The Thoughts of Captain Autumn

It was still just about feasible until the middle of this week, but real life got in the way taking out tomorrow and this evening and it gradually became insurmountable. And having just got a lift home from David Newton, who was playing me tracks from his forthcoming album and inviting me - me! - to offer an opinion (which in my little world is about as good as it gets), this would seem to be a good moment to say enough. I managed 89. And I think I proved to myself that my previous, self-censorious approach was the right one.

Interesting to see a Mark Rothko selling for $72 million this week. When I was about 16 I often used to travel up to London on a Saturday (this is before I realised what a repellent cesspit the place is) and roam around visiting places which I thought were hip, like I would have a clue. One of them was the Tate Gallery, which at that time had a room with a couple of dark, brooding Rothkos in it. I found them slightly absurd (or at least, I found people sitting for long periods staring at them slightly absurd), but at the same time they definitely made an impact. They were overpowering and mournful. I have no idea if this is what the artist was intending. But I certainly got more out of them than I did the telephone with a lobster instead of a handset (Dali, if I'm not mistaken) or for that matter Duchamp's urinal which I think was also there at the time.

It would be nice to skip on a century or so and see what they would make then of Rothko selling for $72 million. Warhol for nearly as much as well. I'm passing no judgement, simply because I'm not informed to do so, but you have to wonder quite how many clothes the emperor is wearing.

England are 280-4 at lunch. What do they think they're playing at? This is the West Indies. For people of a certain age (let's say 39), the West Indies are supposed to be a terrifying cricketing prospect, a team in whose presence you cower and whimper before surrendering pathetically for about 120. It's not right to see them labouring like this, and to see England at their ease against them. Admittedly it did get tedious to be hammered by them year in year out, but at least you knew where you were. This new world order is thoroughly disconcerting. The West Indies thrashing us at cricket was as fundamental a part of my sporting upbringing as Liverpool in the European Cup Final. At least some things stay reassuringly familiar.

I am fascinated by the sitcom ‘Just Shoot Me’. Assuming nobody has seen it (because nobody in their right mind would), it used to be on quite early on Channel 4, round about the time my wife was making the kids’ lunches, and I would see a few minutes every day, magnetised by its unparalleled, jaw-dropping uselessness. Now they’ve started showing it again, I can only imagine to make the episodes of Frasier which follow it (from the later, weaker series) seem like comedic masterclasses in comparison.

I am fairly critical when it comes to comedy, sitcoms in particular, but the scale of ineptitude on display in ‘Just Shoot Me’ would exasperate even the least demanding viewer. It has a decent cast, but I suspect that perhaps this is part of the problem. Maybe they spent so much on the actors that when it came to scriptwriters they could only afford the bottom of the barrel. Because it’s not simply that ‘Just Shoot Me’ isn’t funny, it’s the nature of its unfunniness that is unique. It has the rhythm and structure of comedy, but without any of the humour.

Take, for example, a set-up I saw yesterday morning. One of the characters was supposed to have bought a lottery ticket on behalf of his boss but hadn’t, and it had turned out to be a winner. To get out of this jam he had bought a ticket subsequently, and had primed an associate to walk in on him presenting it to the boss, the sudden entrance somehow causing the fake ticket to blow out of the window. Now, my problem is not with the set-up, hackneyed though it is – great writing can salvage even the most familiar scenario. But if your staging is tired, you really need to nail the gag. Here’s how it played out. The woman outside was supposed to storm in when she heard him say “It’s your lucky day”. It was obvious that she wouldn’t, with which the writers had made another rod for their backs – with the predictable turn of events already anticipated, the ensuing joke needed to be even stronger. The chap in the office stood there saying “It’s your lucky day, it’s your LUCKY DAY”, but nobody came in, and the scene cut to the woman waiting outside the office for her cue. And the pay-off? Her repeating to herself “When he says Marvin Gaye, when he says Marvin Gaye”.

As a punchline it lacks either of the fundamentals, credibility or wit. It’s not funny because nobody would ever be told to listen out for lucky day and think they were supposed to be listening for Marvin Gaye, and it’s not funny because there’s nothing funny about the name Marvin Gaye per se. The joke makes no sense, and it doesn’t compensate for making no sense by being amusing. It’s just a limp, feeble line plonked at the end of a weary build-up.

It’s possible I think too hard about stuff like this. What I am trying to say is, ‘Just Shoot Me’ is rubbish.

There are two types of people in the world.

1) Those who, when reading a magazine or newspaper and needing to turn a page, take the corner of the sheet between thumb and forefinger and then transfer it from right to left in an elegant arc.

2) Those who use their thumb to simply push up the corner of the sheet and then clumsily force it across to the other side, oblivious to creasing or other miscellaneous damage that may ensue.

I think it is time legislation was introduced to deal with the latter group, who are clearly barbarians. Such behaviour demeans not only them but us as a society if we allow it to persist unchecked. Frankly it's the tip of the iceberg, because there is a sub-section of group 2 which consists of people who actually lick their finger between pages. These people should be forbidden to read until such time as they can control their baser instincts. Also, those who are unable to read a newspaper and keep the pages aligned should be issued with staplers for their own edification.

Judgement on those who turn down the corners of pages in books will be passed in due course.

Recently I read that Des'ree had been awarded a prize for the worst lyric in popular music, namely "I don't want to see a ghost, it's the sight that I fear most, I'd rather have a piece of toast, watch the evening news". Now I have more reason than most to dislike Des'ree, what with her stupid apostrophe and what she did to Stanley Jordan, but that's far from the worst lyric ever. My personal bete noire is the Deacon Blue classic "Maybe now baby (maybe now baby), maybe now baby (maybe now baby), maybe now baby (maybe now baby), I'll do what I should've did, because you're real gone kid". Never let even the basics of grammar get in the way of a feeble rhyme.

I wonder what Adrian Gurvitz is up to these days. "Gonna write a classic" he sang when I was 14, "gonna write it in an attic, babe I'm an addict now, an addict for your love".

What an idiot.

The teletext service on ITV carries advertising pages between those with news and information. One of these, I saw last night, was for a premium rate telephone line called Nostradamus. For all I know this connects you to a biography dedicated to the life and works of the French 16th century hokum peddlar, but I suspect it is probably a thinly veiled horoscope aimed at the criminally gullible.

Anyway, on the page in question was a purported quote from a satisfied caller. "So accurate I phoned a friend" it read. Maybe it's me, but that doesn't make it sound like they heard anything earth shattering, if the reaction was just to phone a friend. "So accurate I broke down in tears", "so accurate I put £100 on the 3.20 at Kempton", "so accurate I sold all my belongings and moved to Missouri" maybe, but "so accurate I phoned a friend"? Big wow. The only way that's impressive is if the prediction was about the friend in question. But I'm guessing it's a recorded message and unlikely to name an individual, so how do you know who to call? If you phone a horoscope line and it says "Your friend Trevor Smith will have a serious accident", then the vast majority of callers are going to ring off dismissively. It would have to be vague and say "Your friend will have a serious accident". I suppose you would ultimately then know to which friend it was referring - it was the one who went on to have a serious accident. Who then, to add insult to injury, got a phone call from their excitable friend saying they knew it was coming all along.

That’s what young master James wants to know. Well, that’s not my experience of farmers. They are kindly, positive, thoughtful types who go out of their way to reassure other people in their hour of need. They have appealing smiles, attractive wives and they carry around Labrador puppies.

OK, so my experience of farmers is based entirely on young master James, but I’m sure he is typical of the breed and that it is legitimate to extrapolate from him to form an overview of the profession as a whole.

18 entries to go. Damn, it’s going to be frustrating. I’ve somehow managed to keep it just about under six a day this week, but now that Friday night is largely out of the equation, and most of Saturday as well, it’s going to need a spectacular injection of inspiration to get me to the 100.

Mrs Somewhere is intrigued by my assertion that I had a different personality in Spanish from my usual English one. So I’ll explain.

I first spent a prolonged period in Spain when I was 18, before going to university. I was an extremely diffident boy and was unable to immerse myself in the life of the school where I was teaching, allowing myself to be intimidated by my inability to understand everything that was going on around me. (As anyone who has gone through the process can testify, the leap from the sort of conversational ability required at ‘A’ level to the reality of how people actually speak is gargantuan.) When I returned for my year out from university I found myself in a suburb of Malaga, where the people have a dense, lazy accent that is hard to follow, with no other English speakers around and very little to do to fill my days. I had a choice between repeating the pattern of my first visit, crumbling in a heap in my bedroom day after day, or getting out and taking it on.

