Goggles.

I’m sitting in the roomy bay window of Chris and Laura’s flat. It’s a jammy flat. A Lucky We Know Them flat. As Ian and Fiona’s place is to outdoor hot tubs, so this place is to air displays – handy.

Right now, an RAF Lynx helicopter is twisting itself over the end of the pier, while a Gazelle, a Scout and some French thing are aviation pole-dancing further along the bay. It’s been a weekend of plane porn. Sea Vixen’s flashing their undercarriages and all manner of other filthy things. Bournemouth is at a drooling standstill.

..On a packed beachfront yesterday afternoon, we saw a slope-shouldered individual being trudged by police through the thonged throng in cuffs, looking sort of post-furtive. Not sure if that was to do with the planes or not.

I first kind of knew it would be yet another tricky weekend to get anything done at home at precisely 10.00am on Thursday, when I heard the first crackling screech of aero thrust – a Typhoon skidding around the sky over the cliffs, opening the Bournemouth Air Show with a flashy display of vectored oomph. I kept throwing myself at windows around the house like a rabid dog. Googling eyes pressed twitchingly against the smeered glass. Of course, a real plane bore should know that the odd flash of shapely wing between the houses is probably more exciting than a sensible seat at Farnborough, but still. By Friday lunchtime I wasn’t going to be anywhere but with Chris and Laura on the deck at Aruba, bags of overnight things ready to go back to their cliff-top home for the weekend.

Yeah. I totally love planes. Get it from my mother. She’s sitting on the little balcony with everyone else as I type.

—-

It’s turned into a stunning last day of summer today. Unexpected smell of suncream and the glitter of countless boats out in the bay. It’s like another festival here. Town below us is heaving.

It’s the umpteenth time I’ve blown up the airbed or cleaned my teeth in someone else’s sink lately, and it won’t be the last. My productivity is taking a pounding. I am being moved from one arsing about assignment to another, seemingly without ability to resist. Why? Why does this keep happening? What’s wrong with me? As I swashbuckle the studio’s schedule of pressing proper work, I’m beginning to tear my hair out in clumps at not being able to clear things.

I know. It’s largely my own fault. And there’s usually something tasty being served at wherever I end up, not to mention some good chums on hand, so it’s hardly a convincing tale of woe, I can see that. Like a cheerleader pouting at the injustice of spots. It’s not interesting. ..But here in my head, and in bed at night while my heart does something latin as I try to sleep, I’d dearly like to tick the events all off the list and get some space to think. And give my little bod some space to de-stress.

..Sorry?

I’ve no TIME to live in the now, you unhelpful bastard.

Actually, it’s been a like this ever since we got back in July; “Hi, lovely to see you. Lovely. ..Of course, you know I’m supposed to be somewhere else…” Bed, I think. Writing lists. Working out how to charge people for meetings and be surly when I get there, while still keeping the actual work.

..Yeah, so all a bit mad. Blah. Whatever. In each case, with all the things that have happened this year, we kind of had to be wherever we found ourselves. We’ve had a whole year of not seeing many people. And just as it seems I should be with Mum, gawping at aircraft this afternoon, so I wouldn’t have been anywhere else in the middle of my stupid schedule last weekend than with Sarah in the middle of a muddy field.

—-

If you’ve heard of Soul Survivor, you’ll know it’s a kind of big church event for young people. But surprisingly groovy apparently, despite that description. Momentum is a more recent addition to the event, being a week tacked on to the other three that’s aimed at a slightly older audience – young twenties. You know, that confident, cool, thin time of life.

If you’ve not had any real experience of church life or faith communities, this would seem a bit odd. Instead of waving their arms at a series of bands, the people who go to any one of the very many events like this throughout the UK year wave their arms at Jesus. Or at the worship band, depending on your point of view.

