Wintery Summary

It's a strange and possibly pretentious thing to do, to take oneself away for a few days to work on ideas in solitude. As expected, I'm bored now. There's no proper TV reception here: just fizzes, blurts and jazzy patterns across the little screen. I managed to watch a detective show on my computer the other night, and have read one and a half detective novels, but the general darkness around all that has stopped appealing to me in my current mood.

What's happened with the music? Two new introductions to 'stuck' songs, some new lyrics to an old song which need a lot more work. A miserable song that I might reject, and a scary song that is really close to the bone- about why I travel so much. I have wondered if it's because McDad went away so much when we were little kids, and if in some way I'm trying to find the elusive part of him that went missing. He'd bring us back sugar lumps from the train, Tate and Lyle, two lumps neatly wrapped in thin red tissue, but never really talked about what he did in London. When he got old, I asked him to write a memoir. I'd hoped for anecdotes, or maybe a list of the sweets he used to like. Instead, he wrote down a list of the people who lived in his childhood street, in order of who lived next door to whom, with their names. It was just that- a list. I think he got bullied at school because he had red hair, and that's just about all we knew apart from him riding his bicycle to see Crystal Palace when it caught fire, a bomb blasting a paving slab right over their house from the front to the back, and the fact that his own father, Mac, was allergic to sunshine and they could always tell when he reached the end of the street on his way to work by the mighty sneeze that echoed down the road when he turned the corner into the full glare of the sun.

So yes, looking for McDad and never quite finding him. I know he loved us all but he loved plants as well, and spent most of his home-hours on our smallholding rather than in the house, planting vegetables and raking up leaves. I remember sitting on his lap as a small child and smelling the wood smoke on his shirt from the Sunday bonfire of garden waste. Gardeners and plants-people are fascinating, because they are often absorbed by green things to an obsessive degree. McDad would hold a growing leaf in his big hand, peering at it as though he was learning everything about it just by osmosis. Our garden was almost like a joke that only he knew the punchline to, or a secret that he would keep forever.

That's been the odd therapy of this exercise: thinking about things that there's not normally time to think about. There has been a lot going on in my personal life as well as the general catastrophe that is 'Globe 2024' and sometimes it's difficult to know where to look, and how to help. You can help people best by being strong yourself, and a week of walking and thinking has not only helped with perspective, but also will take my own anxiety out of the equation so I can be more supportive to other people when it's needed.

And procrastination's going out the window. I'm going to set up my recording gear when I get back and start to record these songs properly, fine-tuning the lyrics and the melodies and making sure that the guitar parts are spot on. I need to stop worrying about where my music fits: it's that standard thing of seeing other people and their music as complete and confident, all fitting into a music-scape that makes perfect sense, whereas I can't even describe what my music actually is. Honestly, probably everyone feels like this, and it's counterproductive to even think about it at all. Let's see what materialises. I'll pretend that they are someone else's songs, and see how they sound.

Tomorrow I'll be travelling back home to the hungry sparrows in the back yard, the greedy pigeons who line up on the gutter and give me the evil eye because I won't let them eat the seeds that I put out for the little 'uns, and to the world of ghastly politics and conflict.

I'm going to stop writing now because I've got hiccups. Aren't they old-fashioned? A bit like Imperial Measurements and Clarks shoes. Now there's a thought.