The first obstacle to overcome was the mental block of unlearning so much of what I had ingrained in me about how to speak the language. I had been taught the equivalent of BBC English, which of course hardly anybody speaks. If you want to fit in to a society you need to mirror what it does, so in linguistic terms that was what I did. I listened hard and I replicated what I heard, no matter how abnormal that felt. I also had to get past that old classroom sensation that ‘putting on the accent’ felt silly. When a foreigner speaks English, does it sound stupid if they have a broad English accent? Of course not, it just sounds natural. Finally, and most significantly, I had to accept that I would never understand 100% of what was going on around me, and rather than constantly ask people to repeat stuff or explain what they meant, I would just have to bluff it. I figured I would pick up enough and would just try to fill in the gaps. If that meant laughing when other people laughed without knowing why, so be it.

All of these went completely against my inhibited nature, and that’s where the personality distinction came about. Because even though I felt like I was just playing the role of someone uninhibited, the very act of adopting those traits ultimately led me to become that way. You can’t fake it as a confident person without acquiring some confidence with which do the faking in the first place. In addition to which, there were other factors which made me more open and approachable. The nature of the language itself, the way I needed to form the vowel sounds with a much more open mouth than I use to mumble away in English, made me more expressive and demonstrative. And because the verbal characteristics I most readily employ – irony, sarcasm, wryness – require a degree of subtlety of intonation which is difficult to master, I dealt in them much less frequently than I do in English. I was a more simple, straightforward Spanish me. Putting it bluntly, I was nicer. But, sadly, a lot less interesting.

Shortly after I came back, I happened to work for a while with a chap from Menorca who was new to England, and as such we spoke exclusively in Spanish. After a couple of weeks like that he overheard me speaking to someone else in English. “What on earth was that?” he asked me. I asked him what he meant. “All that deep voice”, and he mumbled away like some fairytale ogre. Turned out that without me having any idea, I even had a higher pitched voice in Spanish. It really was like two different people.

I realise I am in danger of getting obsessive here. But either this is a late April Fool's joke, or the British cinema industry is desperate for an ideas man. Because, apparently, the autobiography of Gordon Ramsay is to be made into a film. "When the idea was first mooted", it says here, "Gordon admits he found it difficult to take in." Really? The gripping, cliffhanger tale of a cook? Not just any old cook though - a cook who swears? Why, it's another 'Gandhi' in the making, surely? "From a potentially talented football player I became a chef against my dad's wishes." You see kids - you should listen to what your parents tell you.

Am I alone in finding pregnancy a disturbing condition? By which I mean that one human being growing inside another human being is, for me, the stuff of science fiction nightmares. In fact the entire process is freaky. Two almost impossibly small cells (the egg is about a tenth of a millimetre, and that's the big one) meet up, divide and sub-divide and sub-divide, and you end up with a person? It's ludicrous. Who would invent such a preposterous notion? I never enjoyed seeing my babies wriggling around inside their mother, and by the time the third one was coming along I had to confess to her that I really didn't enjoy feeling them move either (not that she listened and still made me do it). That whole person-in-a-person business is just too strange.

However, before you get the idea that I think children should arrive shrink-wrapped from Amazon, I'll state for the record that seeing my babies born constituted the four most extraordinary moments of my life. Each time I prepared myself mentally for the anti-climax - how could it possibly live up to not only nine months of waiting but also all the mystical hullabaloo surrounding what is, ultimately, just another natural function of the human condition? Well, it did. And even more incredibly, it then did again, and again, and again. In those instants the miracle of our mere existence was thrown into startling, humbling relief.

Incidentally, I checked the spelling of hullabaloo using my online dictionary, and it gave an example of usage - "Remember all that hullabaloo about the golf ball?" I confess I find it hard to imagine all that much hullabaloo about a golf ball. Although if my wife gave birth to one, I'm sure I could manage some.

We've entered the council's grass cutting season. I'm not sure there's any more pleasant sensation than riding out of a morning and being confronted by the smell of fresh clippings. I think it's probably my dream job, roaming around the city finding long grass that needs attention. It must be so tranquil (engine noise notwithstanding) to just tootle up and down, tidying up. No office politics, no specious initiatives, no necessity for an ID swipe card in order to get to the toilet and back (true). Just you and nature.

I often think that I should never have given up being a postman, which I was one summer while at university. It's the only job I've had which has given me a sense of genuine wellbeing. If I get one thing right as a parent it will be to assure my kids that if they find something they enjoy, then they should stick with it. They won't make the mistake I did of going through a meaningless period of further education simply because that is the expectation. Of course the government has helped in that respect by making sure that anyone going to university now needs to be pretty damn sure of their earning power at the end of it, or else spend decades in debt. You'd have to be off your head these days to go and do a degree in Hispanic Studies. I've made some poor decisions in my life, but that's one of the worst. I'm not saying it wasn't fun for a while to be able to speak Spanish, it was, and it was interesting to discover that I had a different personality in Spanish from my usual one, but as a strategic move it was lamentable. I should have stayed a happy, poor postman or done a degree in something dull and profitable.

Most of us do. Most of us aren’t. We know what we like and we know why we like it, but compared to those with genuine gifts we are all deaf as posts.

By way of supporting evidence, I present the following quote. It comes from a book called ‘Twenty One Lives In Jazz’ by Chris Horne, in which he interviews current British musicians about their careers. I found it fascinating, not least because what to me is the great mystery of jazz – improvising – remained so after reading it, because none of them was really able to put into words how they do it. But I also loved this, from the sublime saxophonist Nigel Hitchcock, a great illustration of the gap between where we are and where they are. It’s his response to the question of whether he has perfect pitch.

“Yes I do. It winds me up if things are out of tune. It’s not too bad on a piano, the things that drive me nuts are records just playing slightly fast, or slightly slow – drives me absolutely crackers!

And when you play in England, the tuning frequency is A440 and when you play in Germany it’s A444 and in America it’s A442. So England is the flattest of them all, but to me that is the true note, don’t know if that’s something you become attuned to or are born with. It’s a really subtle amount; you can make up the difference by different lipping! But you go into some bands here, you think ‘Ah, German tuning!’

A true ‘A’ is actually A448. An ‘A’ is 7 and for each octave it’s multiplied and it comes out at 448. I know about frequencies. The relation of maths to frequencies I find absolutely fascinating – and things like a seashell. That’s a Fibonacci sequence – the growth rate of each section is the same as the Fibonacci sequence, which is adding the previous numbers together, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 and if you do that all round you get a seashell. It’s also related to the maths of music, all tied in together.

The way a tree grows is pretty much the way that music grows, that notes are formed, say in overtones. Heard of the Mandelbrot Set? It’s a mathematical number where the answer to the equation gets put back through the equation, a sort of feed back loop. It throws off patterns. There are examples in nature like beetles, seahorses, the paisley pattern on a tie. God’s thumbprint, if you like. You can look on a computer screen to see it all happening. They put one number in and it forms a sycamore tree, another number in and it builds an oak tree. So if there’s a God, he’s a mathematician!

In jazz, there can be an argument about whether something is mathematician driven, playing a particular pattern, or playing with heart and soul. To me, the heart and soul is seeing the beauty of the maths. But the perfection of it – when you’re playing Cherokee, the maths of the chord sequence is really difficult, but the form when you get into it is just beautiful maths. So there’s no division between maths and music, to my eyes at any rate!”

I have a meeting with David Newton on Friday.

I realise that this means little to most people (although regular readers of this weblog may by now be familiar with the name), but it makes me slightly apprehensive. Newton is one of my favourite jazz pianists, and although I have met him several times before they have all been brief crossings of path from which I have been able to flee once anxiety got the better of me. But this is an actual sit down, have a chat meeting. My main worry – and even as I’m typing this I know how stupid it is, but no matter – is the same as it is whenever I talk to jazz musicians; that they will somehow perceive that I have next to no formal musical education and am thoroughly unqualified to admire their work. I expect them to slip some subtle red herring into the conversation, over which I will duly stumble, thereby revealing myself to be no more than an amateur jazz fan. Either that or they all have a special jazz musician radar which, upon encountering a charlatan, gives off a complex dissonant tone audible only to the musically advanced.

Moreover, this particular meeting has a unique double whammy of insecurity, because I’m also concerned that I might inadvertently reveal myself as unqualified to design his new CD cover. This in spite of the fact that I’ve already done one with which he was sufficiently happy to come back for more. OK so I do them for free, but even so, you wouldn’t take a freebie if it was useless, would you?

Or would you?

