENERS AND PUPPET MASTERS

There are lots of things that happen that I care about. I want them to succeed, and I believe that their outcome will change the world for the better.

There is also, inside me, an acknowledgement that I can do some things really very well, and get a certain enjoyment out of doing them to a high standard.

For some reason though, my tendency is to tie these two thoughts together like a brace of weighted oxen. A thing needs doing, I can do a thing. No-one else is thinking of doing the thing. I should do the thing. I'd enjoy doing the thing. I'd do the thing well. Oh look, I've done the thing.

It's occurred to me that this is exactly how puppet masters get started. Before long, we're literally pulling all the strings, and defining precisely how this thing we love should get done. Then, when other people want to get involved in our passion, we have to somehow prize ourselves away from the strings and teach them how to do it - which is invariably, exactly the way we do it - string, by string.

I've had enough of that.

I'd much rather be a gardener. A gardener knows the secret of background work and fine preparation. Long before the Spring, the gardeners are digging the ground, preparing the soil and getting everything ready. For them, the result is much more than the method - they're focused on what they want to see at the end, rather than what they want to do, and every bit of effort is dedicated to that one outcome.

Then, during the exciting bit (at least I think it's exciting) when everything's growing underground, the gardeners know there's nothing at all they can do to make it happen. It's all down to the sun, the soil, the rain and the air - their only job is to fight off birds pecking the shoots, and tend the ground as often as possible while nature magically does the hard work under the surface.

While the puppet masters are busy getting arm-ache and muted applause, the gardeners have got their feet up, listening to the radio in the shed.

What's even better is that gardening together is much much easier than puppeteering - you can all have a go, and it isn't all specifically down to you. There are loads of different skills, and everyone mucks in, from the youngest to the oldest. A garden project is awesome.

I need to start seeing my projects as gardens - but gardens that anyone can have a go at. All you have to be is ready to hold a spade, to dig when nobody's watching, and to enjoy the summer of fruit and shade together.

That will truly change the world for the better. Plus, there is a secret, hidden delight in it for us while we learn to let go of everything we're striving for - the unbelievable satisfaction it brings, watching something grow. This connects my two original thoughts together, by making it both utterly fulfilling, and, truly rewarding. Who needs applause when you can see things, people, projects, life itself grow in real-time in front of you?

It's just that I think being more of a gardener than a puppet master, is the gentlest, kindest, strongest way forward, and when I'm next stressed, trying to make everything happen by myself, I need to come back here, to remember this... and then to put my strings down, and my feet up.

GROWING A BEARD

The other day I accidentally knocked my electric beard trimmer into the bath. It had glugged its way to the bottom before I fished it out with a soapy hand.

Now I'm a quick-thinking sort of chap, so I wrapped it in a towel like a baby, smoothed it dry and then leapt purposefully into the kitchen. Then I wedged it in a tub of rice.

It works with phones, I reassured myself, maybe the rice will simply absorb the water from the inner-working parts, like Superman inhaling poisonous gas or swallowing a bomb in the middle of Metropolis?

Well, it turned out that my super-long-grain-basmati was less 'super' than I'd expected. It didn't work; the trimmer buzzed like a dying bumblebee, and then spluttered out.

So it's back to the young-santa look for me for a while - or perhaps closer, Evan Baxter halfway through Evan Almighty when God won't let him shave for cinematographic and narrative reasons.

I wonder how beards came to be associated with holy men? Even Jedi masters 'grow strong' in the force it seems. Back in Bible times, I suppose men had beards because shaving was very difficult, rather than it being a sort of symbol of wisdom. Yet holiness ought to be all about discipline, surely? In many ways, being cleanly shaven ought to be more like it. Do the difficult, daily thing, rather than lazily letting all that unsightly hair spring unkemptly out of your chin.

I also wonder whether women know exactly what it feels like to wear a beard. I bet they can imagine it: it'd be just like them to be able to imagine it - and far better than we can imagine what it's like to have a tiny human living inside you, or other... stuff.

Let's get off this subject.

Beards aren't really a symbol of wisdom. They're a symbol that we haven't shaved, or that we'd like to keep warm during the Crimean War, or that we're about to open a juice-bar in Shoreditch.

And while, in the next few days, I will probably start to look like I belong tending the lamp in a windswept lighthouse, I should probably remember that due to a freak accident, my beard-trimmer needs replacing, and contrary to the mirror, I'm not auditioning for a part as Grizzly Adams.

One thing did become abundantly clear though while cooking. It's very hard to pick tiny beard hairs out of a massive tub of rice.

I threw it away.