For, six months after I put my least good drum kit in the Micra and headed dahn sarf, I have vacated my floating holiday home on the Thames. No longer are mornings punctuated by the sound of coaches shouting through loud hailers at incompetent rowers, some of whom were me. No longer do two swans canoodle through a porthole inches away, as I make my morning coffee. No longer does conversation cease on the aft deck when yet another plane roars overhead, dragging unthinking tourists to the delights of Heathrow immigration. Yes, my houseboat idyll is over, at least for now. Last Friday I put the very same drum kit in the identical Micra and drove back north, to experience silence, except for the occasional bleat of a lamb, and, at long last, sensible temperatures.

For London on a houseboat in a heatwave is not really optimal for someone brought up to wear a vest throughout the summer, expecting a glut of goosebumps during a childhood plodge in Cullercoats Bay, caused not by the frisson of glamour, but the wind off the North Sea. When I first lived in London, ‘yesterday when I was young’, it was a lot cooler than in these climate-changing times, and I was still too hot. All the time. I was hot on the tube. I was hot on the bus. I was hot in December. But, looking back now with the benefit of hindsight and a Meaco MC Series 10000 Pro, London in the past was nothing compared with the raging reality of today. Thirty-five degrees, I ask you! At least a houseboat has the benefit of being surrounded by flowing water, cooling the hull a little. Except at low tide, of course. Which happens twice a day. Thankfully, with unexpected and atypical wisdom, I had placed my order for the afore-mentioned Meaco in May, a few days before the thermometer in the wheelhouse first started rushing skywards. (Wheelhouses are made mostly of glass, since it is conventionally nice if the Captain can see where he’s going. This is not optimal in a heatwave. I’ve known cooler greenhouses).

Very good it was too, my Meaco: it had a long flexible hose which stuck out of the window, connecting to a slim white box which made a noise like a Pratt and Whitney engine, but churned out that rare thing this summer; cool air. You could actually sleep. And it came with an App which worked perfectly, allowing you to turn the unit on remotely. Which was a bit pointless really, because when it’s 35C and you have just bought the only air conditioner in the southeast, you’re not ever going to switch it off.

Other aspects of my six month London sojourn were not perhaps so hot. There was the band I joined, for example, more accurately described as a ‘band’, in which four female lead singers - all of whom thought they were ‘the’ lead singer - watched in dismay as the bass player sank another bottle of red wine and said ‘I just need to practise this’, something which appeared never to have occurred to him to attempt between rehearsals. So he proceeded to do that, at full volume, when everyone was trying to talk. I managed to grimace my way through ten of these interesting experiences, thinking ‘this is great material for the sitcom I have suddenly decided to write about a middle-aged band with no discernible musical talent’, before deciding nothing needs that much research. After band practice, I banned the practice.

Then a friend from college invited me to sit in on an afternoon jazz rehearsal in a rather lovely church in Kew, where five very nice but frankly somewhat beginner-ish people arrived, wielding a violin, a rather large jazz guitar, and a soprano, alto and tenor sax (that’s three saxes in total, which is not a typo for what some people with green hair think is the minimum acceptable number of genders). They honked their way through some Miles Davis. It was like a school wind band, but less mellifluous.

Beginning to wonder if London actually contained any decent musicians, I took myself off to the jazz jam in the George and Dragon on Acton High Street. Here a really very good trio entertained an anxious-looking crowd, who fingered their instruments nervously, laid out on tables next to the Fuller’s London Pride, hoping for a chance to play. In the interval, the band leader wandered round, pointed at a sax and a guitar and four people with drumsticks, and said ‘you want?’ Seldom have so many people gulped in such a short time, not since news broke of Mr Sycofantino’s plan for the World Cup, anyway. I fell into conversation with an old chap clutching a saxophone. He must be good, I thought. Probably been playing for sixty years, I thought. ‘What are you going to do when it’s your turn to go up?’ I asked, pointing at his alto. ‘Lady is a Tramp’, he replied, ‘but I’ll sing it. I’ll play the sax on my second number’.

In the interests of respecting the elderly, I should draw a veil over what happened next. Let’s just say that he sang better than he played the sax. Which is indeed not saying much.

The drummers came up after that, one at a time, three of them in all, faces contorted in furious concentration, drumsticks shining with the varnish of ‘just bought’, all revealing themselves to be people who had clearly always wanted to play the drums, but had only ever done so in their bedrooms. I have heard car crashes sound more musical.

And then finally it was my turn, and an American lady sang, and a chap with a fretless bass played (fretless is always a good sign), and half way through we just looked at each other, and smiled.

So, moments before fleeing the fetid south to return to a positively delightful 25C in Northumberland, I joined a good band. We played funk and did one gig. I’ll be back.

Last Saturday, the first morning after departing, I was awakened by a strange sound; the patter of little tiny droplets on the window. What could they be? I wondered, half asleep, bewildered at this now-uncommon experience. Yes, wonder of wonders, it was actually raining, starting hesitantly like a talented singer (who does not play the sax) at the George And Dragon, edging into the first verse, gaining confidence in a middle eight of gentle drizzle, then roaring into a pelting chorus, a pitter patter splash gloop deluge of noisy moisture, more rhythmic than all those bedroom drummers combined, and more delightful to hear.

And then, joy of joys, like a sneaky cat looking for someone else’s food, my new favourite word crept in through the opened bedroom window.

Petrichor.

This is not, as you might think, a multinational oil company which is bespoiling the planet and causing 35C and no rain for months in London.

It’s not a little dish that scientists use.

It’s not the Blue Peter dog.

It’s not even one of Boris Johnson’s many wives.

It’s a word for the smell of rain, falling after a long dry spell.

This petrichor invaded my senses, welcoming me home, silencing the din of planes and bad sax players, making more poignant the joy of making new friends, behind the drums and on the river, being yelled at by a coach or smiled at by a bass player, in a city with no rain for months.

It was heavenly. Angelic.

But I hope it rains again in London soon. This drummer is missing it.

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However, this week AI did reveal a somewhat unexpected ability to make cute animal videos. (These, you will agree, are the sole remaining reason to have a Facebook account). On Tuesday I saw one in which a puppy helped a duck and four tiny ducklings cross a gully at the side of a street; the puppy squeezed down into the gap, making a sort of default canine bridge, and the ducklings waddled across its back. How cute. Leaving aside the minor issue that the video was obviously fake, as no self-respecting dog would ever do such a thing, it did entertain, not least in the number of wide-eyed ‘OMG’-type comments it garnered from the gullible, who thought it was an actual dog, lending a paw to real ducklings. This inanity cheered me up no end, as the sun continued to beat down and what grass remains in the world gave up completely and adopted khaki as the couleur de nos jours.

And then, I saw the ‘Madchester Party’ video. This, also generated by AI, was released to a grateful world the day after Andy Burnham batted his eyelashes into Number 10. It postulated that this recently-implausible triumph had prompted a gigantic trashing of the place, a dissolute celebration in which the Gallagher brothers, a brace of Nevilles and sundry other professional northerners joined a rampant throng of drunk Mancunians partying through the hallowed corridors where Churchill and Palmerston once trod. And Liz Truss too, come to think of it, so perhaps they are rather less hallowed these days.

I watched this video, in which the Cabinet Office was not exactly an Oasis of calm, with a resounding snort. This was not just because it perpetuated the view that northerners are without exception drunken hooligans, when (as everyone knows) that appellation applies predominantly to people from Millwall. The main problem was that, as the not-camera tracked in to a fake Andy, lying sprawled and incoherent on a chair, the worse for wear, it revealed a rather sedate Alan Bennett, who proceeded to espouse the merits of such orgiastic excess.

Alan Bennett? Gordon Bennett more like. How very ignorant. Whoever put whatever prompt into whichever world-destroying Large Language Model was needed to create this masterpiece, neglected to note a few minor details, such as that the north is not in fact one homogenous mass, it does not start at Watford, and Leeds is not the same as Manchester. For, national treasure that he deservedly is, Alan is not, in fact, a Mancunian. He was born in Leeds, which no longer has a good football team, rather like Manchester United. So he’s from Yorkshire. That’s a bit different, as anyone who recalls the Wars of the Roses might attest. The local accent is entirely other, for a start, as is the favourite colour; Mancunians being red in tooth and claw, Yorkshire folk white as the driven snow (which no longer exists up north because of all those AI data centres). I feel confident that Mr Bennett takes a certain pride in such local prejudice. Plumping this famous Yorkshireman into a Madchester party is a bit like referring to the Islamic Republic of Japan. It reveals a certain – how can I put this? – geographic stupidity.

But I expect we should not be surprised. My entire life I have endured tiresome sniggers from what I can only describe as ’southerners’, people who believe Manchester to be in the north, when those of us born in Newcastle, and everyone in Scotland, know it’s actually the Midlands. To them, we are all the same; strange, hostile, under-educated oiks who are entirely incapable of pronouncing words properly or, presumably, reading and ritting. I once had a girlfriend who was perfectly nice in many ways, but she suffered from an accident of birth (Hampshire). Whenever I referred to a) a Roman town near Bristol, which is also an enticing place to soak amid bubbles, or b) a mountain route between high peaks which can also be a request to hand over an item of domestic cutlery, or c) the room in which children are taught, and an ontology which for many decades divided the English, she felt it necessary to comment on my historically-apt short ‘A’, preferring an elongated vowel sound which to my mind was a waste of a perfectly good breath. This did not endear her to me. Our friendship passed into history, or parsed, as she might say.

But the times they are a changin’, and today, apparently, it is all the rage to be northern, even when that word refers to a place in the Midlands, such as Mr Burnham’s preferred political home. Under his would-be inspirational leadership I eagerly expect the whole of England soon to see the light and convert to northern causes, like Americans realising that our football is better than theirs, and they shouldn’t call it soccer. Yes, the north/south divide, that unbridgeable gulf, will soon be overcome, thanks to our new PM, whose first act as leader of our great nation was not to host a party, but to blink his puppy dog eyes and invite terrified southern ducklings across a great chasm of prejudice.

And thus, the nation shall be one. It’s Apparently Inevitable.

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Take, for example, the lady on the towpath.

I was cycling next to the Thames, watching out for that curse of modern life, people with sound-deadening headphones, oblivious to the world around them. Trying to focus on staying upright, as this is usually preferable on a bike, I approached two ladies, engaged in earnest conversation on my left. Plodding along on the right was one of those dogs that looks as if it admires itself in the mirror every morning. I slowed down, to ensure safe passage. Brakes screeched. And one of the ladies said, in a tone likely to enchant anyone with a fondness for dominatrices, ‘mind my dog’.

As I had been spending the previous thirty seconds doing exactly that, waiting for some indication of future direction from the tousled canine and its peremptory owner, this comment seemed a tad superfluous. I said, as politely as I could ‘I already am’.

‘How VERY kind of you’, she replied, words dripping with sarcasm.

And I thought, my God, it must be so horrible to be you.

I eventually darted past her and Fido, relieved no longer to be in the orbit of someone who appeared capable of starting wars with just a glance – a woman in whom the milk of human kindness had clearly curdled many years ago, becoming one of those cheeses that Robert Kennedy Junior eats, which look very busy under a microscope.

Twenty minutes later, on an empty patch of towpath, a different dog ran suddenly out from the bushes. I braked hard, missed it, but fell and hit the deck. This, being a gravelly path, proceeded to liberate much blood from my right knee. The dog appeared entirely unphased by its culpability and failed to apologise. Nor did its owner, who seemed on the verge of blaming me for causing him (and his mutt) mental torment. With the obvious and honourable exception of those of you reading this who have these animals, and are therefore universally peerless in all canine regards, methinks ownership of a dog does not always correlate with possession of a reasoned attitude to life.

Help was, however, on the way. ‘You all right mate?’ asked a black guy walking past with his girlfriend. ‘Groan’, I replied, being both winded and wounded. He helped me to my stuttering feet, picked up the bike, put the chain back on (his hands getting oily in the process), turned it the right way up, and held it out for me to climb laboriously and indeed painfully onto again.

‘Thank you. You are an absolute Gentleman’, I said.

And his girlfriend said, ‘yes, he is’.

Three words. You can learn a lot about someone in three words.