I do like to watch the baseball on Five. There's something pure about it. Although like all sports it's very technical when played at the highest level, its principle is surely the simplest of all the bat and ball games - a man with what amounts to a club belting a ball as far as he possibly can. If he misses enough times, he's out. None of this recondite leg before wicket business, where it depends where the bowler was bowling from, and where the ball bounced, and whether the batsman was trying to hit the ball, and for all I know what he had for breakfast. No, baseball is a straightforward, what you see is what you get type of game. One might even consider baseball and cricket as metaphors for the nature of their respective nations. Anyway, I'm an uncomplicated man at heart so baseball suits me just fine last thing on a Sunday night.

Therein, however, lies the problem. The live baseball doesn't start until gone midnight. I'm not averse to a bit of sleep deprivation now and again, but even I know that Sunday night is not the best time for it. So I call upon the American baseball authorities to reschedule their games so that they start at an altogether more considerate time. They would probably claim, in their isolationist way, that there are commercial reasons for matches to begin at 8pm Eastern time, but if they want to expand the game globally - and perhaps even be able to name their main championship the World Series without the rest of us sniggering - they are going to have to weigh up the needs of other nations. I can't be staying up all hours of the night on a Sunday, so I propose that those in charge of baseball bring the Sunday games forward about three hours. By way of reciprocation, I am happy to petition Oxford to play their games at 3am in order that they can be broadcast live in California. Everybody wins.

Sometimes you look around your workplace and you can't help thinking what a load of cobblers it all is. All the banter, the forced jocularity, the whole social aspect of being somewhere you don't even particularly want to be. I'm always aware of it, but sometimes it hits home with extra clarity. Not long ago, in the space of a week, three girls here told me that they had no idea I was a football fan. One of them I didn't really know that well, although I worked 20 feet away from her for long enough that you would have thought she would have noticed the Oxford Utd hat; one of them I last year had a whole conversation with about football, about how I love it and my boss hates it, and yet she couldn't remember which of us was which; and the other I've worked with fairly closely on and off for the last couple of years. It seems barely credible that anyone could work closely with me and not know one of the only three facts there are about me (kids/football/music) but it just shows how artificial it all is. I'm not saying I'm upset that they didn't know, not at all - it just reminded me how superficial and pointless almost any conversation that takes place in the office is. It's in one ear and out of the other, just another form of displacement activity to get through the day.

I recently discovered that after years of thinking it was something to do with viniculture, my surname apparently has the origin “friend of God”. I am happy to be thought of as a friend of God, but frankly it’s not the first description of myself that comes to mind. To be honest I’m not a friendly person by nature, although that said I’ve never met any deities face to face so I may be doing myself a disservice there. It’s possible that given the opportunity I might indeed be a friend of God. I’d be glad to walk a round of pitch and putt with him and see how we got along. I imagine he’d beat me (that whole omnipotence thing) but I expect we’d still have a good chat.

It’s a long story but there was a time when I quite relished the prospect of finishing off my surname in my little branch of the family, having as I do two sisters and planning to sire no children. Ironic then that thanks to me there are now five more “friends of God” in the world, all of whom at this point are also actual friends of God rather than just masquerading under the name like I do. Three of them are boys, so by the time I shuffle off there could be dozens of us.

I hope God is watching.

Even my long term advocate Mrs Somewhere recently doubted that the 100 post marathon was achievable, but with 28 to go after this one there is still a slim possibility that it could happen. The juices are flowing tonight, which makes it something of a shame that both ‘Prison Break’ (my guilty pleasure – has ever a more preposterous programme been made?) and ‘The Sopranos’ (my not guilty whatsoever pleasure – second only to ‘The West Wing’ as a televisual treat from the last decade) are both about to hit the screen. Plus I have to clean the bathroom at some point. I apologise for shattering the illusion of myself as a jazz-loving, football-watching, drivel-writing demon, but there are four children in this house and they do like to urinate. Mostly, it would seem, in a fairly random manner.

So says famed puppy holder young master Lindow. I can sympathise with his point of view, because all right-thinking people find the revolting yeast extract an aberration against nature, but in defence of Marmite its manufacturers have in recent years produced some wonderful examples of what may be called (I’m sure there’s a term for it) negative advertising, playing cleverly on the disgust of many to make those freaks who like the stuff cherish it all the more. It takes a lot of courage to launch an advertising campaign which specifies that lots of people loathe your product, and you have to take your hat off to Marmite for it. They’ve even created a website - http://www.marmite.co.uk/hate/.

On the other hand, I can’t find any reason to defend Cadbury’s Creme Eggs, which in addition to being the single most repellent piece of confectionery ever to despoil the newsagent’s shelf have inspired some of the most objectionable and irritating commercials to hit television screens in living memory. For many people Easter is a time for religious celebration; personally, it is the time when I rejoice as Cadbury’s Creme Eggs are banished for another nine months.

Just watched the ‘Panorama’ documentary about Scientology. I found it a rather frustrating watch. Apart from anything else it seemed rather crammed in to half an hour, when the subject merits an hour or even a series of programmes to really get to the heart of it. But what disappointed me most was that it didn’t define exactly how Scientology expects to be construed as a religion. The only belief system discussed was disavowed by the celebrities brought on to defend it. Without some form of spiritual faith at the centre it seemed like little more than a centre for self-improvement methodology, which surely doesn’t constitute a religion?

Incidentally, anyone wanting to read about the extraordinary lengths to which Scientology will go to protect its name should take a look at the Wikipedia pages on Operation Snow White and Operation Freakout.

Sometimes of an evening I'll put on the Freeview music video channels to kill a few minutes between programmes. I'm not sure why I do this, because all it does is make me angry at the unimaginitiveness and inadequacy of the fare on offer, but nevertheless I do. Last night one of these channels was giving viewers the chance to text in their questions to be answered by some anonymous expert (presumably a researcher with internet capabilities beyond the capacity of the halfwit mobile wielding teenagers who have £1 a time to toss aside this way.) Mostly these were queries like "Who shares my birthday 21st May?", or occasionally even more facile ones like "Who are the five greatest guitarists ever?" (the answer to which mysteriously listed one Duane Allen, whoever he is.)

One of the questions concerned the singer Rihanna. Rihanna is a foxy young lass who has released several mediocre r'n'b tracks, some of them with videos which are nevertheless pleasing to the eye. Her current single is called 'Umbrella' and it fits that description perfectly - in one ear and out of the other, but in one eye and then the other and then both at the same time with occasional blinking only when necessary. Anyway, the answer gave her birthdate as February 1988. I was horrified. 1988? 1988?! To me anyone born later than the mid seventies is implausibly young, but 1988 simply doesn't compute. It made me wonder whether I have now officially entered the twilight world of the dirty old man. There was something distinctly unsettling about finding a girl young enough to be my daughter attractive. It felt seedy and inappropriate. How does Peter Stringfellow do it?

I'm stuck on 380. I've been stuck on it for weeks. I'm starting to think that there's a limited number of 380s out there. Perhaps someone at the DVLA is responsible for doling out numbers, and they've decided that a select few will be the hardest to come by. It's just like collecting football stickers and discovering when you've nearly finished that everyone is looking for the same six - 380 is one of those much sought after number plates which is frustrating spotters up and down the land. For all I know there's a black market out there for cars with the special six. "Honda Civic, 35,000 miles, one careful owner, comes with full service record and an original 380."

Anyway, if you're near to Oxford and have a car with a 380 number plate, please come and drive around the general Sandford/Greater Leys area for the next few days. Thanks.

Occasionally, I bother to actually look at the spam that gets caught by my e-mail filter. I'm intrigued by spam, and wonder whether the success rate can possibly justify the hassle of sending it out. I suppose it must otherwise people wouldn't do it, although it's hard to imagine anyone who needs a website being ensnared by the one I received this morning from the professional sounding website-designs-uk-4-u. Of the other six today, one was entirely in German, four were the inexplicable stock market tips (would anybody smart enough to trade in shares take advice from an unsolicited e-mail?), but my favourite was the pills one entitled "First class painkiller from USA apothecary". Apothecary? What's he going to send me, leeches?

34 left and six days to do them in, although that could be five if (as looks likely) Saturday is mostly out. In one day cricket six runs an over is the asking rate beyond which it is generally considered the match is drifting away, so if I can just keep it under that…

God is clearly female. So claims theological revolutionary and duck liberator young master Lindow. I beg to differ, for the simple reason that I don’t believe in God. Nor do I not believe in God. Like everybody else in the world (only a fraction of whom choose to acknowledge as much) I don’t actually know.

