Don't do this

This Tuesday's comment on doing something different is very specific. Don't park like a complete arse. Here is the second in a series of "People who Park Like Complete Ejits, in Ealing Waitrose Carpark".

Now this one wasn't illegal or putting anyone's life at risk, just being a selfish plinker. It made life tricky for me and my little Clio (on the left). But if they park like this, do they also lob their fag ends in the street thinking that they'll magically disappear into nothingness, then wonder why the street looks a bit untidy?

Observing what's going on around you, taking responsibility for your actions, being kind and considerate to your fellow man (and Waitrose shoppers), these are things which make people happy. They make the doers happy as well as the done by; they add to the quality of our life in just a little way.
When I find myelf getting miffed at something so small, I remind myself that I'm not being shot at and I've got running water. Life's pretty good when you can afford to shop at Waitrose, unlike 99.9% of the world's population. Life's good for the owner of FL53 SYC too. So why not appreciate it, show that you are glad to be alive and share your good fortune by not being such an arse?

Selfishness is infectious. If other people do it, and get away with it, then it starts to look like it's acceptable. It's not. Be kind; that's infectious too. Start by parking in a straight line and maybe it'll spread to not shooting people on the other side of the planet. Or the other side of London.

The walk to work, sometimes.

My modernist tube station forecourt

Tomorrow's Tuesday, back to work after an extra long weekend for the English, at least. Not the Scots. (Don't know about the rest of you.) I'm fortunate that I have a variety of different streets I can walk down that all bring me home from the tube station without sending me a long way around. Many gardens to observe, flowers to make me smile, bodged porch conversions to make me frown.
But sometimes, I take a long way around just to see what's there. Why should we get home the fastest way possible? Why not stick in a few more steps just to see what happens?
When I'm in central London, particularly in the City, which still has a load of interesting little alleyways that it's easy to dash past, I sometimes stray along a route I've not explored before. Sometimes, when I know it's faster to get the tube, I get the bus instead, just so I can see what's out there.
Doing everything as quickly as we can doesn't necessarily lead to the most rewarding of lives. The pursuit of success, as defined by the usual Western guidelines: big stuff, muscular legs and more money, is turning out to be a bit of a let-down.
This Tuesday, even if it's raining, take a walk and notice something that's never caught your eye before. Wonder how it got there. Come back here and write about it.

My sort of summer festival

I've been thinking about how fortunate I am to live in London. (I'm practising counting my blessings because I've seen how miserable people become when they forget, and just spend their waking hours listing their complaints.)
Then again, when I think about how much stamp duty I had to pay just for moving from one end of Ealing to another, just to get my documents stamped by the land registery people, I darned well deserve to take advantage of all the excellent things that London casually chucks in my direction.

Last weekend we trotted off to Somerset House. Its huge courtyard is home to summer festivals, and we usually come here for a gig or two every year. It's extraordinary to think that someone once had the cash to build it as his town house. On Saturday the entertainment extended to us was Neil Hannon, The Divine Comedy, with his grand piano. He was wonderful, although I did prefer the last gig there with the whole band, where we was looking at us instead of the keyboard. This is a festival with no mud, where you can drink Pimm's and bump into three completely different pairs of friends, none of whom knew that the others were coming, then go home on the tube. Am I sounding a bit smug? Tough.
We share our home with tourists, terrorists and the Heathrow flight path. Once in a while it's nice to have something that feels like our own village fete. Besides, if you don't live here you can always buy the album.

Duty, deadines, determination and discipline

Deadlines. We deal with them all the time. They approach steadily, never by themselves, and we have to hit them before they crash and get us into trouble. I like to imagine them as like the little green aliens in Space Invaders games. The longer you leave them they faster they approach and the more they proliferate. When you've got someone chasing you, or a meeting report with a date and your initial written beside it, you know what you're dealing with. They want it by Friday, you aim to get it there on Thursday night (or if it's me, more likely Saturday morning because unless I'm given strict guidelines, 4a.m. still counts as Friday night).