I cycled off, wincing but curiously exultant at such a contrasting example of behaviour; the miserable replaced by the helpful, the sanctimonious with the unselfish, the loveless with the proudly lovable. ‘Yes he is’ seemed to reveal a life of care and nurture, gentleness and kindness, which this thoughtful stranger embodied, and his girlfriend clearly adored. Whereas ‘mind my dog’ betokened someone living life through a prism of cold, irrational fury. A bit like Pete Hegseth.

Later, I passed an ambulance parked by the side of the road, its paramedic personnel nursing a coffee as they sat on the pavement, waiting to be called to action. ‘Can I be very cheeky and ask you to look at this?’ I said, gesturing at my knee. And they both winced. It was a bobby dazzler of a wound, to be fair. I’ve not had one that bad since I was six.

Over subsequent days the blood gave way to multiple scabs, darkening and drying, like crust forming on lasagne. I tried to resist the temptation to pick at it, my late Mother’s warnings about scars echoing through the decades. It’s better now, but has left a rather garish stripe of different coloured skin, like an incipient arrow pointing to my patela.

But this week, on a rowing camp in northwest Spain, getting up at silly o’clock to pound up and down the river-now-reservoir, marvelling at the beauty of the place, the burbling of the blackbirds, and the stillness of the water, I managed to get the set. Heading down the marble stairs of the hotel to the laundry, the light which automatically goes on, went off. I tripped, and tumbled, head first down an entire flight of stairs. (Did I say they were marble?) Forehead and nose helpfully hit the steps to break my fall, and as I came to a halt I noticed a searing pain on my left knee, which had rubbed along the edge of the (as I discovered) rather jagged stairs. It was a kind of burn, but not like they do on American TV.

So it’s all good, and I now have matching wounds, one on each knee, each at a rather rakish and fortuitously complementary angle, as if I was deliberately aiming for go-faster stripes. I feel sure they will ward off future dogs, and annoying old women.

What are we to make of these random events, these ‘three incidents in search of a metaphor’, to paraphrase Pirandello? Well it rather depends on your perspective. If you’re the grumpy old lady, they would manifest her ‘truth’, that everyone else in the world is to blame for everything, and I deserved my subsequent fall, merely for living a life in brief proximity to hers. The darting dog shows that, however careful you are, unpleasantness can jump out and knock you over. And the headlong cascade to my doom shows you should never use a hotel laundry.

Or, to be more positive, the curious incident of the dogs on the towpath can also prompt happier conclusions. Sometimes hazards are put in our way which we navigate with care, prompting undeserved criticism - but it’s still right to do our best and be polite. Sometimes positives jump out from bushes too, unexpected pleasures, little shards of delight amid the pain. And sometimes you fall head first into a sea of troubles, creating in the process implausible harmony.

Which, you will agree, is a bonkers post-hoc rationalisation for falling down some marble stairs. And sober, too.

Whether any of these examples apply in any way to the current state of mankind, I shall leave you to judge. I’m off to the sauna. Treading carefully. Limping slightly. Minding my leg. Yes I am.

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Yes, I’m bullish about a china shop.

When I say ‘china’, I mean it is rammed to the gunnels, whatever they are, and which I suspect should probably be spelled ‘gunwales’ anyway, with all manner of things for eating, cooking and drinking, many of them novelty items. Sure, you can get a dinner service there, but the best products are the timely ones, those rushed out to reflect political events and entertain the giggling populace. Like the tiny little coffee cup I bought, a week or two after some bloke descended a golden escalator to start ruining all of our lives; it has a picture of said dolt, with the caption ‘huuuuge’. They were doing a roaring trade with them at the time, New Yorkers sniggering as they got out their Platinum Amex, everyone thinking it was all a massive joke. I have one on a shelf at home. Any espresso consumed in it these days tastes a bit sour. Continuing a tradition of getting things disappointingly wrong, in the same emporium a couple of years ago I picked up a rather larger mug with a picture of Kamala Harris, when the same customers (and I) thought she might beat the huuuuuge crook and save democracy. Seems it’s not so much a china shop, more a crucible of thwarted expectations, a cup running over with misjudged directions of political travel. I am very much looking forward to going back there one day and finding they are third time lucky.

But although the shop is fabulous, and comical, albeit usually comically wrong so far, I have a real problem with its name. Fishs Eddy. This provokes in me a pedant’s pain at the sheer grammatical incorrectness of it. Surely it should be Fishes Eddy? Or Fish Eddy’s? Fishes’ Eddy perhaps? But no; they insist on missing whatever apostrophes or additional letters might mediate my agony, apparently on purpose.

Worse, this evokes another baffling American plural which set my back teeth on fire forty years ago. I mean Johns Hopkins University. It’s not John Hopkins. It’s not John’s Hopkins. It’s not even John Hopkins’. It seems that, just as there are several Fish, there are also numerous Johns, none of them understanding punctuation, who somehow had a hand in the creation of this august Washingtonian seat of learning.

Well it’s meant to be august, anyway. But to be honest, I have my doubts about it, too. I went there in 1985, doing some BBC thing about apartheid. Lots of politically-active students were getting together to make impassioned speeches about its iniquities, urging the world in general to ‘disinvest’. The theory was that if some well-meaning, well-heeled East Coast youngsters shouted enough, money would take notice, cut off the cash, and the apartheid regime would instantly crumble. They were Trust-me-I’m-a-student-afarians.

So, in a large lecture room with a small crowd, we set up our equipment and recorded the passionate few, railing against the Afrikaner world. And then we interviewed them, their eyes bulging with righteous indignation. And then we all went to the pub.

‘You have an interesting job’ said the Anti-Apartheid Main Man over a Schlitz. ‘Yes I do’, I said. ‘You must go to some interesting places’. I agreed again. ‘What was your last program?’ he asked, though he probably meant programme.

I told him it was recorded in Moscow and was all about the Soviet attitude to war, forty years after the end of ‘the Great Patriotic War’, as they call WW2 over there. I expected an engaged response from this right-on, internationalist, politically-aware kid only a couple of years younger than me. ‘Oh cool’, or similar.

Instead, he said ‘I hate those fxxxing Commies’.

I hid my surprise, and told him our show was all about how Operation Barbarossa, the unexpected German invasion which overturned the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and brought the Soviet Union into the war, with all the suffering but eventual triumph that entailed, forever impacts Russian defence policy.

And my interlocutor refused to believe me. ‘The Soviets were never on our side’, he said.

He was insistent. According to him, the Russians fought with the Nazis throughout the war. No amount of explanation, no reference to Stalingrad or Yalta or the twenty-five million war dead would change his mind. According to him, Commies are bad, and they fought against America. Part of an Axis of evil, as it were.

And he was at an east coast Ivy League university. Studying history.

I often wonder what he’s doing now. Did he leave Johns Hopkins and see the historical light; does he now buy optimistic mugs from Fishs Eddy? Or did he retain his inviolable sense of rectitude, stayed ignorant, and moved from apostrophes to catastrophes - doing all his political shopping at Malignants Narcissist?

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I don’t mean that you should count yourself fortunate to devour my minor ramblings of a Saturday; it’s I who is grateful to you, for affording your precious time to my Substack self. Rather, this piece almost didn’t happen, my three-year weekly writing ‘streak’ almost ended, due to that baffling curse of modern medicine. Man flu.

It started on Sunday. I was out rowing, obviously, it being my latest obsession, not doing anything too demanding, just pottering up and down the Thames, when I felt a little cough coming on. It was small, gentle, and unfailingly polite, like a well-trained butler drawing his master’s attention to an unexpected visitor. Not so much a cough, more an ‘ahem’. Then it happened again. And again. Uh-oh, I thought. By Sunday evening, invisible hands had wrapped themselves round my throat, like a gangster demanding money with menaces. Or a President. (Same thing, really). My health was about to be obliterated, bombed back to the moan ages.

On Monday and Tuesday I was suddenly co-opted into the Women’s Institute; lots of coughee mornings. Speech became difficult. My throat rasped. I was losing my voice, orally cancelled. By Wednesday things had evolved and my nose emulated a hyper-active influencer (constantly streaming). Then a wobbly shakiness came along for the ride. Like a miser hoarding his money, my body was racking up ailments, wracked with pain. On Thursday I foolishly ventured out to a business meeting, which turned into ’how are you?’ and revealed that Soho House makes a rather good hot toddy. Friday was the worst, spent entirely prone. At one point I did actually look up the symptoms for ‘pneumonia’, taking comfort that I only had about half of them. So that’s all right then.

Lying in bed was sonically bewildering, as my chest gurgled and wheezed like a leaky hot water system or a misaligned steam engine, competing with the geese outside my houseboat to make the most horrible noise. Breathing out engendered a rich diversity of burbling, constantly inventive, always new. There was lots of sound, though not much music - like an album by James Last. How much longer will this continue, I wondered, anxious that its tentacles could reach into the ‘rowing camp’ I’m due to attend in a week. (It’s a misnomer; there’s no tents. Though it will be intense). Suddenly, late last night, rather belatedly in my partial opinion, those hands started to relax; I could breathe! And without coughing, doubling over or waking the neighbours. It’s a modern miracle.

And so, thankfully, this fresh Saturday morning, with the sun glinting off the river, I am well enough to put finger to keyboard and write this. Normal harmony is returning. Life flows again from my rejuvenated soul. My nose needs no nebuliser, my chest is unchastened, my lungs are no longer lemons, honey.

What caused this return to normality? In medical circles, I believe it’s called ‘the Steely Dan treatment’.

Strepsil Logic.

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‘You working last night?’ asks one.

‘Yeah, Festival Hall. Egmont, Rach Second Piano, Tchaik Four. The usual’.

‘Right. Who was conducting?’

‘Dunno. Never looked’.

This beautifully captures the laconic nature of the professional orchestral musician, paid to create beauty on demand, whoever is waving the stick in front of them. Their lives are regimented – turn up to this venue wearing these clothes at this time to play that music in front of that conductor. It breeds a certain sardonic attitude, in which all the composers’ names are abbreviated (hence ‘Tchaik’), booze is plentiful, and jokes abound. The Golden Cockerel by Rimsky-Korsakov, for example, usually presented in a French publisher’s edition as ‘le Coq d’Or’, is always known as ‘Coq ‘d’Up. Viola players are the butt of jokes, and nobody likes the ‘Maestro’, who wanders in all uppity, gets paid a lot, and thinks he knows better. Hence the story about the deeply unpopular conductor who shouted at everyone, so winding up the orchestra that an insolent silence occurred, suddenly punctuated by a sarcastic ‘ting’ on the triangle.

And the conductor shouted ‘who did that?’

For jazz musicians, the irony quotient is always higher, partly because the pay is even less. I did a gig in a jazz bar recently. In the first set, there were more people in the band than in the audience. And we were a trio. For the third set, the venue was packed. We all agreed we’d enjoyed the first set more.

That jazzer’s sense of humour had its apotheosis in Ronnie Scott, tenor sax player-cum-club owner, for whom I was once privileged to do sound, for reasons lost in the mists of implausible time. This was in the days when he was little-known, the Soho venue constantly teetering on the edge of collapse, and to support it he was forced to accept money from Oxbridge Colleges to play May Balls to heedless students in DJs and frocks, who were more interested in watching The Beat or The JALN Band. Or, to be frank, rushing off to a college room for other purposes. That cash kept his club alive. It’s ironic, really, considering that these days every gig is sold out long before anyone picks up an instrument. Then, with survival always dodgy, I rather doubt that watching gilded youth besport itself and talk through the performance was high on Ronnie’s wishlist. They would do their set, then hightail it back to London as soon as decency allowed.

So it was that, at the end of a peerless performance, and following a rather rudimentary encore – Summertime, I seem to recall, the first refuge of the bored – he tilted his tenor, walked up to the microphone whose fader I happily pushed forward at just the right time, and said in response to some rather desultory cheers from the pitiful few who understood they were in the presence of genius ‘thank you Ladies and Gentlemen. We’d love to play you some more. But unfortunately, we don’t know any more’.

And then they were gone.

