Fin.

I am very nearly out of spoons.

Put on your bravest face

A notepad and a baking tin. This sounds like nothing out of the ordinary; indeed, it sounds quite good. That recipe for flour-free banana loaf, scribbled down by pencil on a random scrap of paper in frantic dictation with a friend talking ten to the dozen, and which nearly disappeared thanks to my precarious habit of carrying around, in my vaguely showerproof but definitely not milk proof bag, for far too long bits of paper with useful stuff written on them, duly rescued and stored in my impressive, if haphazard, home "vertical filing system" prior to transcription into a better paper-based filing system, actually turned out jolly nicely. That this better paper-based filing system neatly combines recipes in beautiful bullet point arrangement, beam deflection calculations, sketches of mechanisms, and dimensioned technical drawings in beautiful third angle projection, perhaps suggests my system requires a degree of fine tuning.

Instead of bananas, eggs, cocoa, baking powder and chocolate spread—though I would perhaps substitute peanut butter—assume our recipe instead comprises the aforementioned notepad and baking tin, and a large steel ball bearing. It should be large enough to hold in your hand, small enough and thus light enough not to be so tiring as to hold for as long as the recipe calls for, which, unlike most recipes, is an indeterminate amount of time; it too should be small enough and thus light enough not to damage irreparably your best baking tin in the event of success, not unlike the propensity of an electric hob to accidentally detect your best baking tin that you plonked on it having nowhere else handy, and accidentally induction it to within an inch of its life. The ball bearing should also, and this the most important criterion, be heavy enough to make an excitingly loud bang when dropped onto the baking tin from a gentle height. For most purposes, the height should be a foot or two. And the notepad? This should be placed no further from the baking tin than arm's reach.

If the prerequisites are at least clear, the methodology may not be. When one goes to bed of a night, lie down as normal but with one's arm relaxed, holding the ball bearing aloft and above the baking tin. At the critical time, just before the electric shock of almost falling asleep, when one's thoughts begin to leap around one's head like so many cats having a mad half hour, one is often disposed to mad and peculiar logic, invention, inspiration. Riddles abound and are curiously solved by the absence of directed thought. In this welter of creativity how can one put to good use this untapped brainpower? Thomas Edison was reputed to have invented it in order to think his way through a problem, offline as it were. With that electric shock the ball is dropped, the bang is made, and one is rudely awakened mid-daydream. Like the monk who writes his words unconsciously, quick as a flash, put down everything. Sometimes it makes remarkable sense; in the case of an incredible invention that would solve many of mankind's greatest problems, to wit, "The banana is mightier than the sword.", it turns out to be remarkable nonsense.

Thus, in a similar, yet inevitably forgotten by the morning, manner were borne so many potential new entries here. It's only been ten months. I lost count of the different ways I would usher in the next instalment, confused them over time with new and intriguing introductions I imagined for my next video—another activity that has become delayed beyond measure—and wrote down literally none of them. I could start at the beginning, but just to be contrary I shall ignore temporal mechanics and instead start at the end. I wouldn't want to forget anything now, would I?

The irony is not lost on me that I should be quite the enthusiast of music that was created before I had learned to hold a spoon, let alone a bass guitar: music, on which I have elaborated many times before, whose raison d'être is to look forward: to embrace new technologies, new scales and chord forms, new mash-ups of prevailing genres. They say nostalgia isn't what it used to be. When you've written a diary for a long time, and you started out with such amazing foresight as to use one of those newfangled computing machines in order to make your writings more easily refer back toable, and you're faced with the harsh reality of stonking great paragraphs that, twenty years later, read like so many teenage angst words, nostalgia may be conveniently thrown out of the window and into the bin. Of course, we write at the time to the best of our ability, with all the information that may be to hand. Geddy Lee, for Rush's first album at least, was also the band's lyricist, before someone far more capable joined.

It's self-evident, too, given a longer listen through the catalogue of something of the order of 130 songs, that Geddy's finest Robert Plant impression quickly made way for full-on shrieking (while simultaneously being a better musician than you), which itself in the New Wave and post-New wave days of PPG Wave 2.3s and Simmons drums gave way to more nuanced high notes as experience (and age) demanded. Geddy once said himself, of revisiting the songs making up their famously ill-received Difficult Third Album, Caress of Steel, 'I don't like to go there.' Youthful exuberance was matched only by the naïvety of their expansive songwriting ideas. After all, when you've spent forty years honing your craft, you're bound to look upon your early work with suspicion. But to his—and the band's collective—credit, they soon stopped taking themselves too seriously, increasingly poking fun at themselves and going to town on retrospectiveness. Indeed, where once the compilation album was entitled Chronicles, a mishmash of would-be hits and generically popular songs, later compilations actually were called Retrospective such-and-such. I lost count of how many they did in that vein.

It was on Saturday, two days ago, that I was brought to thinking back in time, to June 29, 2015. It seems so long ago already that bass supremo Chris Squire died. How can a musician like him, a pillar amongst bandmates, be taken from us so soon in the medical world of today? Chris was only 67.

