Nothing so unusual about that, as I went to quite a few, even if not as many as I'd wanted or should have gone to. It was somewhat unusual being someone whose music I'd never heard; I'd only heard of him. Still, I was fairly adventurous back then and thought it worth a try. In some ways it makes the gig harder when none of the songs are familiar, but in others it makes it easier because you react purely to the music, and don't have the kneejerk positive reaction to the songs you know and negative reaction to the songs you don't know that you get with someone you're familiar with.

And perhaps that's why I find now that that was probably the gig that's influenced me more than any other. I suppose I was listening to the sound as much as the songs, and I can't now list definitively any of the songs that were performed, but I can remember clearly some percussion instruments and sounds that I'd never encountered before, and some guitar sounds that were completely baffling even though I'd been playing for a good few years by then. But most importantly the bassist was playing a fretless. I think that was the first gig I'd been to with a fretless bassist, and the sound and fluidity just grabbed me. It wasn't a lightbulb moment, but I can look back now and identify it firmly as the key to why I stopped viewing guitar as my main instrument, and why I came to see fretless as really the only way of playing bass.

What's funny is that it's taken some digging in my mind to establish this as the cause. If you'd asked I could easily have told you that bass was my instrument and that fretless was best, but it's a bit like when you're driving and you suddenly find you're on the A96 without ever having consciously turned on to it or noticed a junction. You find you're there, and you don't question. I find it really interesting how we can make big changes without even noticing the stimulus or that the change is taking place.

Perhaps it was because of my parents having the political intelligence of a Daily Mail reader, or perhaps because of my own preference for ignorance, or perhaps it was because I'd spent most of my days in a mature democracy where tabloids dictated election outcomes and, consequently, manifestos were written by advertising agencies. For whatever reason I'd managed to live a full quarter century before I understood the principles behind the so-called right- and left-wings of politics.

So it was that a kindly friend could, without any great effort, massively expand my political knowledge, and point out that, in a nutshell, left equals big government and right equals small government. Now while I agree with that to some extent, I see the two sides now as having rather deeper roots, and that the size of government is purely a manifestation of deeper principles.

From where I stand now it seems to me that the principles underlying these two wings can be described in terms of how they view an individual's destiny. To someone on the right, an individual is in control of, and has responsibility for, their destiny. If they succeed it is all to their credit, and if they fail it is all their fault. To someone on the left, society has a role to play in this - whether an individual succeeds or fails is greatly affected by their surroundings, so the credit or fault lies with society as a whole.

As with any two extremes of a scale, neither is likely to be particularly accurate, and reality is more likely to lie somewhere in the middle. Of course, a more moderate view in both cases would not lie at one extreme but would, rather, abjure the opposite extreme. This moderate position then, does not embrace one extreme, it merely rejects the other. A moderate right-winger might say an individual's destiny is not purely down to environmental factors, and a moderate left-winger would say that it is not entirely within the individual's control.

Naively, then, the conservatives are right-wing and the labour party left, and one might first seek to establish whether they are moderate or extreme in their positions. Well, the most recent tory politician to express a political ideology (as opposed to merely a desire to be elected) stated quite clearly "There is no such thing as society", thus quite emphatically rejecting everything apart from the extreme, or shall we say "loony", right-wing position. So, on the most recent evidence, the tories are loony right-wingers.

In the interests of political balance I should try and come up with an equally loony left-wing quote. Unfortunately I can't because a) I'm not aware of anyone on the left (at least, certainly no-one of quite such a senior position on the left) saying anything so stupid and b) as you'll know, I'm not remotely interested in political balance.

Of course we do not, theoretically, have a two-party system in Britain, and one might naively hope that where the conservatives form the loony right and labour form the extreme left, the reamining middle ground is taken by the liberal democrats. I have to admit that, on the basis of this idea, my political sympathies lie mainly with the democrats. Unfortunately this view does not fit remotely well with reality and I have to sadly confess that the lib dems seem to be scrabbling around for a clue as to what they should believe in even more than either of the other two main parties. Sigh.