I thought of this on Tuesday, doing a big band gig with the world-renowned Customs House Big Band. This is based in northeast England, and since I am currently mostly a denizen of That London and living on a floating paradise, I go back every Tuesday for the privilege of sight-reading many ‘charts’ with sixteen other musos. The next day, I scoot back to the south and the river and those swans canoodling outside the boat’s kitchen window. It is, to be honest, quite a long way to go for a two hour rehearsal. But on Tuesday, we did an actual gig, in a Masonic Hall in a mining village in County Durham, a place for which ‘down at heel’ might have been especially coined. I don’t think it has seen a metaphorical comb in fifty years. Or employment. It’s the sort of place where you plug in an electric razor and the streetlights dim. The hall is a throwback to the seventies, all red upholstery and brown paint. There’s a picture of the Queen on the wall. Maybe someone should tell them.

This Tuesday there were happily more people in the crowd than in the band. They clapped politely but failed to laugh at any of the jazzer’s jokes from Peter the band leader, a man with a sense of humour so dry it should really be called dessicated. We played for forty minutes, rather well I thought, and had a break in which men in sports jackets and ties sat silently in the bar, gazing at their pints, doubtless puzzling over a clue in that day’s Times Crossword, or wondering what they were thinking, turning down Grace Kelly all those years ago. Then Peter did the raffle. Two bottles of wine. Both won by the same person. We played some more, and I drove an hour home in the dark, musing on the vagaries of musical life. Why do we do this, us musicians? Why get out the car and drive for ages to do a gig for almost nobody?

I have occasionally played to a full house, in the Royal Albert Hall of all places, and The Marquee Club at the height of punk, and at yer actual Ronnie Scott’s, though my biggest-ever crowd was a performance on the pitch at Wembley Stadium, where Evil Knievel sailed over the top of us before crashing and being taken to hospital. Obviously. The capacity crowd cheered a lot, though I’m not sure they were there for the music.

Once, on a local radio station in a world far, far away, a DJ – who was not me, honest - played a record by the Spice Girls and back-announced it by saying ‘that’s the best part of that song. Because that’s where it ends’.

I guess we do it, all of us, whether the dots in front of us turn into classical or jazz, however many people turn up to listen, because the best part of a tune is not when it ends. It’s when it starts.

(At this point, I would like to write some more words for your reading pleasure. But unfortunately, I don’t know any more).

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I don’t remember it being very long, but I was only five, holding my brother’s hand as we staggered forwards, unable to keep in time despite the over-loud bass drum, bashed with gusto by the burly man with the bearskin. There were probably a hundred of us from different churches, all Protestant, mostly Methodist or other ‘non-conformists’. After what seemed like hours but was in retrospect probably only ten minutes, passing the new library and the old Magistrate’s Court, we turned a corner and the end was in sight. We returned to the place where we had started. How biblical. And then, our reward for coming out and ‘witnessing for Jesus’ (not that we had any choice) – an orange. Never have I felt so rich, nobody ever thought at the time.

Back home, there were hot cross buns, and one chocolate easter egg, and Nana, who asked us to play the piano and gave us half a crown for our efforts. That’s twelve and a half pence, by the way, or a couple of dimes. Proper money, the first I ever earned from music, enough to buy an everlasting strip and perhaps even a curly-wurly and still have enough left to save in a jar. Because prudence is a virtue, you know.

Yes, I can confirm, Easter was pretty boring in the Sixties. Away from North Shields, people were growing their hair and playing loud music and discovering something called sex; in North Shields, we held hands and got an orange. Which sounds like a euphemism, but wasn’t.

It was still a fishing town then, with banks of North Sea trawlers moored on the Fish Quay, hundreds of them, five abreast, and fights breaking out in the appropriately-named ‘Jungle’ pub, where they said you had to duck when you walked in, to avoid the flying bottles. Walking down the street, if you met a man with tattoos you were warned to keep your eyes down, immediately identifying a fisherman, the guys who endured storm-tossed nights on tumultuous seas, then came on land to get paid, and laid (there were brothels in town), and start a fight or two. One street was renowned for having the most number of pubs in one stretch in the country, and no wonder, with so many blokes around with cash in their pockets and no homes to go to. In the Seventies there was a TV series called ‘The Stars Look Down’, set in the same place, my home town. In a scene which made my brother and me fall over laughing, two old blokes sat in a pub, nursing a pint of mild, looking disconsolate. ‘If I’d known I’d live so long’, said one, ‘I’d have got out of North Shields’.

In later life, this time of year became impossibly glamorous; Easter Egg hunts for the kids at my in-laws’ hotel in North Wales, or skiing in Zermatt, relieved there was still enough snow. Today, Easter will be different again; I’ll be on my boat, watching other boats, two to be specific, in a race where my old university will lose to that other one whose colours look green to me, not light blue. Perhaps I’m colour blind, perhaps it’s a longstanding joke which nobody has the courage to call out. They say the women’s race may be close, and the men will lose easily, as has now become traditional. One of my kids is coming, with a lot of friends, all singers, so it should be a musical event, and us Oxonians can drown our sorrows with the barrel of London Pride I set up on the main deck and secured with a chain. This is not because I’m concerned about theft (if you can skedaddle with a metal cask containing one hundred and fifty pints of beer, good luck to you), but in case the wash from the race-following launches makes my houseboat rock so much, it rolls off the side and into the Thames. I wonder if it will float. It could be a danger to shipping. And Cantabrigians. (Hmm: perhaps this is how we can finally win again). Winds are forecast against a flood tide, and this week I spoke to an old chap who coxed the Cambridge boat in the seventies and said ‘I reckon one of the boats could sink’. Whatever happens, we’ll be sinking pints.

In modern Britain, the Church of England has morphed from ‘C of E’ to ‘C and E’, meaning Christmas and Easter, the only times the majority of the English bother to attend their eponymous places of worship. The UK generally is largely irreligious, which strikes me as an excellent thing if the alternative is a so-called ‘Secretary of War’ who thinks he’s on a crusade. A bit of lukewarm faith and a lot of doubt pervade our island nation, our passions inflamed by football, that excellent war surrogate. Easter has become a time for family, and rail replacement buses, and thinking that summer will be along soon. And on the fourth day, we shall rise again, and go back to work.

Meanwhile, to nobody’s expectation, North Shields has become fashionable. The Jungle has been turned into yuppy flats with BMW compacts parked outside. There are precious few trawlers on the Fish Quay, but there are gallons of restaurants, some in the Michelin Guide. Just up the hill, past the long-demolished theatre where a local lad called Stan Laurel used to perform before discovering films, is Sam Fender’s favourite hostelry, to which the UK’s answer to Springsteen, also born here, gave one of his umpteen music awards. It will be doing a roaring trade this weekend with people in chinos, drinking craft beer. The tattoos in town are rather different now. And there is no longer a pervading stink from the ‘guano’ works, which boiled down fishbones to make fertiliser, the odour of childhood. Twenty years ago, as the place was in full transition from dump to artisan, I chatted to a posh lady from London, up to work in the Arts and loving ‘the north’. We talked houses, inevitably. She listed all the places she’d like to live but couldn’t afford on an impecunious creative’s salary. ‘But’, she said, eyes widening, passion shaking her Sauvignon Blanc, ‘have you seen …. North Shields?!’ I said I had, but perhaps in rather different days. Time marches on.

But now, I suspect, nobody else. I rather doubt the streets were full of kids yesterday, traipsing past the library on the Good Friday March. Not when you only get an orange.

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His invention lived up to its creator’s self-professed genius. It could, at the click of a mouse, translate any language into any other. Better still, it understood all the idioms that make seamless intercommunication so difficult, the phrases which ‘give the game away’ when you don’t know the vernacular equivalent. The kind that, for example, mean that ‘soaked to the skin’, when translated into French, becomes ‘soaked to the bones (‘trempé jusqu’aux os’). Perhaps the rain is more penetrating in France.

So, to prove yet again his peerless professorial superiority, the hero inventor asked to be set a challenge. ‘Give me any idiom. I’ll translate it into a foreign language, and then back again. You’ll see how good my system is’.

Ok, said his longsuffering and frankly largely unimpressed students, who were not entirely convinced that this test, or he, was quite as clever as made out; translate ‘out of sight out of mind’ into the Russian idiomatic equivalent, than back into English.

So he did.

And it came back ‘invisible idiot’.

When this joke popped into my head this week, it brought to mind a comment from a very senior chap for a very large company, the kind that props up the FTSE100, all while bespoiling the earth. I had been hired to make some mendacious films for them, intended to show that the milk of human kindness (another non-translatable idiom, I suspect) coursed through their corporate veins in endless creamy streams. The senior gent’s job was CSR, or Corporate Social Responsibility, a concept which made me guffaw in scorn, though not enough to refuse their frankly rather generous terms, to be honest. This particular man lived in LA, where he tried to make the corporate behemoth appear slightly less ogre-ish by occasionally giving small amounts of money to local deserving causes. A key aspect of his job was to affect agonies of guilt at his good fortune. ‘Living in LA is difficult’ he told me in his capacious office, with its sweeping view of the Hollywood Hills. ‘You never see the poor. They live under the Freeway. We drive on top of them’.

Nowadays, of course, driving over the poor is practised not just by mega corporations but an increasing number of billionaires. And they have developed a lexicon all of their own, a set of moneyed idioms which capture the unreality of their not very workaday lives. Take, for example, ‘the Four Pack’. This is not what fitness obsessives achieve on the way to the full abdominal six, nor is it a few cans of lager bound together by flimsy plastic to accompany a major sporting event in which your favourite team loses, again. It is instead the minimum number of houses the properly wealthy need, to be considered full members of the ‘I see no poor’ club. It’s a four pack of homes, bound together by a plastic life.

In America, this means the place in Manhattan (Upper East Side of course), the condo in Florida which is ostensibly the permanent home to reduce the New York tax bill, the weekend place in the Hamptons, so easily accessible by the Jitney, and the house (has to be a house or it doesn’t count) in Aspen. The British equivalent would be a place in Chelsea, the chalet in Verbier, the weekend cottage in the Cotswolds and, to complete the set, that nice little place in Provence. To flit between this, the bare domestic minimum, I’m sure you will agree, the undeserving rich of course use the jet - as in ‘their jet’ - or a rented one from NetJets at a push, as nobody takes you seriously if you fly commercial. And it’s honestly such a hassle to drive out to la Guardia or JFK, when Teterboro is so much nicer. Plus, you never have to queue there.

I don’t have a problem with their wealth. It’s the insularity it bestows on them that concerns me, and the impact (or lack of it) on society - which does exist, by the way, notwithstanding what the Iron Lady said. These people, the uber-fortunate few, live their comfortable existences flitting from place to place, calling them ‘homes’ when in truth they don’t really have one, since home is where the heart is, and theirs reside mainly in their wallets. It’s an insulated life, in which stress is reduced by the liberal application of cash, and much conversation is about the iniquity of paying taxes. The problem is not their good fortune, it’s the lack of social responsibility it engenders. It used to be the case that when someone made a lot of money, they founded a school, or paid for a hospital ward, and went to church in the town they actually still lived in. These people don’t live anywhere. They have four houses, but no home. They lack hinterland. Their ultimate way to splash the spare cash is to build rockets, not cure cancer. Their lives have perpetual motion, mobile bubbles, insulated from the inconvenience of other people, lacking human connection, except of course on Instagram, that home of airbrushed fantasy. Their lives are as useless as the Professor’s invention, and like him, not as clever as they might seem. And the poor? Well they just drive over them.

There is one inevitable consequence. With real people out of sight, hence out of mind, the Four Packers become invisible idiots.

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This is not, as you might reasonably assume, a reference to some geographically-specific version of Cluedo: ‘the chef, in the Kitchen at Kenwood, with the carving knife’. It refers instead to what happened rather unexpectedly this week at the world-renowned North Tyneside Refuse Recycling Centre. Something that suddenly evoked ambition, and harmony, and unquestioning love, all manifest in a small kitchen device.