What about the projects that don't have set deadlines, the ones you can put off for almost ever? How do you make sure that they ever get finished? At the risk of beginning to sound like a Victorian moralist, last time I wrote about duty and now I'm thinking about discipline.

Now I'm cutting myself loose from my biggest client to do my duty, I'm going to have to set my own goals, impose my own some deadlines then make sure that I want to hit them. We can use time management techniques to sort out which ones to do first, or to delegate or ditch entirely. We can get ourselves into good habits. We all have some of those: I wouldn't dream of going out without brushing my teeth or locking the door; I always recycle everything the council take; I even bring my plastic back from my holidays.

But to make things happen, you really have to want to make them happen. Without the determination, it all fades away. Finishing off books, for example, everything that you have on your "wouldn't it be nice..." list. How do we set and stick to our own deadlines when no-one is chasing us, or won't pay us if it doesn't get finished? Now that all my big projects are going to be like that for a year at least, can I be relied on to chase myself up? What's my incentive to keep shooting down the aliens?

It's not so much about the small stuff with me; I procrastinate on a grand scale. I take on to much big stuff, then stretch myself beyond any reasonable limit, filling my screen up with thumping aliens and buzzing about like a bluebottle trying to knock them all out before they invade. (And if you don't know what it's like to play Space Invaders, go here www.freespaceinvaders.org. Or even if you do.) In the early 1980s, I did get quite good at Space Invaders, up to 14 screens. You do it by keeping a cool head and a sense of perspective and by wasting loads of time getting good at it. Probably a bad example of discipline.

It's a question of deciding what's important. Then getting on with it. I've got my list (see earlier topics) and I'll make myself a future mood board. (Of which more soon.) From May to July I've got to spend time clearing out old projects that I really will never finish, so that they don't weigh me down with guilt.

Talking of which, if you're anywhere near W13, put 15th May in your diary. I'm having a car boot sale, except in my own front room and just for nice people. I'll be making coffee.

Discipline. Yes. Let's impose a little and bring myself back to the point. From May 2010 to April 2011, the year I've given myself to get things done, I need to get things done. There's definitely going to be some room for slacking about faffing and fiddling, because it's in the faffing and fiddling times that you have your best ideas, as long as you've been taking the time to observe, contemplate, consider and plan. And talking of plans, I've got one, but I'll keep it flexible, because all the best plans should adapt to fit the circumstances.

As stated in many other places on paper and in the ether, I plan to have a building where I can run writing workshops and yoga classes and where people can come for a good creative think, and a decent coffee. So let's see how we get along, shall we?

Free Fruit:

Free Fruit:
Go forth and find it.
For the past few weeks I've been out for a couple of hours each weekend to a patch of wild parkland near the canal in Hanwell, London W7. First it was the blackberries, then the plums, and last weekend more plums - 14lb of them - plus a few straggling brambles, a bag of apples and aother of pears which were just ripe enough to cook. This week, if it's not too wet, I'll get back to the pear tree (you have to clamber under the hawthorn tree tunnel but it's not impossible, just a bit of a challenge.

To be surrounded by more fruit that I could carry, without even having to stretch up on tiptoes, filled me with such fundamental happiness that it took me a while to calm down and start picking. Spending Bank Holiday Monday evening in the kitchen, turning it all into crumble base, puree, compote and finally, by Tuesday lunchtime, fruit leathers, was one of the simple pleasures that you hear people talking about theoretically but find difficult to pin down. So if it's not raining, and you have a patch of wild land nearby (or you know someone with a fruit tree in the garden) go grab some.

Cooking it is not hard. Put a small amount of water in a pan (1cm or so) with a load of fruit and a some sugar if you like. Put the lid on and stick them over a very low heat until it's all gone soft. Watch it or it'll bubble over and put sticky red goo all over your oven. (Did that.) Eat it. You can do exciting things with it involving pastry, syllabubs, sauces or savouries. Be as inventive as you like. In modern life we've lost the plot when it comes to remembering what really makes us content; harvesting is one of the good guys.

