2006: MY LIFE ON HOLD

Here's a confession. I learned one new thing only this year - to make music on my computer. I still remember last January gazing at the time-lines and various buttons of the comparatively simple (as it turns out) software GarageBand and sighing about the learning curve that it was going to involve. With help from a couple of my friends, and a bit of encouragement about the initial results, I finally got to record an album of digital sound quality where pay-by-the-hour time was not a factor. (Never before.) There's nothing brilliant on there, but I'm not in my 20s anymore. It's a good enough album, and it's a start. Making it gave me hours of pleasure, and only a little frustration - it's much easier than old-style 8-track cassette recording. So now I have a technique, and I want to go looking for some inspiration, perhaps in some of the "nu folk" compilatons that have been released in the last year or so.

Suddenly, the kind of music I've always liked - and actually been making, since 1990 - more or less psychedelic acoustic stuff with a nod to folk tradition, has become, if not exacty mainstream, a genre that's written about in the music press. I think Devendra Banhart really got this thing going - it started happening in the States following his Golden Apples of The Sun compilation. Congratulations to people like King Creosote, Tunng, Espers and Joanna Newsom, as well as Rob da Bank and the Green Man festival (wish I could have been there) for carrying the torch! Maybe there will be enough fans of this kind of thing to come out and fund Roy Harper's pension?

With this, and Doctor Who being so popular in the UK now, I feel part of the cultural mainstream in a way I haven't for years. It's an eerie feeling. The last time was when I eagerly anticipated the third Oasis album and shook Tony Blair's hand in Downing Street (Spring '97) - neither of which I'm proud of now.

In 2006, apart from my album, I have achieved little else that's new. My life is on hold. The things I have most dearly longed for since I was a teenager, I have not got. I realise it's selfish to dwell on it. I don't.

I've managed to be unrelentingly upbeat ("unrelenting self-confidence and positivity" is a mantra I got from a friend in 2002) but sometimes it seems like putting a brave face on things. Against the backdrop of real, if not severe, disappointment, I've been getting on with it this year. Three things that have made me happy are positive feedback at work from our TEFL trainees (month after month, it's a shot in the arm); my unstintingly supportive boss; and Brindle, who keeps smiling through anything, and is determined that there's a spiritual meaning behind all of this!

I'm also happy to come home to "my" new flat in Budapest, where I can read, play, get online, and download at will. But it all seems a bit "adultescent", the Dylan period! I've often poured scorn on,

"...them that must obey authority
That they do not respect in any degree
Who despise their jobs, their destinies
Speak jealously of them that are free
Cultivate their flowers to be
Nothing more than something
They invest in."

feeling that I was something different - free, and for the most part happy. But I do wonder when I can comfortably begin to invest in the future in any way at all - I don't mean money and property, though that's part of it. In 2007, I would like to discover something of this, something long-term. If I don't succeed, I may turn the corner towards unhappiness and the beginnings of bitterness. There. I said it.

Best of 2006:

The best album was Broken Boy Soldiers by the Raconteurs. It's full of enthusiasm, and presses all the right retro buttons. I said that about the White Stripes before. Funny, that! "Good Ol'" MOJO picked it as album of the year too. I enjoyed every track but one, quite unusual in an album. I also enjoyed the incredibly hard-to-track down El Perro Del Mar debut (the tracks I've heard) for her lightness of touch and melodicism, and the unashamedly Hammond-driven grooves of Winner by Big Boss Man.
Some of the refreshed Beatles songs on Love were amazing - great to hear I Am The Walrus and Strawberry Fields in rounded digital brilliance. Love really worked - 9 out of 10. (My only reservation was the new ending of Strawberry Fields, which was a bit too much.) The best thing I heard all year was easily No Fit State by Hot Chip (actually from 2005) included on the Uncut compilation this month. It reminds me of the 1980s, not always a good thing, but is just such a effortlessly well crafted and well produced song, I never tire of it.

Films I liked were Knallhart (gritty realism), The Wind That Shakes The Barley (ditto), Children of Men (for the chillingly convincing vision of Britain in the future.) Best of all was Brokeback Mountain, for the reasons you've read elsewhere! And also because we've been ripping off the Texan drawl ever since in our office to mouth obscenities and let everyone know "Ah'm sick of beans" (sic?) The best TV I saw was Blackpool, a couple of years old now, probably? To me, it was just the kind of entertaining drama where you couldn't wait for the next episode. Nice to have that Dennis Potter-esque musical "commentary track" revived. The second Doctor Who series had its moments (notably, The Girl In The Fireplace) but wasn't a patch on the first.

The best books I read were (#2) Steven Pinker's How The Mind Works, where he deals neatly with Nature v Nurture and whether we should follow the ethical "dictats" of our genes - in the first two chapters! Then he goes on to discuss the mystery of consciousness... It's ambitious. Haven't finished it yet; the diagrams slow me down a lot. #1 was The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov, which I read and speculated about for hours, while I was living in Minsk (June) and gazing over the forest of tower blocks in the morning sun.