If an individual's destiny is purely within their own control then it becomes clear that government is an irrelevance and, being a costly irrelevance, is clearly undesirable. This coincidentally ensures (to my naive, non-loony-right-wing mind) that those who have power will keep power, i.e., those who have the most money. Of course those who have loads of money like to think that it is purely down to their own efforts (which, when that money is inherited, requires quite an impressive level of self-delusion; we can be proud of our upper classes that, while intellectually-challenged to olympic standards, they can nevertheless achieve that level of self-delusion without even breaking out into a sweat) so it is convenient for them to hold loony right-wing views, but the conservative (with a small c) outcomes of such views is also undoubtedly something they're glad of.

To the successful, these views are comforting not only by reassuring them that they can take full credit for their success, but also because they can look at the unsuccessful with no feelings of guilt whatsoever. That tramp is in the gutter because he has chosen to be there, and I don't need to help at all. The acknowledgement that the successful don't need to help the unsuccessful, or indeed that anyone needs to help anyone, implies that the successful don't need any help from anyone at all. Which is why, for example, you'll never see a conservative politician claiming expenses from the state so that they can give their children some extra pocket money as reward for "research" work. It's why you'll never see right-wing supporters asking for help, such as claiming welfare benefits. It's why right-wingers don't believe in education, because passing knowledge on is a form of help. And it's also (to explain a point I made to a friend when I was unfortunately too inebriated to have any chance of justifying it) why punk is innately right-wing, since it is music made by people who claim (ignoring the fact that most of them are lying) to have had, and needed, no musical education. Like the "self-made" millionaire, it's nice to emphasize that you didn't need any education or help, because it means you get to take all the credit yourself for your success.

On the other hand, if society has a role to play in ensuring a positive outcome of each member, then it seems reasonable to try and organize this in an effective way, i.e., a government is needed. Of course, such a government, with the aim of improving the lot of each member of society, is quite a different beast to a government under a monarch. Since a monarch's primary aim is to use those same members of society to protect their (the monarch's) position and possessions, the government must also fulfil that purpose. It does so by appeasing the populace sufficiently to a) prevent civil disorder/revolution and b) persuade them that the monarch is worth fighting for whenever the monarch needs an army to defend their (the monarch's, remember, not the populace's) possessions. But one could imagine that a republic could, conceivably at least, have such a government for the people.

But if you've ever tried helping anyone in difficulty (including, for example, bringing up children) you'll realize that cooperation is rarely a high priority for the person needing help. Moreover, where some people do not cooperate, others take advantage. (Ah, yes, that's why right-wingers claim benefits - because benefit-fraud is entrepeneurial activity for which they can take full credit.) That was one of the reasons why I could never fully buy the socialist ideal. It seemed to be based on a rose-tinted view of human nature which fits neither my experience of people (as a mixture of good and bad, with nobody completely one or the other), nor my theology. So I was intrigued to read a review of Raymond Aron which suggested he had developed socialist principles that acknowledged that people can be bad, and that socialism is about working with that to achieve good government. Since I haven't myself read what he has to say I can't see if this fits in a coherent or plausible philosophy, let alone one consistent with Christianity, but I'm faintly hopeful. Which is an unusual thing to feel after any kind of political discussion.

About seven years ago I discovered a talent for soothing babies and rocking them off to sleep. Either it has something to do with flexing the knees at exactly the right speed or it has something to do with offering to hold the baby at exactly the right moment - when it is susceptible to being pacified. I used to mostly think the former but in my cynical dotage I'm tending much more to the latter view these days. In any case I got to really enjoy holding babies. Partly I was enjoying challenging the stereotypes and encouraging other males to participate in childcare by setting an example, and partly it was the simple pleasure of providing comfort to the child, obviously, but also to their parent(s) since a calm baby is better than a screaming one. I remember being mocked (by a mother; I'm afraid there is a gender war on and it's important to clarify which attacks come from which side) that if I really enjoyed it then I should do it full time. This was one of those incredibly rare moments when I had an answer ready because I'd already gone down that line of thought. And my answer was that I'd love to do that but I simply couldn't afford to since hands-on one-to-one childcare like that is never going to pay anything like as much as I earn (and, I kid myself, need in order to pay the mortgage and support my family).

