I’ve been using one of these new fangled tracker things over the last few weeks to some amusement – I still have not got past the shock of it vibrating away on my wrist the moment I have passed my step target (not something I would have thought about before I confess). The reason I have it is that I am interested, as I get older, in having some indications broadly as to how fit I am and whether things are working smoothly, although other than tracking the amount of movement and making a decent stab at monitoring my heart rate (I suspect at least it is accurate as the nurse who has to record it when I give platelets, I am under no illusion that it is a precision instrument) everything seems to be a rough algorithm. Like Body Mass Index then it can only be a guide to progress and not a reliable indicator of overall health.

I can see the appeal for more though and I suspect it is only a matter of time before we have sensors that will also conveniently and unobtrusively monitor blood pressure and also measure a lot of what we get blood tests for – cholesterol, various organ function measures and a one that personally interests me, blood sugar. As far as I can tell I have not yet succumbed to type II diabetes but I’m certainly in the risk zone – it runs in the family on both sides and my grandfather first went blind and eventually died of complications brought on by it.

But for the moment it feels almost like a game, this monitoring. Which I guess is what they are supposed to offer, a way of making people do more exercise than perhaps they would otherwise. Maybe, you think, I‘ll walk the long way back to my desk. After all, you don’t want to reach midnight only a few steps short of target do we?

I did miss it yesterday, but then I did not think climbing up and down the stairs a few times before bed was really necessary to get my literal ‘buzz’ of the day – even with good-natured coaxing from the Lovely Wife. But then I’m suffering from a bit of a head cold so I thought that no amount of playing the numbers game is going to make me feel any better because it is stopping me form running. Which as anyone who runs a lot will know is incredibly frustrating.

OK, I know that taking a sensible few days out to recover so I can get back in the trainers properly and safely is the right thing to do, but as is so often the case the opposite is more tempting. When the illness or injury is not bad enough to banish any thoughts of physical exercise, the temptation is to push your luck and come back as early as seems possible, but my judgement in that matter is often flawed. And as a result the setback is will take longer to heal and produce more frustration than if I had left it well alone in the first place.

But actually, it did help today. Having a step target gave me the satisfaction at least that if I cannot do the exercise I want to do there was still a target to aim at that was achievable even when I was not well which was still useful and would not put me back to square one. So hooray for the technological boost… But I want to be back in the running gear soon nevertheless.

I wish I had the energy of a sparrow.

Well at this moment anyway, as I write this (I’m uploading later) I am looking outside the window the amount of small bird activity is quite impressive. They are nest building (well you have to assume that a beak full of fluff is intended for a nest) in between bouts of noisy squabbling that could be the avian version of romance or territorial dispute or perhaps both. But for such small birds they certainly have a lot of energy. Maybe that is why in Disney movies the little woodland creatures always get press-ganged into a slave labour force for whichever generic princess type happens to need some housework doing.

I’m quite jealous of our little friends I was suffereing one of those days that have not really gotten started.

I think we all have days like that. They start too soon to begin with, as though someone has fiddled with your alarm clock to move it at least a couple of hours fast – I mean, it cannot be that time already can it? And from that point you are always going to be fighting a losing battle as you wade through the treacle of the day. I hate days like this. A bit like being a Newcastle United supporter (especially this season) after a few attempts at trying to get anything useful done you realise it is largely pointless and then you want to just throw your arms in the air and just give up for the day (or indeed the season) and just go back to bed and hope tomorrow arrives in a better mood.

But life of course does not make that really an option. For a start I have work to do and there is something just plain wrong about throwing a day away completely – if only because you do not know you will have one tomorrow. Well, of course you hope for it but there are no guarantees.

So, how do you get yourself kick started?

For some it is just force of will (‘pulling themselves together’) but I’ve never been strong on the willpower front so I need a bit more of a boost. For some that might be a treat (providing you do not feel guilty about the chocolate afterwards). Maybe motivational music is your thing. For me, it probably comes down to going for a run or at least a brisk walk.