My late Mother was an early adopter of overseas cookery, or ‘foreign muck’ as Uncle Ronnie termed it. Since the world of the 1960s was considerably smaller and more isolated than today’s - which I am not entirely persuaded is a bad idea, to be Strait with you - this meant Mrs Arvold’s Continental Cookery Course at the North Shields YWCA. The English of the period could not imagine much beyond Dover. ‘The Continent’ was what today we call Europe. You may recall that peerless newspaper headline, ‘Fog in the Channel, Continent Cut Off’. Like the description of Peter Mandelson peering at the mushy peas in a chip shop and asking for ‘some of your splendid guacamole’ it is unfortunately apocryphal; but both stories, despite being invented, reveal an essential truth. The UK, as it was then never called, was splendidly isolated. It still regarded itself as Great, sufficient unto itself. It didn’t need any funny foreign food, thank you very much.

This was a time when husbands worked, wives were homemakers (they were always wives – ‘living in sin’ only happened in London), children came home from school in the middle of the day for dinner, and the evening meal was tea, eaten at four-thirty, with the entire family round the same table. Homework followed, then some communal TV, and everyone was in bed after the Nine O’Clock News. It was a time when ties were worn, even when washing the car, and woe betide any ‘housewife’ who put washing out on a Sunday.

In this narrow world, diets were similarly xenophobic. Meat and two veg prevailed, and nobody sniggered over the phrase. The pressure cooker worked overtime, usually cooking vegetables that were organic but came from the allotment, not an overpriced shop. It would not be true to describe the results as ‘al dente’. Sandwiches contained cheese, or Marmite, or bananas, never smoked salmon. Corned beef in Fray Bentos tins found its apotheosis in ‘corned beef hash’, topped with potatoes from a packet. ‘For Mash get Smash’. (You remember - the ad with the Martians). Cakes abounded, all made by said housewife when she wasn’t cleaning the home or toiling over a twintub, despairing when it rained and the washing got soaked. Wine was unheard of, and once in a blue moon the ladies would ‘throw caution to the winds with a little dry sherry’, to quote Alan Bennett’s fabulous line from A Private Function. Life was hydrated with tea, never herbal, always with milk and sugar. I expect restaurants existed somewhere, but nobody went. There were no fast food outlets. Nobody was fat.

My Mother broke free from this constricted world each week, returning from the YWCA extolling the virtues of a dangerously modern, unheard-of thing called ‘pasta’. Then ‘pizza’, pronounced pits-er. Some garlic was even invoked. These weird new dishes contained something called ‘oregano’, pronounced the American way, for some reason. There may even have been the occasional avocado. Yes, as you can tell, we were living dangerously. Good job the neighbours never found out. We would look at these sumptuous delights, delivered on the Formica-topped kitchen table, ribbing her gently for her adventurous taste then gobbling them up, rejoicing at our internationalist worldview.

And then, one day, when things must have been going well for the family finances, my Father suddenly handed my Mum a precious gift, the summit of culinary ambition; a labour-saving device. Yes, it was a Kenwood Chef. She’d wanted one for years, then suddenly … I recall it being removed from its box, that new plastic smell, the cardboard packaging, devouring the instructions, being told to get your hands off and we must wash it before use. Pressing a button tilted it up. Turning a knob made it go whir. We’d never seen anything quite so exotic. It was an instrument of adoration in a house which never had a dishwasher, and holes were drilled by hand, with a brace and bit. I recall my Mum’s excitement at pushing in the weirdly-shaped beater and having her cakes mixed for her. Bit by bit, ‘implements’ arrived; a dough hook for the bread we never baked (who needed sourdough when there was Sunblest?), and a coffee grinder, a perfect complement for the Russell Hobbs Coffee Pot which, I can confirm from recent testing, still works, and still makes appalling coffee. I would watch her, with the focused eagerness of a greedy dog, as she pressed the button to tip it up, pulled the lever to release the beater, then twisted to release the bowl and pour the mixture into a cake tin, hoping there would be enough left for me, and my licked finger. This for her was not a tool, it was a passport to a better world, a manifestation of ambition, a signal of the same intent which sent my brother and me to university with the merits of hard work and ambition schooled into us. The Kenwood Chef lifted us from our small home on a housing estate to a world of possibility. It was Modern. And so easy to clean!

And then this week, we finally came to the end of the rituals arising from my Mother’s death almost three months ago. The paperwork is long done; all that remained was her house. I think I have made forty trips to the local tip, my pickup full of dumpy bags with branches from the back garden, now no longer a jungle, and then the clothes and then the furniture and then the house was finally empty, but for the carpets. This week, as the estate agents hovered, waiting to be given the go ahead, I took the last few things, ‘small electricals’ all rejected by the charity shop for lacking any PAT testing. And there, in the garage, at the back of the pile of small broken radios and an answering machine that is redundant in a digital world and a fan heater that smells of burning something and that awful coffee pot, was the Kenwood Chef. It is vintage now, but not in a good way; the plastic is discoloured, the gleaming white which we wiped so carefully now reduced to a yellowish dullness, the suspicion of rust around the metal, the cable fraying in the plug.

And so, as I made that last journey to the tip where the guys say ‘you back again?’ with good humour, forgetting to check for my online appointment because they’ve seen me so much, my hands paused over the cavernous metal container with other people’s discarded, disregarded, hoovers and kettles, microwaves and laptops, remembering Mrs Arvold and the pits-er and licking the spoon and feeling safe. Then I paused, and threw it over the edge. And then I followed.

The Kenwood Chef did me in.

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It was chock of full of clubs, replete with societies, catering for all desires, most of them earnest. They were known by abbreviations, usually starting with ‘OU.’ This is not short for ‘oh you beautiful doll’, although half of the membership was. There was OUCA, consisting of people who wanted to be Prime Minister; OUDS, who all hoped Trevor Nunn would sign them for the Royal Shakespeare Company; and The OTG, whose members wished they were in the Cambridge Footlights. I was in OUBS (broadcasting) and OUSO (orchestra). My next-door neighbour, who kept me awake with his Wagner, was in the Oxford Union, and told me earnestly how he expected to be in the Cabinet before he was thirty. I asked him why. ‘Oh, power, obviously’, he replied, with naïve honesty. ‘How stupid of me’, I said, ‘here was me thinking you might say “to help people”, or something like that’.

If this sounds untethered to reality, which it certainly was, may I present to you a university society which made everything else seem tame in the extreme, a word they took very literally. I’m talking about The Dangerous Sports Club. This consisted of undergraduate toffs, usually dressed in top hat and tails, doing stupid things which would put the fear of God up their parents, who were paying for it, all while giggling mercilessly. Champagne was usually involved, to get just the right kind of buzz while you try to steer a grand piano down a ski run in St Moritz, or have dinner on an active volcano, or jump off Bristol Suspension Bridge doing a new thing they almost invented called Bungee Jumping. Presumably because drunk young people bounce, or maybe toffs are just born lucky, not many of them died, except for one poor unfortunate who allowed himself to be launched out of a trebuchet into – or in his case, near too – a net. That did not land well.

I was thinking about them this week, listening to The Bottom Line on Radio 4, in which Evan Davis, who so far as I know has never started a company, asks questions of people who have, in wide-eyed fascination, as if observing a particularly excitable puppy. The topic this week was risk. The guests tried to aver that we entrepreneurs don’t think what we do is risky, because we are passionate about it, and driven by a desire to make the impossible possible. It’s all about calculated risk, to fulfil a vision, one of them said. I agree with this, from my own experiences pushing water uphill for a living …

… and it brought to mind Tip Tipping.

This is not, as you may imagine, a handbook on gratuity etiquette.

It’s the name of a chap I interviewed back in the Middle Ages when I was a TV Producer. I was making a series of short films for a newfangled thing called Sky, each of which explained the mystique of those weird jobs they have in the film industry, things like Best Boy and Gaffer and Key Grip. Reel Work, we called it, with staggering wit, you will agree. Sky hired me because I’d just produced a series called Rough Guides for the BBC and was briefly deemed to be hot. I know that’s hard to imagine.

So it was that we set up our tripod on a film shoot, and pointed it at Tip Tipping. He was a stunt arranger, having moved into films after being a Para and then a member of the SAS. He sat, his burly forearms on display, next to a few friends, who also did stunts for their day job and jumped out of aeroplanes for fun. Tip explained how everything they did was carefully planned, all risks assessed, because a) it’s nice if you don’t die, and b) the Director might want a second take. He was one of those people with a huge personality, who just invites you in, has you smiling and laughing, even thinking ‘I wouldn’t mind trying that’. After I said ‘cut’ and we put the gear away, he opened a bottle of whisky and started on the real stories, the ‘squeaky bum’ moments, when they laughed, but only afterwards, and never in top hats. ‘And then there was Richard Branson’, he said.

He explained that Mr Virgin had called them up, before his flying balloons across the world period, to say he’d done some parachute jumps but never freefall, and would Tip and his pals care to teach him? They did all the training, and went for the first jump.

‘Branson was grinning and gurning, giving the thumbs up, loving the adrenaline’, said Tip, ‘and we got to the time to pull the cord. And he didn’t pull the cord. “Pull the fxxxing cord” we gestured to him. More grinning. Still didn’t pull the cord. So I flew across and pulled it for him, then pulled mine. We were twelve seconds from hitting the ground’.

‘When we landed, I went across and said “you are a madman” ’.

‘Hey, I’m so sorry’, replied Branson, ‘the buzz was just so great. Let’s do it once more. I promise it won’t happen again’.

‘No way’, replied Tip.

‘How about Twenty Grand a man?’

So they went back up. And it happened again. This time, when Tip pulled his cord, they were eight seconds from the ground.

One of Tip’s pals, another Para, was into base jumping. But he’d broken most of his bones, several times. He couldn’t really run any more, it was more of a speedy stagger. So when, some years later, he went base jumping in Norway, he didn’t get far enough away from the cliff, banged into the wall, his chute didn’t open properly, and he ended up spending the night on a ledge, with two broken legs. Other base jumpers tried to rescue him, and a helicopter, but they could not get to him. The next morning, realising his situation was impossible, he rolled off the ledge.

Tip himself was killed aged thirty-four, recreating a parachute accident for a BBC TV Series called 999.

And these guys thought Richard Branson, world-famous entrepreneur, was a member of a club they’d rather not join.

I guess there’s risk, and there’s risk. And some people are just - O, U know what I mean.

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It’s been hard to do that here of late. The clouds have wrapped their unwelcome arms round the nation like an over-anxious parent, deluging and drowning, keeping our spirits low. Then there’s been the life stuff I have been going through since the death of my Mother, mediated by a wonderful birthday spent with my kids last Saturday; all calculated to increase the dampness quotient, if you see what I mean. I had however hoped that, in my increasingly obsessive rowing ‘outings’ (as you have to call them to be hip in the boat community), the only humidity involved would be sweat dripping from virtuous brows. But then; last Sunday.

We were piling down the Thames from Richmond to Chiswick, passing through a reasonably pretty part of Brentford (which I appreciate sounds absurd, like talking about a kind dictator), doing what is known as ‘a piece’. This is not a piece of work, nor even a piece of you know what; it is instead the pièce de résistance of rowing, where we go faster and faster yet still manage to stay alive, and in time, somehow. Usually. This particular ‘race piece’ involved all four of us, with two blades each, doing about twenty-six strokes a minute, which is not very many, except for the fact that the stream from an engorged Thames (see above comments about the rain) was carrying us along at a fair old whack.

And then: whack.

We hit a buoy.

Matter of fact, we head-butted a buoy, striking it with full force, turning the front of the boat into a crumpled heap, like Dame Edna Everage’s smile. A buoy-bent bow, it was.

Now when I say ‘buoy’, you perhaps imagine some dinky thing, maybe with a little light on top, all cute and round and easy to miss against the grey steel of the river. Not this one; it was huge and cylindrical, like an overinflated oil barrel tilted on its side, three metres wide and a metre high, painted bright yellow, standing imperiously out of the water as if to say ‘do you not know who I am?’ Or, indeed, where I am. It was hard to miss. But, unfortunately, we didn’t. We piled straight into it, like a bunch of crash test dummies.

