Day 9: Pink Floyd

"Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way.
The time has come,
The song is over,
Thought I'd something more to say..." - Pink Floyd, Time


In 1995, two seemingly unrelated events took place.  My school in Bristol started giving me 'prep' (homework to pretty much every other school in England) and my loving parents bought me a Sega Saturn for Christmas. (A Sega Saturn! What a way to show my age!) I'd never owned any previous consoles, having only experienced them wonderingly at neighbours' and friends' houses, but as the occurrences of the first event became rather more regular as the school year dragged on, I found myself unable to enjoy the second event as much as a ten-year old boy should.  When you have a demon of a maths teacher like Mr. Evans, you don't dare turn in your algebra a day late just because you were trying to set the Mountain course record in the Lancia Delta in Sega Rally.


However, by pure accident, I managed to combine the two. The Saturn was stationed in the 'playroom' by a charmingly clunky Acorn CRT monitor, a hangover from our old Atari ST, not far from a battered old sofabed which I would wearingly unfurl every evening and cover with old-fashioned exercise books and ring binders. One evening, when I was particularly frustrated with an English essay that had started but simply refused to end, I took a break and started rooting around the desk, toying with the idea of taking on that ridiculous fifth boss from Panzer Dragoon again. (I was so close!)


Instead, though, my eye caught a glimpse of a CD cover lying on the desk.  I hadn't remembered putting it there, and had only vague memories of my Dad mentioning it. It simply bore a stylised ray of light shining into a glass prism and refracting into a rainbow. It was undeniably striking, especially to a ten year-old, but it didn't even reveal the artist or the album title. Intrigued, I turned the Saturn on, let it run through to what was then the thoroughly modern CD screen and slipped the disc into the tray.  I pressed C on the joypad and returned reluctantly to the essay.


That night was the first ever time I had listened to music on the Saturn, and it became a ritual that I adhered to for as long as I remember grappling with homework.  I eventually added other CDs to the roster - Billy Joel's An Innocent Man and its brash reworking of soul and Stax; Dire Straits' easy-listening giant Brothers in Arms - but those records were in the rather unfortunate position of having to follow Dark Side of the Moon.  I'd never before heard alarm clocks or cash registers or disjointed voices layered together in music.  I'd never heard an instrumental, much less one with a single female voice improvising a horrendous yet melodious cry to heaven (or with titles like "The Great Gig in the Sky").  And I'd never heard anything so fatalistic and final as the closing song cycle of "Any Colour You Like", "Brain Damage" and "Eclipse".  My small childish brain was simply blown away by what I still consider the greatest (non-classical) album ever committed to disc, and I have spent the rest of my life trying to find something to equal it (and have some fairly close with The Who's Who's Next and the Floyd-esque Ten Silver Drops by Secret Machines).


I had the opportunity to revisit those early memories when my girlfriend surprised me with tickets to see Brit Floyd at the London O2 yesterday evening.  Various extenuating circumstances meant we could only see the first half, but they were note perfect from the outset, sensibly dividing guitar and vocal duties across the band and keeping the inter-song chat to a minimum.  Particular highlights were the monolithic "Welcome to the Machine" and a sensitive, studied "Us and Them", although both Jo and I found the visuals, while appropriate, slightly disconcerting at times.


I left feeling as if I had rediscovered a small part of myself, reaffirming my faith in music and its power not only to delight in the present but also to transport to the past as well as any sepia-toned photo album or battered train ticket.  My Saturn may have bitten the dust a long time ago, but it opened the door to my current obsession with music, and to lose that would be to lose a part of me too precious to replace.

Day 8: Wimbledon

"The All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club...reserves the right to refuse entry to anyone adopting unreasonable social behaviour..and/or commits any action against the spirit of The Queue" - AELTC Wimbledon Website


In this inter-connected, smart-phone-dominated world, it amazes me how much sway paper still has over the national consciousness. As the summer holidays grind into gear, and thousands of families flock to airports, Dad might at the check-in desk smugly whip out a tablet that contains the flight tickets, the boarding passes, the travel insurance and the kids' dental records, but they'll still all need to glumly root through their oversized baggage to track down the tiny red book that ultimately grants passage through Terminal 5. All the technology in the world can't help you if your passport is still in the sock drawer.