The Lovely Wife has pointed out on numerous occasions that if I am in some kind of grump then going for a run tends to bring me out of it. Beyond the obvious physical benefits and the subsequent ‘runners high’ (which certainly exists for me, if I’m placed in a position where I cannot run for several days I become increasingly tetchy due to withdrawal) it gives me time to think, to be away from whatever was dragging me down or to pray. In the case of day that is not going anywhere it also means that I can feel I’ve achieved something in doing some exercise (which my cheerful little fitness tracker gleefully congratulates me on) so I’m already making some inroads into the day being not completely pointless.

So as the aches reside I can perhaps get back to all the other things that need doing with a small amount of positivity. The next step for me is to be realistic about what I am going to achieve. Start with the small things, the simple things and leave the large complicated stuff to a day when you feel full of beans (if at all possible). Put the pile of clean clothes away in the wardrobe that has been sitting there for several days. Send the couple of emails that you’ve been planning to send to old friends to check how they are. Do some washing up. I’m quite amazed on what can be achieved even on an off day.

But I wish it was easier, I’d be lying otherwise.

Well that was a nasty shock. My scales had been lying to me. And like all the best lies I was only too happy to believe them.

I’ve succumbed with the help of my main birthday present this year to the endless fascination of fitness tracking. Probably it is my stage of life but it seemed a good time to take a long hard look at how I’m managing my life and make some sensible adjustments. It seemed a good idea at time. But I should have reminded myself about various sayings about uncomfortable truths.

So the good news was that, allowing for inaccuracies these things inevitably bring with them, somethings at least are going well. Heart rate is in a nice healthy area and I’m doing more than enough exercise it seems (although possibly not the right type). But yikes, the new smart scales to go with the wristband has reduced any slightest amount of smugness that might have been brought on by the initial few days of tracking to a growing sense of things not being how they should be.

Whenever you get a new set of scales there is an opportunity for a nasty shock, and if the new scales are really that much more accurate the old ones have been underestimating my weight by several pounds… And I’m not even going to mention the dreaded body fat percentage measurement. So in a few moments, I’ve gone from a small amount of satisfaction to worrying about my BMI and thinking ‘how did it get like this?’

Not that I regret it. I’d rather know and then feel motivated to do something about it then stick my head in the sand and just let things get worse. I quite like these tracking things and ideally I’d like to be able to track other health parameters such as blood sugar and liver function, if only to be able to spot problems at an early stage and give me a chance to make the changes before they become a problem. That said, part of me wonders about the drawbacks of getting too involved with the figures. In the end, we all probably know the problems; I drink a bit too much, I’m not as careful about my fat intake as I should be, and take in too many ‘incidental’ calories, such as snacking on olives while cooking (very bad habit). Looking at the exercise I am doing, I start to see why this perhaps does not help as much as it should. Most of it fits into the cardio range which is great for my heart but not that good when I want to lose weight. Sigh. Who knew it was all so complicated? Well, I did, but it is easy to put your fingers in your ears and hum. It’ll be alright. I’ll start the healthy eating tomorrow. And that is one possible drawback of actually tracking these things. If the figures look good, then everything must be fine, right?

Maybe I am better off getting nasty shocks from the scales. The reality is that there is plenty of time for me to put things right, but it needs to be now as it will not get any easier as I get older.

So generally I am happy to have a better dataset then before to see how I’m doing – but I cannot say it is making me cheerful. I can also do without the cheery little emails from the system telling me how well I’ve ‘nailed’ today’s exercise goals, best exemplified by the one I received yesterday proudly informing me that since I signed up I have walked the same distance as the penguins in ‘March of the Penguins’. That really helps. Maybe I should go on a pilchard diet….

The problem with people you respect or even treat as heroes is that there is always the chance they will let you down (as they of course are human and therefore have the same weaknesses as all of us). I do not just mean complete meltdown of someone you might have loved as a child turning out to be some kind of monster, although that can be bad enough. It can be a lot less dramatic than that and these days of so much coverage of pretty much everything the chance of someone being reported saying or doing something you disagree with is greater perhaps than in the past where people were able to control the image a lot better.

