We're approaching the end of a decade, and it appears that the fashionable thing to do among those with an interest in music is to write about what we each perceive to be the best music of that decade.  I'm somewhat cynical of the journalistic merits of endless list writing, but they provide a simple enough structure in which to place some opinions, and I'm lazy enough about writing as it is, so I think I'll allow myself a list every now and again.  I also find it curious that lists like this are headed up as being "The best of..." when these things are clearly extremely subjective.

Anyway.  That's enough preamble criticising the post I'm yet to make, so I'd best get stuck in.  Here follows a run-down of my favourite albums of the past 10 years...

10 - Jay Z - The Black Album

I've only started listening to rap music in the past year or so, and Jay Z is pretty accessible as far as it goes.  I find listening to rap music interesting, as the focus on words as opposed to music means that the style of "lyrics" is very different to the rock music that I usually listen to.  With those genres you have to worry about the middle 8, the guitar solo... hell you have to worry about a tune.  With rap you have a beat, and words... maybe a sample to go with it.  The musical side is stripped down in favour of the words, so the vocabulary, the wordplay, the rhyme structure can be much more varied and inventive.

I also enjoy the different content in rap music.  I've listened to a lot of rock and pop in my time - I've heard more than my fair share of love songs, for example.  Rap tells different stories, and while they may be somewhat harsh to our white ears - bitches, niggaz, crack and Glocks - it is an alternative to the over familiar milieu of yet another mainstream guitar band.  I even find the palpable hubris somewhat alluring - it's very different to hear someone like Jay Z rapping about being at the top of his game, the best in his field, in contrast to the overly modest shoegazing Britpop bands I grew up with.

The Black Album is not, I am told, Jay Z's finest work.  The Blueprint is said to be a far better album, for example, and while I enjoy that too I'm just not drawn to it in the same way.  Maybe it's that The Black Album is more in your face and more polished in it's production.  And maybe it's just the fact that Dirt Off Your Shoulder and 99 Problems makes an almost unbeatable double A side.

9 - Semisonic - All About Chemistry

Ah, back in safe territory.  Itunes pegs this as "power pop" and that's a fair assessment.  Guitar, drums, keyboards... I know where I am with this.  This album formed part of the soundtrack to a very happy time in my life, my last post-school summer before going to university.  This choice is more about the memories of that time than it is anything to do with ground breaking music or particular lyrics, so maybe in that capacity it helps that here there is the familiar love and heartbreak that are such a big part of teenage years.

It is slightly bitter-sweet that an album I like so much was a commercial failure compared to it's predecessor.  The band has been on hiatus for the 8 years since, and I'm not holding my breath for another album from them.  Still, there's worse albums that you could go out on.  This is thoroughly competent, well written and well produced pop.  It also scores bonus points for high levels of innuendo, including an entire song about masturbation.  And why not?

8 - Johnny Cash - The Man Comes Around

This was the last album released while Cash was alive.  It consists largely of covers, though the title track is of note as an original recording documenting Christ's return in a calm, foreboding manner that I find both horrifically threatening and wonderfully comforting in light of my faith.  The music here is stripped down and minimal, with some songs featuring just an acoustic guitar alongside Cash's distinctive voice.  His voice is absolutely captivating, and there's a brilliant selection of tracks on here in all manner of styles.

The standout track is generally held to be the cover of Nine Inch Nails' Hurt, which serves as a tragically beautiful epitaph to Cash's life, and the place he found himself as he approached his death.  I also like the cover of Sting's I Hung My Head, a ballad about a young man on trial for an unintended shooting, and Depeche Mode's Personal Jesus.  Elsewhere, moving from the sublime to the ridiculous there's an old folk song, Sam Hall, with it's refrain of "Damn your eyes!" being hurled at everyone who stands in the way of the protagonist.

I often struggle to listen to just vocals and a guitar (you could throw a million talented "singer-songwriters" at me and I'll struggle to retain interest) but the variety of music here and the voice doing the singing are just too much to resist.

7 - Belle & Sebastian - The Life Pursuit

I was introduced to Belle & Sebastian by my then girlfriend and now wife, who had been introduced to them by an ex of hers.  She gave me Belle & Sebastian, and I gave her the Eels, and we spent a considerable amount of time listening to their music as the soundtrack to our early years together.  The Life Pursuit was released in 2005, by which time we were married, and - to employ a tenuous metaphor - their music has grown and matured as our relationship has, while also getting rather weird around the edges.

This is a diverse album, employing a lot of styles and with some fairly eccentric lyrics, and some very casual use of "the f word" that I can't help but smile at given the way the female backing vocalist echoes the line.  It's also very "full" music, which I like - there's always a lot of different things to listen to on a track at any given time, like a slightly tidier Radiohead.

6 - The White Stripes - Elephant

If Belle & Sebastian's music is full but tidy, then The White Stripes' is full but incredibly messy.  This is lo-fi grungy, and desperately under-produced, like they recorded it in a week on a tape recorder in someone's bathroom, but somehow it works.  Meg might be one of the world's most bizarre drummers (and by bizarre, I mean inconsistent - not a great quality in a drummer) but she serves as an excellent muse to Jack, the creative mind here.  I couldn't even begin to tell you what Jack is singing about, but he definitely means it whatever it is, and the music is performed with a fervour that you don't really find much of these days.  This is imprecise, and all the more exciting for it.

5 - Muse - Origin Of Symmetry

Ah, Muse.  A band on an inexorable trajectory into Matt Bellamy's pretentious little world.  Their albums have been steadily getting more and more ridiculous, with their latest offering tipping right over the edge with a song that ends up being sung in French with a clarinet solo to finish.  Hmmm.

However, look back to 2001 and you find the high point of the band's musical output.  This album is frenetic, driven by it's distorted guitars and falsetto vocals, the best example of which being the unstoppable Plug In Baby with its ba-rock guitar riff.  Elsewhere, a piano dominates Space Dementia, in the face of the onslaught of drums and bass, and on Hyper Music the bass takes its turn to push the verse along with a definite sense of urgency.  There is an air of musical competence about the album, suggesting that someone behind the mic actually knows a bit about musical theory, which is good to hear once in a while.  Yes, that does mean that there are hints of the musical silliness to come, but here they act as inventive tweaks to already solid songs rather than choking things into submission.

This is Muse at their best, and makes for a very welcome listen after attempting to enjoy the latter half of The Resistance.  It was nice knowing you guys.

4 - Radiohead - Hail To The Thief

Hail To The Thief is Radiohead's last "conventional" studio album, before they got fed up and decided to release In Rainbows on the web for no fixed fee, and thereafter gave up on releasing any albums at all.  Radiohead find themselves in a similar position to Quentin Tarantino who, having made his name and his millions on Pulp Fiction, can now do whatever he likes.  After the unprecedented success of OK Computer, Radiohead are in a position to do anything, and the risk here is that they will.  Mercifully things haven't got quite as silly as they have for Muse, but they've certainly got quite weird, and I rather fear they won't be able to come back from where they've taken themselves.

After OK Computer, Radiohead released Kid A and Amnesiac, which are both very inventive and exploratory albums, if not necessarily enjoyable in the conventional sense.  The experimentation was, however, absolutely necessary in bringing Radiohead to a point at which they were free to produce an album on the scale of Hail.  This album returns to the rock band roots of guitars and drums, but is not constrained in any way by any sense of the nature of the band or the music they make.  The music bringis in any number of other instruments and recording techniques picked up in their more experimental phase.  The music is altogether surrounding, almost oppressive and at times exhausting; the lyrics are every bit as weird as you'd expect and more; Thom's vocals are as ragged as ever, except when he's screaming or, on the last track, almost rapping.  This is definitely Radiohead, but more so than ever before.

Looking back on this album, maybe it's not a wonder that Radiohead have decided to stop recording conventional albums.  It must have been a veritable ordeal to put together something as big as this.

3 - Eels - Souljacker

As I said earlier, as my wife introduced me to Belle & Sebastian, so I introduced her to Eels.  Eels are a pretty weird band, and in keeping with a couple of other choices on here, the music wanders all over the place, the production is minimal and the vocals are pretty rough.  Souljacker is very varied in tone, with some very dark songs about persecution, violence and murder, all of which stand in contrast to Fresh Feeling, one of the most beautiful love songs I know of.  The two even collide at times, with World Of Shit taking it's place as one of the weirdest love songs I know of - a marriage proposal as being the best option in the otherwise awful world we live in.  Funny how things work out.