Five years ago that enjoyment of holding babies took a dent when my daughter made it abundantly clear that she hated being held by me (or being with me in any shape or form). But other babies still enjoyed my rocking and I still enjoyed holding them, so the feeling largely stayed. And I suppose it still does though I get to do it less often. But whereas that enjoyment of caring for babies developed along with my own babies, it hasn't developed into an enjoyment of caring for primary school-aged children as my own kids have reached that age. I'm certainly not going to be volunteering to run a Sunday school class any time soon, and would rather do cr\èche any day.

Now, that all sounds fine and cool - different people have different talents, and of those with a talent for looking after kids, some will be good with babes-in-arms, some with primary-agers, some with tweenagers and so on. But it's not actually fine, it's actually a bit of a problem. Because it means, more or less, that I don't actually enjoy being with my kids. And that's not so cool.

This week I happen to be getting to watch a lot of TV, which is quite unusual and, consequently, a novel pleasure. And one thing I happened to see was a video of that clich\é, the middle-aged dad who doesn't understand his teenage son. It was an advert so it was fairly abbreviated, concentrated clich\é, so we had the son playing loud music on his stereo and the dad shouting at him to turn it down. Then we had the son playing guitar and the dad leaving the room, and later of course we had the son performing a gig to an adoring audience to demonstrate how successful he was in his chosen m\étier. And of course, everyone watching that was screaming at the dad to see how stupid he was being and to stop and listen to his son and understand things from his point of view. (Why, incidentally, is it so clearly the dad that's in the wrong? Is there no r\ôle for the son in the necessary reconciliation? Funny the things that occur to you once you become a parent.)

Now, of course, it's all supposed to be symbolic and the music/guitar playing is just a standard symbol of teenage rebellion. The problem is I (and I suspect I'm not alone in this) have a literalist mind, so to me the son is actually playing a guitar, not performing some icon of rebellion. As such it seems easy and obvious for the dad to actually stop and enjoy the music and, thus, build up the necessary rapport with his son. What I can't get my head round is how objectionable a guitar can be to someone of sufficient age. (Perhaps I'm biassed by the recollection of my mum listening to me playing music when I was a teenager and her saying "I can't stand this guitar strumming music" when actually the instrument playing was an organ with no guitar in the mix at all. Or perhaps I'm biassed by being an occasional guitar player myself. Whatever). I can't really comprehend the dad's difficulties in this scenario. I can't make the jump from literal to symbol.

But slowly I'm beginning to understand. To take one example, my son has a book about dragons. It lists dozens of different species of dragon, and details each one, pretending to be like those wildlife books that help you tell your great tit from your stupid tit and so on. For some reason (perhaps because of the association with RPGs, perhaps the proximity to science-fiction) I can't stand this book. But my son reads it and then wants to tell me every conceivable detail about the difference between the kangaroo dragon and the kimono dragon, their eating, mating and toilet habits, and a thousand other things. And I can't stand it; I just want to leave. As I said, that is one example and there are, unfortunately, dozens of others.

I can enjoy spending time with my kids, but (it seems) only if I get to be talking to them about science or music, or other things that I want them to know about. Ha - I almost wrote there "things that I think they'll be interested in". I stopped because even I can see the fallacy of that. Some of what I say they will be interested in, but my whole problem is that I have no patience for listening to them tell me about stuff they are really interested in, like dragons. I am a dad, I am that dad.

That clich\é-ridden ad at least makes it easy to see the son's point of view. My experience with the dragons makes the dad's point of view overwhelming clear too. So, if the traditional view is right then I guess I have no choice - I either get with the dragons or slowly lose my son. Great. Ok, tell me about the wyvern again and I'll try and fight my boredom.

There's a song about happiness which I quite like but which my wife doesn't, because, I think, she finds it childish. To my mind it's about taking pills (probably legally, but possibly not) as a means of curing unhappiness, and it's a reflection, or even a rant, about the shallowness that can lead people to doing that or recommending it for others. I hear the singer as a patient being offered anti-depressants and parodying the doctor as saying "Do you want to be happy?", and rejecting the implied viewpoint that being happy is all that matters in life. This interpretation is partly based on knowledge I have of the singer and the fact that he's struggled with depression. This knowledge leads me to interpret the lyrics one way, and read into them things which, objectively, aren't there. Objectively it is simply a song extolling the virtues of being happy. That simple extolling is all my wife hears and why she thinks it's rather less than profound.

