Moi je croix.

What do you take comfort in? I think that most of the things humans take comfort in are – if analysed with that most unfair of scientific tools, honesty – flimsy notions. Impressions. Brands, if you like – ideas of things that fit our view of the world and that we want to buy in to, to reinforce it. Romance, in other words.

Think of places. Caroline and I were contemplating the idea of city brands – every famous place on Earth paints an instant impression in your mind when you say the name – Egypt, Rome, New York, London. And straight away you know how much you identify with that place or not. Have you always been a London type of person? Does Marakech open a door of exotic comfort for you? ..If so, where the hell did that come from – you live in Bournemouth.

Both of us, for example have long taken a strange and well-known comfort in Paris. The idea of Paris. Don’t know why, but we do bang on about it. We were each asked once, separately, what our Favourite Place On Earth was – daft parlour game – and we both said the French capital.

Now, to a flimsy dandy like me, a place as ponsed-up as the city of lights is an obvious choice – a perceived lifestyle of loafing in cafés talking lightweight philosophy as a basically-not-veiled-at-all excuse to watch aloof french birds swing up and down the leafy boulevards. All safe in the knowledge that some of the finest creative names in history came here to do and to champion, even, exactly that.

..But Caroline? Perhaps the least pretentious human alive? She chose this place?

Don’t get me wrong, I doubt either of us would want to live in a world where you could never actually leave your Favourite Place On Earth – Greek inlets, Swiss Mountains and Scandinavian forests are all worth a visit I hear – but our joint admission just goes to show what a strong impression places create – usually despite the facts.

It makes no dent on my romantic daydreams of the Left Bank, for example, to be all-too aware that most Parisians live outside the Periferique and have a fairly unromantic view of the French police and their identity in Gallic society – that much-photographed Haussman-ploughed city centre still gives off an intoxicating vibe. And I don’t mean the dog shite.

But who remembers the city’s attempt to publicise itself – ‘Paris, c’est la Peche’? And, for that matter, how many people remember that The Big Apple was so christened by an ad campaign? At the beginning of the 21st century, at least, these iconic locations appear in our minds as fully formed brands, without an ad man or a local community influencing us either way. Don’t they?

Perhaps. But I’m not sure it’s quite so simple. What’s your view of Berlin? Black and white Nazi propaganda backdrop – or Lily Von Stüpp in fishnets, drawling ‘I’m so tired…’ on a back-turned chair? Or maybe you think of the wall and wonder what all that was about. I’ve not been yet – ‘yet’, note the brand impression already formed in my mind – but I think of a dynamic place of creativity and regeneration – art galleries and forward-thinking music. How right will I turn out to be when I go?

Places can change their brand then – perhaps when they fall out of the world’s consciousness a little and have to make a new statement. But how do they get inspired, these grand new statements? You may be able to – and have to – stump up umpteen million euros to re-imagine the Pottsdammer Platz, or to create La Defence, or Canary Warf, but who inspires creatives to get together and be really inspired somewhere? They probably put the soul, or at least the brand, into a place – but what puts the soul into them when they go there?

I couldn’t answer that without really thinking about it, which I can’t be arsed to now – it’s midnight, for Pete’s sake. But it makes me think of another idle notion that I’ve long taken great comfort in: the idea that British people are united by their use of humour. It’s the one thing that Middle Englanders quietly think they’re still allowed to be collectively proud to be British about – perhaps the one remaining thing.

On Fi Glover’s show last Saturday morning, there was a very nice lady sharing her Inheritance Tracks – pieces of music of personal significance, passed on from parents to children, and children to their children. She was a charmingly unshowy sort, who came out with a pearl I’ve not been able to forget all week. Because it’s something I think I’ve clung to as a very conscious philosophy for very many years.

The track she felt that her father impressed upon her was by Peter Ustinov – Mock Mozart. The gigantically talented Mr Ustinov is a comfort to many people, I think – a brand he would, I suspect, feel bemused at and unworthy of. But the fact that his enormous-seeming humanity expressed itself so often in sheer sillyness is something to make romantic Britons weep for joy. And Mock Mozart is a prime example. It’s what I do in the shower most mornings. On this record, he has basically multi-tracked his own voice as a series of strangely convincing operatic enunciations of random Italian words, to a Mozart-like score. It’s a piece of class daftness.