I remark on this because yesterday saw the official opening of the All England Lawn Tennis Club Public Ballot for Wimbledon 2012. Being unemployed and a (gentle)man of leisure, I thought I could probably clear a few minutes in my packed calendar to fill in the online application form. Except, I couldn't find one.  I couldn't even find a link to download a PDF, or, heaven forbid, an RTF file. It turns out that the first stage in applying for the ballot is to send a stamped, self-addressed envelope to a PO BOX address in SW19. The gentry at the Club will then check that the envelope is the correct size and of the self-sealing variety (those AELTC tongues have far more important things to do than lick your SAEs), that the address is legible, that the stars are aligned, and then they might, MIGHT send you a form. And all this to qualify for a glorified raffle, with the prize being the chance to give a tennis club a lot of your money.


What I thought would take a few minutes eventually took a morning, as I scoured the flat for envelopes, broke two biros, covered myself in ink as I resorted to fountain pen to scrawl my address, and then trudged to Sainsbury's to buy stamps.  It says something about our current attitude to letters, too, that at the checkout the lady was so surprised that I wanted stamps she had to ring a supervisor and ask him to unlock a drawer within which the offending bits of gummed paper lived. I hadn't realised that in the eyes of supermarkets, stamps were now controlled goods.


But in the end, I had to give the Wimbledon people credit. After all, we are the only country in the world that believes that the queue to witness a particular sporting event is as enjoyable as the event itself.  In an age where buying a flight to New York would take less than five minutes, I applaud the organisers of one of the most well-respected tournaments in the world in standing by their old-fashioned yet quintessentially English processes, and insisting that for attending one of their tennis matches, obeying paper-related rules is as important as handing over the cash.


So taken was I with this wonderfully traditional process that I decided to spend the afternoon in Wimbledon itself.  I'd never been before, though I have friends who love life there, and thought this was as good a time as any to pay my respects. Outside the train station, it seemed that the area hadn't completely escaped the onslaught of modernisation, as Alexandra Road was covered for half a mile in extensive roadworks, but fortunately I'd heard good things about the Village, so I hurried my way there first. Climbing Wimbledon Hill Road, I could indeed feel the crowds of Frappucino-slurping students and honking car horns behind me, and I reached the quaint High Street in good spirits.


As I approached Wimbledon Common, however, I could see that the searingly hot sunshine that day imbued the whole place with a kind of stale, staid immobility.  The grass was faded to a limp straw colour, there were small clumps of teenagers slumped sweatily here and there, and even a group of enterprising Frisbee players looked  lethargic and defeated.  The paths around the Common were little more than dirt, and in the oppressive heat the stones and pebbles seemed to glint and shimmer.  I didn't last long before I turned around - I'd spotted a Pain Quotidien on the High Street and lurked there for an hour or so with tea and a tartine.


Mid-sip I was struck with a sense of familiarity.  Just as the hill lead to a beautiful High Street and untamed Common, so did Holloway Road lead to Highgate Village and Hampstead Heath, my favourite stomping grounds of a few months ago way up in N6. London may be a patchwork of many patterns, but look closely and you'll see the same cloth repeated over and over again. Perhaps I'm starting to make sense of this city now - starting to make the connections.  If days of freedom aren't intended for us to make sense of the world we live in, I'm not really sure what they're for.

Days 5, 6 and 7: Alma Mater

"Why, it's a perfect little city.  If you have never been to Durham, go at once.  Take my car.  It's wonderful" - Bill Bryson, Notes from a Small Island


The East Coast mainline has long been my personal railroad. My first ever journeys to London originated from the wildlands of West Yorkshire, as I gingerly boarded at Wakefield Westgate what was then a tired but proud GNER service. I remember as a teenager, Young Person's Railcard in hand and tiny rucksack on my back, sneaking a glimpse at the ostentatious restaurant car and the opulent (for me, at least) surroundings of the First Class carriages. I'd hurry quickly onto Coach B and realised I'd booked, yet again, a seat in the Quiet Coach, where at least one pariah of silence would look thunderously at my Creative Jukebox Zen and oversized wraparound headphones (this was long before iPods were de rigeur, of course). The journey to London lasted two decidedly uncomfortable hours, and I used to pass that time in expectant agitation until the confused microcosm of capital activity that is King's Cross Station loomed into view.