To be honest I'm not so much concerned about what the song is supposed to mean. I am selfish so I don't particularly care what the singer meant; all that matters is what the song says to me, and to me it's an anti-happy-pill rant, and I'm happy(!) with that.

What interests me is how the context (my knowledge of the singer's mental health) affects my interpretation of the song, and whether I'm then actually responding to the song at all, or whether I'm just responding to what I know of the singer. And does that make it, actually, a really badly written song? For surely a well-written song should actually say something itself rather than rely on other sources to communicate? If I write a song with a lyric that simply repeats the word "naminanu" then it probably wouldn't mean much to you. But if I spread the word that "naminanu" is a word that American soldiers used in Vietnam to describe the moral vacuum they perceived in their intervention in that country, then the song would acquire much more meaning. But it isn't actually the song that has that meaning, in the same way that the song which I listened to while reading about the deaths of 200 people has become a very sad song to me in a way that has nothing to do with the intentions of the people who wrote the song.

The happy song is a simple case but I'm mulling it over to shed light a) on various songs by a band I like which, I realize, are good songs ruined by awfully-written lyrics, and b) on why most chorus writers seem to feel no need to write a decent lyric, and c) on whether my inability to understand or even parse half the lyrics I hear is due to my ineffable ignorance or due to them simply being badly written.

I didn't publish it here, nor anywhere else. Not even a single person has read it because it is so bitter. It rants against what seems to be a fundamental cock-up in the way the world is, or evidence, as Depeche Mode put it, that God has a sick sense of humour. I don't even know that it should have been written down. Writing things down often, for me at least, clarifies them and helps me see whether they are reasonable or risible. But this time it's left me in a quandary. What I've written seems reasonable - the evidence of the situation seems fairly clear to me. But if I accept it and act on it then that would require flatly contradicting several other principles that I take as self-evident. If, on the other hand, I'm to keep those principles, then I should suppress these contradictory thoughts. So which is it to be - that which I believe in, or that which my eyes tell me? Put like that I can recognize an age-old dilemma. Well at least that gives me an excuse for not knowing the answer.

It was the scariest book I've ever read. I read a lot of "horror" stuff in my late teens (including, to my shame, Stephen King's complete works up to that point) all of which I just laughed at - the only horror they contained was stylistic. The only thing that came close to being as scary was "How late it was how late" which was truly disturbing. (And brilliant, by the way. Jim Kelman comes across as a complete paranoiac in recent interviews talking of the London intelligentsia's patronizing attitude to anything north of Watford, but when you read that book, and then compare it with all the fuss the press made when it was published about the language, then you see that actually he's talking a lot of sense. And when the paranoids are the ones talking sense ....)

How late is actually a good point of comparison because the book I read those years ago, whose name or author I have no recollection of, was about a deaf lad. What felt really significant was this lad had the same name as me. I have always had a problem of identifying too strongly with protagonists in novels (except in those books which are so 1-dimensional as to prevent a 3-dimensional person getting inside any of their characters' heads). That's great for getting an emotional punch from a book, but not good for one's sanity. Anyway, somehow the isonymous protagonist made the book more uncomfortable for me than otherwise - it felt like the book had become a prophecy - the idea of a deaf me was inescapable.

I could cling on to the objective facts that I wasn't deaf, but they offered just as little comfort as the idea that when on a precipice I need not jump - objective and factual possibly, but meaningless and pathetic nevertheless.

And now that I have deficient hearing I find that book coming back to haunt me. I don't know if my hearing is going downhill - it may just be a result of all the gigs I went to in my late teens (see, I did something worthwhile with my time back then (well, okay, don't ask me what gigs I went to - I need to look after what little street-cred I may still have)), and it may just be that I'm noticing it now more than I used to, or even just that I'm less in denial about it than I was. Or it may be that it's getting progressively worse and that that prophecy is coming true. That's not a nice thought, but I wonder if this interim stage is actually worse. It's really quite silly, but I'm realizing that a major concern of mine is how stupid I must seem to people, because quite often my responses to what they say don't make much sense at all, or sound like I'm not all there. Whereas it's simply that I haven't been able to discern what they actually said. After you've asked people to repeat themselves once or twice, and especially if you haven't had the nerve to ask in the first place, and you can't understand, then what do you do? My answer, which is certainly not a great one, is you fumble. You mutter something inaudible, or vague, or you smile vacantly. That, at least, comes quite naturally to me.