2 - Green Day - American Idiot

American Idiot was a very welcome comeback album, coming after Warning, an album I found to very disappointing.  Green Day seemed to be drifting into much more mainstream pop-punk territory, to have lost their way.  I can't really say that they had "sold out", without being lynched by the hardcore punks who'll claim that they sold out as soon as they signed to a record label that didn't operate out of a trailer and sold more than 37 records, but it wouldn't be too wide of the mark.  I feared that they'd be making safe records from thereon, and had rather lost interest.

In the face of this, came American Idiot, a surprisingly grown up political punk album.  My father has, in the past, complained that no one makes political music any more.  Where is today's Dylan, for example?  Well, if you can accept that he might be using an electric guitar these days, and have started swearing a fair bit, then here is your modern political rock album.  The album has a strong undercurrent of dissatisfaction with all things middle America, not least the Bush administration and the war on terror, as evidenced on the masterful Holiday, and takes no prisoners in criticising the various things that have attracted the band's ire.  The album was billed as a "rock opera", which could be enough to get you worrying about things getting pretentious again.  It works though, as a cohesive album following it's protagonist on his journey, set against the middle American backdrop, through youth, religion, politics, leaving home, war, death, love...  The album covers a bit of everything, in it's own crunchy, shouty way, and really cemented Green Day's position as one of the great rock bands of modern times.

As an aside, there should also be an honourable mention for Dean Gray's (alias Party Ben) re-working of this album, into the mash-up album American Edit.  Heartily recommended if you like mash-ups.  Which leads us to...

1 - Girl Talk - Feed The Animals

Ah, here we are.  This is my one chance to feel somewhat self satisfied in the face of people who know much more about music than me, because I can be pretty sure that next to no-one will have even heard of Girl Talk.  For those of you with a better memory of the 80s than me, I am not referring to the teen duo who made a minor incursion into the charts with the backing of Stock, Aitken and Waterman.  Rather, I refer to the stage name of an American DJ who specialises in mash up albums.  For the uninitiated, mash ups combine samples from two or more songs to produce something new.  For the Radio 4 listeners among us, One Song To The Tune Of Another could be seen as a primitive precursor to this...

Feed The Animals is just under 54 minutes in length, and is made up of somewhere in the region of 350 distinct samples from music sourced from the past 50 years.  The album is  a single, seamless track.  The length of samples used ranges from fractions of a second to a minute or so.  From a purely technical point of view, I cannot help but be absolutely amazed at the craftmanship involved here, in putting together so many pieces into a coherent whole that rolls from start to finish in this way.  The degree of invention here is incredible.  Busta Rhymes and the Police?  Sure.  Kelly Clarkson and Nine Inch Nails?  Why not.  The Carpenters next door to Metallica?  Better than you might expect.  Salt n' Pepa's Push It, Deee-Lite's Groove Is In The Heart and Nirvana's Lithium all at once?  Hell.  Yes.  The album is beautifully eclectic, by it's very nature, drawing on music from all over the place, and making for a constantly surprising listen.

If Itunes is to be believed, I have listened to this album over 30 times in the 6 weeks since I got it.  I love this.  I really, really love it.  It's a masterpiece.

While I can honestly say that I have studied at Cambridge University, it would be somewhat disingenuous.  The truth is that I have spent a grand total of four weeks there, at various points in the past three or so years.  While my employer uses their own training facilities these days, they still use Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, as a "residential" location for more intensive periods of studying.  The auditors go there for their crash course in materiality and transposition errors, and tax folk such as myself go there for a parallel introduction into the 5 6 books (gotta love that ever increasing tax legislature! Thanks Gordon!) that contain just about everything we need to know for the white-knuckle ride that is a career in tax.

Last week, was just such a week of studying.  I can honestly say that all of us present dug deep and embraced the true academic spirit of our surroundings and became once more the exemplary students that we once were in years gone past.  And if that all sounds like an elaborate way of dressing up the fact that what we really did was sleep too little, eat rubbish, drink a lot and occasionally do some work, then shame on you for being so cynical and doubting.

OK, I admit it, we had some fun while we were there... I beat my friends at bowling, won and lost at poker, played a fair bit of Mario Kart, almost won a pub quiz, resolutely lost another and went to a truly awful nightclub.  I ate too much fried food, not enough vegetables, mountains of crisps and even Pop Tarts for the first time in years.  I drank coffee during the day and beer at night.

In between all of this, I did actually get quite a lot of work done, and sat 3 mock exams in readiness for the horror that awaits me in the early days of November.  I will finally be sitting my final Chartered Tax Adviser exams.  CTA is said to be one of the hardest professional qualifications in the country.  I've heard it said that it's the second hardest, after some actuarial qualification, which is probably only so challenging due to being so spectacularly boring.  CTA pass rates are about 30-40%, and that's with a pass mark of just 50%.  It's also slightly unnerving that those pass rates stand in spite of the fact that all the exams are open book, so you essentially have the vast bulk of the answers right there on the desk with you, if you can only persuade them out of your set of heavily highlighted legislation and onto the blank page in front of you.  An open book exam is something of a poisoned chalice when you consider that the books in question are the 5 6 behemoths with a total of over 20,000 pages.  It is rather a lot to take in.

I must say, it's been quite a long time coming - I've been studying for this for three years, and it's been quite a slog, not least when combined with the depression mentioned in my previous post.  I've been spending roughly a week a month in London on courses, which has been quite rubbish in terms of being away from my home and my family.  On the other hand, it's going to be quite weird not going any more - I'll be in the office all the time and I won't see my friends from my course on the same regular basis, which is quite a shame.  It should all be worth it in the end, in terms of career advancement and - assuming the recession doesn't ruin everything - pay rises and a decent bonus to boot.

So, 5 weeks work, 3 exams, then a couple of months waiting till the results come out.  I'll keep you posted.

A friend of mine, who works as a teacher, texted me a couple of days ago to ask permission to use a blog entry of mine for a lesson she was planning.  I asked which entry, and she said she was after the one I'd written yesterday.  I can only assume she'd misread the date on my last entry, but it did rather spur me on to thinking I ought to get back into writing on here.

So, it's been a year since my last entry, and it has been quite a year.  Quite a hell of a year really.  The long and the short of it is that I was diagnosed with depression in August 2008, and since then I've been on anti-depressants and have been attending counselling for some of that time.  I'm now in the process of coming off my medication, all being well, which I'm very glad of, but it has been a pretty rubbish time all told.

Depression, and most mental illnesses, are not terribly well understood.  I can only imagine that it's quite hard to quantify, categorise, diagnose and treat illnesses which take place entirely within the patient's head with very few outward symptoms.  I'm inclined to believe that depression is frequently misdiagnosed, be that false positives for want of any other diagnosis or false negatives for lack of the patient perceiving any problem or the doctor spotting it.  There's also a very palpable stigma surrounding mental illnesses which follows from the lack of understanding, which makes it rather hard to discuss with people.

One of the people I was able to discuss things with was a tutor of mine on a professional course I'm attending, who informed me that he'd also suffered with depression at university.  He said that he'd found the most crippling thing about it to be the utter loss of motivation that comes with depression, and I absolutely must agree.  Depression can rob you of the desire to do anything at all, with the ultimate potential result of not even wanting to get out of bed in the morning.  I was never that bad, but I can certainly attest to a lack of motivation to do anything productive, be it work, study, learn new things, go out... I found myself wanting to do nothing but kill the time, and would perhaps have gone on that way until time killed me.  I could spend hours in front of the TV or computer, watching rubbish, playing games I didn't particularly enjoy, constantly refreshing forum pages on the web, for no other reason than that it passed the time.  I didn't find it easy to take pleasure in many things, or to take pride in anything I did manage to do.  This is bad news for married life, family life, work life... you name it.  Perhaps tied in with the lack of motivation is the hopelessness - the lack of belief that things can ever be better, or that you can change anything.  I have an irrational fear at the best of times whenever I'm ill or have a headache or a hangover that I will be left feeling that way for the rest of my life.  Depression extended that despair to bring in fears about my work, my capacitiy as a husband and father, my potential to be happy.  It's very hard to go through life with such a bleak outlook, and it's not a wonder that I was occasionally suicidal.