At the Proms

On Sunday night, we were at the Albert Hall to see a Promenade concert with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. We got some Beethoven (4th Symphony - which I'd heard before but couldn't remember). First there was a very modern piece which used three sets of timpani and the biggest collection of percussion I've ever seen, plus two harps which you couldn't hear for the percussion. Fun to watch though. You could observe the action while listening to the sounds, and let your mind wander off to the music and see where it took you. It sounded like a film score, passing through a ghost story, science fiction, a bit of 1950s black and white cowboy film (the bit where they're parched with thirst in the desert) ending with some huge explosions as the goodies triumph in the end. During the interval, we compared notes, and we'd all pictured the same things: Nick, who doesn't normally listen to orchestral music, Alex, (18) who's got a place at the Guildhall and performs classical music, and me, who got grade 8 clarinet in 1978 and was brought up on the stuff.

After the interval we got Berlioz' Te Deum. The choir had at least 300 people in it. 100 boys, 100 men and 100 women that I could count and I couldn't see them all. We'd a huge orchestra, four each of the woodwinds, five horns and trombones, two tubas, four(+?) trumpets, a row of side drums and one of cymbals. Watching the cymbal players was fantastic. Once every 15 minutes or so there'd be a couple of huge crashes, then the four of them would sit down again, carefully placing their kit into their custom-made stands. The trick was to spot out of the corner of your eye when they stood up, when they lifted the cymbals out, lined them up, then wallop!

At the back was a bloke with a substantial stomach who sat perfectly still for at least 40 minutes, then started to twiddle with his cufflinks. Then he opened his book and finally stood to sing. A wonderful tenor voice wafted around this huge space.

The best bit was the loudest; call me crass, but I'm standing by my claim; if you go to hear Berlioz, you want noise. The Bertie Hall organ is not to be messed with. We were way, way up, so high that if we lobbed a peanut off the circle it would take a good few seconds to hit the promenaders on the floor below. When the organ crashed out a huge chord, from bass pipes so massive you couldn't wrap your arms round them, and all 300 voices, basses to trebles, hit their notes, I burst into tears. I always do.

I count things. I think that there were around 3000 people in the audience (400 or so were the choir's mums, dads, brothers and sisters), but there were still some spare seats. I've not been to a Prom for years and yet it's only a 20 tube ride from my house. It's the biggest orchestral music event in the world, it's on my doorstep, each concert is wonderful. Yet along with another several million Londoners I don't shift myself off my office chair to go there often enough. The Albert Hall is glorious in its Victorian opulence, with its red and gold garments and its curiously intimate feel for such a vast space. Human civilisation started in the mud and several billions of years later it comes together in a round hall in SW1. The choir was singing to the glory of God, but for me this was the glory of the Big Bang and aeons of evolution.

Why don't we go? Well, because we've seen the Last Night of the Proms on television, all union flags and prats jumping up and down to Rule Britannia so we think it's for the white middle classes. Or we think it'll be sold out, or we think it's expensive. It's none of those things. We paid £11 each to sit down and Alex stood in the second row from the front for a fiver last Tuesday. It's less than the cinema. You can listen, you can watch, you can panic a bit when the organ player starts to flip his score backwards and forwards and you think he's lost his place! In front of me there were a couple of young teenage boys I bet had never been to a classical concert before; they'd come to watch their brother in the choir. At the very, very end of the final applause, when the choirmasters had been on and off three times and the tenor had been on and off twice, and the conductor finally left the stage and indicated that her orchestra could pack up, one of them clapped and clapped until he was sure he was the absolute last one. I leaned forward.
"You won," I said to him.
"I know!" he said delighted, "I was trying hard."

Which is why everyone should grab the chance to get down there. It'll fill you to bursting with things you've never felt before. It made me want to spring the Symphony 1010 clarinet from its case, make red and gold clothing for winter and unpack the spare speakers so I can have music in my office. Even if it just inspires you to be the last man clapping, don't miss it.