At this juncture our (impossibly thin, wobbly) boat, having been so suddenly stopped in its tracks, decided to imitate an unscrupulous politician. Aka, a politician. First, it leaned to the left. Then, it leaned to the right. Each time, considerable dollops of Thames accepted its invitation to come on board, swashing and swooshing into the place where our feet were, the bit that is traditionally best kept dry, as a general rule. Suddenly, my wellies, removed at the start of the outing and stored between my legs, started to float, sensing an opportunity to make a bid for freedom. But I couldn’t do anything about that, as the sloshing and gyrating had reached the point where our viability as a boat that stayed the right way up was suddenly in doubt.

When you capsize, which I’ve done a couple of times in the past, rowing on my own and entirely a consequence of learner incompetence, there’s a ‘will we, won’t we’ moment, and then you reach the point of no control, and over you go. I imagine it felt rather similar in the Titanic; but we went sideways, not stern first, preventing us from launching any of the lifeboats that we didn’t have. At this juncture, your feet are meant to slip seamlessly out of the shoes which are attached to the boat, their Velcro admitting defeat and releasing them in the interests of, you know, not drowning. On this occasion, however, one of mine remained trapped inside the increasingly upside down boat, which, as you can possibly imagine, was not ideal. Suddenly at risk of emulating Jacques Cousteau, I reflected that I would generally prefer to keep my head above water, especially literally. Eventually, a large yank released said appendage, allowing me to get out from under and savour the full delights of the Thames when it’s the First of March and the sun ain’t shining. Cold water shock, they call it. I can confirm that it is indeed somewhat shocking.

There followed a momentary pause in which we all said ‘are you ok’ to each other, an entirely stupid question really, given what had just happened, but it did at least confirm that we were still in possession of the right number of living, breathing participants. Then, the question arose of what to do next. We tried to turn the boat the right way up, rapidly realising it was a thankless task given minor things like water, current, eight misbehaving oars, the proximity of a hulking buoy, and the fact that we had suddenly doubled our body weight in wet clothing. As I watched one of my wellies float off to start a new life in Greenwich, reality dawned that we were really quite a long way from home, and were going to have to swim.

At this point, salvation arrived in the shape of a nice man called Nick Wild, or perhaps Wilde, in a rather ugly aluminium launch which was at that moment the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. He’d been coaching some kids close to us, observed our fall from grace, and came motoring across to the rescue. Dragged onto his boat, ours rescued, oars on board, he sped us down the river to the boathouse, regaling the soaking, miserable, increasingly-shivery us with tales of capsizes he had known, politely forbearing to say what he was doubtless thinking, ‘why were you on the wrong side of the river and how did you not see that ginormous yellow buoy?’ This generosity was perhaps motivated by the fact that the guy at the front, who had been steering, was meant to be knowledgeable, and was, to be frank, entirely to blame for this appalling balls up, was shaking so hard we were all worried he was getting hypothermia.

Anyway; I didn’t die, as you have possibly guessed, though when I thought about the incident in the thirty minute warm shower I needed afterwards, I did reflect that it could have gone rather a lot worse, quite easily. Yesterday, on the basis that you have to get back on the horse, or in this case in the boat, I was in a very similar rowing shell, in almost identical conditions, following the same route. I am pleased to report that we managed to stay entirely upright, which on balance I much prefer. As we passed the scene of the dousing, in true biblical fashion we passed by on the other side (which is where we should have been on Sunday), and I peeked at the cause of our involuntary swim. It really is very big, and very visible. Normally.

To re-write Wainwright, a man who loved the Fells more than I loved that Fall; avoid buoys as best you can. Lest dampness ensues.

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Poking my head round the corner to the ‘office’, which did not appear to have seen a duster in decades, I was greeted by Dumbledore. Well he looked like him anyway, a hirsute man whose long flowing beard, variegated from grey to very grey, reached from just below expressive eyebrows to the bulging belt on his rather tattered jeans, an impressive appendage so wide and full it almost entirely concealed the tie dye t-shirt, spattered with long-dropped food - testimony of summer bites, as T S Eliot might have put it. Smiling brightly, for it is nice to be polite, especially to the Keeper of the Key, I introduced myself, explaining that I was the new drummer in the band rehearsing in the big room. He looked away, evidently a man who decided that making eye contact was a waste of energy in 1972, and had encountered nothing since then to change his mind.

His informative thumb kindly beckoned me to the anointed destination.

I walked along a corridor narrowed by piles of aged amplifiers, one with a hand-made ‘broken’ sign, presumably to deter kleptomaniac guitarists, then pushed the heavy soundproofed door; the venue for our first rehearsal. The hand of history lay heavily on my shoulders, as a former member of The Ugly Rumours might have said.

Inside, the capacious room had a manky sofa to the left, a Fender Rhodes piano on the back wall with many bits missing, and a couple of unnecessarily huge loudspeakers, presumably to fulfil the childhood fantasies of egocentric guitarists (is there any other kind? I hear you ask). To the right was what I can only describe as ‘a drum kit’.

Now I know it might be argued that the central purpose of this instrument is, you know, to be hit quite a lot, but as a general rule it’s better if that happens on the drumheads. This one appeared to have instead been battered on every available inch, so marked was the once ruby red surface of the shells. It looked like it had been in a fight. I felt instantly sorry for it, sighed, and picked a stick from my bag.

‘Thwack’, I went hopefully on the smaller tom, mounted precariously above the bass drum. ‘Clang’, it responded, a noise – not really a sound, definitely a noise – which managed to contain every note and overtone known to man, and probably a few dogs too, without ever settling on just one. I have heard jerry cans sound more musical. The floor tom was even worse, wobbling like an over-confident drunk, seconds before the fight starts. As the note reverberated, it went from wah to woo and back again, as if uncertain on which aural island to place its rather tattered flag. The bass drum - known to some as the ‘kick’ – had clearly had more than a fair share of kicks in its poor, benighted life, managing to evoke disappointment and disillusion with each muffled strike of the rickety pedal.

I took out my drum key and set to work.

Half an hour later, after much tweaking and prodding, pressing the heads with thumbs and wishing I’d brought a kit of my own, the toms had graduated from bad to bad ass, and the bass drum had acquired a new sense of its own importance. Progress. I removed my vintage snare drum from its case, where it had been hiding until the percussive coast was clear, then mounted my cymbals. They shimmered in the rather dingy light, old friends in this grave new world. A small warm up followed, consisting of a militaristic snare drum figure inspired by Max Wall, then my go-to workout, a mambo. This requires playing lots of different things on many different surfaces all at once. I’m sorry to be so technical.

Feeling the evening now stood some chance of being bearable, the drums being vaguely in order, I settled down with a banana to await the band. First to arrive was the lead guitarist, a new guy like me, and evidently rather experienced. His hair had clearly been inspired by Peter Frampton, in the days when Peter Frampton had hair. He smiled enthusiastically and said ‘hey’ in an American accent. This could be fun, I thought. Then he removed a vintage Les Paul from its case and revealed a large bank of foot pedals. This will definitely be fun, I concluded.

Within half an hour the entire band had arrived, the last being the bass player, delayed by a meeting in the City and still wearing a dark suit. He devoured chocolate biscuits while tuning his instrument, a copy of Paul McCartney’s Hofner bass but the other way up, then downed a large glass of Coca Cola. The rhythm guitarist, a chap both ascetic and perhaps a tad acetic, had chosen a contrasting grey suit. Unpacking a Stratocaster, he removed his tie, instantly signifying his rock’n’roll credentials. The singers came, one by one, and we kicked off with Brown Sugar.

It was, to be honest, quite good, so I said at the end ‘we’re ready for a gig!’, a joke that nobody got. We tried again, then concluded it could no longer be performed, because lyrics or something. Which slightly made me wonder why we’d done it in the first place. Three more tunes followed in quick succession; Boogie Shoes, that remarkably un-funky thing by KC and the Sunshine Band; Proud Mary by Creedence Clearwater Revival, which should really be called ‘Rollin’ On the River’, since that’s the bit everyone remembers; and Get it On by T Rex, which I decided mischievously would be absolutely brilliant played very slow with a smoky blues feel. But we didn’t do that.

After two renditions of each, everyone was smiling, including even me. It is the easiest thing in the world to play a rock rhythm at eighty beats per minute for tunes you’ve known all your life. So then we did them again. And again.

After five renditions of each melody, I began to long for the big band, whose two-hour practice the night before had included sight-reading twenty songs, including the theme from The Flintstones, a tune I absolutely love to yabba dabba do. As the evening wore on, I realised the bass player’s plentifully-consumed Coca Cola was actually red wine, which did not perhaps enhance the accuracy of his musical stylings. And then, flushed with a mix of triumph and a lack of available material, we laid plans to rehearse regularly, and then do a gig. In October. So soon!

We finally parted (Dumbledore still scowling) with many hugs and giggles of excitement from most and sundry. The next morning, I received some generous text messages from one of the singers, someone clearly complimentary, but lacking a complementary tendency to check for typos. ‘You are a brilliant drama!’, she wrote, suggesting Apple’s audio transcribe cannot distinguish between percussion and Succession. Then she wrote ‘you ate the beating heart of the band’. Which, you have to admit, does sound quite rock and roll.

So apparently I passed the audition, and we’ll be back in two weeks. I’ll bring my own drum kit. And a scented candle.

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Homework is done, sock drawer tidied, school bag packed for the morning. We have entered the Dull Zone. I am so very bored.

And then, I make the mistake of saying so. My Father replies with his habitual silencer of dissent; ‘go upstairs and practise your handwriting’.

I of course obey, but however carefully I hold my biro, however seriously I screw up my face, no matter the focus applied to this most tedious of tasks, everything comes out as a dreadful scrawl. Left-handed, you see. The last great under-appreciated discrimination. It’s all very well for you righties, pulling a pen from left to right, as it was designed to do. Left-handers have to push ink uphill. No wonder we end up running countries.

Inevitably, my woeful attempts did not go down well with my Father, a right-handed teacher for whom a neat script was a question not just of professional pride, but a manifestation of purity of spirit. Coming into the bedroom to assess my efforts, sighing balefully, he calls me ‘a left-handed Johnnie’. And then he writes something to copy, in which his perfect copperplate, with its curlicues and accurate descenders, shames me, the writing runt of the family litter. His handwriting was indeed beautiful.

And instantly recognisable. This week, as the emptying of my Mother’s house continued, I found a stack of school exercise books, whose blue covers proclaimed the name of the institution of which my Dad was Headteacher - one which presumably didn’t police the stationery cupboard very closely. They contained diaries of every holiday since the Sixties, listing the cost of four tickets up the Niesen, how much petrol you get for ten Francs in Rheims, and where the bread and milk were bought in Granville. This was not a manifestation of miserliness; in those far-off days of exchange controls, with limits on how much cash you could take out of the country and no holes in any walls abroad, it was prudent management of the household finances.

And then I opened a more recent book, the record of a holiday he and my Mum had taken not long after retirement. ‘Dolomites, 1997’ it said on the cover. And there, at the top of the first page, in his perfect script, was this: -

Paul’s second daughter born @ 12.22. Breakfast and off by car to the airport. Heard the latest news re baby when we rang Paul from the airport…. Interesting drive through the Dolomites by bus.

That little baby is twenty-eight now, and just bought her own flat.

This sudden bumping into history stopped me in my tracks, accentuating the feeling I’ve been surprised by, this past few weeks, as my Mother’s death recedes in the mirror and life keeps on flowing. I expected the grief, and busied myself with the mundane to cope with it; I’d not anticipated the deracination. There is now no reason to stay living in that part of the world, to be just down the road when she calls. I’m no longer needed to do the shopping or take her to hospital. So I can in theory go anywhere, do anything.

This is ‘freedom’, but it is debilitating. With lifelong assumptions erased, assumptive scaffolding removed, liberty brings uncertainty, dislocation, and rootlessness. It’s time to construct a new self, to write my own next chapter, albeit in a left-handed scrawl. But as new tunes beckon, I sometimes long for a dull, domestic Sunday afternoon, and the banal certainties of sing something simple.

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I suppose it could be alleged that one advantage of being so very old is that I have quite a lot of musical experience; thousands of gigs, in hundreds of venues, playing all types of music. But, in all that time, with very few exceptions, seldom have I ever been ‘in a band’, in the Rolling Stones sense. Because here’s what happens when you are.