Fast forward to last Friday, and I had the pleasure of visiting King's Cross again. GNER has now morphed, via the disastrous National Express stint, into the safely anonymous 'East Coast', but the station is still one of the more unpleasant in London. A claustrophobic mix of greasy fast-food, frantic coffee-shop waitresses and unrelenting Tannoy announcements is disorienting enough, but add crowds of tourists efficiently wheeling their suitcases over your toes or sprinting en masse to the immensely unhelpful barriers and your departure becomes a Herculean labour of patience. Whilst the beauty and luxury of St. Pancras lies just moments to the west, East Coast passengers must tolerate the madness of King's Cross as their own gateway to the capital.  Its long overdue facelift cannot come soon enough.


Our train yawned and stretched its way to the North. The track unfurled past luscious green as we curved through Doncaster and York on our way to my university friends' long-awaited wedding.  The approach to Durham is particularly breathtaking, with the city's towering viaduct offering a spectacular view of the famous Cathedral and Castle. In the Friday evening twilight, the city lay twinkling below us, but its vista felt immediately familiar and curiously distant, as if the city was challenging me, three years after I had last visited, to rediscover its treasures and compare the glorious past with this suddenly inconveniently real present.


With the Friday evening drinking crowd in full swing down North Road and around the Market Place, I impatiently waited until Saturday morning to commence my re-exploration, satisfied with merely recounting memories of misspent youth to my long-suffering girlfriend on the walk to the hotel. Even a brief wander, though, made the years drip away, so that the sudden jolting appearance of a Tesco Metro weighed on my heart as much as the comforting immutability of that tiny pub I got drunk in lifted it. As I sat in The Swan and Three Cygnets with the groom and assorted ushers, necking Sammy Smith's cider on a drab bench overlooking the mighty Wear rushing below us, I was a drunken stumble home away from 2006.


As I was providing the music for the wedding, including ten minutes of 'incidental' music I had previously completely forgotten about and had to improvise on the spot, I had little time to get too sentimental, and once we'd scarfed down a fry-up at the Saddlers and strolled across Prebends Bridge (frustratingly enveloped in unsightly scaffolding), the nerves began.  Accustomed as I am to playing in public, wedding music offers little room for escape - the line between enhancing the poignancy of a bride's entrance and rendering it farcically amusing with a false note or chord is remarkably thin.  Fortunately, all went well, and bride and groom tied the knot with no accompanying musical hilarity. 


The wedding itself was beautiful, a real unpretentious, joyous occasion.  The venue was our old college, of which the ninety-two guests had pretty much exclusive use, and stalking the old corridors of the Junior Common Room, the Dining Hall and the Bar I noted how little things really had changed.  It was admittedly difficult not to wallow in nostalgia as I ordered the first round of drinks, but as I pulled out a twenty-pound note from my wallet, when years ago I would have filled the barmaid's hand with change, it dawned on me that we could not have had a better reason to revisit our alma mater. To return thinking that the city would welcome us irrevocably with open arms and envelop us in a motherly embrace would be folly.  We had travelled full circle from that evening at The Swan and Three; now we were celebrating a wedding of close friends with a meal where we had shared innumerable student dinners before, and where the bride and groom had blossomed to the beautiful couple they now are.  Now we were enjoying our appreciation of our past without allowing it to dominate our present, and as the Viaduct vista receded into the Sunday afternoon distance, I left knowing that while university starts us on our path through life, it is well beyond the student bubble where we must travel.

Day 4: Baking

My Masters year at university was one of the best. I loved my course, I loved the grizzled postgraduate life, and most of all, I loved the fact that during the backs-to-the-wall period of furiously typing and re-typing my dissertation, my contact hours with tutors dropped to an average of one a week. I was expected to write ten thousand words about Robert Browning and the dramatic monologue with the least possible intervention from my tutors, and the independence and isolation suited me completely.


Immersing myself in the intricacies of Victorian poetry and Romantic aesthetics for hours at a time would on occasions leave me mentally exhausted, a condition only a healthy dose of Neighbours could cure.  More often that not, however, my thoughts would just turn desperately to distraction and the need to occupy myself with something, anything, that wasn't throwing virtual words onto a virtual page.  In short I needed an excuse to leave my desk, yet keep the creative juices flowing - and hence I discovered baking.