I'd been feeling like that for quite a while - I wouldn't even like to guess how long, maybe years - when I went to the doctor's in August last year.  Depression is assessed using a little 10 questions survey, which seems a rather blunt instrument for such a complex and varied condition, but such is the lot of the GP handling hundreds of patients with every ailment going.  Either way, the computer program "confirmed" my depression and I was duly prescribed anti-depressants and counselling, which I think it's fair to say have helped quite a lot, though not without their problems, mainly relating to the medication.  Anti-depressants are somewhat renowned for their side effects, and it's not unusual to have to try numerous types before finding something that doesn't leave you fast asleep, wide awake, sick as a dog or even more suicidal than you were before.  Even given all the potential side effects it can essentially boil down to choosing between actual depression and a collection of potentially depressing side effects.  Mercifully the first pills I tried were largely OK for me (though a friend of a friend tried the same brand and got the shakes and chronic insomnia - go figure) though with some rather cruel side effects.  No sex drive while depressed?  No sexual ability while on anti-depressants.  No motivation to do anything while depressed?  No ability to concentrate while on anti-depressants.  Still, at least the desire to step in front of a train was fading.

So, here I am a year on.  I've finished counselling for now and I'm slowly coming off the pills.  I'm feeling more positive about things and a lot more motivated to get on and do things.  The difficulty now is in making up for lost time and picking up the pieces of everything that was damaged in the interim.  I've a fair bit of catching up to do in my marriage, my studies, my employment... It's quite difficult trying to make up the ground on everything, as though I've been in stasis for however long while everything around me has slowly decayed.

Still, I am at least still married, still a father, still employed and still alive.  In other news, my second daughter has been born and I've bought a Mac, so it hasn't been a totally rubbish year.

It seems that these days it's not enough to be a celebrity. You have to be more than that. You have to be a brand. You must have your name on clothes, jewellery, perfume, make up, music, books, films... anything you can really. You needn't be any good at any of the things you're doing, but that's not important - the key thing is maximum exposure, wherever and however you can manage it. Hell, it's worked for Victoria Beckham, hasn't it?

Taking a step back, I can only assume that the logic behind such aggressive branding is that a certain percentage of people are expected to latch on to a given celebrity and can then be persuaded to buy anything with their name on it. Like Lily Allen's music? Why not buy one of her dresses. Like Sarah Jessica Parker in Sex And The City? Try her perfume. Like Paris Hilton... in her half-arsed sex tape? Dress yourself head to foot in her clobber, wear her perfume and jewellery, listen to her album, read her book and watch her in a film (with her clothes on this time around).  Perhaps this last one is the biggest mystery of all, given that she's famous for taking her kit off and is then marketed entirely towards women, but maybe I shouldn't be surprised - Playboy don't seem to have any difficulty persuading women to buy anything with their bunny on it... But I digress.

In the UK, we're blessed with a particularly mindless power-branded couple in the form of Katie Price/Jordan and Peter Andre. Famous for having a surplus of breasts and a deficit of musical talent, they dominate women's trashy magazines and get their name tacked on to just about anything going. While Peter has mainly just tagged along and sired a few children, Katie has dabbled to a greater or lesser degree in the following:

• Glamour modelling
• Politics (no, really)
• Television
• Music
• Lingerie
• Jewellery
• Haircare products
• Horsecare products
• Books (autobiographical)
• Books (childrens)

The only field to permeate our house is the children's books. Beth's last childminder gave us one of Katie and Peter's "Mermaids and pirates" books after her daughter got too old for it. The story is about Katie the mermaid and Peter the pirate having a picnic, together with an assortment of seagulls and crabs. There's a nice little moral about sharing. The illustrations are nice enough. As a kids book, it's pretty good really.

On the back of the book there is the usual copyright notice and publishing details, and the following text, which I quote here verbatim:

For fun, games and lots more visit www.katiesmermaidsandpirates.co.uk  For Katie Price's adult website visit www.katieprice.co.uk

A brand too far? I think so.

I work in Manchester, just down the road from the Arndale shopping centre. Part of the centre crosses Market Street, so there's a large sheltered area there. You often get buskers and the like there. There's a wicked blind guitarist who plays there sometimes, people do dancing of various forms - George Samson used to dance there, and sometimes people do chalk art on the floor or sell pictures.

One day last week, I was walking past, and saw a small crowd of people watching something. I found a space to watch, and saw a black guy with dreadlocks playing speed chess against a twenty-ish girl, while a very tired looking Ipod dock blasted out Coolio's Gangsta's Paradise. The chap played very quickly and very well from what I could judge, and dispatched his female opponent with ease. He shook her hand and then asked for another volunteer from the audience to play. The crowd started to dissipate, while others taunted their friends to take him on. I looked around at his signs that he'd placed on the floor, which proclaimed him the "Jamaican speed chess champion" who needed to collect money to fly home to see his dying father. Still, the man was asking for a volunteer, with no one brave enough to step up to the proverbial plate.

I sat down with him.

He shook my hand and introduced himself as Pablo. I told him my name, and conceded ahead of time that he would destroy me, as I'd not played for years. We arranged the pieces on the board, he reset the clocks, and flicked the Ipod to playing Killing Me Softly by The Fugees. Game on... I opened the best way I could remember, and he countered with ease. The crowd built around us, as I made mistake after mistake. I dithered over moves, while his hand shot to his pieces before I'd even let go of mine, and we hit mercilessly at the clock at our side. With his queen on my back row, and my king pinned behind a solitary pawn, I conceded checkmate. He had torn me apart in a matter of moments. The crowd applauded. I got up, threw a pound in his collection box, and wandered off to catch my train home, glad of the opportunities that one can find in the cities from time to time.

---

That evening, I decided to take a look on Google for this mysteriously stranded Jamaican chess champion. So, a search for "Jamaican speed chess pablo" reveals... That he's a fraud. Several sites on Google report him as running his little scam in London, Glasgow, Cardiff, as well as Montreal, Perth (Australia, that is), Tokyo, etc. Always claiming he needs to get back to Jamaica in the next ten days, to see this father of his. In the past he's charged for games, though on the occasion I saw him he was just accepting donations. Either way, I had been had. I'd been hustled out of a pound by a phoney. Even at the time I wondered how a champion of his calibre could fall on such hard times that he'd have to resort to this to get home, but I was clearly taken in by his charisma and the quality of his chess. I had fallen for it.

The strange thing is, I am not angry with him for "stealing" money from me; rather I feel I have been robbed of an experience. My memory of playing chess with a Jamaican champion on the streets of Manchester in front a crowd of people is a lie. We may have played chess in front a crowd, sure, but the reason for doing so was a fabrication, a get rich quick scheme for a lazy chess player. I had believed him. I had wanted to experience something as unusual as playing chess with a champion who had fallen on hard times and was using his skills to solve his problems the only way he could. In those fleeting minutes I had played chess with a brilliant man, while people looked on in wonder... Except I hadn't.

I am reminded, in some ways, of the conclusion of Yann Martel's book, The Life of Pi, which I would recommend to anyone with eyes in their head to read it. If you've not and you intend to, look away now, before I discuss the ending... The end of the book concerns the eponymous Pi's claim that the preceding story is entirely true, while the sceptical parties to whom he has related it, disbelieve and say it is a pack of lies. Pi tells them that they are free to believe what they prefer to believe - if they have the faith, they may believe the improbable story that he has recounted, or they may believe their stripped down, straightforward interpretation. The choice is theirs, to believe what they want. In that sense, I find that I prefer to believe the fantastical account of my chess foe, even if the facts clearly show him to be a fraudster. I would like to believe that his story was true, that he really was the Jamaican speed chess champion, struggling for money to fly home to his ailing father. Never mind that I have since found the name of the true champion, and Pablo it is not, or that he has been playing this game in any city he finds himself in, and by extension flying the world on his victim's money... None of this is important. What matters it that for about 3 minutes, I played chess with a champion, was deservedly beaten, and gave him some money to aid him on his noble quest to see his father before he died.

Or perhaps I never met him, but merely happened on his story and chose to write about this...

29 July 2008. 1 hour is spent in the basement of a Moroccan restaurant in London, just off Regent Street, watching a band I'd never heard of before and couldn't name now without Googling. Time passes unmeasured, as I stand in silence with a friend, watching the blonde at the microphone. She puts up a parasol, indoors, at night. This too is fine.