The rehearsal starts at seven. I arrive at six, with my drums. The bass player shambles in at six-thirty, staring at his feet. The keyboards guy comes ten minutes later, glasses all steamed up. Rhythm guitarist arrives at six forty-five, saying nothing, then the lead guitarist at five to the hour, saying a lot, all of it about himself.

We all wait outside the rehearsal venue. Then, at twenty minutes past seven, the lead singer arrives. With the key.

There, in a nutshell, is why I don’t play in bands. I have done, but each time I venture into that hell hole, it increases my blood pressure and shortens my life. My first gig in the band with the tardy lead singer took place in a rugby club, where nobody could hear each other. So I bought a PA system, and paid two of the young guys who work in my music business to do the sound for the next concert. We stuck everything in a van, unloaded and rigged it all by ourselves, and then the rest of the band arrived. ‘Oh, you’ve brought a PA system’, they said, in a way that was both approving and strangely uninvolved, like talking to a small child, or complimenting a servant on their hairstyle. After the gig, they all wandered off to the bar, buying each other drinks and saying how well it had gone, and how good the sound was, leaving my chaps and me to de-rig everything. Oddly enough, that was my last gig with them.

Here, by contrast, is what happens when you play in orchestras…

If the rehearsal is due to start at two o’clock, everyone arrives at one and gets their instruments out. They gossip a little, then go for a cup of tea, to gossip some more. We’re all back on the stand at twenty to, doing preliminary tuning while the music librarian checks everyone has all the dots. Silence falls spontaneously at five to the hour, and the oboe gives the A. Everyone tunes. Two minutes after that, the orchestra manager introduces the conductor. String players tap their bows onto music stands, the conductor says something warm and inconsequential, and at exactly two o’clock, the baton drops, and the music starts.

Thereafter, for three hours, the Maestro can do no wrong, even when he is wrong, which is often the case, in the estimation of the musicians. They remain silent, absorbing whatever is said, taking comfort that they get paid to do this. There are no arguments, no disagreements, no ‘but you said’, and never, ever, any mutual criticism. Our job is to be there, keep our heads down, read the dots, and do what we’re told.

I like this approach. I’ve been doing it since I was eleven, when my first pro gig paid the then-princely sum of five pounds. I like to turn up on time, and get paid to play. Avoiding musical differences. Eschewing egos. Being professional. Which I rather think is preferable to the alternative.

But now, unaccountably and despite the foregoing, I seem to have agreed to join a band. Well I think I have, anyway. I was asked, and they were insistent, and their drummer had just left, and it’s handy for the houseboat, so I have agreed to it. Or to a rehearsal, anyway.

It’s a sort of rock band, that plays some pop, and a bit of blues, but mostly they do hits. I don’t say ‘they perform hits’, as I have seen videos of their concerts. I think it is more accurate to say they ‘do’ hits. Other verbs are available. The line-up is generous: keyboards, bass, drums, rhythm guitar, lead guitar, and not one but four singers. One apparently thinks she alone is the lead singer. The others question this. Harmony seems to be rather lacking, in several senses.

I know all this because there was a band dinner. A chance to get to know everyone. To observe the social interactions. To question my sanity. The lead guitarist spent most of the evening saying the kind of sexist things that used to be commonplace in the Seventies, but thankfully have now been banished to the dustbin of history. Then the conversation turned to rehearsals, which are apparently characterised by arguments, and alcohol, though possibly not in that order. Over dinner, it was suggested that the lead guitarist might a) arrive on time for a change and b) try to remember the chords. He countered by primly informing the singers that the band’s problems all stem from them and what he called their poor microphone technique. Apparently he alone understands this. By this point, I was pretty sure that the band’s problems all stem from the lead guitarist. I’m quick like that.

Afterwards, I thought about running a mile, but instead decided to take a stand. I’ll join the band, I said, but only if the lead guitarist leaves. This went down well with the singers. And the bass player. And the rhythm guitarist. And the keyboards player. So I’m in; I like the people, and the multiple lead singer thing is actually genius - it’s like live karaoke. It gives permission to the audience to join in. Because the other shocking thing about the videos of their gigs is that the entire crowd is singing along, having a fabulous time. As a result, the band fills really quite serious venues. I suggested we add some Abba, obviously, and Brown Sugar, to the set list. I feel some Eagles coming on ere long. The first rehearsal is in two weeks. I’m doing a call sheet, which will suggest everyone arrives an hour early. Because the Lord loves a trier.

Whether this will prove to be a triumph of hope over fifty-seven years‘ experience remains to be seen. But I think it will be a hoot. And it’s probably about time I joined a band.

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‘Onomatopoeia’, for example. It’s the verbal equivalent of a couloir, into which we launch ourselves optimistically, hoping to land the jump and emerge triumphant with whoops and hollers, but always fearful of getting our ‘ons’ and ‘oms’ mixed up, like trainee yogis. ‘Excrescence’ is another one, likely at any time to dart unexpectedly sideways and end up as ‘exegesis’, a mistake which would certainly require some explanation. Then there is ‘verisimilitudinous’, a word I use all the time, as I feel sure you will know to be almost true. But worst of all, the biggest trap for the unwary, is ‘discombobulated’. It’s a word which evokes the very emotions it describes, causing pronounced stress and verbal fear. And it seems longer than it really is - rather like the Melania movie.

But, ‘discombobulated’ accurately describes my emotions, now I am once again, for an initial three months anyway, most of the time a Londoner. It’s twenty-three years since I abandoned Hammersmith and skedaddled north, sick of the noise and dirt, the cost and rudeness, and the fact that, then, nothing in London seemed to work. The Tube was filthy, buses incomprehensible, traffic wardens ubiquitous. I would drive to work through endless traffic jams, never sure when I would arrive, wholly dependent on a battered A to Z. (For - shock! - this was a time before Google maps). The north came as a welcome relief, a great place to bring up kids, surrounded by fields and friendly people who lived in housing that was affordable, but not by edict. You got a lot for your money then. The only challenge was how to find the right change for the parking meter, some of which still took two pence coins. Used to London, where a quid lasted six minutes, I always had too much cash.

But now, ensconced as I temporarily am on my houseboat, the Thames burbling gently a few feet away, I confess to a certain amount of bewilderment, and a great deal of discombob… (etc). For, as I go about my business, remembering old haunts and finding new, I keep coming across people who are – how can I put this? – nice. Chatty. Yes, let’s say it: friendly, even. There’s Hossein, for example, proprietor of Fat Boys’ Café, who smiled when he brought a rather dripping me, fresh from rowing in the rain, a delicious bacon sandwich with a cup of coffee, introduced himself, then topped up the coffee five minutes later ‘in case it’s gone cold’. When he learned I’m now a local, he knocked a fiver off the bill, too, kindly declining to soak the already soaked. There’s the old Australian lady, Yvonne was her name, who struck up an animated conversation in Fat Boys’, causing said cold coffee. I now know all about her kids, and her childhood in Victoria. It was all a bit … pleasant. Warm. Reminiscent of somewhere else. There’s the neighbours, all of whom I have now met, who invite me round for a drink during smiling random chats. Even riding my new, very old bicycle, chosen to be the cheapest and hopefully least likely to be stolen from the gloriously-named Fudge’s Cycles of Chiswick – a Dickensian name if ever I heard one – evokes smiles and waves from fellow earth-savers as we cross each other on a path, enjoying the cycle lanes which now litter the city, making bikes by a (country) mile the fastest way to get about. In short – whisper it under your breath - Londoners have become friendly. I know! Shocking!

Then there’s the weather. At this time of year I had expected my fellow capital denizens to be outside in their designer t-shirts, sipping Chai Latte Herb-infused Pumpkin Chocomaltocinos in their chinos, greeting each other with air kisses and designer sunglasses at kerbside tables, as the handsome waiter brings out their harissa herby vegan smashed avocado breakfast delight, on sourdough, of course. I had expected spring to be already three quarters sprung, the sun to be ubiquitous, heating turned off throughout the city, and florists to be selling a tiny assortment of four daffodils for eighteen pounds fifty. Instead, everyone is hiding indoors, trying to avoid the rain, which beats down constantly through mist and gloom. The Thames is swollen and ugly outside my window, all rowing stopped, a red flag to the RNLI. The other day, two confused swans passed my boat, possibly paddling beneath the surface but it would have made no difference, so rapidly were they being swept along. ‘This doesn’t look much like Oxford’ they seemed to be thinking, on their rapid way to Holland. This is not London weather. It’s worse. Something very strange is going on. London is different. Changed. Reminiscent of somewhere else.

There is one final, extreme and confusing aberration. House prices.

This week I read that the cost of buying a roof over your head has climbed skywards, not in Hampstead or Islington, Chiswick or Kensington as you might expect but, of all places, in the north. And I don’t mean Highgate. Double digit year-on-year price rises were reported north of the Wash, biggest of all in districts of north-east England which I know and cause a shudder, former mining towns and undesirable housing estates where men have the name of their pit bull tattooed on their faces. But in London? They plummet.

To summarise: in my Thames-side floating home, I am surrounded by friendly people, the weather is terrible, and property is becoming cheaper. What can explain this bizarre shift? After much reflection I have reached a momentous conclusion. There has clearly been a rending of the space/time continuum. Magnetic fields have shifted. The world has bounced on its axis. And the South has become the North.

Next, Londoners will be using the short ‘a’ and supporting football teams that always lose. It’s all very discombobulating.

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This week, the UK has been buffeted by Storm Something or Other - they seem to have increasingly odd names, and I’m losing track, of the storm. Presumably as the climate continues to worsen, at some point the available bank of appellations will be entirely used up and we’ll have to resort to … something else. Maybe cartoon characters? Storm Daffy will make everyone duck; Storm Zebedee will have us all bouncing up and down. In America they will name them after porn stars, leading to Storm Stormy.

I experienced this week’s tempest back in Northumberland, which is perhaps just as well as I rather doubt a named storm would be much fun on a houseboat. I’d gone back north on Sunday to do more post-funeral stuff and check on my Mum’s house. And, indeed, mine too. I arrived to burgeoning winds and no heat from my biomass boiler, which had decided not merely to stop working, but to be properly, genuinely, completely broken. As I discovered this news, it started to snow. I think there must be something in the DNA of all boilers which makes them break only when it’s cold and horrible outside. They are innately malevolent, always knowing when a failure to heat would be most inconvenient. And costly too; for they are very reluctant to work weekends. Rather like plumbers.

So, as I was shivering and donning all my clothing at once, doing my best Heidi impression, the storm came, and boy did the winds blow their cheeks. Further ‘raging’ ensued from various ‘cataracts and hurricanoes’ (odd that ‘cataract’ had such a different meaning to Shakespeare), proceeding to ‘drench’ various ‘Steeples’. Then, when it was all over, fog. It felt like King Lear had suddenly transmogrified into Bleak House. Through the mist and gloom, which rather coquettishly appeared to be always about to lift, then changed its mind, I started to reflect on that other storm which has just abated, the one consequent on my Mother’s passing.

All the hard stuff is done now, the busy-ness of death. The grant of probate came back lightning quick, just ten days after making the application. So this week I ran around closing bank accounts, which proved an object lesson in corporate culture. (Nationwide Building Society; gold star. HSBC; could try harder). I made the first payment required by her will exactly one month to the day since she died. It’s felt good to get on with it, to do something productive, as the coming reality starts to dawn. For, as I got in the car and drove down to London, I realised that, though the immediate maternal storm has abated, no calm is yet on the cards.

Twenty-one years is quite a long time to be the person just down the road, the first to be called when there’s an issue, the one who has her over at Christmas. And now, that phone will not ring, the ‘could you pop over?’ will not be asked. It is very strange, dredging up all kinds of questions about identity, and priorities, and desire; a kind of freedom, that does not feel at all free. I’m still like Lear on the Heath, wondering ‘who is it that can tell me who I am?’