I've always believed that cooking is art, but baking is science. Cooking requires a reliance on subtlety and nuance, where flair and variation is encouraged.  In contract, baking demands a precision that is rarely required in all but the most gastronomic of cooking.  If a recipe says 125g of flour is required, you need electronic scales to accurately weight that amount.  For 100ml of water, you must revisit your Key Stage 3 Science and check that the meniscus of the liquid is perfectly in line with the mark of your measuring jug. It's an inherent paradox that an English and Music student thrives on such mathematical logic and scientific exaction in as trivial a pursuit as making a cake, but baking a perfect cake is to be so much more satisfying than throwing together a stir-fry.


On this particular day of freedom, I was reminiscing about those days (mainly because I return to my alma mater for a wedding this weekend) and had an urge to bake once more.  I'd recently bought my girlfriend a copy of British Baking by the geniuses at Peyton and Byrne, and within was a recipe for one of my favourite childhood obsessions, Chelsea Buns.  A quick trip to Waitrose later and I began.


At first, progress was serene. Butter was rubbed into flour, salt and sugar added, and then dried yeast with liquid carefully mixed in.  With the addition of a single egg, the dough became sticky but it came together pretty much as it should. As per the recipe I was obviously tirelessly following to the letter, I covered the sweet lump and left it to its own devices for an hour, where I would expect it to double in size.


Returning to the kitchen at the prescribed time, the dough remained resolutely its previous size.  Confused, but not perturbed, I rolled out, dotted butter in the centre, and folded in on itself, before rolling once again.  Here the problems started to occur.  If the dough had risen correctly, it would overpower the butter and welcome it into its folds, but as it was flaccid and stunted, the butter just rose to the surface on rolling, cracking the dough and spurting unattractive yellow ooze from the sides. A misguided attempt to let it rise again produced, unsurprisingly, no results. My yeast lay deadened within the dough, and no amount of coaxing, I thought, would enliven it.


There was nothing for it.  I made the sugary, curranty filling, spread out across the rolled-out disaster of dough, gritted my teeth and rolled. What resulted was a horribly misshapen, Cornish pasty-shaped splodge, fruit leaking from all sides.  The dough cast aside all attempts to seal the fruit within, mockingly splitting at every opportunity and pouring sugar all over my sideboard.  In the end, I just put it in the oven, lamenting an entire afternoon wasted.  What came out was ugly, unsightly - and perfectly, wonderfully edible...

My yeast had woken up, in the nick of time. A splodge had turned, rather euphemistically, into a loaf. It just goes to show - art can sometimes, just sometimes, triumph over science.

Day 3: South Bank

"By seeing London, I have seen as much of life as the world can shew." - Samuel Johnson


September 2007 was the first time I travelled to London without a return ticket.  Indeed, I didn't even have a single - my Dad drove me from West Yorkshire to North London, with most of my life tucked away neatly in cardboard boxes in the boot.  I remember clearly drinking lukewarm, overly strong tea in the Welcome Break at Watford Gap, still trying to convince myself that despite having never stayed in the capital for more than a night, I was relocating permanently to this ultra-city, this gigantic monument to urbanisation, commerce and tourism. I was convinced that all business in London was conducted by suited-and-booted charlatans who carried on like candidates in The Apprentice, in a cut-throat city that would envelop me in its shadowy folds and crush me to nothing.


I had two weeks from moving into my shared flat in Holloway before I started work, and so I sought to get my bearings as best I could. I remember performing a hilariously incompetent trial commute to The City, disembarking from the 271 at Finsbury Square and traipsing backwards and forwards across the Square Mile in desperate search for my new office, finding only endless sandwich shops and identi-kit glass offices with bored receptionists and shifty security staff clock-watching to stave off the immense boredom of guarding these corporate conglomerates. But I also remember enjoying immensely an inescapable sense of anonymity that I had never found anywhere else, a sense of being one person against the vastness of an unlimited but uncaring city.  And perhaps it was an attempt to recapture that feeling that led me to walk from Waterloo to Charing Cross Road, via the South Bank, yesterday evening.