But what this lady, Anna, said it made her think of was her father’s strongly-held philosophy – if nothing is sacred, then everything is sacred.

If nothing is sacred, everything is sacred.

That’s it. That’s why it’s so bloody important to be funny. It’s defiant. It’s victorious even, when you’ve little other reason to feel so. And it shows what true value every little moment has.

Call me a daft romantic, but this is something I believe. And I find it a great comfort indeed.

Pneu pneu – da-daahh de-dada.

A whole week has gone by without having a wife around. Given that we’re normally both living and working around eachother here in the flat, it’s been a strangely un-strange week for me; think we’ve both just gotten on with things. And I rather think Caroline’s week has been more intense than mine, which is a cruel twist of fate given that I’ve been working and she’s been on a sketchbook field trip to Montpelier. Still, I’ll have to work up the sympathy a little when she returns, as right now I think she’s likely to be in a café in Paris, diverted to the city of lights by the current French rail strike. I’ve had FIP on round the house all day, listening to a bonkers-eclectic playlist and Parisian traffic reports in solidarity.

Lastnight, it was French music too. Though I’ve yet to decide if Air’s fashion sense is the future or not – it wouldn’t be the future of a family, if I did adopt their tight white jeans as my new look du jour.

I’m beginning to wonder if the Opera House has pants acoustics. Can’t say lastnight’s mix was any better than Pendulum’s a week ago – and what a dreary technical way to start a review of one of Pop’s most enjoyed left-of-centre groups. But trying to pull off electronic music live is a tricky one, I feel prompted to say again, and though the boys did an admirable job with their band, a combination of fizzy synths, live vocoding and a middle-aged audience did little to create a seething Zion in the mosh pit.

Still, as an inadvertant Air nerd, I enjoyed playing air keyboards along to their back catalogue and it was nice to hear so much from their least commercially successful album, 10,000htz or whatever it’s called. It was a likeable, tuneful show with a fabulously over-egged, arpeggiated finish, even if they’d cleared off with a friendly ‘bon soir’ by quarter to eleven. They obviously figured their demographic would need to get home sharpish to relieve the baby sitter. Never mind.

I did have a bit of a Pavlovian reaction to some of the tunes from Moon Safari though – I’ve had so many darned dinner parties to that album over the last decade, I was desperate for the main course by the end.

So, to celebrate a night out properly, we turned a joke into an action plan and Andy, Mark, Mike, Emma and myself hotwheeled to the Chick King and ate mushroom burgers in the seafront carpark.

Health kick starts tomorrow, when Caroline is back. I had better get the hoover out; if I still haven’t cleared the washing up by the time she walks in later, I won’t be humming french lounge music, it’ll be something from The Muppets.

Afrikaans apricots. Sort of.

Alas, I am left alone. Couple of days in, and Caroline’s absence from the home for a whole week is a darn shame on a cold winter’s night, but we are both being remarkably grown-up about it. While Caroline is drawing flick-book stick men with berets, while pretending to fill a sketchbook with intelligent elevations of eighteenth century Provence, I’ve already watched enough Top Gear on Dave to split my head gasket and indulged in splendidly serious World Cinema with Mark.

And that’s the interesting thing. Most of my finest chap-mates would furtively turn on Cold War documentaries and The History Channel and BBC Four World Music specials when live-in loved ones are away or not looking. If you are interested in another perspective on the Palestinian debate, for example, watch Sundance-applauded Paradise Now, about two young men from Nablus facing the prospect of becoming suicide bombers. Simply very good and very subtitled.

To be fair, I can’t think of much that my lovely wife and I don’t enjoy critiquing together. But one Top Gear a week would be enough for her, I think, and I’ve yet to convince her to snuggle up and watch Downfall, the much-acclaimed cinematic dramatisation of Hitler’s last days. I have too, I notice, left Tarkovsky’s original epic Solaris lying around conspicuously this week, two years after borrowing it from Jamie. Am I kidding myself?