And it matters not whether the band sound like Bic Runga or Lene Marlin, or even Travis on one track; or that the beer costs a fiver a bottle, or that the place is full of incense. My mind is far from my CD collection, my bank account, and my wonderings the next morning as to whether the smoking ban even covers incense. Nothing really matters here, just 4 minutes of music at a time, applause, and more music. I could be anyone, anywhere, no-one, nowhere, unknown to almost everyone in the room. My mobile doesn't even get a signal. I am out of reach - far away.

I've not been to a gig in many years, and am out of touch with this environment. It's good to come back to it. If nothing else, it's wonderful to just take an hour out of my life and just be lost in the semi-acoustic anaesthesia created by these 3 people; far from my studies, my work, my worries.

The band finishes, and we part company. I return to my hotel room, alone, though not before I call in at a newsagents to buy a packet of chocolate covered Hobnobs, for some as yet undetermined reason. Before too long it's 5:08am and I'm waking up in my clothes with my laptop still on at my desk. I doze for 2 more hours, before getting up. The alcohol leaves my system, and my worries and paranoia creep back, and I'm fretting about discussions with my friend over our dinner and drinks prior to the gig, as if I will be judged for voicing my opinions on ebook readers, the changing music industry, whether films can ever be adequately adapted from books (with specific reference to Love in the Time of Cholera, High Fidelity and Bridget Jones), whether the message of American Psycho is lost in it's grotesquery, whether Rage Against The Machine's half-caste heritage makes their covers of violent black hip-pop more palatable to me as a white man, the relative merits of Christina Aguilera and Alphabeat, and my assertion that All I Want For Christmas Is You by Mariah Carey could be the greatest pop song ever were it not for a single atrocious harmony in the middle eight. Well, maybe I should be judged for that last one, but nevertheless - I seem to spend so much of my life worrying about things I've said and done in the past, as though people are keeping score, tallying up all the stupid things I've said or done in the past, the rants, the swearing, the dirty jokes, waiting till I tip the balance before disowning me. I'm sure I'm not the only one to worry like this, but it doesn't really make it any easier, and I do find it concerning that it only seems to be alcohol that can adequately mask those fears.

In other news, Tuesday wasn't my only night of culture in London this week. I spent Monday night at the Proms at the Royal Albert Hall. I went with three friends to see a couple of pieces by Beethoven (including his 5th symphony) and a concerto by a chap called Carter which none of us really rated, though we were impressed with the variety of primary school type percussion instruments it made use of. And if that sounds like damning with faint praise, that's because it is. The 5th symphony was brilliant, especially as I - being rather less cultured than my veneer might suggest - had not previously heard it in full, and was only familiar with the well known first movement. It was interesting to spend such long times listening to just music, with no lyrics, as I have obviously become accustomed to through listening to modern pop music and the like. It was quite surprising to find how quickly the 32 minutes of the 5th symphony could pass. A good time was had by all, and I enjoyed doing something different, taking advantage of being in London for these trips to do something I'd not normally have the chance to.

I've also had another night of culture tonight, albeit much more mainstream and popular. I went to the cinema (alone, which I don't think is as weird as some of my friends do) to see The Dark Knight. I'll not write about it at length, as there's enough credible reviews out there, but I will say I thought it was spectacular. Heath Ledger's Joker was terrifyingly psychotic and I found the film genuinely unnerving and edgy. It was gripping, exciting and intense. Definitely one to see.

What price nostalgia? Last week, I spent £15.70 to have a look at the past and see what it was like. A couple of weeks back - probably around the time I was watching the No Surprises video over and over - I had a lengthy chat with my mum to try to get to the bottom of why I'm so predisposed to feeling melancholy; she's known me about as long as anyone, so it seemed a reasonable bet that if anyone knew then she might. I don't know that I got many answers, but in the course of discussion I came to wonder whether I'd been "happier" prior to moving house from Haslemere (Southern Fairy fancy town where footballers live) to Heswall (Northern monkey fancy town where footballers live). It sticks in my mind that I was happier before then than since. Perhaps there's something in that...

Besides, class had finished early for the day, and I quite fancied a nice walk in the sun. If nothing else it would be nice to see how well I could remember places I'd not set foot for over 18 years.

I took a train from London Waterloo to Haslemere, a journey I'd not made since - at best guess - I'd last been to visit London with my dad all those years ago. It seemed odd to be making a journey like that again after all this time, and doubly strange to think of it as a journey that my dad made every working day for about 7 years. I wonder how much faster the trains are these days... It's a very different journey to my commute into Manchester. The railway line appears to carve out a path through woods and forests, where my journey merely runs past a slag heap and through a handful of small towns. I'm struck by how green everything looks, and by the different plants that grow around here - there's bracken everywhere, for example. I don't know where I'd go to find bracken up North, but it's all over the place down there.

The train approaches Haslemere, and I feel nervous, like I'm about to meet someone important, or do something dangerous. I remember travelling to Newcastle, my birthplace, from Durham, while at university, and feeling similarly strange. This is a stronger feeling though - I left Newcastle at 18 months, and don't remember it at all, but I feel I know Haslemere like the back of my hand. I've not brought a map with me, but I'm confident I'll be able to walk about 5 or so miles around the town without getting lost.

Stepping out of the station, I take a right towards Wey Hill, and I see a dentists on the other side of the road. It looks very different to when I was there last, when I had my first orthodontic brace and my brother had his first fillings. Apparently it's the Denplan Dentist of the Year. Heading towards Wey Hill, I pass a pub, and it occurs to me that my landmarks for navigation are completely different to anything I'd have used back in the day. These days, I work on pubs and churches. Last time I was here, I attended one church and no pubs.

I pass the library and a fabric shop that I remember my mum taking me to. I don't see the toy shop where I bought a Lego set and a teddy bear with one year's birthday money, so I guess they've closed down. At the bottom of the hill, I'm disappointed to find that the old leisure centre where I learnt to swim has been supplanted by a Tesco store and a few blocks of flats. I wonder how long it will be before Tesco crushes the Co-Op over the road, the scene of my first shoplifting crime in which I took a tin of Quality Street off the shelf and started eating them. I don't recall if my mother was made to pay for them, but I know she wasn't best pleased. Behind the Co-Op there's a children's playground with a very tall slide that I'm sure I never went on, much as I wanted to. I toy with the idea of going on it now, for old time's sake, but there's kids everywhere and I'm not sure it would go down too well.

On towards Shottermill, I pass a church where we attended a Finnish School of sorts for a number of years with my mum, and a layby outside a newsagent where I remember discussing the withdrawal of half-pennies with my dad. I press on, heading out of town somewhat, towards the roundabout that takes you to Liphook, and pass another pub that I don't remember. I assume it was here when I last was, but I couldn't really say. Shottermill Ponds are as pretty as I remember them, with ducks, geese and swans swimming on them. I take some photos and hope I can put together a panorama later.

I can - click for a big pic:

Rounding the corner into Camelsdale, and heading back towards town somewhat, I pass children in school uniform, playing by the ponds and in a park where I remember a fete of some kind. Some of these children are the same age I was when I left. The younger ones could feasibly be children of people I went to school with. Of course, I don't recognise anyone, and even if I did, what could I possibly say to them? Since our lives diverged they've doubtless run parallel courses, but what could we have in common any more?

I'm starting to get thirsty walking in the sun, so I call in at a newsagent for some Ribena and a Double Decker. The name - Cee Gee's - is the same as it was when I was last here, though it appears to be independent these days, where I remember it as part of the now defunct Happy Shopper franchise. I toy with the idea of asking the shopkeeper how long she's owned the shop, but decide against it. The gentlemen behind me in the queue talk to each other and I wonder how my accent would sound against theirs. They would probably think I sound Northern, which would at least make a nice change from being up North and sounding Southern. I expect my voice will always sound like it belongs in another part of the country.