Either way you get yet more confirmation of your feeling that you're not connecting with people, that you're isolated, that loneliness is closing in on you even in the times when you're surrounded by friends. And you end up feeling that John Donne was quite wrong.

Truth is important to me. I prefer to be honest, partly because I can't cope with the chess games of inventing a plausible lie and then making sure that everything else I say consistently fits with that lie, and partly because I struggle to tell when other people are lying. In fact I mostly get round that problem using quantum mechanics. Just as Schrodinger's cat could be simultaneously alive and dead so, when certain people tell me something, my brain bifurcates and holds two conflicting notions - the one that I've been told, and the logical negation of that. If I ask person A who ate my cake, and they say it was person B, then my brain seems quite happy to hold on to both the idea that B ate it, and the idea that A is lying and so probably A ate it. Experience gives me a balance of probabilities to assign to these two outcomes - for some people I have a 90% expectation of being lied to, for others it's a 90% chance of them telling the truth. And, just as in physics, sometimes the probabilities collapse and the truth is established. But often it's not, and I just go on not knowing. I suppose that not knowing has become a very familiar state to me and I seem to cope with it very well. (Or maybe not - maybe this permanent dissonance is why I'm completely screwed up. I don't know, so I'll go on considering both options and their relative probabilities).

I don't know if my dislike of lies dates back to this occurrence, or whether it was already present then, but there must be some strong connection, because this experience is so firmly etched in my mind. I'd done something silly and, to cover up, I'd lied to my mum about it. Unfortunately, but not unexpectedly, she'd been told the truth by someone else. So she challenged me, albeit half-heartedly I think. For various reasons I lied again - I said the other person must have been lying. So far, so depressingly mundane and so mundanely depressing. Now I don't really know what my mum thought - maybe she believed me (and don't mothers usually want to believe their own offspring?) or maybe she knew better. I'll never know for sure now, but at the time I was certain that she didn't believe me. So I knew my lie wasn't convincing her, and yet I felt it was important for me to keep up my pretence. Somehow it seemed important for me to maintain the lie even though she knew I was lying, and I knew she knew I was lying. I remember feeling that very strongly, even though I couldn't remotely understand why, and still can't.

Perhaps it's that incomprehension that's why I'm still concerned about that occasion. But perhaps it's the dissonance between what both parties believed and what they said. I often feel like I'm on the receiving end of that sort of thing - there were many times in my childhood where my brother would lie, either to my face or to my parents, and I would know that he was lying and that he knew it. And even when it was just me, if I told him I knew he was lying he would deny it. He knew, I knew, and he knew that I knew, but he would deny it. Of course he was sensible (in a way) to deny it: by doing so there was a chance he could convince me, but also it was a way he could achieve the usual fraternal aim of destroying his sibling. By creating such a clear cognitive dissonance he could mess with my head. After all, maybe that's why I'm so screwed up now.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately not just because of searching for the reasons for why I'm in such a mess, but also because someone is lying quite vehemently to me at the moment. But unlike those earlier occasions, this time I know the liar is actually deluded. Which, I suppose, means he's not actually lying. Hmm, as I write this I can see a further layer of irony to it all. As I said, I tend to interpret what people say to me in a quantum way, holding contradictory assertions in my head, just with different probabilities. That being the case, what would I say if you asked me who ate my cake? I'm not sure, but it seems quite possible that I'd give one answer one minute, and an opposite answer shortly afterwards, because I will have mulled things over in between times and quite possible adjusted the probabilities for each in the light of that mulling. Which is what I've observed my deluded friend to do quite often: many times I've seen him say two flatly contradictory things to different people within the space of about 10 minutes. And the thing is he's actually something of an expert in quantum mechanics, so it's really quite likely that he has the same approach to believing what he's told as I do. So not only do my childhood's experiences confirm the horrible thought that I am like (and as bad as) my brother, but I can't escape the fact that I am also like my deluded friend.

As I said above, truth is important to me. And that is, of course, what any good liar tends to say.