Interesting thing, sitting here alone in the flat, little nose going blue as I refuse to put on the heating for a day with just me here, in the absence of the loved one, I’ve made some new friends quickasaflash, thanks to the superficial influence of the internet.

I promised myself I would restrict my Facebooking to real friends – actual people I interact with. However, today I had a friend request from a chap in Capetown that made me bend my rules.

Jaques Maclárn Peach wonders why he’s never heard of the name Peach outside his own circle, and why he’s an Afrikaans-speaking Boer with Scottish grandparents and a huge family peachtree crest with a mysterious motto in an alien tongue tattooed all over his arm. He pretty much seemed to be asking me: ‘any idea how I got here?’

I looked at the ribboned words around the crest on the picture he sent me. Not English. Not anything South African either. With huge communicatio-lingustic instinct, I immediately divined it to mean: ‘I abide in hope and abandon fear’ – or, as I broke it down knowledgeably for Jaques: ‘I live in hope, not fear.’ How cool is that?

I then immediately thought of having this crest tattooed all over my arm.

And then I looked into some Scots Gaelic, which I discovered this is likely to be. As poetic and noble as I’d like this hither-to unheard-of Peach family crest vision statement to be, it turns out it could equally mean: ‘Keeping myself in beer up in the glen, and enjoying the odd shank of heffer, stops me shatting myself’. And you think I jest.

What the hell was I doing looking this up? I was in the middle of a press production and trying to translate Scottish mottos into South African Dutch!

Thing is, Jaques’ story didn’t half sound like a story waiting to be unfolded. A series of buried links across the world. Perhaps a sort of Jason Bournemouth. And when I saw how many other Peaches he’d collected from round the globe in his quest to find a family, I felt I could do nothing but welcome him in.

He said: ‘it must be nice to have so much family’. I sheepishly replied that I didn’t bother with the rellies much – but my friends were as much family for me as anyone.
So make Jaques feel welcome in the UK, especially if you’re a Peach. Timewasting so sociably with the snapping social reflexes of the idle fickle is what we do best, so let’s keep it in the family. ‘Whether on the south coast, the south of France or South Africa, my circle of friends are all Peaches’ I assured him warmly.

Buff-diff, baby.

So, lastnight we went out. Just for fun.

I know – mid-week madness for two hard-working poppets like us. And we were, of course, already sleep-deprived from Caroline’s usual Wednesday late-nighter from London – and Mike, who’s idea it was, had to be up at five the next morning to do his morning radio show (gratemate), the crazy boy. But when you discover that stadium drum’n’bassers, Pendulum, are doing a live show right in your back yard at the Academy – sorry, the Opera House – it’s not so daft to give your slumbers a bit of a dent for such a big beat treat.

The band’s debut album, Hold your colour, is as much rocked-up, riff-tastic fun as it is sophisticated style statement. Sort of Apollo 440 for the naughties, if that means anything; all very nicely put together and so hot right now. But I did sort of wonder how they’d make it work live – I know from bitter experience how hard it is to make electronic music mix well in concert. Especially when you’re trying to create an atmosphere in a mostly-empty church hall to your mum and a stray dog. It either sounds like a backing tape with you doing karaoke over the top (which it probably is after all) or it just sounds like a clamorous mush. Which is a total cow, because the idea of mega soundscapes filling the night with sonic possibilities is a seductive one – electronic music should be the biggest kind of live music event, to my mind. Never mind, eh, you can always enjoy it properly on your iPod afterwards.

So, as we queued to get into the recently revamped venue and gazed around inside to see how they’d refurbished the Victorian space, I think Mike, Emma, Caroline and I all secretly wondered if everyone else buying tickets thought we were there to drive the youth group minibuses. But we continue to live in faithful Post Rave Nostalgic denial, as dictated by our demographic, and just enjoyed the DJ set – Noisia (I think – who knows what Mr or Mrs Noisia actually looks like, given that no-one ever introduces a DJ set) played some great mixes of electro tunes new and old along with a comfortable blend of lovely drum’n’bass buff-differy. Justice and The Prodigy and all kinds of things I vaguely recognised – all proper electronic music to my mind; groovy and cleverly built. We were all jigging about and grinning a lot as the vaulted old theatre filled and filled.