I walk down towards St. Paul's church and Camelsdale Primary School. The vicarage has been extended but the church is just as I remember it. They've cut down the elder tree from which my siblings and I used to pick and eat the small black berries after church. I look through the church windows, trying not to appear too suspicious to the parents picking up their children from the playgroup in the church hall, and I'm proud to see that a banner my mum spent weeks making still hangs in the church, exactly where I left it. I'm glad they're still enjoying it, given the work that I saw go into it. The school is also much as it was when I was there, barring the removal of a few trees and some rebuilt outbuildings. I don't see the small outdoor swimming pool that used to be there, and either way I'm sure that the laws nowadays wouldn't permit children to get changed in the open air with only a towel to protect their modesty...

Back up the hill and past the street where I went for piano lessons. I recall sitting in our car on the piano teacher's drive while my mum spoke to her, and letting the handbrake off to see what would happen. Had my knowledge of physics at the time been as good as it is now, I would have deduced that the car would roll down the drive and into the road. I may even have figured out that that was quite dangerous. As it was, no such thoughts occurred to me, though mercifully my actions didn't lead to any injury, death or damage.

I approach one of the hills that surrounds Haslemere, and head further out of town, past a builders merchants (I remember it as Jesse Mann - it now calls itself Coomers) and then round a bend in the road to the site of many a grevious crime against humour, as perpetrated by my dad... The turning towards our house is on a bend with very poor visibility so whenever we drove out of that junction my mum had to get my dad to duck so she could see past him. Sometimes when my mum asked him to duck my dad said "Quack", much to our amusement.

Smiling to myself at the memory of this, I head on towards the street where I used to live. The road is quite narrow, and I remember the days after the '87 hurricane (or "storm" if you must insist on meteorological accuracy) when it was blocked by trees and you couldn't get a car out of there. At the bottom of our road I pass a little stream that goes under the road, the venue for many games of Pooh Sticks (Google lists a website for a Pooh Sticks World Championship, which sounds awesome. Alas, the website is rubbish). The houses around here are enormous, and the gardens look like they could have been transplanted directly from Ness Gardens or somewhere similar. I imagine that some of these gardens would be a full time job to look after, but if you can afford to live around here, I imagine that you can afford to pay someone to do that full time job.

I walk past our old house, but I can't linger to look at it for long as the owners - who also own two BMWs - are just pulling into the drive. The house is as I remember it, though I fancy that the end of it has been extended out towards where we used to have a greenhouse and a vegetable patch. I shudder to think how much the house is worth nowadays. Half a million? More?

At the top of the road I turn briefly to the right down an old bridlepath that we used to walk with our nanny, who looked after us when my mum was finishing up her English classes. There's the overgrown remnants of a log pile that we used to hide in and around, and I'd like to walk further but it would deviate from my planned route. I turn around and head back in the opposite direction, past the house of a girl I used to know; my mother informs me, and I vaguely recall, that I used to fret about whether she'd marry me when I grew up. Ah well, it wasn't meant to be! Onwards round a corner, past ponds where I once found a snuffbox - old fashioned even then - and more enormous gardens. There's a small table outside a tired farm building with boxes of eggs and an honesty box, though I fancy the eggs aren't at their best after a day in this sunshine. I take advantage of my age and independence and walk a path that I never trod but always wanted to, through woods that skirt the edge of Shepherd's Hill. I see a fox sat in a field, but I don't have the right camera to get a good shot of it. Nevertheless, it occurs to me that when I was last here mobile phones were the size of a briefcase, the 35mm camera was just in fashion, and the Walkman (the ones that played tapes - remember those?) was hitting it's stride. These days my mobile has Walkman written on it, and a camera in the back of it.

I pass a house for sale with a sign that says "Plot and 33 outbuildings". My mind boggles somewhat.

I get a nosebleed - they've picked up this past week for some reason - as I head into the town centre which seems apt given how they plagued me as a child. At the other end of town is the doctor's where they cauterised my nose after first anaesthetising it with... cocaine.

I have a quick look at the nursery I went to, where I remember puzzling over the difference between addition and multiplication - why should 2 + 2 = 4 = 2 * 2 ? Surely one of the signs in question is redundant? I stay long enough to take a picture of the building, but I feel self conscious, as though in this day and age I could be arrested for even looking at any kind of school with children in it.

The town centre is an odd thing, with a building stubbornly located in the middle of an elaborate roundabout. I look at the shops - there's a bookshop and a Woolworths that I remember, others that I don't. The bookshop's sign doesn't appear to have been painted since I left. I wander past the museum and take a quick look at the doctor's, then head back into town to look for somewhere to eat. I settle on a Wetherspoon's pub, different and the same everywhere you go. I sit down for sausage and mash with a pint of cider. I watch a cat climbing over shop rooves and I call Alison and Beth, and I miss my family. Beth is pre-occupied with her Duplo, so conversation with her is brief. I finish my meal and listen to the surrounding clientele curse out their conversations, and for a moment the only difference here is the accent people are talking in.

I get up and head back towards the train station. Passing a small park, I see teenagers loitering, and I wonder whether they have always loitered here. These ones probably weren't even born when I left, but perhaps others loitered before them and I was just never around to notice them. Rounding the corner on the approach to the station, I come across a gang of men, suited and booted, no doubt returning from their days at work in London. I think of my dad again, coming back each day from work and heading home to his waiting family, and I'm reminded of how I feel like my dad every day, getting the train to and from work, coming back to a house with Alison and Beth waiting for me.

I run over the station bridge and get on to the train to Waterloo (how many time's did my Dad nearly miss a train here?) and reflect on what I've seen...

I think it was easy for me to remember things in a certain way, given my age and the simplicity of my life when I lived here. I didn't know the world was broken at the time, but plenty of bad things were happening when I lived here. Vietnam and the Cold War had just about ended, but the Gulf War was brewing. John Lennon wasn't long gone. Fred and Rosemary West were burying people under their patio. Meanwhile, I was a child, playing in the garden, reading books, going to piano lessons, walking in the woods. I wasn't worrying about exams, girls, popularity, sex, money, work, wars, recession... I was innocent, and protected from all the troubles of the wider world. They would have got round to me eventually though, and I'd have found out about it all, and it would have probably been just as difficult to deal with as it was for me up North.

I wonder if I was slightly naive to think of my time in Haslemere as trouble free - a simpler life - but perhaps it's only natural that my mind has picked such a prominent event as a 200 mile move as the dividing line between my innocence and my... enlightenment?

I'm reminded somewhat of Rob's fixation with Charlie in Nick Hornby's High Fidelity (a masterpiece, as I've said before, in both book and film form) and how he had made her, in his mind, the root of all his problems.

I'm not sure what questions I was asking in going to Haslemere, and I'm not sure they were answered, but I definitely learnt something, if only about myself. The ancient Greek aphorism Know Thyself comes to me. I think I do understand myself a bit better following the trip, and that's got to be worth £15.70 of anyone's money.

I only recently found out that the carbon monoxide in that lyric refers to suicide by way of vehicle fumes. It fits with the rest of the song, but it's still somewhat jarring to learn that, not least when it seems so obvious in retrospect.

I've been busy as all hell lately, with work and studying and family and trying to enjoy life at some point along the way. Work has been pretty dire lately, and I honestly don't know how much longer I'll be able to stick it out for before moving along. Likewise studying has been very hard work, though now that my exam is out of the way I feel I've got a bit more room to breathe. Family life is more enjoyable by orders of magnitude, but nevertheless hard work. And even "fun" seems a tremendous effort at the moment. It's much easier to just pass time without regard to whether I'm actually enjoying anything I'm doing.

I came across the video for No Surprises a couple of months back, having not seen it for a long time. The imagery seemed distressingly relevant at the time, and I watched the video several times in tears. It was rather reminiscent of my miserable teenage years, at which time The Bends was a mainstay in my music collection; a time when I felt sure I knew just what the man in the Just video had said, and knowing why he'd wanted to lie down in the pavement and stop...

I wish I could stop. Lie down. Rest.

Anyway...

Alison and I watched Control the other night - the documentary film about the life and death of Joy Division singer Ian Curtis. I can't claim to know much of Joy Division's music, beyond the marvellous Love Will Tear Us Apart and even that only due to it's presence on the Donnie Darko soundtrack. I did know what Joy Division meant prior to seeing the film, though that's more to do with my obsession with trivia than any interest in the band. Still, even without my having any real interest in the band, the film was engaging and interesting, and quite moving. The story was somewhat reminiscent of the much more well known Kurt Cobain, what with him being unable to deal with his fame and the pressures of performing. It was quite interesting because it was very difficult to sympathise with the lead character. It was much easier to pity him for his mental problems (depression, epilepsy) than to sympathise with him, as some of his actions - particularly with regard to his love life - were basically selfish and foolish. The suicide itself was well done, and very moving. Quite challenging to think of his situation and how he felt, and whether a person could ever be justified in killing themselves and leaving a wife and daughter behind like that.