Sometimes you know the flaws anyway and put up with it as you might put up with a relative or friend – you ignore the views that you do not agree with because what else that person represents is important enough to make that worth doing. So you bite your lip and say nothing, or if the relationship is of the right kind enter regularly into full on arguments that both sides know that they are not going to resolve anything but allow the air to be cleared (for the moment) and then you can get back to all the things you do agree on.

One of the most difficult things can be when someone who previously you could rely on lets you down when you most want them to be there for you. For many years I had loyally followed former Ultravox lead singer Midge Ure around the concert circuit and was probably one of the few individuals that actually bought his solo albums. Why? Well because I was enjoying the brand of well written folk/rock that he was pushing out and the gigs were an entertaining mix of performance and genial good humour (admittedly with some swipes at the charts – a reference to 2Unlimited regarding ‘No limit’ as ‘No Lyrics’ sticks in my mind).

So I was fairly sure I was on safe ground taking the Lovely Wife to Shepherds Bush for a greatest hits gig.

It was terrible.

The sound was off, the place half full and no support band (just videos), so the atmosphere was pretty much zero. Worse, Mr. Ure had clearly come with his grumpy pants on that day and his mood deteriorated through the gig. They sorted the sound problems out, but considering they were recording for an anniversary release and therefore there was a bit more at stake than in a normal gig this must have added to the pressure.

I was gutted, and I filed my CDs away sadly, as no matter how much I protested how much this was out of character (as opposed to say, a band like Midnight Oil, who are the only act I have ever seen you deliberately seemed to want to antagonise their fans) there is nothing better to cement something than to actually experience it.

There is a happy ending. We are a big fan of The Stables at Milton Keynes as a venue, and Midge Ure was playing there as part of his ‘Breathe Again’ tour (an album I really liked at the time) and with a little coaxing the Lovely Wife agreed to give it a go. Maybe it was the venue, maybe the superb support band (who also provide the backing music during the headline set, the excellent India Electric Company, do look them up) but suddenly it was all smiles and jokes again, and some great live music. We agreed in the car back that the rehabilitation is complete.

Now all I have to do is get the Lovely Wife to come along to another Marillion concert – again not a happy experience last time, although nothing to do with the band. That’s another story.

Erratum: As rightly pointed out by a good friend of mine with a better sense of geography then I the Maharajah’s Well is not, in fact, in Berkshire as indicated but in South Oxfordshire. Hopefully no one is stuck wandering around Newbury trying to find it.

Thank goodness that St Valentine’s nonsense is over with. Please say we can now get back to buying normally pricey rather than outrageously priced flowers for our loved ones and get back to working at the much harder challenge of loving each other throughout the year rather than focusing on one day.

You can probably guess that I’m a bit of Scrooge regarding February 14^th but like poor old Ebenezer the reason is from bitter past experience. For me, not so much the entire lack of ever getting a Valentine’s card (even in jest) but the sublime experience of being dumped by the then object of my affections (by email of course) on that date. Basically she panicked – we had been going down to Dorset to see her parents and spend the weekend wandering around the local area but I guess she had already decided to put an end to it and the possibility I might get all romantic on her obviously was too much to bear. In the end I went anyway and it was a perfectly nice weekend – but then I had still months of obsessing over this one to go through (I know… I cannot believe I was so stupid, but many of us can attest that the delusion of love can make you completely unable to see sense).

So I have a personal little hatred for the thing. Thankfully, the Lovely Wife is not very keen either so I can largely ignore it without creating undue stress on our relationship.

About the only thing I do get out of Valentine’s Day is being amused at the music played on the radio under the mistaken premise that particular songs belong to the romantic style of love song, as opposed to those that are about lost love, obsession or worse.

We tend to start Sunday mornings with the BBC Radio 2 programme ‘Steve Wright’s Sunday Love Songs’, a couple of hours of slightly tongue in cheek romantic tosh. Well, that’s what it is supposed to be, if it were not for the fact most of what is played is wildly inappropriate (and please tell me that it is deliberate).