Religious debate rears its head infrequently in this house, and I’m certainly not going to start any here. This is because my wife is a believer and wishes our children to be so as well. Occasionally people express surprise at my willingness to have them raised this way, but it seems to me that the right sort of Christian teachings - ethics, morality, social responsibility – are not dissimilar from those I am trying to impart to the children myself. I just do it from a humanist perspective rather than a spiritual one. For her part, my wife accepts that the children should be aware that I do not share her faith, so that that option will be open to them as they get older and perhaps start to question what they’ve been told. It’s a delicate balancing act but it seems to be working, more or less. All it needs is tolerance of someone else’s belief system. Maybe we should be running the Middle East.

Showering my youngest son this morning, I pointed out that I could see his ribs. (I would like to clarify at this stage that my children are not malnourished, it just happened I could see them because of the way he was standing.) He said I couldn’t, but when I told him that ribs was the name for the bones in his chest and showed him where they were, he had to concede that indeed I could.

He then asked me what was the name for the bone in the willy. This stumped me, not least because I don’t even know if there is a bone in the willy, which I admitted to him. There is, he assured me. Furthermore, it’s green. Apparently all the other bones in the body are white, like a skeleton which used to have skin on it until all the skin dropped off, but the bone in the willy is green.

You live and learn.

My wife came in this afternoon and told me that she’d found a man stumbling around in the road. She sat him down by our front wall and I went out and had a chat with him while she phoned for the police and an ambulance.

There’s nothing to make you feel appreciative of what you have like encountering someone who has nothing. Falteringly and frequently seeming about to pass out, he told me he was homeless and had just been assaulted by three men. He’d not long been released from hospital, and he wasn’t allowed to drink, and they’d given him tea which had been spiked. Then they’d attacked him and taken all the money he had - £2. He proceeded to give me snapshot details from a hard life, most of them concerning the deaths of people close to him.

He was incoherent and hard to understand, and it’s impossible to know how much of it was real and how much in his mind, not that it mattered. Although he was in a lot of physical pain and emotional distress, and clearly suffering from mental health issues, occasionally flashes of character would shine through. He asked me how many kids I had, and when I returned the question told me he had seven. “Seven!” I exclaimed. “We didn’t have a television” he responded, and he laughed for the only time during our conversation. He became briefly animated when talking football, telling me he was a fan of Newcastle. He insisted that they were going to win, although he didn’t specify what. (Either way I took it as irrefutable proof that he was, as suspected, delusional.)

He said he didn’t have long to live, and it was easy to believe. He was only 45 (there was a hospital tag around his wrist with his date of birth on it) but he was frequently convulsed with pain in his stomach, and he showed me huge scars on his leg which he said were the result of cancer operations. He was the kind of man you’d cross the road to avoid, and I felt guilty when, in spite of everything, his humanity shone through. He apologised repeatedly for imposing on us. We gave him a drink of squash, and when he finished it he insisted that we threw away the mug so that there was no chance of the kids catching anything off him. And at the end of it, after he’d been sat in the ambulance for about 20 minutes, the paramedic came over and said he wanted to see me before they left. I figured it would be to see if I was going to lend him the tenner I’d said I might, but when I got there he simply wanted to thank me. I wondered how long it had been since someone had just sat and chatted with him for half an hour, just listened to what he was saying to get it all out of his system. I think that’s what he was thanking me for as much as anything. And then I wondered when I had last done something like that, without the fear of having someone drop dead on the pavement outside my house to push me into it.

It was an illuminating experience in many ways.

My wife, to put it simply, fancies Johnny Depp. A not uncommon trait amongst women, and in spite of my rampant heterosexuality I can see why. I actually think he's a terrific actor, and he has a wonderful body of work behind him already: Donnie Brasco, Ed Wood, Edward Scissorhands, Finding Neverland, Sleepy Hollow, What's Eating Gilbert Grape... there's a wealth of quality material in which one can enjoy him, not to mention a couple of Pirates of the Caribbean films if you're desperate.

By comparison, I'm rather partial to Tea Leoni. She was in Bad Boys, Deep Impact, Fun With Dick And Jane, Jurassic Park III, and Spanglish.

Guess who got the rough end of that deal.

There is little that annoys me more in life than when I put my cashcard into an ATM to get some money out, only for it to ask me whether I want to top up my mobile first.

No. No I don’t. Because I don’t own a mobile phone. I hate mobile phones. I hate them in themselves, and I hate them for the quick-fix instant gratification society they represent. Contrary to popular belief (not to mention every other advert on TV) it is possible to function in life without owning a mobile phone. Occasionally it takes a little forward planning, occasionally, I’ll concede, it involves acceptance of a modicum of inconvenience intolerable to (it seems) every single other adult in Britain. But there is something wonderfully liberating about being completely uncontactable. You can’t even leave me a voicemail. I exist in a void.

What feels like 90,000 words ago on St George's Day I extolled the virtues of being English, and mentioned that at some point I would doubtless redress the balance. So here is a bare scraping at the surface of the wealth of loathsome aspects of this great nation of ours.

Our binge drinking culture; the fact that we gave the world Benny Hill; Gordon Ramsay (Scottish, but we made him what he is); our obsession with vacuous celebrities who offer nothing beyond their own celebrity; tanning salons; our lame aquiescence to American cultural imperialism; Lenny Henry; the royal family; TV schedules swimming with programmes about buying/selling/renovating houses; the Daily Mail; allowing Madonna to live here; Mr Bean; soap operas; Jeremy Clarkson; our massively disproportionate love of dogs; Gilbert & Sullivan; Ben Elton; London; Davina McCall.

Ah, that feels better.

I'm not a great user of profanity. Barring the heights of passion (sorry) or a quiz machine asking me a question about soap operas at a crucial moment I swear extremely rarely, saving my curses for moments when I truly wish to emphasise a point. So it is with no little feeling that I write this.

Aylesbury is a shithole.

I had the misfortune to be obliged to move to Aylesbury as an 11 year old, and didn't fully escape its clutches for an appropriate 13 years. It's a tedious provincial outpost with nothing to distinguish it except the towering, mis-shapen slab of county offices which is visible from miles around. What little character it ever had in the centre has been overwhelmed by unimaginative architecture, formulaic shopping malls and 1960s concrete. A few years back I wondered whether I had done it a disservice, my opinion of it distorted by my experience of schooling there, and went back to re-appraise it. It had got even worse. The High Street was almost all charity shops, pubs in the centre of town had got rougher, and with the exception of a facelift for the bus station it all seemed grubbier, wearier and uglier.

To be fair to Aylesbury, I didn't realise when I was living there as a teenager that it's no worse than hundreds of other places. I think I must have imagined as a child that all towns and cities looked like Oxford. Maybe I should go back again and see if I can find anything redeeming this time.

Then again, maybe not.

To most English readers that name won't mean anything, but Barry Bonds is about to surpass one of the great American sporting landmarks and become the record holder for home runs in baseball. It's a tremendous achievement, which makes it all the sadder that it is tainted by allegations of steroid abuse. As it stands Bonds hasn't done anything illegal or against the laws of baseball, but there's an awful lot of smoke floating around (including an investigation against him for perjury before a grand jury) which suggests there's probably some fire somewhere. I find it particularly saddening because baseball holds such stock by statistics and records, more than any other sport I've seen. Now one of the most significant will have a cloud over it.

I wonder if athletes understand the massively devaluing impact that such suggestions can have on the average sports fan. In last year's Tour de France, Floyd Landis pulled off one of the most extraordinary comebacks ever seen to take a stage the day after he had seemed like a finished man. It was an inspirational ride, real lump in the throat stuff. Only problem was, a couple of weeks later he tested positive for excessive levels of testosterone. In that day Landis did more damage to the sport of endurance cycling than he can possibly imagine. The Tour de France is one of the world's great sporting events, but it will be hard to watch it this year without wondering dubiously about every impressive ride. Everybody loses.

A few months back, my eldest tried out for his school football team. He was asked to play out of position, barely got a touch and didn't even make the squad, let alone the team. Other boys who didn't attend the training session were picked on reputation. He was crushed. (As indeed was his mother, who had to be gently dissuaded from visiting the school to berate the PE teacher.) I explained to him that all he could do was stay positive and show them what he was made of, and eventually he would be noticed. Part of the problem is that he's not the most eye-catching of players - not for him the Cruyff turn or Ronaldo step-overs. But he knows where to be and when to be there, and he'll run his heart out till the ducks fly home, and these are assets which in the long term all teams will need.

So he persisted, training session after training session. A few weeks ago he'd made his way to the subs bench. Yesterday he started and played the full game. Sensible lad, he said he should play left back, which he doesn't like much but which he knows he can do well. His team won 3-0.