Sticking with films, but on a decidedly lighter note, Alison and I are going to see the new Indiana Jones film on Saturday. It's getting some mixed reviews, but I'm sure it'll be good at what it does. I'm sure it won't be a searing critique of the work of archaeologists under the pressures of the cold war, as some critics apparently think it should be, but I'm certain that it will contain the following at a bare minimum:

• A hat
• A whip
• A tomb/cave/other dark place
• A car chase
• A fight

which should be about enough to carry it really. I've no doubt that it won't be as good as Raiders, or even as good as Crusade, but with the dross that Hollywood gets by on these days, I'd even settle for anything as good as Temple. It'll be 2 hours of thud and blunder led by Harrison Ford, which will definitely do the job.

Alison and I are picking up the new Lego Indiana Jones game for the Wii too. It looks like good fun, and if it's anything like Lego Star Wars which we both had a great time playing, then it should be £30 very well spent. The Wii has been one of our best purchases of late, and I've been amazed at how much I've been able to get Alison playing it. Gaming has normally been my domain, and occasionally a mystery to her, so it's been quite good to find some games we can play together. Mario Kart and Mario Galaxy have been two recent surprises - I'd never have expected to have got her playing those two.

Right. More another time... I'll write about some films next time.

I've been meaning to write for a while about some of the various media I have been consuming of late... books, films, games, etc... I shall start today with music.

First and foremost, the title of this post is a line from Get Over It, the new single by The Guillemots. It is, in my humble opinion, a masterpiece. You can watch the video at Youtube if the fancy so takes you. I have purchased the single via Itunes this very afternoon... I like being able to buy a single for less than a pound, and actually be involved in the charts again. I know the charts are horribly corporate and whatnot, but I think lowering the barrier to entry in terms of price (both for a band distributing singles and for the listener purchasing them) can only be a good thing. I'm hoping the charts will broaden out a bit more to include music that would otherwise not get in there, were it only being purchased by 14 year olds in Woolworths.

Talking of singles, I picked up The Mystery by Doug Walker as well. Chris Moyles had been banging on about it and how good it was, but also how no other DJ or station would touch it. The song was good, so I downloaded it, and after a few listens figured out why no one was interested in playing it... It's a Christian record. Sure, it doesn't mention God or Jesus, but it's pretty clear when you know what you're listening for. Shame that popular radio is so biased against anything remotely "edgy" in that sense.

Talking of things that are remotely edgy, I watched the Brit Awards last month. Dear goodness, what an embarrassment. It doesn't take too much cynicism to imagine that it was pre-arranged that all of a sudden once the 9pm watershed hit everyone would get drunk and start swearing. Sharon Osborne, Vic Reeves, The Arctic Monkeys... It's all just a bit cringeworthy. Very pretend rock 'n' roll. The awards themselves were predictably bland... Yes, I was pleased to see Mika, Mark Ronson and Kanye West pick up an award and yes - it's arguably fair that the Foo Fighters won a couple, though I think Dave Grohl's sarcastic acceptance speeches pretty much covered off the fact that they were pretty much token wins; the rest of the awards all seemed either ill deserving (Adele - more on that story later) or tediously predictable (Take That, Kylie). The performances were also pretty forgettable, with the exception of Amy Winehouse' hideous singing for Mark Ronson's version of Valerie that was memorable for all the wrong reason. All in all it was a bit of a waste of time.

Adele... How can she win a "critic's choice" award? In what world of paint-drying-and-peelingly boring music can she be seen to be even remotely interesting? Why the dragging vocals? Why the uninspired music? Why the obsession with pavements? Why the enormous record sales, for goodness' sake? I'll tell you why... It's the fault of middle aged, middle class folk buying any old CD for £7.97 in Asda to sit on their coffee table next to their copy of the Daily Mail. It is music for people who do not like music. It is the Ready Brek of the music world.

In other news, I've been buying second hand Placebo albums lately. Placebo are one of those bands that I've always known I should be listening to, but somehow never quite got into, with the exception of putting Without You I'm Nothing on a compilation tape about 10 years ago. The albums are all pretty much brilliant. The music is confident and capable - precise without sounding fake. The lyrics are poetic, in a way that surprisingly few songwriters achieve considering that songs are arguably just poetry with a backing track. I think the thing that surprises and impresses me most is that the music is almost effortless to listen to and appreciate - it's not like listening to a Radiohead or White Stripes record and having to give it time to be sure that it actually is good music and not just arty wank. The content is somewhat unsettling - spanning misery, modern life, drugs of every kind, bisexual sex - but strangely I find it less offensive than, say, the majority of R&B in the charts at any given time. Consider, for example, the lines:

Got a headrush, in her pocket
Two rubbers, two lubes and a silver rocket

from I Know by Placebo. Yes, it's very rude. However, let's compare that to the marvellous writing by Taio Cruz in his top 10 single Come on Girl, the bridge of which is worth writing out in full:

You wanna take a bite?
Come whet my appetite,
Put it in, do your thang, make my head spin,
So c'mon take me away,
You better take me away,
You better hit the spot,
If you want I can make you pop,
So let go, electro, take it nice and slow,
C'mon boy, c'mon boy, c'mon boy!

Maybe I'm using double standards here, or maybe I've got some idea that one of these artists is making grown up music for grown up listeners, while the other is making songs for immature sex crazed teenagers. Hmm. Either way, I'd much rather listen to Brian Molko's musings on his rather torrid lifestyle than yet another blinged up rapper banging on about all his bitches or whatever. Ugh.

Right. That's about all I've got to say about music for the time being... Films or games next, I think. See you then.

It surely has been a while...

I've just returned from a few drinks with an old friend of mine. Always good to catch up with someone you've known nearly 20 years. There's a somewhat unusual sort of freedom with someone like that. Like, if you've known someone that long and not freaked them out or driven them away by now, then you should be pretty safe to talk about nigh on anything, right? So, that was nice...

I've had my birthday just lately. I'm now 26 years old. People keep telling me I'm more than halfway to thirty and that sort of thing, as though I'm somehow supposed to be bothered by the inevitable, unavoidable, irrevocable passage of time. You may get the impression that I'm not overly fussed by being 26, or being 27 next year, or even 30 in 4 years time... You'd be right.

I was given money for my birthday, which is fair enough because that's what I asked for when people asked what I wanted. I've bought myself a swanky new Ipod, which is pretty cool. I've ummed and ahhed about getting one for a while now and it is pretty handy now that I have it. I've also finally got into buying music off the 'net with Itunes, which is something I've been meaning to do for a while, and so far it's not disappointed. It's all very easy and the quality is good, so I'm quite impressed. I know there's all the furore about DRM (I'm a geek - I'm supposed to know about these things) but I'm a bit apathetic about all that fuss at the moment. Anyway. The music's good and the price is good, so I'm not too fussed.

Beth is doing well at the moment. She's really getting the hang of talking now. She's apparently supposed to know 300 words by the time she's 2, but I'm sure she knows more than that already. She talks all the time, and is good at assimilating new words and using them properly. She's started to get the hang of talking on the phone too now. I'm currently away on training in London, but I've been calling each day to say hi to Ali and to Beth. I think she appreciates it, even if all she says is "Yes" to about anything you ask. Still, it's progress... a while back, all she'd say was "No".

I've actually got some good photos of Beth, from Christmas, and from a day a while back when we had some snow. I'll post them on Facebook or something, or on here sometime soon.

Training, ah training... It's pretty hard at the moment. I've got loads of work to be getting on with and it's very difficult trying to fit in family life and leisure time. I've come to appreciate the ironic use of the phrase "copious free time" as coined in - as I understand it - the US Navy and popularised by the legendary satirist and pianist, Tom Lehrer. "Sure", I say, "I'll do that in my copious free time". My, how we laugh, my fellow students and I, as we quietly wonder how we'll manage to cram everything into our brains in time for the exams. Panic is already setting in, and the first exam is still two months away. It's not looking good. I'll get back to you in May and let you know how it all turns out.