I looked at Mike and smiled. He and I were swapping musical reference points as usual and I suddenly thought how nice it was to be still doing so after nearly twenty-five years. Then I dropped my smile when it occured to me these reference points hadn’t changed much in twenty-five years.

Eventually, the floor below us was a heaving mass of hormonal youth. As the stage finally dimmed and everyone went bonkers, Caroline thought it looked like a renaissance painting of Dante’s hell – a dark sea of writhing limbs and red light.

It went off, proper. People were crowd surfing all night and being proudly pulled out of the front by bouncers, while Pendulum’s MC did what all MCs do – which was basically: wander around saying ‘Are you having a nice time? Sorry, what was that?’ loudly, while the musicians who were obviously all too nervous to do any of this themselves, just made a wall of energetic noise.

The two guitarists clearly thought they were simply in a rock band – tight-trousered Mossop & Keenrick ball-stretching oratory stance and all – and the keyboard chap/undoubted production brains of the outfit sheepishly pushed buttons between Axel F-style synth riffery. Meanwhile, the drummer just sucker-punched the 165bpm tempo all night.

It was just very cool. And very ramped. And very enjoyable fun, thanks chaps. It’s true, sadly, that you’d have had no idea as a newcomer to Pendulum’s oeuvre that they actually made finely-crafted electronic soundscapes of melody and poise, and you’d be hard pushed for some of the tracks to even pick out the face-slapping big fat riffs they’re famous for – the mix was mostly a wall of noise. Everyone kind of looked like they were miming in a sea of midrange for much of it, apart from the drummer and the MC who both sounded energetically clear, cool and bang-on. And really, this was all anyone wanted.

Top show; brilliant music hidden in it, with a couple of particularly nice musical moments breaking through the mix. Had a great time.

And best of all, Caroline is finally converted. She finally gets Drum’n’bass. I said: “Yes, darling, the genre’s double-time reggae heritage creates an irresistable hip-swinging hypno-saucery that builds the kind of wild-eyed build-ups, break-downs, switches and releases that the rest of Dance music can only aspire to.”

She just grinned and said: “Buff diff, baby.”

Autumn colours, winter blues.

Weird. Worrying? Welcome; Momo isn’t a frenzy of screams and clamours and phone calls and general jumpings up and down. I don’t think I’ve had such a civilised week in two years.

Of course the studio never has nothing happening in it. I’m still trying to think of a proper ending-in-o suffix for the new branch of the business that Caroline has established – she’s annexed half the space, technology, time and effort of the company to studying Urban Design but I’m blowed if I can make it fit the brand properly. I will – have no fear – this kind of creative time-wasting is what I’m clearly best at.

But despite her mad deadlines and my pile of things to do at all times, we took off a whole day on Sunday. Just sort of happened. And what a day to go for a walk in the forest. Just think:

Reasons Why We Live Here
(absence of mountain vistas and a decent music scene not withstanding)
1: People who are prepared to look past our character flaws and invite us in for tea live here.
2: We own a flat here and it makes sense to live in it.
3: The New Forest is cycling distance away and eye-wateringly pretty at this time of year.

Yes, it’s true. We went for a walk in the Autumn sunshine from Standing Hat near Brockenhurst and the trees and the colours and the light and the air and the relaxed beauty restoredeth the souls. I just so bloody love living here sometimes. Most times. Been grateful since I was a kid, in fact. Because all this niceness never takes you far from a shop or a rail link to London.

Sad to say that Mum and Dad, however, have been feeling more wintery than back-to-school chirpy. Mum has been badly ill since Dad came back from hospital. Been a cyclical thing all year and the doctors don’t yet know what it is. Poor things are so down about everything and I don’t at all blame them. They were hoping to get out into the forest themselves this week but I suspect it didn’t happen. Shame. They need a little soul-restoring more than many at the moment.

Going round there now, in fact. Because, obviously, they’re a pretty big reason why we live here too.