I've never been one for the notion that organised sports in school teach kids valuable life lessons about teamwork and cooperation. I think the lesson they mostly teach is that naturally sporty kids get adulation and the unfit and uncoordinated get ridiculed. That's a lesson of sorts about how life will treat us as adults, but it's not one I'd necessarily want to convey to children. So it's gratifying that for once a sporting environment has provided a substantive example of where dedication and determination can get you (and it's proved me right for good measure).

He's also shown he can fight his own corner without his mother embarrassing him, which was probably all the motivation he needed in the first place.

44 posts to go in eight days. It's looking increasingly unlikely. The problems are two-fold, namely that there just aren't enough hours in the day and that I don't have enough opinions worth stating. If anybody has an opinion they'd like me to adopt at some stage of the next eight days, feel free to suggest one. I quite like the idea of having to compose a piece in support of something of which I have no knowledge or in which I don't believe.

For now though, I will wonder why people refer to Male and Female Toilets (as in an internal communication I just received). One of the great joys of the English language for me is that all our nouns are neuter. That said, if I had the option I think I'd choose to use a 'female' toilet. Whilst I understand women's frustration at the inadequate number of cubicles provided in their public lavatories, they should nevertheless offset the ensuing waiting time against never having to experience the horror of a communal urinal. I don't really understand why men are expected to stand elbow to elbow, urinating collectively into a long trough. It's a pretty unedifying process at the best of times, and that's even if you avoid one of those appallingly designed steel jobs which, should you be unlucky enough to find yourself alongside a man with a particularly full bladder, can be prone to what I shall delicately term splashback.

To those of a sensitive disposition, I apologise.

I caught the last few minutes of a documentary about Roy Chubby Brown a couple of nights back. Although his home life seemed very happy, professionally he cut rather a sad figure, trawling round the country to theatres that he can no longer fill. This he ascribed to the golden age of stand-up having been the 1980s and early 1990s. Then they showed a clip of him on stage. He told a joke constructed on such redundant, meaningless racism - the punchline involved cotton and spears - that it was genuinely shocking to hear it on television. It wasn’t the racist content that took me aback, it was hearing someone tell the type of joke which died out in playgrounds in the late 1970s. It had all the currency of Mike Yarwood doing Harold Wilson. And it was impossible to avoid a sense of schadenfreude that the repugnant Brown remained hopelessly unaware that the decline in his audiences had nothing to do with stand-up comedy being out of fashion, and everything to do with him being out of touch.

One of the reasons I so despise Margaret Thatcher is what she did to the political landscape in this country. By appealing to people's craven self-interest, she slewed the nation so far to the right that eventually the only way the opposition could get elected was to shift there as well. As such, by the end of Thatcher's reign (and the twentysomethings who accuse Blair of being presidential should have seen Thatcher at her worst) we'd got to a state where some of the excesses of Thatcherite ideology were just meekly accepted. It's taken 15 years for people to start noticing the absurdity of splitting a national rail network into a thousand tiny pieces, or to wonder just why a German shareholder should be coining it because we need water to live.

I got on this train of thought when I saw a BUPA advert a couple of days ago. I don't agree with private healthcare for essential surgery. I don't see why anyone, by virtue of their financial position, should be able to jump a queue of people all waiting to have their lives saved or improved. Similarly, I don't agree with private education. A decent education is a fundamental right, and as far as possible we should all have the same opportunity. I don't see these as particularly radical opinions, and yet in modern Britain stating them paints me as practically a communist. Margaret Thatcher isn't to blame for private health and education, but she is to blame for creating a society (or since she doesn't believe in society perhaps I should say a living tapestry of men and women) in which opposing them will never again be part of the political mainstream.

I’ve been thinking about young master Lindow and his 5am starts. In particular, I remembered a book I read recently concerning a farmer who appeared to have found a solution to this unenviable (to my mind at least) issue. This farmer used to spend most of the day in bed eating chocolates, while one of his ducks would do all the work around the place. Milking the cows, feeding the pigs, you name it the duck could handle it. All the farmer would do is roll out of bed now and again and call “How goes the work?” out of the window. (“Quack” was the standard response.)

Ultimately the duck got completely worn down by his heavy workload, and fearing for his health the other farm animals formed a conspiracy, ganging up and chasing the farmer away. After that the farm operated as a collective, and the duck made a full recovery.

I think master Lindow can use this model for his own benefit. It didn’t work out for the farmer in the book, but it has to be said he took liberties with his anatine apprentice. I am confident that master Lindow has the wherewithal to instigate a work sharing scheme with one of his ducks (assuming he has some) which will not lead to a communist revolution on his farm. Perhaps he could ask the duck to take weekends, or they could alternate early and late shifts. Some form of verbal appreciation for the duck’s efforts (ie something other than just yelling out of his bedroom window to make sure the farm was ticking over) would probably be in order as well. There are doubtless other refinements to the original plan which would prove beneficial, and I am hereby offering my services in a consultancy capacity if required. If not, I can probably find the instructional manual for more efficient farming on my little girl’s bookshelf somewhere.

The other day I was at my sister’s house. It was about 3pm on a Sunday, and my nephew was still in bed. We’ve all been there, but even so I felt like waking him up and telling him to stop wasting the day. Because there is one natural resource I value above all others these days.

Time.

How I yearn to get back the endless summer holidays I couldn’t fill as a teenager, the weeks of boredom spent idling away day after day. Now time just seems to race away from me. Days disappear with terrifying alacrity – get the kids up and out, go to work, get the kids to bed and there might be a few hours left of near exhaustion before doing it all over again. Weekends seem like they’re over before they start. I’m willing away the weeks just urging payday to arrive faster. Sometimes I wish I could just stop the clock and take a moment to appreciate everything, rather than seeing life go past me in a blur.

Once in a while you’ll hear a middle-aged person say that they feel just the same now as they did when they were a teenager. I’ve always found it a slightly odd assertion, carrying as it does the implication that they have developed not a jot in thirty odd years, but I understand what they’re getting at. Because aging is a strange process. Our shifts in character and appreciation of the world around us are so gradual that they are imperceptible, and yet re-reading diaries I wrote as a teenager I am shocked by the naivety and incredible immaturity of what at the time I presumed to be wonderful perspicacity. However - and this is where the notion that people haven’t changed comes from - mixed in with it are traits and opinions which haven’t shifted an inch in nearly a quarter of a century. The spirit of an individual is in countless tiny strands, some of them racing ahead of the pack, others steadfastly clinging to the starting blocks. Those in the vanguard have to deal with the cold, hard reality of surviving as an adult; it’s no wonder we cling to the slackers for comfort.

The fact that this is entry 51 of the 100 post challenge put me in mind of the house in which I was born, which had that number. It was an end of terrace about a mile from the centre of Oxford, looking out over a couple of large playing fields and the hills to the west of the city. I never appreciated it at the time, but it was a fairly idyllic setting in which to spend my first 11 years. Then I moved to Aylesbury and it all went wrong, but that's for another time. A time when just thinking about Aylesbury doesn't get me maudlin.

I think my parents had been living at Number 51 for a year or so when I was born. The house had cost them about £3500 at a time when my Dad was earning £1000 a year. It's worth maybe a hundred times that now, incredibly. My own house is currently worth around 12 times what I earn. This sounds lovely except there's every chance that I will never actually finish paying for the house in my lifetime. In the meantime the mortgage - currently at a reduced rate because it's not long been renewed - siphons off nearly 40% of what I take home every month. I am more or less a jellyfish when it comes to money, but something doesn't add up to me here. Surely putting a roof over the heads of my family shouldn't cripple me financially for my entire working life and beyond? My Dad used to say that a house is only worth what someone will pay for it - it sounds fatuous, but it makes a very valid point. What I want to know is, how did we collectively decide in the last quarter of a century that houses would be worth such an impossibly unmanageable amount of our incomes? How did we get in this mess?

Answers on a postcard please. Preferably with a solution as to how we can turn back the clock to a time when it was feasible to really buy your house, rather than just continually feed banks interest payments.

I've crawled my way to my 150th entry. Halfway through the 100 posts challenge with 20 days gone and 11 to go. Can I possibly finish this? A pessimist would say no. I am a pessimist, so I'll say no. But I'm not giving up yet. What I need is an injection of Clarkson Serum. It's an additive which makes you incredibly opinionated about any subject which happens to cross your path, irrespective of whether you have even the most rudimentary understanding of it.