I timed my trek for early evening, yet again finding myself pushing against the flow of commuters hauling themselves down Victoria Road after ticking off another Wednesday workday. Leaving Waterloo and strolling to Jubilee Gardens, I experienced again that sense of forfeiting your identity. Already the space and the noise rendered my body insignificant, as crowds enjoying the late evening twilight sought to squeeze every last second from the attractions surrounding them. I fought my way beyond the London Eye and headed left, past the National Aquarium and the imposing facade of County Hall, and with every step I found myself distracted by the flash of cameras and smartphones solidifying the South Bank onto memory cards.  As I began to cross Westminster Bridge, gaggles of giggling schoolchildren darted in zig-zags from tourist traps to overpriced Japanese restaurants, and their sighing parents handed over banknotes to the desperate tricksters inviting you to choose under which matchbox the coin was placed.


But passing over the bridge and heading down Parliament Street and Whitehall to Trafalgar Square, I reflected on, in reality, how little different I was from these clueless tourists convinced that all of London's glory lay at the feet of a mime or a magician. I may have paid my council tax to the Greater London Authority for nearly four years, but as I've barely worked here, I found myself in that chilled grey space between tourist and native. London is both familiar and utterly intelligible to me - I might be able to tell you where the best pizza is (here) or my favourite bar for a mojito (here), but for me, living here is like staring at a pitch-black sky with faint pinpricks of light that catch the eye. I need to turn those stars into constellations, those constellations into galaxies - if that's not a noble mission for these days of freedom stretched out before me, I don't know what is.

Day 2: Portal 2

"Well done. Here are the test results: You are a horrible person. I'm serious, that's what it says: A horrible person. We weren't even testing for that. Don't let that "horrible person" thing discourage you. It's just a data point." - GLaDOS, Portal 2.

After the exertions of to-ing and fro-ing between various Zone 6 conurbations on Monday, as well as returning home later than planned after a post-Mahler gin and tonic at the Queen's Arms at Gloucester Road, an appointment with the dentist - my first in over eight years, I'm sad to admit - seemed an excellent opportunity to take the weight of my feet, albeit with a middle-aged man scraping my molars and poking my gums with an ultrasonic cleaner.

I've never had an issue with dentists, mainly because I've been lucky enough to wander through life without any major operations required. Sitting in this particular dental surgery felt weirdly like having a medical procedure performed in somebody's living room - I almost expected the tea and muffins to be produced on a silver platter after my third rinse, though no doubt the concept of muffins is frowned upon in general dentistry culture.

I left unscathed, £70 lighter and with an appointment card for a year hence. It seemed strange adding a calendar entry on GCal for July 2012, but I suppose as time rolls on and the months seem to pass ever more quickly, those beautifully blank days will soon be covered with duties and engagements. I never cease to be amazed at quite how rapidly life crystallises around you, forming unbreakable connections between you and the world at large in the blink of an eye. Even in freedom, I find that activity still permeates its way through my hours, to the extent that endeavouring to keep your calendar blank is almost as hard work as trudging through wall-to-wall appointments. Our world is one where we convince ourselves we must be ceaselessly doing, or else fall behind into primitivity. I try to challenge that world every day.

Fortunately, Day 2's appointments did indeed conclude at 9.30am, meaning I could spend the rest of the day playing Portal 2. I've never been too publicly forthcoming about my interest in gaming, as I still believe that for the vast majority of the uninitiated, the thought of video games conjures up an unpleasant vision of greasy-haired nitwits delighting in the simulated slaughter of countless numbers of soldiers, or single bearded males hunched alone over laptops, ensnared in a virtual world where they chatter with acolytes for hours but can barely hold a conversation in reality. Such stereotyping is obviously highly immature. It is now impossible to ignore the meteoric rise of gaming in ordinary households, what with the advent of motion-controls and smartphones, and with the industry generating $15.6 billion in content sales in 2010 (and that was a 'tough year') its prevalence will only increase.