Being in Minsk was the peak of the whole year for me because it underlined that you can have an unforgettable experience form something you think beforehand will be disappointing. The summer was breaking out day after day, and the reaction of the trainees to the experience of communicative teaching added some belief against the doubt about whether the job I do is worth anything at all. (When you've turned your back on the property option and have opted to earn less to gain more in other ways, you need this!) My big wish in 2007 is for something else like this, and to feel that my life has some real momentum behind it. I'm also ready to record some more, in a stranger folkier vein. So bring it on.

THE QUALITY OF AMAZEMENT


I remember reading (in Sophie's World) the part where her philosopher friend reminds her not to lose the ability to be amazed by things. He mentions waking up to the fact that we are on a planet in the middle of "outer" space, and that we are sentient and so can reflect on it, except that people don't. Doctor Who echoes these sentiments when he tells Rose he can feel the Earth spin beneath him. The same idea is repeated in a different way in Steven Pinker's How The Mind Works when he writes about the "everyday miracles" performed by the human mind. He quotes Confucius: "A common man marvels at uncommon things: a wise man marvels at the commonplace." Now, is that enough intellectual backing? I get a lot of flak from people at work for using superlatives all the time; they think it's charmingly naive of me or something. It's not. I am in the world and this is my response: amazement.

Take this, as a random example of why. On Monday, I was travelling home for the midwinter festival (bring back the old festivals! by the way) and had time to think. I had just come through the futuristically refurbished Kings X, and I was sitting on a vehicle moving at great speed along a steel rail linking that surreal beast of a city which is London to my old home town. I was listening on these great Bose headphones I have to a digital reproduction of some Romanian gypsy musicians playing cymbalom, accordion and, over this, a seductively wailed melody line full of joy and real swagger. This was on CD not MP3 so it felt as if they were there in the same room. (Remember CDs?) I could stretch my legs out (on a cheap first class ticket) - it was bliss. And that was even before the wine hit. For the light effects, see below.

Be amazed again. It's worth it.

MIDWINTER LIGHT - UNCAPTURED


On this season's much anticipated journey home, I had to take at least three photographs in my mind. This is because I forgot to bring my camera. In fact hardly any of my best photographs have made it on to a format which can be publicly viewed. Come to think of it, it's true of my best music, which is often lost in waking up, and the best thoughts I come across, which spring up in a conversation but are never recorded for later.

First picture. I woke up, hours ahead of everyone else, on Sunday morning at a friend's house in Kilburn. It was just beginning to get light. The window looks on to an area of greenery, but from my sofa-bed I can only see twigs, branches and part of a tree trunk, bare for December. The sun, starting to rise, makes the tree look pale blue with green shadows against the palely lit (cloudless) sky behind. Then, at once, the branches are touched with bright coppery light. It's all framed by the window and looks like a perfect cover for a wintry song collection. But not mine, this time.

Second picture (sequence of films). Seen from a train window. On Monday, the countryside north of London was shrouded in freezing fog. (Still is.) The lines of trees across the fields look like a two-dimensional scene made with (does it still exist?) tracing paper. Each strip of scenery is covered with a layer so that the trees receding into the distance are greying into white and out of view altogether while the ones close to the train are quite distinct. Suddenly as we career past Morpeth, the sun shows, ghostly behind the mist at first. It's teasing, peering, gone again - then suddenly, and this is just as my first glass of wine kicks in, the clouds are gone as we emerge from the fog, and the scene is suffused with golden light, the white layer of frost on the fields accentuating the blueness of the shadows. Later as the sun sinks, it is all Christmas card silhouettes. The smoke and other vapours have turned dark blue against the sky which is still alight, its orangeness reflected by the pools of water (or ice?) on the ground. Now the freezing dark mist is low on the fields and as high as a person, or perhaps a house.

Third picture. Walking along Aberdeen beach putting off a bit of time before the James Bond film. Airbrushed sky (bright orange again, through green, to dark blue.) I can see the impossibly thin neo-gothic spires of Marischal College, the tower blocks winking at Bridge of Don, and a couple of cranes which must be at the harbour. It is all - and I'm not kidding - a keener pleasure, a more sumptuous memorable thing, than the film itself. Or is it only me? We should rate sky scenes and window scenes higher than we do.

Happy Solstice to all light lovers. Tomorrow the sun returns to the cold fields.

CHRISTMAS RUSH


Last weekend I went to Vienna on what's become a bit of an annual pilgrimage. I've always loved the pre-Christmas atmosphere anywhere - well, anywhere cold! It must be to do with childhood, an apprehension of magic that never quite materialises. Anyway, I went round the Christmas markets and took so many pictures of stalls that I could give you a virtual tour - but bought very little. There's something about a Christmas bauble that makes it look good in company, but throwaway on its own. Judging by the heaving crowd, it will have proved worth the stallholders' while taking all those hours to set up. In the - very - gentle haze brought on by some mulled wine, it was a perfect winter's day. The only disappointment was that there wasn't the least trace of frost in the air.