Histon and Droylsden then. Histon and Droylsden. Bloody hell. It's my boy I feel for more than anything. His friends who've mostly adopted the Premiership club of their choosing still have the Cup Final or the Champions League or a UEFA Cup spot to look forward to; he has the fixture list containing Histon and Droylsden. It seems an unfair lot for a kid who (to my archaic way of thinking) has done "the right thing" and picked his local team to support. At least I've had a few high points over the years, but in his four seasons of attending he's seen nothing but disappointment. Last year, when we got relegated out of the league, I was doing OK until I saw the look on his face as we were leaving. And last night I was doing OK until my wife recounted a conversation she'd had with him. She'd said it would be too much to ask for the under 12 team he plays for (which has finished second in its league) and Oxford to both get promoted. He answered that he would rather Oxford had. That did for me.

Don't have kids everybody. You spend years getting yourself bitter and hardened and in a position where nothing and nobody can hurt you any more, and then kids come along and destroy all that hard work without even trying.

You'd probably expect me to be angry at the result, or the opposition, or the referee, but no. I'm angry at myself for not seeing it coming. Not the defeat you understand - recent postings of mine will illustrate that I was most prepared for that eventuality. No, it was the manner of it - the tortuous procrastination of extra time and penalties. I've been supporting Oxford for a long time, and I really should have known that the disappointment would be as protracted and deflating as possible.

Happily, the realisation that there are far, far more important things in life kicked in long before the match had even ended. That's not to say I don't have a distinctly empty feeling at the moment, but it's good that the rationalisation has begun so promptly. I must be getting old if I can't even sustain the illusion of genuine significance until the inevitable conclusion is played out.

So barmy old duffer Patrick Moore is at it again, saying the reason television has got so terrible is the high number of women executives. He thinks the solution is to create two separate BBC channels, one for women and one for men. I realise he's a far-right old loon, but even so this sort of tired sexism depresses me. Not just because it disparages women who have achieved prominent roles in television on merit, but because in its one-dimensional take on gender definition it is equally dismissive of all of us. Let's say Moore's BBC for Men came to pass - who would be the sort of people employed on a channel aiming specifically at males? The two who leap immediately to mind are Jeremy Clarkson and Gordon Ramsay, both of whose programmes I would walk through glass to avoid. I fear I would probably fail a Patrick Moore masculinity test. In fact as a jazz loving football fan, I'd probably cause the equipment to seize up. That combination simply does not compute in the nescient world of simplistic sexism.

Society is never going to advance until it stops being so desparate to compartmentalise everyone into easily digestible packages. We are all individuals, we are not white but a million different shades of grey. It's not a palatable truism, but it's inescapable.

Talking of Ramsay, 500 readers of Esquire magazine recently voted the profane bully their most admired man. Who the hell else must have been on their shortlist in order for him to come out top? Fred West? Stalin? Ben Elton? Ramsay is a cook, a cook dammit! The single most overrated profession that television has ever puffed up completely beyond its merits. A cook with a gimmick - he swears. It's not that he swears that bothers me, it's that as far as television goes that's all he can do, as anyone who saw his floundering performance hosting 'Have I Got News For You' can testify. Watching Ramsay, I had to conclude that men should get off the television and stay in the kitchen where they belong.

Young Master Lindow's tale of early starts reminded me of my own flirtation with pre-dawn rising. Way back when, I used to have the great misfortune to work at Kensington Police Station. I shan't go into it in detail now - the memories are mostly painful - but not the least of my woes was the commute. To try and minimise my travelling I got into the habit of getting up at about 5.20 and catching a coach to Shepherd's Bush, from where I would walk for twenty minutes or so to arrive at work at about 7.00. Although exhausting, this had the added benefit of a couple of hours of tranquility before most people arrived, not to mention leaving work when everyone else was just negotiating their mid-afternoon slump.

Now I hate London as much as Londoners hate manners, but even so I managed to get a degree of pleasure from the ten minutes or so I'd spend crossing Holland Park as part of that walk. Although the stench of the capital's filthy air was never truly escapable, there was a relative bucolic charm to the park that was completely at odds with Notting Hill and Kensington on either side of it. It was in Holland Park that I first saw a peacock fly - I hadn't known they were capable of it before then. I even came to like the brazen Cockney squirrels, bounding up in loutish expectation of small treats they were accustomed to being passed. I used to carry a bag of nuts with me and see how close I could get them to come, a personal best being the upstart who ran up my arm to grab one off my shoulder.

Because I would generally sleep on the coach, the walk would often be conducted in a semi-comatose stupor which added a vaguely unreal air to everything. So I can't be 100% sure that I really did see Barry Norman, Desmond Lynam and Rory Bremner having their photograph taken together one bleary morn. So if anyone can prove that such an event did actually take place, please let me know.

I've held back as long as I can, but given that my 100 posts challenge is faltering to the extent that I am now up to a required rate of 4.58 a day, I can hold off no longer. It's time to write about Art Pepper.

When I was about 15, shortly after Donald Fagen had brought Dave Brubeck into my life, I chanced upon a documentary called Notes From A Jazz Survivor, a short film about Art Pepper made in 1982, not long before he died. Pepper was the embodiment of the self-destructive jazz musician cliche, except that he somehow managed to live through it and survive to the age of 56. As a young man he was handsome and charming, and he enjoyed considerable success with his light, tuneful touch on the saxophone. But that was before his demons took hold. He tells in his astonishing autobiography Straight Life - which I commend to anybody, jazz fan or not - that knowing that he was an addictive personality, he had always steered well clear of drugs. When he finally succumbed to temptation, it took him into a spiral which would all but destroy his career, taking in en route alcoholism, armed robbery, spells in San Quentin and the abandonment of everything in the name of heroin.

Except. In his mid-forties he met his third wife Laurie, who somehow cleaned him up and got him playing again. And, incredibly, he came back better than he'd ever been. His later records reveal a soulful rawness, a tortured beauty borne of his experience which elevate them beyond any of the sweetness of his early recordings. He wasn't the greatest composer in the world, or the greatest improviser, he didn't have the greatest technique, but Pepper could bring tears to your eyes with a handful of notes. All the joy and misery of his life is there in the music. As he said, "I want the emotion to come out rather than try to make everything perfect. You can’t express your emotions that way."

The eighth letter of the alphabet is H. That’s aitch. Not haitch. It’s in the dictionary under A. Pronouncing it haitch isn’t a regional variation or a matter of choice, it’s just wrong. Incorrect. Erroneous.

I’ve long suspected that The Haitch People are part of some secret society, and their mispronunciation of the letter is their verbal equivalent of a Masonic handshake. They probably have clandestine meetings (presumably at their Haitch Q) where they discuss other methods of destabilising the fabric of the English language. Their campaign to ensure that nobody pronounces ‘harassment’ correctly has been an almost complete success, and no doubt there are other innocent words out there awaiting assault from their barbarian tongues. I’m not sure what long-term aims might be served by such disregard for linguistic decency, but I guarantee they’ve got a plan and this apparently harmless letter abuse is only the beginning.

Stand up to The Haitch People. They are perverse and very possibly evil.

Snooker commentators are an annoying bunch, aren’t they? Dennis Taylor seems a nice enough chap but, like many Northern Irish folk, he has problems distinguishing between a past and a past participle. Although that’s preferable to John Virgo, who uses adjectives relentlessly when he needs adverbs. Willie Thorne’s grammar is slightly less suspect but he whinges constantly. However, my main problem with them is their unique mixture of condescension and hyperbole. Endless explanations of tactical battles which anyone who has followed the game for more than a couple of days can understand (it’s snooker, not chess – the tactics are glorified geometry) are coupled with repeated assurances that this or that is the greatest this or that since the invention of the sphere. Well, sports spectators aren’t stupid (not that stupid, anyway). We’ve seen most of it before, and when we haven’t we’re capable of working out that something is memorable for ourselves. Banging on ad nauseam that what we’re witnessing is remarkable just prompts the viewer to sharpen his critical faculties and make a realistic appraisal.

I trod on the cat the other night. Having previously expressed my feelings about dogs in these pages I should probably explain that it was inadvertent, but it did send me on a train of thought which could yet make my fortune. It occurred to me, for example, that it is not his fault that a flight of stairs looks to him like a graded arrangement of ideally sized cat napping benches. Nor, with his enhanced nocturnal vision, does he realise that humans can barely see in the dark. And with his feline lack of self-awareness, he is unable to glance in the mirror and appreciate that when he lies on his front his entirely black back makes him almost completely invisible at such times. With all this in mind, I have come up with a device which will transform the lives of dusky step-dwelling moggies everywhere.