This is nothing I can claim as weird to me. Not officially. I’ve spent years exploring faith – at my own, limping kind of pace. Finding myself going to church as a teenager – the last thing I’d imagined I’d ever need at such a time of life – I found myself also going to a number of things like Soul Survivor. Though way less groovy. Really. And these events did a lot to help me frame a pretty positive view of life at a formative time, if I’m going to over-simplify it. They also did a lot to teach me about church culture and how conservative it fundamentally is on mass, despite the issues of freedom it explores.

So I understand these odd environments. And I can see that SS is a straight-talking, positive thing of its kind; I know how I benefited from the certainties I felt in the early days of my own journey. Yet going back to something like this after so many years was, I confess, a really weird feeling. It wasn’t my environment. By the time I left, I was fair pining for some kitsch lounge music and Channel Four News. But I hadn’t gone there for me.

On the one hand, it was an opportunity that I was grateful for to simply meet people. Talk around issues I care about – art and creativity. Hear where others find themselves and try to encourage. I’m not sure I’d get tired of debating this stuff – it matters too much. Art is about, famously, new ways of seeing. And I met some interesting people who added to the way I see things.

But, if I had an actual job over the five whole nights I was with Sarah at this particular church event, other than pretend curator, I consider it was really to be with my great creative mate.

It was a privilege. I’d have been nowhere else. And as Mark joined us and we all hung out some more, then found ourselves clearing up an art gallery together on the last morning, I just thought how strangely great it was to be on another random project with them. Normal. Despite how un-normal so many things really were.

As person after person approached us in the Art Shed and asked us about how to explore art and faith – how to ask questions and challenge life, while trying to build a safe community around some answers – I watched Sarah working with them, sharing her own experiences, and I should say honestly, I felt pretty moved. I felt pride in her and Mark. How much they’ve grown their creative outlook. And their family.

To create comfort when you don’t have all the answers; to help people find a place to fit in when they don’t try to look like everyone else – these are the marks of experience. Even wisdom. And these are the people you want around you to learn from. These are the people who help you find new ways of seeing.

This is the job of the artist. And, I think, the person of faith.

—-

Sitting here now, the balmy afternoon is waning and we’re all a little dopey. Mum is sitting beside me, gazing out to sea as the flotilla of little boats head west to Poole for the evening. I guess restaurants will be starting to warm up around the town.

Watching the Red Arrows at lunchtime and the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight later on, I was grateful to be watching these moving examples of teamwork with some of the gang.

And grateful too that Chris had vainly tempted me to buy a new pair of trendy-ass, wraparound sunnies. I couldn’t have seen half as clearly without them.

Mo-mentum.

So, this Momo job. Yeah. ..Not a real job. I’m working in a tent for the weekend.

It’s part of the zany joy of being an independent, of course; I can do odd things as part of the schedule. But I’m going to miss my Apple cinema display. And my flush toilet.

It’s a thing. A festival-type, young person thing. I think. It’s called Momentum. ..I think. And it’s somewhere near Shepton Mallet. But I should really find out sort of where before I leave with the mobile Momo domo later this avo.

I’ll be helping to promote the Art Shed on site for a few days over the bank holiday. It’s a chance to encourage creativity and the debates around it. These are conversations I don’t tire of having – and it’s always nice to meet folk. In truth, I have no idea what to expect from the coming few days, other than mud, the smell of paling grass under canvas and hours of cursing as I try to remember how to set up our needlessly large tent. ..I thought about being efficient and cute and just taking the little two-person thing, but then I thought: ‘HOW many nights? Sod all that crawling around – I’m thirty-seven and a company chuffing director… do you know who I am?’

I have these stern talks with myself sometimes. It comes from having no team to answer me back. Besides, I need the practice putting up the needlessly-large tent before Bestival in two weeks, when people will be staying with us and therefore watching us put it up.