I am, I suppose, an entrepreneur. I like dreaming up companies, and am immensely proud of Amazing Radio, the music business I started, which helps new artists to be discovered, most notably Dua Lipa, Sam Fender and Alt J. Someone accurately described it as my ‘fourth child’ and it reaches adulthood in April; eighteen years old, but unlikely to be leaving my mental home any time soon. I’m also a musician, always have been, and brought a drum kit down to London when I drove back, in hopes of finding some gigs. I stopped playing classical music a few years ago; it’s fun when it’s a professional orchestra and the timpani are waiting for you when you arrive, but as you get older that top tier of work dries up, for good reasons as there’s young people just out of music college trying to make a living from it, and I have a proper job too, so don’t really need the work. It means you end up playing in less good ensembles, providing your own instruments, aka driving a van, essentially a roadie who also gets to perform, after all the humping. So now, my playing happens mainly in big bands and jazz groups, where joy is accompanied by very little back strain. I’m a skier too, thankfully free of injuries so far, due to a decision (which was perhaps not so much far-sighted as ineffably lazy) when that bug first bit, to stop running, to protect my knees. So at some point soon I shall stand on top of a mountain, breathing in the exhilaration, making some turns, continuing to descend the piste of life to its inevitable end, where there will be no after-ski. Above all, I’m a parent, the most important job anyone ever does, immensely privileged to have three smart, fun, well-balanced and just generally wonderful young people in my life, who daily impress me with their empathy, and inspire me with their energy.

So most of the things that constitute me, the building blocks of my identity, will continue, but now in a new and rather harsh reality. For, I may still be me, but I’m no longer a son.

Coming to terms with that will, I think, take some time. It is very eery.

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The nice funeral director, resplendent in his black tail coat, came up to say hello, and I replied ‘thank you for coming’, like an idiot. Then he popped round the corner, appearing a second later doing that weird walk in front of the hearse thing, top hat teetering, making me long for New Orleans and some dancing umbrellas and a brass band. We crept behind the coffin, smaller than I expected, into the tiny chapel. Some Chopin played. Sniffles began. The Minister, appointed to do the talking because of our Mother’s alleged hatred for untruthful eulogies, got most of his facts wrong, which made me giggle sardonically, after what was said last week. It was all over quickly. Ninety-eight years, compressed into twenty-seven minutes.

Then came the famous ‘cup of tea’, which shockingly was mostly coffee, suggesting an earth-shattering shift in British mores, served with M&S sandwiches, consumed in conversations which turned rapidly from head-tilted ‘so sorry for your loss’ to ‘what are you up to now?’ and ‘when do you go back?’ Inch by inch, munch by munch, life reasserted itself. My daughters looked at the clothes, leaving the fur coat. Before long, we were off to the station.

I pulled over in the drop-off spot I have used for roughly two decades, rushing to the back of the car to get the kids’ bags out, when a traffic warden crept out of the shadows, already punching buttons on his Device of Doom. ‘I can drop off here, right?’ I said, fully expecting an affirmative. He ignored the question and kept his eyes on the screen. ‘Hello?’ I tried again. Reluctantly, he looked up, saying brusquely ‘unloading only’. Which I was pretty sure was exactly what I was trying to do.

‘Oh, I’m sorry, I thought it was ok, I’ll jump back in the car and find somewhere else’.

‘Too late’, he replied, ‘I’m issuing the ticket now’.

His finger paused on the execute button.

‘You see this?’ I said, holding up the black tie against my white shirt. ‘We just came from my Mother’s funeral. It was at Tynemouth Crematorium. Look at my kids’ (gesturing), ‘we’re all dressed in black. You’re not really going to give me a ticket at a time like this, are you?’

He teetered on the edge of arsehole.

‘All right’, he said, reclaiming his place in heaven, I suspect temporarily. ‘You can turn right by the cathedral and drop off on the double yellows’. Which I am also pretty sure is much more illegal.

And so the day went from pain to triumph, in one cancelled parking ticket.

The next morning I was on a train to That London, to move into a houseboat – the one I had agreed, entirely coincidentally, to rent weeks before, when my Mother was still alive and there was no thought of funerals. How odd when life creates transitions for you, as if it knew the best thing to serve up the day after saying goodbye to your Mum would be a new life on the ocean wave. Or in this case, the river wave.

It’s on the Thames at Chiswick, and will be my part-time floating home for three months, except when back north selling her house, or checking on mine, or working away. I’d thought about doing it in September, decided not to be so silly, then concluded silliness is fun. Two bedrooms it has, both ensuite, and a soaking tub, and a ‘wheel house’ with a sofa and incredible views from Hammersmith to Barnes, and it is all really rather splendid – essentially a two bedroom flat, that floats. I could tell you how much it costs per month, but you would hate me; it’s less than two nights in a London hotel. With faster internet.

Dave, the lovely owner who is heading to Spain in a camper van for as long as Brexit will allow, wanted ‘someone mature’ to house sit – or houseboat sit, I suppose, to be literal – but got me instead. ‘I only want to cover the bills’ he said. I like Dave. On Tuesday he showed me round, starting with ‘the most important thing’ which involves pumps and pipes and I hope you are not eating as you read this.

The boat is immaculate, and Dave’s attention to detail continued in the guided tour, in which he kindly explained how dishwashers work and how to clean a shower. Then he pointed out where the leaks are likely to be. Then he and his wife disappeared off to the Bay of Biscay, and I sat down and reflected on how strange life can be. A page turn, at exactly the right time, happening entirely by accident.

The boat wobbles a bit, as the tide ebbs and flows, and I was nervous of feeling sea sick, or river sick I suppose, but it turns out you only feel woozy if you look at something on land, like the fashionable flats which sell for exorbitant prices, but have worse views.

That first night, I was way too hot. Seems houseboats are not cold and damp after all.

The next morning, there was no water. Seems nothing works on a houseboat except the heating.

Then I learned most of West London was in the same virtual boat, due to a burst water main in Holland Park. The water returned, I adjusted the heating, and since then have slept like a baby, rocked to sleep by a gentle sway, waking to a slight smell of diesel and a strong sense of disbelief. When the tide reaches its peak, bouncing off the river banks, all the boats on the jetty jiggle from side to side, like excited children. The sun is shining as I write this. A heron just flew by. Perhaps it’s my mother’s soul, smiling.

So now, with flukey timing, days after saying goodbye, I’m saying hello to a new kind of life, temporary but welcome, a chance to reflect and ponder whom I shall become, now I’m no longer her main carer, as I have been these past twenty-one years. Instead, I’m in a floating flat, watching the river, wondering what the tides of life will bring next. Time to drop off and unload, with no risk of parking tickets.

It’s not a pied à terre. It’s a pied à l’eau. Like me, open to passing currents.

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These were always my favourite. We were regaled with news of the Regnal Circle, which I am pretty sure is something afflicting men of a certain age which modern medicine has yet to cure. Then, with the ‘it’s coming soon’ certainty of a running joke, we would be informed, with great seriousness, of a mid-week church event at which ‘a cup of tea will be served’.

My brother and I always corpsed at this. We had visions of one giant, steaming receptacle, replete with gallons of PG Tips, carried in with pomp, held aloft like a European potentate in a sedan chair, (perhaps even a plenipotentiary, whatever one of them is), to be greeted with silent stares of admiration from the awe-struck congregation, before being set down on a table to be admired, but not consumed, obviously. ‘Why don’t they ever have more than one cup of tea?’ we would mutter to each other, pleased at our little joke. And then we would return home for Sunday lunch, where, lucky family that we were, we had one cup of tea, each. Luxury.

I was back there this week, my brother accompanying me, to meet the new ‘Minister’ and discuss our Mother’s funeral. In the roughly three centuries that have passed since we were young, my brother has grown even taller, acquired a charming wife and two delightful children, and become a lawyer. I don’t say he ‘trained’ as a lawyer, nor indeed that he works as one, although both things are true; he has become one. He inhabits the role like a method actor, with the important distinction that he doesn’t switch off and become someone entirely different at the end of the day. He ‘is’ a lawyer. Always. He embodies the legal profession. His every utterance says ‘lawyer’. Until recently, if you called his landline and the answerphone kicked in, his outgoing message included the word ‘however’.

You get the picture. He’s a lawyer.

I, by contrast, am not. I am, I suppose, some kind of creative. I like words and jokes, as you may perhaps have noticed, and starting companies. I used to make radio and TV programmes. I don’t feel this career path has been wholly lacking in rigour; it might perhaps be argued that an ability to organise a film shoot with hundreds of people, or investigate miscreants and get the law changed, or make a live programme start and stop precisely on time, or make payroll every month for thirty-five years ... that these are not entirely spurious, lightweight activities. But I am not a lawyer. And I’m not sure my brother is entirely happy about this.

Our rather differing approaches to life have been on plentiful display these past few weeks. In the question, for example, of whether to pay many thousands of pounds to, um, a lawyer as it happens, for Probate, which we can instead do ourselves online, faster, for free. You can perhaps guess on which side of the line we each stood on this issue. And, when discussing a funeral to honour our late Mother, we settled into now very well-established, rather divergent roles. I, being younger and obviously entirely disreputable (aka, not a lawyer) suggested ideas with the aim of fashioning an event which might not only be lovely and moving and respectful, but also have some lighter moments. On the basis that funerals should not be unremittingly funereal. My brother then disapproved of my suggestions. I think he regards everything I say as ‘dangerously modern’, or perhaps just dangerously inventive. Lacking in precedent at any rate. Failing properly to see the downside.

So it was that we entered the Minister’s office at Cullercoats Methodist Church. It’s just behind where the organ pipes should have been. It was a comfortingly messy place with big plastic storage boxes lying on their sides, paper strewn liberally across the desk, and pictures of small children pasted on the walls. It looked like a creche, that had been in a crash. The Minister had a Yorkshire accent, an enthusiastic demeanour, and jeans. The discussion began.

We agreed that we wished to plan a funeral service for our late Mother.

That was about all we agreed on.

My beloved bro’ thought Mama would like some poetry. ‘Perhaps some W H Auden’ he said, averring a hitherto unknown maternal affection for the author. ‘Stop all the clocks?’ I asked, somewhat sceptical that a poem of utter despair, one moreover ending ‘nothing now can ever come to any good’ might catch quite the most apt note for our mother’s very long, happy life and thankfully gentle death. I thought about suggesting some Hamlet, on the basis that ‘the funeral baked meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables’ would hardly be more ridiculous. Then, we got into the real meat of it. Baked or otherwise.

Should there, asked the Minister, be a eulogy?

This was already a moot point. I had earlier suggested to my sibling that, if he did not want to do one himself (which as the elder, I think would be his prerogative), I could have a go, perhaps reading a shortened version of the piece I wrote here some weeks ago, which told our Mother’s life story and celebrated her love for our Father. I hoped it might produce some smiles of recognition and the occasional laugh. It’s always nice to laugh at a funeral, is it not.

My brother had clearly seen this coming. He headed it off at the pass, telling the Minister that our late Mother had once said she hated eulogies because they were always full of lies. This opinion was as hitherto unknown to me as her love of Auden. I am reasonably sure it was his way of saying ‘I don’t want Paul to do a eulogy’. For a moment, I considered proposing that everything I said was fact checked. Instead, I suggested the funeral might end with that well-known classic, ‘The Dashing White Sergeant’ by Jimmy Shand, because our parents always loved Scottish country dancing. This idea was taken under advisement.

Later, we had to choose the pictures for the order of service. I wanted to feature one I printed here a few weeks ago, in which our Mother leans on a stick, a look of the most beatific happiness on her face. ‘She looks too frail’ he opined, offering instead one taken during Covid, where she sat on a garden chair in her garage wearing an anorak, a face mask half-draped around her neck. The garden spades and forks in the background added a certain je ne sais quoi. I countered with one from the Fifties in which she wore an off the shoulder dress, looking radiant and gorgeous next to our father, all handsome in a tuxedo.

‘Doesn’t look like her’, said the man born five years later. He proffered instead an image in which there was a lamp post growing out of her head.

I think he’s an excellent lawyer. I’m not convinced he missed his vocation as a picture editor.

I decided that life was too short, even when your mother dies at ninety-eight, and asked him to take full responsibility for the Order of Service. So it will have the wrong pictures. Though he did agree the Jimmy Shand.

Hence, we’ll all have a spring in our step on the way out, as the congregation wonders why there was no eulogy, before heading to her house, where a cup of tea will be served.