Fluorescent Cat Jackets.

As you head off for bed, just slip the luminous jacket onto your cat, and be sure that should you need to stumble haphazardly down the stairs at some unearthly hour to check for the seventh time a door that you know full well is already locked (for surely it can’t just be me), your pet will not lie surreptitiously in wait for you like some giant furry banana skin. No, wearing his Fluorescent Cat Jacket he will loom out of the darkness like a radioactive beacon, and you will sidestep him effortlessly.

See, I TOLD you we'd do it. Not much of a game if truth be told, and if anything we should probably have scored another, but a win's a win. Obviously the main point of us winning tonight was to create the opportunity for the ultimate disappointment of losing, and failing to get to Wembley, at home on Tuesday night. There is much I still have to teach on the art of pessimism.

Anyway, enough tedious football waffle and more tedious jazz waffle. When I was 17, I tuned in one Friday evening to Channel 4's 'The Tube'. My reason for watching was to see an erstwhile favourite band of mine, Level 42, but before they appeared Jools Holland introduced Stanley Jordan. I'd never heard of him, and Holland didn't do him any favours by saying we should prepare ourselves for something the like of which we'd never seen before. But, incredibly, he was right. Equally incredibly, a grainy old clip of that very TV appearance is on YouTube. It won't be to everybody's taste, but I bet you've never seen anybody play a guitar like this before:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-l-IukRxxs

So, bearing plaudits from a host of jazz glitterati, Stanley Jordan burst on the scene promising greatness. Sad to say though, it never really happened. Despite a couple of excellent albums to start with, he never seemed to establish a clearly defined musical identity, and as such never built a strong following. The last time I saw him live was at the London Jazz Festival in 1994, where he was ignominiously asked to perform for about half an hour before making way for the jazz legend Des'ree. Perhaps that was why he delivered such a lacklustre performance. At one point he explained to the audience that although he was using backing tapes, all the guitar playing we could hear was live. He said he wanted to point that out, because usually he got more of a reaction. It was a simultaneously plaintive and petulant comment which made me want to ask him where it all went wrong.

Three hours till kick off. Of course you know that already, you're counting the minutes.

Starting to get a little nervous now, I'll grant you, although I think that's mostly been caused by my discovery that Exeter City have been featured live on Sky 14 times in the last four years and have won precisely none of those fixtures. Those naive optimists amongst you would see that as cause for confidence, whereas we realistic folk know that when something hasn't happened 14 times in a row, that only makes it all the more likely that it will happen now.

I told myself that each of these 100 entries would have to be at least 100 words in length, and checking the above two paragraphs I find that they come to... 99. Typical. I'm counting it anyway. So there.

I owe much to Donald Fagen. He made an album called 'The Nightfly' - there it is look, at the top of the page - which I bought on a whim when I was 15. I liked the cover, and I was intrigued by the sticker on the front which said 'Founder member of Steely Dan', like that made any difference. I'd never heard of them, so telling me this bloke started them seemed a pleasingly wanton way to try and sell an album. I decided to give it a shot anyway - I imagine it was a period when we were all trying to impress each other with the music we were listening to which nobody else owned, and he fitted the bill.

In as much as it's possible to have a favourite album, that arbitrary purchase has now been mine these last 24 years. Perhaps at some point in my remaining 60 (ulp) posts I'll attempt to explain why, but for now I'll pinpoint the one line for which I feel so indebted to Mr F. Halfway through 'New Frontier', a song describing his youthful attempts to woo a girl, he sings "I hear you're mad about Brubeck, I like your eyes, I like him too". As the album became a fixation for me throughout my 16th year, I felt compelled to investigate just who Brubeck was. And once I found out, with a greatest hits LP which should be a compulsory part of every teenager's musical education, I never looked back.

Or course, the chances are I would probably have ended up loving jazz one way or another, but it might have taken a lot longer had it not been for Mr Fagen and his bewitching 39 minutes of paradise.

(If I knew how to I'd insert a link to the video for 'New Frontier' here, but I don't so try this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRrCZCN8Kj0

I may be biased - it's a possibility - but if there's a better music video out there I haven't seen it.)

Ten hours to kick off. I should be impossibly excited, but I'm not. I can't work out whether this is because of the crummy week I've been having, or my innate pessimism. Pessimism is, I feel, an unfairly maligned attitude to life. I suspect that we're going to get beaten tonight - badly beaten, in fact. We haven't conceded three goals in a game all season, and I can just picture this being the night. Now if we don't get beaten, who's going to feel better at the end of the game, someone who expected that to be the case or someone like me?

Of course, there is a school of thought that pessimism can be self-prophesying, at least in as much as how our own lives turn out. It's probably true to an extent, but at the same time I'm living proof of the fallibility of the theory. When I was 25, you'd have got incredibly long odds against me ever even having a girlfriend, still less ending up with a foxy wife and four gorgeous kids. Then again when I was 15 you'd probably have got pretty long odds against me reaching 39 in this sort of fiscal mess, so I don't know what I prove. Not to place bets on the vicissitudes of the human experience, I suppose.

Percentage wise, I'm now as far through the weblog marathon as I am through the consecutive number plate spotting. Funny thing is, in spite of it having taken me over four years to get through 380 number plates, it feels like it's taken twice as long to reach entry number 38. My current rate is 2.53 a day, and the required rate has crept up to 3.87. Seasoned watchers of one day cricket will know that it doesn't take long before the latter suddenly starts shooting up. Another four days at my current rate and the requirement will be 4.33 a day. Four more and it will be 5.25. Eventually, if I don't pick up the slack a bit, I'm going to be left needing to write 32 entries on Cup Final day. Assuming I watch the match itself and get up at 6am to crack on with this, that gives me half an hour for each one. All day. Without stopping to eat.

Not helping the push to 100 is that morale is approaching an all time low in my household. I have a son with some undiagnosed ailment which causes him to be exhausted for a week every couple of months, which obviously gets him down and has now started to prey on my vulnerable mind (when it comes to worrying about my children, it's a miracle I don't have them all attached to my wrist by a long piece of string.) My wife, who has enough on her plate just keeping us all fed and clothed and the house in order without having to work two days a week as well, has been trying her hardest to acquire new (by which I mean new to us, not brand new) much needed bikes for the eldest two. This she had finally done, only to be told by the bike shop this morning that they need repairs we can't possibly afford. She is practically in tears, both out of frustration and on behalf of the boys. I am practically in tears, out of frustration, on behalf of her and on behalf of the boys. The other day I gave my eldest a pound as pocket money, only to hear him a while later slip it into the jar I keep to save up for the football. He couldn't keep it for himself. I think he felt guilty about having it. When I asked him about it, he said he wanted to do something nice for me. He's 12. I'm supposed to do something nice for him. His heart was in the right place, so in the right place, but I doubt he could have done anything which would have made me feel more of a failure as a man and as a father.

Still, the four year old has discovered jokes, or at least what he takes for jokes. Here's one he told me a couple of mornings ago.

"Why did the chicken cross the road?"

"I don't know, why did the chicken cross the road?"

"Because his friend was in the hospital but he didn't know where the hospital was."

OK, so it's lacking a certain something, but he's undeniably got the basic structure in place.

Cycling in this morning listening to the aforementioned Geoff Keezer on the old Discman (and I use the word old advisedly, given that the bulky apparatus I have to sling around my neck is now a frequent source of open mockery by the iPod generation - whose listening equipment, lest my aversion to mobile phones be misconstrued as technophobia, I envy to my core), I noticed a piece of percussion work which hadn't met my ear before. Towards the end of a drum break, there was a very clear, richly defined strike on a cymbal. So impressive was it that I could hardly believe I hadn't picked it out earlier - it practically seemed to come from outside of the headphones. That was when I realised that I'd inadvertently knocked my bag against my bicycle bell, causing the clang in question.

Even though I'd created the effect myself, it definitely enhanced the listening experience, and I wonder whether I haven't founded a musical artform. If today's rap 'artists' can take someone else's record, talk over it and call it their own, I see no reason why I should not be in the vanguard of a new movement. I'm thinking of calling it jazz'n'bike. I will augment existing pieces by interpolating the percussive possibilities of the pushbike. Not just the bell - imagine the effect that could be created by reverb gear changing; the euphoric uplift of a hasty pedal acceleration; the frantic staccato of a playing card dragged across the spokes. I think I may have finally found my calling. Does anyone have Simon Cowell's phone number?