This last Sunday my particular highlights were James Blunt’s ‘You’re Beautiful’ a song of a delusional and drugged up man’s fantasy (he’s not ‘flying’ high on the album version, it’s another word beginning with ‘f’ which gives quite a different perspective on the song) about someone he had just seen and never even spoken to, with the video suggesting (in my reading at least) it will drive him to suicide. Lovely – could they top this? Oh yes, my friends they could. A few minutes later it is Hot Chocolate with ‘It started with a kiss’, a song underpinned right from the start by the line ‘You don’t remember me, do you?’.

Still, it could have been the Beach Head feel of ‘Emma’ so maybe I should be thankful.

Does anyone actually ever listen to these lyrics?

Pick up any ‘Greatest Love’ compilation and have a look at the track listing (and then put it back down with a shudder). I’m looking at one now. Let’s see… ‘I heard it through the grapevine’ – great song but hardly happy love-wise. ‘The Tracks of my Tears’… ‘Just My Imagination (Running Away With Me)… It goes one and on. Goodness sake it’ll be the Police’s stalking record (‘Every Breath You Take’) or REMs dismissive ‘The One I Love’ next.

Actually the CD I’m looking at (given out free with the Daily Mail in 1996 if you must know) finishes with one of my favourite examples of the unhappy love song – Engelbert Humperdinck’s ‘The Last Waltz’, a song that leads you along in fluffy land until half way through the second verse before punching you in the guts – in much the way the object of Engelbert’s affection in the song does to him

Yes, there is nothing left but his tears and the orchestra playing. Happy belated Valentine’s Day everyone, personally I am more looking forward now to World Pangolin Day http://pangolins.org/world-pangolin-day/

It is proving to be a stormy start to the year in year in the part of the universe I inhabit and not just that I am looking out frequently to see if our fences are still standing and keeping the fingers crossed that the roof will still be intact in the morning.

But so far so good, although I found the morning run a little more of a workout than normal thanks to a head wind that was strong enough even to be problems for my considerable bulk.

Ah. There I go again. Once more I see myself as a blubbering mass of flesh. My lovely Wife will be reading this and shaking her head again and will no doubt (rightly) tell me off.

But still as Lent approaches I always wonder whether I can use this as a self-control rocket launch pad to get myself out of bad habits and into good ones and get myself into a path that could be sustainable for future years.

As someone who will be forty five in a few weeks I am still able to ‘party’ reasonably hard and get (mostly) away with it, partly because I have a heavy exercise regime and partly I guess luck and blessings. But the reality is that I am losing the war. The weight has gone up a bit but is under control; nothing seems to have gone badly wrong in other areas – yet. But I drink too much and regularly. I know so do a lot of people but that is not really an excuse for having full recycling boxes. On the plate the portion sizes are still too big, I have not yet completely unlearned the terrible curse of ‘eating everything on our plate’ and I let pass my lips too frequently things that should never be classed as food (I am thinking here of one of my favourite bar snacks, that cursed things known as the pork scratching. Take fatty pig skin, deep fry it – because the natural fat content is clearly not sufficient – and then saturate it with salt – honestly, I am not sure how you could make the things less healthy. But with a nice pint of beer, and the bags are so small, usually so everything must be fine, surely? I kind of thought that until I realised just how much that salt was temporarily elevating my blood pressure…)

Exercise is essential but it is only one half of the story and I find the other half difficult to adjust – although progress is being made. The main thing I need to find is the motivation. Someone very close to me smoked for years and despite many entreaties never really wanted to, and so didn’t, give up. Then he worked out that if he was no longer paying through the nose for cigarettes that the books could be balanced so he could take early retirement. He stopped overnight.

For me it is probably the weight question. I was a hugely overweight child and have struggled all my life with weight and related self-esteem issues and still do. I was terribly disappointed when I gave up alcohol one year for Lent and lost no weight as a result (and I was deliberately trying not to overcompensate in other areas). Not sure why that was, but I think that for the alcohol intake fear of other issues (my poor liver) is probably the best incentive for intervention. I guess what concerns me most is not the moment, but the future – if I’m blessed enough to have a substantial number of years left I’d like to be in decent condition but time does take its toll and the possibility of (what for me would be a disastrous) running injury gets higher and higher with each year.