I've a mind to write about a whole bunch of other stuff, but it wouldn't really fit with this sort of general progress update. I've got a bunch of buzzing thoughts about various items of media... films, books, TV... Rough reviews of sorts. I'll post again soon, maybe even this weekend.

Still, don't hold your breath, eh?

One of the things I was given for Christmas, was a book that you may have heard of. It's called "Freakonomics" and it provides a rather unconventional look at the way the world works, tackling such issues as eduction, parenting, crime and so forth. It's fairly well written and makes for a pretty compelling read. It's occasionally guilty of the third kind of lie, but generally speaking the arguments and reasoning appear sound, if a little of the wall. The tone errs on the side of editorialising, but this is aimed at being a popular paper back for the casual economist, so that goes with the territory. Either way, it's a good read and I'd recommend it, if only to those with a passing interest in statistics and the like.

Yesterday I read a chapter concerning the fall of crime in the USA during the late eighties and early nineties, which surprised everyone as crime was expected to skyrocket at that point. The authors debunk various theories - improved policing, gun control, strong economy among others - and settle, with a knowing air of controversy - on the notion that it was the legalisation of abortion that led to falling crime. The argument goes that unwanted children are more likely to turn to crime, so as the legalisation of abortion (Roe v Wade 410 U.S. 113, for those of you who really want to read a full case note. For the less keen, the edited highlight can of course be found at Wikipedia) leads to less unwanted children, less crime logically follows. The reasoning is persuasive, albeit somewhat distasteful, and it certainly treads a fine line between utilitarianism and Machiavellianism. The idea that we can reduce crime at the cost of however many million unborn babies is certainly difficult to weigh up.

I am reminded, at this point, of another economic notion that I have come across in my limited flirtations with the subject. There exists a logical fallacy, known as "the parable of the broken window" which was conceived by a French economist in 1850. The fallacious argument goes that if a window happens to be broken, this is a good thing, because it makes work for the glazier, who can then spend his earnings on bread, such that the baker then has money to buy a pair of shoes from the cobbler, and so forth. The factor that is overlooked is of course that the owner of the original window has paid out the cost of the repair, and has nothing to show for it. He has borne the cost of the improvements to the rest of the economy, and the end result is that the system as a whole is worse off to the tune of one window.

It may be a sound argument to say that the abortion of many children is a good thing if it reduces crime. Society benefits from lower crime, and there is much rejoicing. The problem that is overlooked is that society has lost millions of children, and has arguably committed an act of corporate murder, depending on where you stand on the abortion issue. As for myself, I come at things from a Christian perspective, albeit a fairly liberal one. I disapprove of abortion for reasons of lifestyle, laziness and contraception, but I think it's probably OK if there is a great risk to the child or mother. All of which leaves me in the position of considering the cost of abortion to be a pretty steep one to pay for the prize of lower crime rates.

The real difficulty with this sort of thinking is that I'm pretty much bound by the nature of this life to think in terms of "the lesser of two evils". The thing is, I don't want the lesser of two evils. What I want is no evils. I don't want to have to pick between two bad things to try to achieve one good thing. The brick wall that I come up against is that this world is fundamentally broken, and no amount of chopping and changing can fix it. The window was broken way back in The Garden of Eden, with the apple debacle, and we've been attempting to pay off the glazier ever since. The sad truth is that the system can not be fixed from within, and requires an outside influence to sort things out - in short, it can only be done by God, by way of salvation through Jesus. That's the only way that this particular window can be fixed. Any other solution is short term and limited. We may fix one thing, but it will always be at the cost of something else, until we look for something beyond this world to help us out.

By way of easing my way back into blogging, here's an easy option... one of those quiz things that goes round. Not very interesting, I know, but it's been a while... I'll get back into it soon enough.

Quiz...

1. Was 2007 a good year for you?

Yeah, it was OK. It wasn't spectacular... I didn't do as much exciting stuff as last year - no new houses or babies. It wasn't bad though.

2. What was your favourite moment of the year?

I had a good time in Finland on holiday. It was fun taking Beth swimming in the lake, I liked that. She couldn't walk on her own yet, but she liked paddling while I held her up. There's pictures on Facebook.

3. What was your least favourite moment of the year?

My Grandma in Finland died, which was pretty rubbish, although we had been expecting it. Still, funerals are never great times, are they?

4. What are your plans for 2008?

More of the same, really... Work and look after my family. Try to get back on track with God. What a mess that is. I need to reprioritise a lot of things... Stop worrying about things I'm going to buy, stop wasting time on pointless things, get back in touch with people. It's all a bit messy at the moment.

5. What countries did you visit?

Last year I visited Finland, twice - holiday and then funeral. I don't think I went anywhere else. I don't think I even went to Wales.

6. What date in 2007 will remain etched in your memory?

Beth's birthday in June was good. We went on the big wheel in Manchester, then had tea in Cafe Rouge.

7. What was your biggest achievement of the year?

Beth getting to a year old, our marriage getting to three years old... More ongoing achievements than landmark single events.

8. What was your biggest failure?

Continuing my slide away from any kind of meaningful relationship with God. I still believe it all, but I can't get excited about it these days. That and not doing enough work for my course. Oops.

9. Did you suffer any illness or injury?

Coughs and colds, but nothing major. Had a bit of surgery to remove a nasopalatine cyst from the roof of my mouth. It turns out I'm in the lucky 10% for whom the nerves get damaged, so I've lost some feeling behind my teeth. Never mind.

10. What was the best thing you bought?

Probably our Nintendo Wii. Awesome. We got it for Christmas, but I had the foresight to buy it in September, anticipating the rush. It's great fun.

11. Whose behaviour made you appalled and depressed?

I had a very rough drunken night back in February... That was pretty bad. That or the drunken trip to the strip club in October or whenever. How embarrassing.

12. Where did most of your money go?

Things I bought on ebay... CDs, DVDs and games for the Nintendo DS. I'm well into Nintendo at the moment, so loads of my cash went that way.

13. What did you get really, really, really excited about?

Our holiday in Finland, as I'd not been for a couple of years and I really like it there. It's beautiful.

14. What songs will always remind you of 2007?

I've listened to the radio a lot this year... There's been lots of songs I've gotten really sick of, rather than ones I've really liked. I've not got bored of the Mark Ronson/Amy Winehouse cover of Valerie by the Zutons. That was good.

15. Compared to this time last year are you:

• Fatter or thinner? A bit fatter. It's all those trips to London and eating two cooked meals a day.
• Happier or sadder? Probably a bit sadder... I'm feeling the pressure with work and my course. That's kinda getting me down.
• Richer or poorer? A bit richer.

16. What do you wish you'd done more of?

Studying, praying, reading the Bible. Sleeping too... I've fallen into bad habits of staying up too late wasting time and doing nothing of any use at all.

17. What do you wish you'd done less of?

Wasting time on the Internet. Ugh... how dreary.

18. How will you be spending Christmas?

I spent Christmas with my family - first my immediate family, then we saw Alison's relatives and then mine. It was busy, but good to see people I'd not seen in a while.

19. Which LJ/MySpace users did you meet for the first time?

I don't have accounts on either LJ or Myspace, as I am not 14.

20. Did you fall in love in 2007?

No, for reasons that should be obvious to most readers!

22. What was your favourite TV show?

Heroes was very good. I watched some more 24 on DVD too.

23. Do you hate anyone now that you didn't hate this time last year?

Who has time to hate people? It's time consuming enough trying to like people.

24. What was/were the best books you read?

I think I read Day Of The Triffids this year. That was great. I got into reading the original James Bond novels too. They're really good, much better than the films. Live And Let Die was excellent.

25. What was your greatest musical discovery?

I got into The White Stripes, who I think are pretty good. I'm trying a bit of hip-hop too, but it's yet to really grab me. I can see the talent, but I find it hard to actually enjoy it.

26. What did you want and get?

A Nintendo Wii.

27. What did you want and not get?

Enough good marks on my homework, but I only have myself to blame for that really!

28. What was your favourite film this year?

I don't even remember what I've seen this year... American Gangster was good. I saw Die Hard 4.0 too, which was pretty much what you'd expect - silly action and whatnot. Oh yeah, and we watched The Last King Of Scotland on DVD which was brilliant.