There will naturally be a myriad naysayers, and those who believe that games are inextricably linked to crime, anti-social behaviour and an inability to deal with real world issues. Those naysayers should track down a copy of Portal 2 (or its equally terrific predecessor) and see for themselves how games can challenge, question and ultimately enrich a player's world. As well as its key USP of intelligent, physics-based puzzles, involving the manipulation of gels, bridges, funnels and of course the eponymous portals, the game boasts a vast but grounded environment, some terrifically anthropomorphised robots, and, crucially, a riotously funny co-operative mode where players are encouraged to interact with another to progress. And it has Stephen Merchant in it. What more could you want?

I played it for about eight hours over the course of two or three days, and found it immensely fulfilling. I enjoyed the adrenaline rush of identifying the final piece in a puzzle, of exploring the crushed world of Aperture Science, and, most of all, hearing two robots verbally sparring with a script of such intoxicating black humour it could rival any Hollywood blockbuster. Games will, I admit, never be considered as art. But for every Call of Duty and its vicious, mindless theatres of war, there is a Portal 2 to maintain the equilibrium. It's just such a shame I've finished it.

Day 1: Mahler

"The symphony is a world; it must contain everything." - Gustav Mahler

Day One started, in retrospect, with a mistake. Perhaps fired by some misplaced conviction that freedom from the distraction of work somehow imbues the body with supernatural powers, I decided, moments after waking, to go for a run - my first in around six months, maybe longer.

Running has long been an unexplained obsession of mine, perhaps because it's one of the most universal of athletic past-times. Football may personify the nation - in salubrious as well as celebratory ways - but even for a quick kick-about you need, ideally, a ball and goal posts. Running only requires legs and a destination. Of course, you can pepper the pastime with a variety of technological distractions, such as GPS watches and heart-rate monitors and iPhone apps and bottles of super-water that promise the earth, or at least five seconds off your personal best. But strip away the accoutrements and it's just you and the road, and it's your mental as well as physical strength that will keep your feet pounding.

I sorely lacked those strengths yesterday morning, and puffed from Surbiton Station to Kingston John Lewis (barely two miles) with all the grace and form of a wheezing rhino. But it was still a victory. Jogging down Victoria Road, I passed tens of commuters walking sleepily to their trains, clutching coffee cups or grunting into smartphones, and just for a few moments, running away from civilisation and onto the beautiful stretch of the Thames that separated me from my goal, I felt my rash decision vindicated ten times over.

My legs, stiff and sore this morning, have since forced me to question that decision again!

That run to Kingston was just one of three I made that day, running a number of dull but important errands. On my final trip I finally signed up for a membership to the leisure centre - my induction is Wednesday. The receptionist curtly asked me what time I wanted to present myself for gym indoctrination (or was it induction…?) and to my great surprise my mouth instantly responded "9am, Wednesday", presumably without any prior consultation with my brain. Clearly my body is conditioned to early mornings - perhaps I need to explain to it the concept of freedom.

In the evening, rushing from Kingston to South Kensington, and polishing off The End of the Affair on the journey, I met with my friend Peter, with whom I used to play in an amateurish but terrifically satisfying piano trio. We had tickets to the BBC Prom that evening, a performance of Mahler's Ninth Symphony by the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra, with the wonderful Sir Roger Norrington wielding the baton. Mahler's Ninth has long been a favourite of mine, a monumental work written in a hut in the Dolomites, during a period of personal self-exile and estrangement triggered by the death of the composer's daughter and the diagnosis of a heart condition that put paid to his horrifically intense schedule of conducting and touring.

I don't intend to use this post to delve into a critical analysis of the work - innumerable writers have taken care of that for me - but in that seventy minutes of music, Mahler has distilled a powerful love of life with a submission to the inevitability of death and decay. I would urge you all to find the numerous recordings of the symphony on Spotify and experience it for yourself. The performance itself was of course amazing - maybe the tempi were a little fast for the outer, slower movements - but unfortunately the usual Prom plague of coughing, hacking, spluttering and sneezing was present and incorrect. I hate the snobbishness and presumed exclusivity of classical music as much as anybody, and the Proms do a great deal to open the borders to the masses who may have never heard a note of Mahler or Mendelssohn before, but music in all its forms requires respect and attention. Norrington conducted the beautiful Elegy by Edward Elgar as an encore to yesterday's concert, but nothing ruins a memorial to the dead more than a contrasting symphony of random throat noises emanating from the Dress Circle.

Tomorrow I visit the dentist. From the sublime to the ridiculous!