Glancing at the long list of things to tick off over the next ten days, the thought of spending half of that time on a battered 12″ G4 Powerbook isn’t thrilling my hopes for productivity. But I’m taking the layout pad and the iPod and a pile of files and plan to become the Art Shed’s artist in residence – having people sit infront of my easel with nervous vanity while I scritch scratch away in florid swoops, only to swivel the board with a ‘ta-daah’ and see their disappointment at my sketches for an electronics distributor’s new logo system. At which point I’ll say something clever, like: ‘Art is about new ways of seeing – it’s more about the journey, the thinking, than the realisation.’ And while they’re leaving, I’ll call something pithy after them, like: ‘And brands are built on behaviours, mate..’ and then I’ll get on again. Or go get the team another round of coffees.

But you know? Randomness. Creativity needs a bit of this, doesn’t it? FInding yourself somewhere you hadn’t planned can be the space where the spark hits. Or something. I have a quiet wondering about that for this weekend.

..Although, in my experience, finding yourself somewhere you hadn’t planned means you’re going to get to know the drinks machine in Frankfurt airport really well while you wait for the flight to re-connect you to your bags. Or it means peeing in a bush by the M4. Or it means wondering woozily what all machines these nice strangers are plugging into you do…

Of course, the pertinent reason for going to this random thing this weekend is simply that Sarah asked me to. And all schedule challenges aside, I can can’t think of a more appropriate time to spend a while with this particular creative mate. I’m not sure there’s anywhere I’d rather be.

Besides, I usually come away from time with her and Mark feeling an extra creative momentum. And that’s my real job.

Drum riser.

After so long in a variety of sealed human cattle devices, the week before last, I guess it shouldn’t have been a surprise that I caught something. Kids and germs and fatigue and blah. Or bleugh. But I haven’t had a cold in over 18 months and the first ickoo tickoo in the back of my froaty on Thursday did seem odd. Especially in August. Then it moved beyond odd to proper, raging Man Cold. So, as you can imagine, I’m lucky to be alive.

I soldiered bravely on through Friday, but fairly unproductively by tea time, and then just wiped out on Saturday. Sunday I managed to do some washing up, I recall. But spaced out like I was doped after an operation.

The boring yet vaguely stressful point here is that I started Monday morning with a stupid list of things to get through creatively. Once again, I somehow survived meetings and deadlines but by being grouchy and short-tempered. Little tip for those of you thinking of going into business for yourself: don’t do this. Polite is profitable.

Still, as I prep for another ruddy day out of the studio, unable to eat into the work in front of me, I do at least have the very happy memory of sitting in a little studio in Poole lastnight, watching Mark A through the booth window bash the skins for all he was worth. His brow-beaded grins as we laid down some drum tracks for The Golden Age was infectious and uplifting after a sad, stressy, uncreative time. And, oh man, hearing him kick off to the d&b; section of Disfunkshun was a golden little moment. Buff-diff, baby. Mark’s hard-working enthusiasm is a lift.

A drum riser, if you will.

It’s this stuff that keeps me sane. Keeps me going. It’s the stuff I creatively day-dream about. And the last few weeks, I seem to have been listening to the mixes more and more.

—

I’ve not written about Wednesday because, truth be, I didn’t feel able to do it justice. And I didn’t feel sure I was fully there, looking at photos of my friend and trying to understand that – in our part of space and time – this was all we had of him now. Just three weeks before, I’d hugged him goodbye in a very casual way. Sure we’d get more time.

I couldn’t take in the full emotion of the tracks he’d been listening to in his last months. But Pearl Jam’s I’m still alive never seemed more meaningful.

I couldn’t take in the significance of the snapshots of life, slideshowing past us from Jon’s casual portfolio. But the simple views of the river, the shoreline, the mountains, never seemed so important to capture. To hold on to.

I couldn’t process the sense of loss that each testimony tried to tackle. But seeing how many people were in Russel Park Baptist that afternoon in Bedford, and seeing the surreal mixture of laughter, colour and stunned incomprehension, I felt a little humbled by the effect Jon had quietly had on everyone.