So what am I giving up for Lent this year? Well, with regret the pork scratchings are getting the push among other dark delights (see you in April, chips). My birthday falls within Lent and I find it hard to celebrate a landmark birthday without a tipple, so it’ll be more cutting down than cutting out.

Rather I think I will try and use the time to redesign some parts of my life that are under my control to build something I might actually maintain after Easter that can lead me to a place where I do not feel that I am just building myself up for trouble in the coming years.

Sometimes the Lovely Wife and I like to go away for a bit of countryside and walking and this last weekend was another such mini adventure. At this time of year you have to take the weather as it comes and accept most things are closed, but at least it gives you a chance to get out on your own and away from people (sounds anti-social I know, but the biggest obstacle to connecting with the countryside is having to share it with a lot of other people). You can also get to stay in interesting places. This time we were renewing our longstanding love of Landmark Trust properties. Landmarks are a slightly weird and very British set of holiday homes, epitomised by the lack of providing even the most basic of communication devices – no TV, DVD player or Wi-Fi here – and in most cases providing accommodation in buildings that were never really meant to live in, even for short periods.

We have stayed in dozens of the things, but this was the first time we have stayed in an industrial mining building. Danescombe mine is the engine house of an old abandoned Victorian arsenic and copper mine down a track on the National Trust Cothele estate on the Cornish banks of the Tamar. As we cautiously approached (the pothole strewn track was somewhat perilous for our non 4×4 conveyance) it seemed to loom up out of the dark woods like some kind of Industrial cyclops (one big window left illuminated by the housekeeper).

Inside the rear of the building is filled with a massive metal staircase entirely in keeping with the original use of the building while the rest of the three floors are the comfortable if basic accommodation. About the only thing that made us slightly nervous was the car parking space was on a concrete platform above what the logbook described as a ‘small stream’ but which with current weather as a fast flowing torrent. On the Friday night, as the rain battered down on the roof seemingly all night, it is fair to say that it was with some relief that I looked out in the morning and saw that our car was not in fact washed halfway down the valley.

The appeal of these places to me is based on a number of things. First, the conservation part of me would rather see quirky buildings like this converted and used for something rather than have them disappear – the Trust specialises mostly in unloved buildings that are otherwise good examples of their type and are in danger. Sometimes they are more obviously historically important (e.g. Pugin’s The Grange in Ramsgate for example) but often just forgotten gems, such as the Music Room in Lancaster, where a tiny enclosed square in the centre of the town contains of all things an abandoned garden pavilion that somehow has avoided demolition as the rest of the town grew around it obliterating the house and garden in once belonged to.

The most exciting recent Trust acquisition is Belmont in Lyme Regis. It seems incredible to me that we were in danger of losing such an important little house. In more recent times it was the home of the novelist John Fowles but its most historically important owner was Eleanor Coade. The artificial stone that she perfected (Google ‘Coade stone’) and marketed dominates so many houses and monuments up and down the country that the (equally decorated) house of the person who invented it should fall into disrepair and be threatened with demolition is very sad, so it is nice to know that it has now been saved.

We love our Landmark stays and this one was no exception, even if the walking involved random hailstorms. Unfortunately returns to the real world are inevitable, but made easier having generated good memories.

No, this is not a review of the 1995 album by Enya. This is a letter of mourning for the untimely passing of a fine old apple tree.

The house next door (no one actually lives there at the moment, the owners are putting it up for rent, so I am not concerned in personifying the whole house) is in the process of cutting down a large tree in their garden. It is a mature apple tree, much the same as the Bramley apple tree we have in our garden. I cannot help feel sorry for the old thing. The tree is over 100 years old and like ours was still very productive, but I guess that is their choice.

We love ours and are not looking forward to the day it dies, as eventually it must. It amuses me that people seem to forget that a tree is a living organism and grows and eventually dies like any other. In the end it just does these things a lot slower than we do and therefore does not meet with our own ephemeral expectations of those processes.