29. What did you do on your birthday and how old were you?

My birthday... I don't think I did anything special. I went to church, then I think I travelled to London for a week of training. Lucky me. I was 25.

30. What one thing would have made your year more satisfying?

Knowing I'd done some more work instead of wasting time.

31. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2007?

Haha, I love the idea of a "personal fashion concept". Again, who has the time? I'm still wearing clothes I bought years ago. My "personal fashion concept" was "If it's not got holes in it yet, then you can keep wearing it and avoid spending money on new clothes".

32. What kept you sane?

My calm, easy going nature. And tea.

33. Which celebrity did you fancy the most?

Kelly Brook on Strictly Come Dancing. Her and Camilla Dallerup, also of Strictly fame. We're going to see the Strictly tour in February. I think both Alison and I will be eyeing up several of the competitors!

34. Which political issue stirred you the most?

CCTV, ID cards, all that crap. You can argue about whether it's Orwellian or not, but it's hard to see it as anything but a rubbish waste of money. The other thing that wound me up was tax credits... What a pain in the arse.

35. Who did you miss?

Alison and Beth while I was on training. Also, most of my friends from back in the day. I'm rubbish at keeping up with people at the best of times, let alone when I'm busy with work and everything else.

36. Did you treat somebody badly in 2007?

I probably didn't always make the most of the time with my wife and daughter.

37. Did somebody treat you badly in 2007?

I don't think so, no.

38. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned this year?

Nothing worthwhile is ever easy. You have to work at it.

39. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year...

Pick a few lines from Fitter Happier and you're pretty much there.

...just very busy. I'll blog soon, I promise.

By the time I get round to uploading this, I will probably know who has been voted off Strictly Come Dancing this week. As it is, I'm writing this in Notepad and will have to upload it later, as I'm on the train and Orange 3G perplexingly classifies my blog as "pornography" and unsuitable for anyone under the age of 18. Obviously my last entry raised more eyebrows than was immediately apparent.

So, I'm probably on decidedly safer territory if I stick with good, wholesome family entertainment like Strictly. I'm obviously getting dangerously middle-aged and middle-class, as I'm an ardent Strictly fan. So much so, that Alison and I are going to see it live when they go on tour in the New Year. Excellent.

We had our staff ball a few weeks back. We all headed down to the Kensington Olympia, ate fairly forgettable food, drank lots of free drink and generally had a good time. As part of the entertainment they had a bit of Strictly Come Dancing competition with various of our partners dancing with professional dancers and being judged. Brendan Cole and Lilya Kopilova from the show were there.

After they were done, and whichever partner it was won and was given their trophy, the dancing became decidedly less sophisticated and artful. The DJ put on the dance music and thousands of accountants descended on the dance floor. I resisted the pressure to dance, informing people that they'd have to get several more drinks into me before I'd go anywhere near the dancefloor... Well, being as the drink was free, this wasn't too difficult to achieve. I went and had a dance, in so far as my uncoordinated flailings can be called dancing. I don't have a problem with rhythm - I'm pretty good at keeping to the beat - I just have a problem with moving my limbs in anything like a sensible fashion and without causing bodily harm to my fellow dancers.

So, I danced for about an hour or so... Me and a thousand other dinner jacketed men and evening gown-ed women, aged anywhere between 20 and 60, letting our hair down and taking a break from our hours sat at desks counting other people's money. "This is weird", I think to myself, my and many other arms raised in the air as Faithless' Insomnia booms out at us. "Dun-dun-da-dun-dun-dun-da-dun-dun-dun-da-dun-dun-dun-dun". I wonder how silly we all look, sweating away in our black suits, dancing with other people's spouses to 10 year old records. I can't bring myself to worry for too long though, carried away as I am by alcohol and deep bass notes and the sheer physicality of this slinking, gyrating mass of people...

It's a curious thing, but it's strangely liberating... Moving to the music, following the beat from song to song. I am, admittedly, relieved that I don't have to try to impress anyone with my "moves" - I don't think Alison really saw me dance till after we were wed, by which point it was too late - but perhaps that just leaves me freer to enjoy myself. I doubt I'll make a habit of it, and I'd rather be able to dance properly, Strictly style, than to do anything that might fit in at a club, but perhaps once in a while it's fun to give it a go.

***

And lo, it was Dominic who left. Not to worry.

"Don't go a strip club - those women have mother's, fathers and they want to have children one day!"

So went the exhortation from a friend of mine, shortly before she left the pub wherein we were celebrating our tutor's stag do. Predictably, we proceeded to go to a strip club, but not before getting a few more drinks inside us, losing several quid to the quiz machine and eating lots of noodles.

I have mixed feelings about strip clubs. On the plus side, there are women taking their clothes off; on the other hand, it's really nothing more than the more socially acceptable face of the sex trade. You see the dichotomy, I'm sure. Strip clubs are respectable and enough to appear on high streets up and down the country, but I'm inclined to say there's something a bit more sinister at work than just a bit of smut at the end of a lad's night out.

I suspect that of those people who would ever go to a strip club, most would only ever go for a stag do or birthday party or the like, irony optional. But what of the numerous people I saw at the club I attended, still in their pinstripe suits after a day at the office? Don't they have homes to go to? Wives? Girlfriends? Or are they too busy spending their Thursday evenings in strip clubs to find any such partner? What of people attending strip clubs on their own, with no leering accomplices? Could there be a sadder way to spend an evening?

I wonder who is exploiting who, in the strip club system. The most obvious suggestion would be that I, the punter, am exploiting the stripper, forcing her to take her clothes off for my money. Having thought about it of late, I think that's a rather simplistic way of looking at things. Rather, I would think it more accurate to say that it is the proprietor who exploits me and my fellow punters, by way of exploiting the girls that he employs. I think it is men who are exploited out of their money on account of being too controlled by their sexual urges. To put it succinctly - it's just too damn easy to persuade us to give an unknown girl a fiver to take her top off for two minutes. I'm not saying that the women aren't being exploited too, but that's not the financial incentive for the guy in charge - he's just out to betray his fellow men by taking our money.

Now, admittedly, this is not exactly what was on my mind when the pretty blonde was taking off her rather inauthentic airline stewardess uniform, but I digress. It's easy to look at this seriously now, when I'm not full of alcohol and surrounded by hordes of baying City workers.

Now of course, the women are being exploited too. We pay women to take their clothes off and show us their bodies for our enjoyment, without really caring a jot about any aspect of their lives that doesn't involve their being nude and in our presence. Anything else is irrelevant. They are paid for their physicality and nothing more. However, the trouble with such a line of thinking is that it paints me into a corner regarding nigh on any other trade that depends on a person's physical traits and abilities. Is a model being exploited any less just because they get to keep their clothes on? Is a construction worker being exploited any less just because he's a guy building a house? The work is entirely contingent on his body. Hell, sometimes even he doesn't keep his shirt on. Is a sportsman any less exploited just because they're using their body to run around a pitch or swing a tennis racquet?

The corollary to that argument is that I'm then obliged to say that prostitution is legitimate, which is rather more difficult to justify. Working on the prior line of reasoning, a prostitute is making their physical abilities available to another person for money. It's their body to do what they want with, surely. Perhaps the problem there arises when you introduce a third party - the guy pimping the girls. Now that's real exploitation, never mind just paying women just to take their clothes off. That's when things get ugly. That's when people start getting shipped in from other countries, bought and sold like animals. That's when people start getting beaten and abused. Clearly there is a line somewhere between being paid to play tennis and being paid to have sex with someone, but for the life of me I'm not quite certain where that line is. That being said, I suspect that stripping lies on the wrong side of the line.

Now, it's all very easy to argue for and against prostitution when I'm not letting morals cloud things, but as a Christian (albeit the kind that occasionally finds himself half drunk and in a strip club - go figure) I'm compelled to think of things rather differently. No, it is not right for women to be exploited for their bodies, be that for page 3 modelling, prostitution or rape, take your pick. I suspect the whole problem arose back in the garden of Eden, when Adam and Eve first became aware of their nakedness and were embarrassed of their forms, and God gave them their clothes. From that point on, the body was something to be covered and hidden, and from that point on it was inevitable that one person would pay another to reveal their hidden body. Were it not for the fall and our subsequent hiding of our bodies, there would be no need for strip clubs in which to see other bodies exposed.

So, with that in mind I can only resolve to not set foot in such an establishment again.