More specifically, I read the album title "tapes \& tapes" and interpreted the first word as a synonym of cassette, and the second as the Catalan form of the Castillian word tapas. I was intrigued by the suggested mix of music and food until I realized that this was undoubtedly not the intended meaning. Am I the only person capable of reading the same word in the same sentence in my own native language and misinterpreting it so obscurely?

At least I still think I was. We had been asked to write something, the details of which now escape me, perhaps it was a dictation although that doesn't seem likely. Anyway, we had been asked to write something, and now we were asked to swap with the person next to us, and mark their work. So I marked the stuff my pal Sam had written. (At this point it seems worth pondering the fact that Sam was the only non-caucasian in the class and he was my best mate. At the time I thought nothing of that, but some years later, when I realized how unbelievably racist my parents are, I wondered at the seeming paradox that by being so pally with Sam I seem to have not inherited any of my parents bigotry. Maybe it really is a paradox (albeit one admitting a simple explanation, namely that racism isn't genetic). Or maybe my parents aren't actually as bad as I perceive them to be. Or maybe just racism is subtler than I'm giving it credit for. I suppose the typical racist holds that people of other races are generally bad (in racially-specific ways), but that there can be exceptions, and meeting one individual of a different race, getting to know them and like them and seeing that they are genuinely good, is entirely compatible with maintaining the view that their race are generally all bad. In other words maybe I'm just as unbearably racist as my parents.) So, I marked Sam's work. And in one sentence he had written "slooped" where, clearly, it should have been "stooped". The t hadn't been crossed, so I put a red cross by it and docked a mark. That should have been the end of the story, but later when the teacher checked our marking she saw what I'd done and told me off, because I'd put a cross where Sam had correctly written "stooped". I don't suppose I'd remember this at all if it weren't for the overwhelming sense of injustice I felt - injustice seems to be a fantastic aide-memoire. I was absolutely certain that the word had been "slooped" when I'd marked it, and either my memory was completely unreliable (a concept that, frankly, is way too hard to grasp for a primary school kid) or someone had surreptitiously crossed that t after I'd marked it wrong. It was such an easy error to correct, with no trace detectable, that I was pretty sure at the time that this is what had happened. And I think I still am. I think.

The trouble is that I've had this experience repeated in different variants fairly often in the intervening decades. I've had an absolute certain recollection of something which has later been contradicted by the facts. In that first instance there was another explanation (the t being crossed after I'd marked it), but in many of the subsequent times there was no such get-out. My memory was simply wrong. Somebody would ask me who did a particular job and I'd say it was Bob, because I know that it was. And then some incontrovertible evidence would appear to show that it was actually Fred. It's not that I can't remember - it's simply that I remember wrong. It's not an erasure in my memory, it's a corruption. My memory supplies the answer with absolute 100% waterproof confidence. And it's wrong.

I guess themes in my thinking at the moment are trust, and how to handle situations where you can't trust people or things, and memory, and how memories can dominate for good or bad. So what happens when you can't trust your memory, when it lies to you? Essentially memory covers everything I've done, everything I've learnt, everything I've experienced, everything I know and consequently, more or less, everything I am. And I can't trust it. It's not a nice feeling.

The problem was that none of them were words. And none of them would allow themselves to be formed into sentences or even coherent thoughts. And unfortunately it's still like that. My head is a jumble, a blur, a London-sized congestion of confused notions trying to fly around but just bumping into each other and getting nowhere. Partly as a result of the muddle and partly as a result of loads of other things that I can't seem to articulate, I'm feeling pretty down most days, but unable to ever explain why. If you're down, and someone, someone who you actually care about enough to admit how you're feeling to, asks why, then just saying you're head is muddled or you can't explain tends to be a bit inadequate. And even if I can't explain to anyone else I guess I'd like to have a clearer idea for myself why I'm feeling like this.

I guess I've developed an over-reliance on articulation. Some weeks ago I was trying to understand a bad situation I'd got myself into and spent some time on my own going over the details, even writing down a timeline of what had happened, in the expectation that it would clarify things, help me understand and, most importantly, get me out of the hole and stop me falling in it again. In the past that kind of thing has worked for me. But this time I just ended up with a page full of notes jotted down that made no connection, bits of a jigsaw that didn't go together, parts for which the sum total was considerably less than the individual components. In short it got me nowhere. So, is that another symptom or a cause? I have no idea.