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So I busied myself surveying my surroundings. The zimmer frame with a table, on which I had placed her last cup of tea only a few days before. The TV remote, volume set to almost max. The telephone with the extra-large buttons, allowing her to call me at any time, despite her failing eyesight.

When the hearse had left, I walked round the house, opened the window in the room where she had died, stood for a while, then drove home. Two of my kids were there, with friends, to celebrate the coming New Year. They looked at me anxiously as I walked into the kitchen, not sure what to expect. ‘I’m an orphan!’ I said, because dark humour is usually a comfort. They hugged me, and one said ‘you’re not an orphan when you have kids who love you’.

We drank champagne to her memory. I went to bed early.

The next morning, it being the dead week (no pun intended) when the nation lounges amid never-ending turkey and increasingly desiccated mince pies, it seemed sensible to start tidying her house. Three years of illness, confined to a bed in the dining room, ending with eight weeks of falls and back and forth to hospital, had left it an uncharacteristic mess, for such a house-proud, diligent woman. First, the garage, throwing away the pieces of wood my father had thought he might find a use for one day, forty years ago. And the half empty cans of paint. And the random unidentifiable bits of plastic. And that rake whose handle broke but maybe we could find a replacement. And several radios, all broken. And chargers for long-lost devices. And some rusty saws. Strange how satisfying it can be to survey carnage and impose order on it, like turning over an unkempt flower bed.

Next came the decision to wash absolutely everything which was not to be thrown away. Seldom has a rather decrepit Bosch seen so much action. Soon, the house was filled with the sweet scent of Comfort Pure ‘gently fresh’ hypoallergenic fabric conditioner. Flannelette sheets distantly remembered from childhood sat on every radiator, and on the clothes horse which I recall my father fashioning with two-by-one and some bits of dowel, as I marvelled at the pinks and oranges which were clearly very modish in 1965. Suddenly my universally-white sheets at home felt very unimaginative. Then, joy of joys, I opened the G Plan sideboard, to discover ….

Three quarters of a tea service, twice, some never-used tumblers which would not survive a vigorous washing up mop, still less a dishwasher, a plentiful assortment of sherry glasses, numerous tea pots, and those little display boxes containing ‘Sheffield silver’ spoons, five small and one large one fastened imperiously to the lid, looking down on the little ‘uns, wedding presents all, gratefully received and never used, not even ‘for best’. And a lot of sugar bowls. Seems like the fifties must have been one long sugar rush. Soon, everything was dusted and laid out on the dining table, (also G Plan), which was only ever used at Christmas, sorted into serried ranks, because ranks must always be serried, mustn’t they, whatever that means, everything tidy and ready for ‘can I have that’ from the grand kids or more likely, careful packing on their way to a charity shop, where they will smile, but sigh inwardly, and add everything to the pile of other stuff that nobody will want to buy. In short, I have measured out her life with coffee spoons.

My son came to help, attacking the kitchen with rubber gloves and determination, starting a search for the most out of date item in the cupboard. (The victor: April 2002). At the end, the kitchen with its yellow doors, some of which do not sag uncontrollably, was clean and ready for some putative future purchaser to walk in, all excited, and say ‘it’s got the original kitchen!’ The Pyrex dishes brought me to the edge of tears, remembering corned beef hash or cottage pie produced from a steaming oven by my proud mother, fresh from horse riding lessons to mark her Fortieth, all rapidly devoured by my brother and me. It felt only right to bring them home and put them in a dishwasher for the first time in their lives, returning them gleaming and as new.

I decided to leave the living room exactly as it was, removing only the mobility aids and the large magnifying glasses which never really helped her to continue reading books, turning the place back to the impeccably tidy, clean place it was before her first major accident, three years ago, when she fell down an entire flight of stairs. So, when we all head there for the wake in ten days, it will still be her house, the pictures of grandchildren still where she placed them, the books still alphabeticised on the Ladderax.

Then upstairs I headed, to the ineffable joy of ‘the cupboards’.

Domestic archaeology.

One drawer contained a plentiful assortment of half-used Christmas wrapping paper.

So did another.

A third had birthday and wedding anniversary and Christmas cards dating back to the early Mycenaean period. ‘Love from (indecipherable squiggle)’. ‘Happy Birthday from (died fifteen years ago)’. Some were hand-made by my kids, ‘thank you for the Christmas presents’, after forcing them to ‘do them now and then they’ll be done’, time capsules made with glue sticks and ribbon.

The most splendid moment was opening a cupboard door and finding thirty or so biscuit tins, sadly all empty. Pondering for a moment if I had enough random screws to merit such a capacious set of storage options, I decided that perhaps the recycling centre was a more apposite home. I just know I’ll come to regret it.

And so it went on; decades of stuff, all once carefully selected, chosen, retained for future use, put away in a box or wardrobe to be used again, but never actually re-visited, banished into remote darkness like a Victorian child with behavioural problems. But, among the dross, there were moments to give pause, unearthing that picture from that time we all got together wherever it was for something or other … and then my father’s first ever teacher’s contract … and his workings for the family tree (he got back to 1803 and the trail went dry, doubtless because of some Scot born on the wrong side of the blanket) … and my brother’s first school books, with his name proudly written in spidery handwriting, almost sixty-five years ago. His signature looks a bit similar today, come to think of it.

I liked the pictures the best, my Dad looking proud by a piano in 1944, in uniform, fronting the band he assembled in the army, ‘the Blue Rhythm Boys’, who played exactly the same music I’ll be doing next Tuesday; my Mum, aged nine, wearing glasses, next to her sister, looking very grand in a gaberdine; my parents, in their late Twenties, sitting in modest swimming costumes on an inevitably perishing British beach, in their courting days; me at infant school, in the formal class picture, surrounded by ragtag urchins some of whose names I remember, because they were the bullies (George Nibre, Derek Lawless, your infamy lives on), all of us with comical hair, wearing grey shorts and bemused expressions, and wonky ties under hand-knitted cardigans. Room after room of random memories, the inconsequential mixed with the ‘awww’, the pointless and the seminal, packed away and invisible for years, testaments to a life lived well, and very, very long. All stored, never to be seen again, until death demands a tidy up.

The funeral is booked, the legals have started. Ere long we shall all be swept along in the act of continued living. I’m grateful for those few days in a time machine, honouring my Mum, tidying and cleaning her house as she would have wished.

Though she’d be cross about the biscuit tins. And I forgot to dust the light bulbs.

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What an extraordinary sentence to have to write.

The woman who gave birth to me, what feels like several millennia ago, in Preston Hospital (which no longer exists and is now a desirable housing estate with executive homes with conservatories and double-glazed UPVC windows) … the one who suckled me, and fed me forever afterwards, often assisted by Pyrex, and always asked if I was eating enough even after I turned fifty … the one who kept diaries (as I discovered yesterday) in the drawers under her bed from the Seventies onwards, with ‘Paul back to Oxford’ and ‘Paul starts at the BBC’ written in them, along with ‘hair cut £5.76’ … that woman, that Mum, who lived for ninety-eight and a half years without ever complaining, even in those few pitiful days towards the end when the Alzheimer’s and the shutting down of her organs consequent on her heart having given so much for so long but finally giving out, gave out … that person, that human, that Mum of mine.

She died this week.

When this happened to my father, twenty-one years ago three weeks on Tuesday, it was after two long years lying prone on a nursing home bed, surviving without living, after the stroke that frankly should have killed him, but he was too fit. It felt cruel, in those immobile twilight years, his exceptional mind still more or less there, when the rest of him had forgotten what to do. How to move. How to smile. What living was. Two prone years in which he could talk a bit, but his voice had changed, and he could see my baby son, and say ‘hello little man’, but not hold him, and we all wondered if he really understood, anything, really. ‘Pneumonia is the old man’s friend’ I recall him saying a few years beforehand, and I think he was grateful when it shook him by the hand, and beckoned him into another space, where it would be nice to think he could listen to his music, and watch his grandkids grow up from afar, albeit without being able to touch them; but whatever the romantic concepts, however many the ‘wouldn’t it be nice if there is an afterlife’ thoughts, he was just basically gone, and that‘s all there is to say for it; for he was gone.

I cried a lot then. I’m not sure if it was shock, bewilderment, perhaps even outrage, that the tall, smart, talented man who used to slip my little four year-old hand in his and sometimes called me ‘Paulish’ (but never said ‘I love you’, because men his age never did) had actually proved mortal. Or maybe I was just too young, and it was too much of a shock.

But this week ….

She came out of hospital on Christmas Eve. Medically fit, they said. ‘At home for Christmas’. What a lovely idea. Except that she could not get up from a chair, having been on a hospital bed for eight weeks, and could barely make sense of anything anymore. ‘Shall we open your presents and Christmas cards now, Mum?’ I asked that day. ‘No, she said’, incredibly wearily, ‘let’s do it tomorrow’. So I arrived at hers on Christmas morning, Baby Jesus Day… and she was fast asleep. And remained so. ‘See you tomorrow, Mum’, I said after watching her for an hour, kissing her forehead, no response from the gripped hand, going back to a house full of life, with my kids, and a tree, and pressies which actually were opened, and recollections of doing it with her there too, for all those previous decades.

And then, suddenly, it was vertiginous. On Boxing Day morning the call came from the concerned neighbour popping in with a box of biscuits to find she had fallen ... and the unravelling began. Two paramedics did an ECG, showed me the trace and explained, with the patience of Job, what it and the collapsing blood pressure inevitably meant. Only a question of time. Days? Weeks? Hours? By some miracle, months? For a ninety-eight year old?

After that, it was watching a falling knife, knowing no-one could catch it. Her disquiet. Distress. Confusion. Sleep, then shouting, then uneasy sleep again. Drugs helped, initially injected (except when she refused the needle, demanding to ‘go to hospital NOW!’ then in the next breath ‘I want to be home’ ‘but you are at home Mum’), then finally a machine to pump the morphine constantly, avoiding those two hours of distress when the injected effects wore off, waiting for the nurses to arrive, summoned on the phone after pressing button two and being told my call is important to us and we are extremely busy and please hold, which I did for eleven minutes, as she screamed in the background, voice strident and different, urgent in its need. ‘She needs palliative care’ said the second set of paramedics, summoned on Saturday, ‘but that department doesn’t work weekends’.

Then, finally – finally! - on Monday, there were palliative carers, not really people, more perfection in human form, short women with greying hair and dull uniforms who spend their lives helping complete strangers as their bodies stop working, who cleaned her up when needed, which was a lot. And the District Nurses, who came back three times that day, smiled in a kindly way and put their heads on one side and explained how they would increase the dosage if the GP agreed. And the GP, a young man who made slightly too many attempted jokes, and agreed with the women who had seen it a million times before, and did what they had asked, as if he knew better, then left in his BMW compact. And finally the police, two young men embarrassed to have to ask me hard questions because apparently a 98 year-old dying at home having had a fall is an ‘unexplained death’ so they had to rule out the prospect that I might have killed her, or something … asking me about her life, and my childhood, and my occupation, as her body turned grey in the next room. But even they, asking dumb-fool questions because the system forced them to, were kind, and sympathetic. They were all kind, and sympathetic, all of them, the four paramedics and eight district nurses and six palliative carers and nine community carers and two GPs and three constables and one police sergeant and two funeral directors - all those who entered her house in the last days, this past week; they were all caring, and gentle, and kind, and doing their job, like it was not a job. I’d like to see them all again and thank them and tell them they are astonishing and made the worst thing, tolerable … but they’ll be busy, helping someone else, right now.

It was Monday afternoon – how can that be just five days ago, as I write this? – when I squinted and gaped and thought ‘is her chest still moving?’, then called the experts, who agreed it was not. And now, she is not. She died of old age, the Doctor told an unsurprised me, on the phone yesterday lunchtime.

It was peaceful. She was at home, in her own bed. Life had grown intolerable. Her suffering is over. This was a release. She is in a better place. She had a wonderful life. Etcetera, etcetera - the things we say, which are true of course but make no difference, a forlorn attempt to rationalise, as if loss can somehow be gain...

The funeral is being arranged. I’ve cleaned the house. Washed the sheets. Put out the bins. Thought about the music.

Because what else is there to do? When my Mum died this week.

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