People’s attitudes to trees in their gardens seem quite often to drop at the extremes, where either they want them out or refuse to manage them (we know someone who likes their trees to grow ‘naturally’ in their garden and clearly fail to recognise that a garden is not a natural landscape so any plant in it should ideally be managed in line with that (as indeed is the requirement if you buy some woodland). The apple tree in our garden, like its unfortunate neighbour was here before our house was built in the 1920s. We found that out from looking at the original deeds, which show how the house plots in this area were drawn up. Before the houses were built this area was an orchard, possibly connected to then nearby orchid breeding business. It is clear from the plans that each house plot was carefully drawn to include a large fruit tree in each garden, and if you look up the range of gardens in nearby houses a handful of those trees are still there (numbers reduced sadly by one). It makes a lot of sense. In the early 1920s, having a mature apple tree in the garden was a major asset, not just for personal use of the family living there but for trading with neighbours and even retail sale. It seems strange now as we are so used to cheap and accessible fruit, but it was not always the case in peacetime or indeed especially in wartime. I suspect whoever had this house during the Second World War ate a lot of apple and probably swapped them illegally for other goods as well as delivering to the overall war effort stores. A fruit tree was a true asset. One of my favourite little places in Berkshire is the Maharajah’s well, which is a gorgeous piece of Victoriana set up in a village b    y an Indian nobleman as an exchange for a well set up in India by the local Squire. As well as paying for the well itself the Maharajah set up a cherry orchard nearby. The understanding was that the income from selling the cherries would pay for the upkeep of the well for perpetuity. Sadly, while the cherry trees may be very pretty, the value of their produce of course no longer is enough to look after this unique piece of history.

Our tree is of great value to us. It has provided crumbles, apple wine and apple jelly in boundless quantities, but it is also a home for a lot of wildlife (increasingly looking like an island in a sea of lawns) and at this time of year even the last lot of unsightly windfalls are an absolute godsend for the blackbirds and migrant thrushes such as Fieldfares. We had eight male blackbirds in the garden feasting on the one day of snow we had recently, which is quite impressive in a small space – and fun to watch as they are very aggressive at the moment and were clearly juggling their need for some juicy apple (with added insect larvae) versus pecking the seven bells out of each other.

I feel sorry for the family that might eventually buy next door. They won’t get the fruit or the pleasure we have in having a diverse garden. Maybe we’ll sell them some tickets. Joni Mitchell’s ‘tree museum’ becomes a little closer to reality.

There is something about a pie that seems to awaken some kind of Pavlovian reaction in myself and a lot of people I know. I’m not entirely sure why. Possibly it is one of those guilty thrills when you are about to eat something you know is not very healthy but are going to devour it anyway because you just know it will taste so good. Maybe it is because of the mystery of what might be lurking beneath that golden brown crust (hopefully not four and twenty blackbirds). Part of it, at least in the making of one, is how you can take a combination of ingredients that look nothing special to start with – let’s be honest, uncooked pastry is hardly enticing – which when later combined and cooked look just gorgeous, good enough to, well, eat.

I do not think that we give enough credit to the pie – and its variations, I do not want to exclude the pasty or the Bedfordshire clanger (for the uninitiated, which myself included until recently, the clanger is a double chambered pasty that has savoury filling in one section and sweet in another – main course and dessert in a single pastry creation) from this particular love letter – as part of our National cuisine. Like our selection of stews, hot pots and other slow cooked dishes our pies are ways of using up what we have and providing as much high calorie nutrition as possible to a population used to hard physical work – all in a handy edible package whether to be devoured on the terraces (famously the quality of pies at football grounds has been just as much of a talking point then the results of the games) or for feeding Cornish tin miners (complete with that ridge of pastry that had the dual role of first allowing the miner not to be poisoned by his lunch and second, once hurled away into the darkness, to feed the faeries…) Personally there is nothing like a good pork pie as a reward for a hard days walking in the country.