Picasso once said - I'm paraphrasing, but this is more or less it - that the day would come when a common cold could be cured by looking at a wonderful painting. I remembered this when I was thinking about Geoff Keezer yesterday. Keezer is an astonishing pianist who can play with absolute assurance in a dizzying number of styles. He is at home accompanying Diana Krall (as he does marvellously on the track 'Love Dance' from his album 'Turn Up The Quiet', thereby demonstrating what's missing from most Diana Krall albums - someone who can really play), in piano duets (as on his album 'Sublime' which is, well, the clue is in the title), in a straight-ahead trio (as on the last recordings by Ray Brown, notably 'Live At Starbucks'), or on the glorious trio recordings with saxophonist Tim Garland and vibes player Joe Locke. Some of his playing is too sophisticated for my uneducated ears, but that I can cope with is endlessly rewarding. A few years back I went to see him with Garland and Locke at the Holywell Music Room. This is a small, sparse venue in the centre of Oxford, apparently the oldest purpose-built concert hall in the country, and one which has hosted performances by Handel, Mozart and Haydn. I'd been toying with not going because I was feeling really under the weather, but I reasoned it might be a very long time before I got another chance to see Geoff Keezer so I'd better take it. So I sat, shivering, wrapped up in my coat, waiting for a concert which I knew might well be beyond me. But when they started to play the whole experience - the stunning acoustics of the hall, the rich texture of piano against saxophone against vibes, the aching beauty of the melodies - swept over me like some ethereal musical therapy. I felt genuinely better. And I thought, Picasso might have been on to something.

I am well aware that of the many redundant postings I have sent, a paean to Geoff Keezer is near the top of the list. But I don't care. Somewhere out there in webland there's another Geoff Keezer fan, and he or she might just stumble across this while Googling one day and feel validated.

We, the English, are too polite.

This is perhaps a surprising assertion in an age when loutishness and yobbishness are all around us. However, my point is not that general standards are too high (if only), but that many of those people who are well-mannered take it to a ridiculous degree, and in doing so devalue the act itself. A few weeks back I was standing in a Post Office queue behind a woman who was renewing or paying something or other. Up she went to the counter.

"I'd like to pay this please" she said.

"If you'd like to slide it through then please" came the reply.

"Thank you" she said, passing over the paperwork.

"Thank you" replied the assistant. A few seconds later he slid something back to her. "If you could just sign this please?"

"Thank you" said the woman as she retrieved it. She signed it, and passed it back with another "Thank you" for good measure.

"Thank you" said the assistant as he took it from her. He stamped it, and returned it to her with another "Thank you". She took it, with a final "Thank you", and went on her way.

This is absurd. I wasn't aware that we did it until I lived in Spain briefly, where the words please and thank you are used much more sparingly - dare I say, appropriately. Try it, actually listen to what people say in that type of situation. We are constantly thanking people when it is neither necessary or relevant. I often thank the bus driver when I get off the bus. For what am I thanking him? Letting me off? Getting me there safely? That's his job, which I have literally just paid him to do. It's not discourteous to just get off the bus. But I have been raised to believe that it is polite to say please and thank you at almost every possible opportunity, without thinking about the rationale behind it. I'm not saying we shouldn't use the words, just that we should only say them when it's meaningful.

This all occurred to me when I got out of the lift on my floor this morning. There was a workman there waiting to go down. I stepped out, and as he passed me getting in he said "Thanks". I have no idea for what he was thanking me. Vacating the lift? Bringing the lift to the right floor? No, like so many of us he was just filling quiet time with vacuous gratitude.

I thank you.

There are strange forces at play in the universe. I went down to get my tickets for next Tuesday night's home leg, and who should I run into in the Kassam Stadium car park but the very same injured defender of whom I wrote earlier, Luke Foster. I doubt I would have recognised him (sitting as we do one row from the back of the top tier it's hard to make out individual features) had it not been for the cast, the crutches and the disconsolate expression. I expressed my condolences, slipping seamlessly into my Dr Jekyll football character and using the relevant sporting term 'gutted', before wandering over to the Bowlplex. The inescapable multitude of TVs therein were rolling through a selection of miscellaneous 80s music video tat, most of which has very little appeal for someone who had to endure it first time around. Then, out of the blue, there was 'The Lady In My Life' by Stanley Jordan. (This would seem spookier if I had, as I considered yesterday, written an entry about Stanley Jordan, but you'll just have to go with me here.)

Someone without any form of belief in a bigger picture (someone like me, in fact) would probably dismiss this as mere coincidence, but it's all too strange. I can't remember the last time I bumped into an Oxford player but it's certainly years ago, and even when I did I hadn't spent large parts of the morning thinking about him and talking about him to people too polite to ring off or walk away. Before yesterday I hadn't thought about Stanley Jordan for months, and I didn't know that he'd ever made a video at all, still less one which might find its way onto rotation at a bowling alley. Something weird is going on and I can't work out what. The simple explanation is that Stanley Jordan, despite being a 47 year old American jazz guitarist, is going to step in and hold Oxford Utd's defence together at this difficult time. But that's too straightforward - these things usually come in threes, so there's one freakish turn of events left to arrive and make sense of it all.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that most of you haven’t heard of Russell Simmons. He’s the founder of the hip hop label Def Jam, responsible in no small part for the explosion of rap as a mainstream musical force. Now he’s called for broadcasters and record companies to bleep or delete the words 'nigga', 'ho' and 'bitch' from music.

It’s a complex issue and not one to which I profess to have an answer, but I have to admire his guts for coming out and saying it when such statements usually bring on horrified accusations of censorship and spurious appeals to the first amendment (I always felt that free speech was a privilege, not a right). Lenny Bruce did a routine years ago where he suggested that by continually using racially abusive terms we could rob them of their power to offend, and although it's initially an appealing notion it would ultimately be an empty gesture, because language would simply evolve to create new terms of offence. Aside from which, without wanting to get into a semantic philosophical debate for which I'm not qualified, I'm not sure that eliminating derogatory terminology entirely is necessarily a worthwhile aim. People will always need to express discord and enmity, and if there is no language to serve that purpose then what remains?

That said, I think the way certain styles of rap use the words 'bitch' and 'ho' practically as a synonym for 'woman' is lamentable, and Simmons is right to suggest that it needs to be addressed. If record companies and artists can't self-censor effectively, then they invite external intervention.

"Tea is brilliant" declares an advert currently rotating ad nauseam on commercial television. No it isn't. Tea is horrible, and anyone who says otherwise is misguided at best and delusional at worst. Even if tea tasted nice (which it doesn't), I fail to see how they could describe it as brilliant. Something brilliant is either literally sparkling and gleaming, or figuratively talented and inspired. Tea, on the other hand, is generally an insipid beige colour, and has never displayed any great artistic gift or innovative prowess. Mozart was brilliant. Einstein was brilliant. Picasso was brilliant. None of them was a cup of tea. I rest my case.

I'm sick of adverts for stuff I don't like, want or need. Commercial breaks are bad enough anyway, without having to sit through endless waffle about irrelevant products. I don't drive, I don't drink alcohol, I don't own a mobile phone, that takes out the majority of adverts at a stroke. Surely technology has advanced far enough that they could target at me specific adverts which might actually influence my meagre spending? I've got an HMV card burning a hole in my pocket, the various record labels and DVD manufacturers could wage televisual warfare for my £35. It would be a lot more appealing than seeing that bloke from The A Team shouting about Snickers bars from a tank. I don't like Snickers bars you mohicaned fool! They're full of nuts! And you know what I say about nuts, it's like eating wood, and we don't go round gnawing at trees, do we?

68 to go. Blimey. And today May 1st as well, that makes my required rate 3.58 a day. It's going to get messy.

I'm sure you don't need me to tell you that it is now 82 hours until the first leg of the play-offs. I'd like to say that the gnarled fingers of tension are clawing at my insides, but news of a broken leg to a key member of our already depleted defence has merely reinforced my sense of doom regarding our imminent West Country woe. In fact my main anxiety is less about the matches themselves than how I will react to the prospect of another year in the Conference. I thought I was ready for relegation last year, but the reality of it hit much harder than I expected. It wasn't just the relegation itself, it was the knowledge that I really ought to be able to be cold and logical about it, and realise that it's just a game, and therefore move on. The frustration of being affected so deeply by something so trivial was practically as bad as the initial disappointment.

This year it will be worse in one regard, in that I will be visually reminded of it on a daily basis. In February my company relocated to a building about two minutes from the Kassam Stadium. My office is on the third floor, and if I look up from my computer I look straight at the girders which hold up the South Stand where the boy and I sit. In a couple of weeks time, those girders might be laughing "Histon and Droylsden mate, Histon and Droylsden" at me twelve times a day.