Nothing like a family weekend away to reset your settings back to, well, factory setting, factory settings being the ones you were fortunate or unfortunate to be saddled with when you popped out of the converyor belt and into the big world.

Luckily, despite repeated attempts to override mine and adapt them, they’re still there somewhere, and they’re not bad at all. And I didn’t come from no factory anyway, more like from some strange, optimistic, jumbly co-operative workshop that expands across England valiantly and curiously, recruiting new members as it does so, who often look a little shell-shocked as they join the team, but seem to enjoy themselves nonetheless.

Having discovered the following things - the installations of Wolfgang Winter/Berthold Horbelt; how to make a balloon dog; Slominsky’s Thesaurus of Scales; nice old editions of Robert Louis Stevenson and books about the British countryside from a charity shop in Leeds that had a sign up saying AS MANY BOOKS AS YOU CAN CARRY FOR A POUND; the absolute appropriateness of playing Alice Coltrane at wedding receptions; and the rather pleasurable discomfort of wearing a full-on early 1950s outfit (including gloves and corsetry) all day long - I came home and tried to get cracking on the awesome task that is getting this magazine together in the next two weeks and still keeping a-hold of my other work at the same time, tired and inspired by my couple of days in another space with people I rarely see.

On the train home I read fiction the whole way, pleased to be back into words again after months of only wanting to listen to music, and when I got home I opened lots of jiffy bags and listened to Sunroof and almost without thinking stacked up all the lonesome boy-singer music I’ve been sighing over these last few weeks into a neat pile and pushed it to one side, the better to get on with the business of instruments and sounds. The better to concentrate on my own songs.

I read a quote from Morton Feldman about how if you didn’t have a painter as a friend, you were in trouble (or something like that). I opened up the window to listen to the mad London monsoon outside and started writing a letter to a painter friend who doesn’t have email.