..I can’t process all this now. In the stupid schedule roller-coaster, I felt again like I was doing a lightning costume change and trying to hastily get into character as we drove up the M3. I felt this way for Dad’s funeral. For David’s. The people we’ve lost this year. The way we’ve needed eachother. The inability to ever take in their absence properly. I couldn’t function in our current life if I didn’t turn them all over to God fairly swiftly. Whatever it means for quiet moments in the future, right now it means the same message on each mental memory tree: ‘See you soon, mate.’

I wish I could measure the thing. The losses I’ve witnessed in my average life over the last four years. Have I ever understood my cousin Melanie’s death a few years ago? What her mum went through nursing her? The palsied loss written across the faces of her friends from Switzerland as they looked down at the wreathes outside the cemetery chapel?

How can I? How can I sum up whole lives? How can we understand the absence of our friends and family? We simply can’t.

We have to close it off and pretend. Or we have to surrender to it and be washed away for a time. Or we have to pray – pray as someone who trusts, bizarrely – and get on. Certain we’re on the same road. We just have a slightly different time frame to work in. I’m not sure how much we get to choose each of these options, with each individual grief.

Once again, looking around the room that day, I just wanted to hug the good number of people I seemed to know there and tell them thanks for being there. For Sarah, for Gill, for Wes, for Mark. For the bloke on the perifery, me.

We have such little time to enjoy eachother. Such little time to make eachother laugh. Make eachother see things differently. Inspire eachother to be creative.

Jon, mate – see you soon. And thanks for getting so many good people together last week.

Going to keep daydreaming about uplifting rhythms until we’re next at the same party, if you don’t mind, mate. It’s a tiny fore-taste of then. Got a strong feeling it is.

Love you, man.

AZERTY.

We’re back. I realise I’ve been away a week. Post, phones, mails – all piled. I’ve learned that my trip to the Netherlands has won me a job. And that the French have their own computer keyboards. Did you know?

Half the keys in the wrong place. Types like drunk arse in English. Requires shifts where you weren’t expecting them.

So staying in touch with home online has meant a fair few words coming out a bit wrong on Rachel’s dad’s laptop. But, after a year, it was good to see her and Jamie. The two girls are impish, gorgeous french-looking children that, watching them run around the wide, light beach of Criel Sur Mer, made me think of an idylic 70s childhood. A happy young family. Looked after by quietly bonkers-lovely parents.

But I’m feeling the ache of so long away from the family here in Bournemouth. Not that we could do much but feel it all, had we been here. But, y’know. Our friend is gone. And our friends are hurting.

And swapping hats so bloody much when you just want to be in one place, focusing on the one real thing on your mind is, it turns out, not ideal for clear-headedness.

Still. Here’s the positive. We’re back tonight, for what it’s worth. We’re joining a large group of friends running up the motorway to Bedford tomorrow, to be together and to celebrate Jon and each other; to celebrate how Mark and Sarah are facing the road ahead.

And Caroline and I have a shit-load of French booze in when we all get back.

Loss.

The last few days have been weird. Distant as we’ve been from the bedside, it’s coloured everything.

I’m sitting in an office in Eindhoven, somewhere on an industrial estate on a changeable Thursday afternoon, killing time before a flight back to the UK and a train ride to a ferry bound for France. And this doesn’t help the weird.

I enjoy meeting people. And I enjoy discovering that Momo can help them in some way – working for yourself as a creative is a firmly cool lifestyle, even if many of the professional challenges are far from arty farty. I hope today’s meeting and my madcap Presentation On A Train turns into a good little project for the studio and some helpful results for the people I’ve met.

But it’s the people I’ve lost that are on my mind. Losing a friend and seeing friends lose loved ones is no respecter of the To Do list. Sitting so far from the studio, knowing I won’t be back in it until the middle of next week and knowing some clients are jumping up and down about it just adds to the distance I feel about it. I just want to walk away from the schedule altogether. Do the things I most care about.

What I want to do is find a way to fill the hole that Jon has left in his family.

And, much as I love words and pictures, I need to find a way to spend more of my time making musical creative. Making tunes. Before the time or the energy for making a joyful noise is lost.