My love affair with pies partly stems from the presence as a childhood treat. My mother, who in many ways was a great cook and baked a mean Christmas cake never made pies that I remember. So pies were shop bought – and therefore special. The exception was what came out of the ovens of some of my older relatives. My Great Aunt, who lived across the road and who I was expected to call in on every day as a result had a relatively small repertoire but was terribly good at them – a light lemon sponge, perfectly crafted scones and the best apple pie I have ever tasted. I have still never found one quite so good. It had a sweet, almost cake-like texture and quite light and frankly the apple filling was slightly redundant. Sadly she is no longer with us, and she took the recipe with her (so often the way). It was a source of slightly wicked amusement that my grandmother, her sister, cooked an apple pie too, but unfortunately her pastry was something of the consistency of leather. In the politeness that comes from the necessity not to offend your mother we frequently commented on how nice it was, which of course meant she made more, little mini pies on old saucers that we could take home. And pile one on top of the other in the fridge until my mother or I had the courage to bin them and take back the saucers with praise for their baked goodness. Sometimes you just have to say things you don’t mean, and anyway if the apple pie was a bit of a disaster, her egg custard was exceptional (and again, lost to time and memory).

According to the Lovely Wife I have freezing hands. Apparently this is an advantage to pastry making. So this year I am trying to master the art of pie making. I doubt I’ll make it to the level of my Great Aunt’s apple pie – she made that every other week and we know what practice makes. But I am looking forward to the trepidation and thrill of taking something out of the oven and hoping it looks and tastes a thing of beauty.

In the UK yesterday everything it seemed was pretty much dominated by a huge outpouring of love and grief for David Bowie, and it is indeed very sad. At the same time at least we were lucky enough to get so much of the man’s art over what was a long and varied life – which is one of the things that certainly I found most impressive about the man – the way he played the reinvention game to perfection time and time again and usually seemed to be at least two steps ahead of what the music journalists and his fans expected. That’s a rare feat to pull off.

I was too young to really appreciate the seventies groundwork on his career and I do feel I missed out on the out there vibe of particularly the Ziggy Stardust stuff, which in retrospect would have suited me as a teenager down to the ground in both the aspects of flamboyancy – and, at that stage of my life – the mixture of music, science fiction tropes and sexual ambiguity. On the other hand, the thought of the teenage me with dodgy orange hair and skin tight jumpsuits does make me wonder if the universe was indeed saved from something even more terrible than the Laughing Gnome (let us not pretend that does not exist. He was young).

Indeed my main Bowie moments are based around the mainstream explosion in the 1980s and ‘Space Oddity’ from even earlier. I adored the latter as a child. It was sad and strangely uplifting at the same time and was like nothing else I had heard up unto that point. We always have impacts from the music our parents had and played, whether those be the scars that mean you cannot go near something again or whether a type of music becomes something of an aural version of a comfort blanket. In my house it was a weird bipolar mixture of the trendy (Beatles, Bowie and the likes of Johnny Kidd and the Pirates) to Easy Listening purgatory (Val Doonican, Barbara Dickson etc.) and all of it had some impact. But although I had an entry into Bowie through Major Tom, I did not take it.

Instead the next time that I got hit with Bowie fever was the wonderful video for ‘Let’s Dance’. Note that it is the video that sticks in my head, not so much the song (great though that is). Again, it is the mixture of different emotions that permeates it. On the surface the song is quite upbeat, even slightly soppy. But the video takes that, subverts it and adds a disturbing sense of wrongness to the whole thing that manages to unsettle and leaving you somewhere ambiguous about what is wrong and what may be right.

I think for me what makes Bowie’s work so interesting at times is the refusal to play the game and to allow anything to be tied down to one thing or another. I always feel that his art is saying something, but I’m never entirely sure as to what it actually is (and, at its best, it is probably saying completely different things perfectly coherently to different people). I mean, what is ‘Life on Mars’ actually about? I’ve no idea. I am not even sure it needs to be about something anyway if it is capable of generating a response every time out of people (even if that is to turn it off).

Perhaps the weirdest thing for me is based on all this isn’t it this or isn’t it that, it is hard not to be slightly suspicious that David Bowie is not actually dead but has just gone back to whatever weird planet he originally came from. Here’s hoping. In the meantime, finishing now with my favourite Bowie lyric, which I commend to all:

‘He told me:/Let the children lose it/Let the children use it/Let all the children boogie.’