Neil Peart, famed drummer with Rush, outstanding lyricist, commanding author, and perhaps even a role model for introverted people, was also 67. Some things are just not possible. How? I was never a drummer, unless you count air drumming, typified by mastering the pattern that introduces Subdivisions, but my brother is, and I daresay the bottom fell out of his world just as mine did with Squire. I saw Rush perform four times, twice with my brother. We had a ball. For the last year and a half the band was already officially retired, but the sudden finality is jarring. Think too of Family Peart. In 1997–98, within ten months Neil lost both his wife and his daughter, and yet had the strength to pull himself back eventually from enforced solitude to drum again with his best buds, subsequently knocking out two of their best albums since the mid-80s. He regrouped, met Carrie, they made Olivia, and once more everything was right with the world. The Big C then had the temerity to arrive, and burdened Geddy and Alex with faces to show the world that, to respect not just the family but Neil's own desire to avoid the limelight, could not be the face they show themselves. And so the titans of the tricky time signature are laid to rest and fully cemented in rock history.

Our better natures seek elevation
A refuge for the coming night
No one gets to their heaven without a fight

Another fight was probably what I needed, too. I hadn't really had one for quite some time. An occasion, perhaps, for a DIY exorcism. It's too easy to go all retrospective and introspective and lose sight of a new objective. I wouldn't care to visit the road where there be dragons, or octopodes the size of houses, or worse, demons: at least not under the same conditions. That much I learned the very hard way. But this time I had otherwise good reason for some DIY. In a very real sense, it was a chance to catch up with myself, to try to pick up where I left off ten years before. I started with some more typical DIY: brakes, brake pads, discs, steering bearings…a little wiring. The last was essential. Before, I was using for navigation a device I called Dumbass: an outdated iPAQ with a dodgy OS, inside a homemade waterproof box, alongside TomTom's own outboard GPS receiver whose enormous size, to be fair, was probably mostly battery. The iPAQ's battery was unreliable at best, and rather smaller at worst, lasting fractions of an hour unless plugged into a power source. My Africa Twin didn't have an appropriate power source, so I'd made one from good old cigar sockets and a plastic box. But that was then, and this was now, and now meant my Garmin, and/or my phone, and USB. A few quid on eBay, and a couple of afternoons' tinkering time later, I had the power. I'd also saved myself about £45 compared with buying very much the same thing you find pre-made in the motorbike accessory shop.

When I was a car owner, I spent many happy hours turbocharging my way up and down the M6 in Clara the Rover, visiting exotic-sounding, faraway places like Manchester, and Conwy. The reason for those journeys hasn't gone, entirely, although the desire to run a car has, when taking the train often feels like as good an option, assuming I can bring my bike onboard. Of late—the last couple of times in fact—I had to borrow a car to make that kind of journey, the red torpedo on the roof, and behind me no doubt a trail of motorists with their necks snapped in two from sheer incredulousness.

I hadn't had an adventure for ages, and now was the time. S, R and A were visiting from the USA. S had given me plenty of advance notice, which of course I had done nothing about other than block out the time in my work calendar, until train ticket prices were considered to be less fun than burning petrol, and, as we shall see, rubber. I couldn't not make the trip to Wales. Before riding 500 miles along the Erie Canal in 2009, spending my birthday in the city I love more than almost anywhere else—Toronto—I had been further south in good ol' North Carolina to spend a few days with one of my best friends. It was only ill-fortune that my loose itinerary and S and R's movements couldn't coincide, for they were just up the road, in a USAnian kinda way. And of course I couldn't not make the trip, because our personalities are so very similar. A chance to hang out with people who wouldn't bat an eyelid if (or rather, when) I said the wrong thing at the wrong time.

Apart from having to stop in Moffat to wrap my gloved hands around the exhaust pipe, for it was a six-baselayer day and my heated grips (a) stopped working the week before, and (b) were the only thing I didn't know how to fix, and having to stop at Killington Lake later again to find a hot radiator to sit on and to drink even hotter coffee, I had a pretty decent ride to Jodrell Bank. Had my itinerary allowed, I might have pottered for a few hours at the great telescope, but it was cheaper to spend more time riding and less time sleeping in B&Bs so agreeably appointed that they came with enough milk next to the kettle.

The next day, I nearly upended my motorbike after travelling, oh, twenty metres at least, with the rude reminder that gravel is indeed less grippy than tarmac. Then my automatic chain lubricator stopped working. I found a motorbike shop in Crewe, with good stuff and ambivalent staff, and bought an aerosol of racing lube or some such nonsense. The M6 became the M5, and the M5 became the M50 as I blasted south. I changed my itinerary on the hoof because I had a bit more time than I thought. When I was in north Wales, I learned that it's either raining, or about to rain. I reckoned on south Wales being more like Devon, Dohrset, Zummerzet, where people go 'ooh-arrh' and sound like they're a little bit drunk. On my way to the Big Pit at Blaenavon, the road over the top got higher and steeper and even before the summit it was sleeting into my visor. So, not wanting to die horribly, I turned around and rode straight to where S was staying. The weather in south Wales was overjoyed to see the Mistress of Moisture again, so it hailed like mad as I navigated narrow country lanes with even narrower tyre tracks.

I liked S, R and A immediately. S of course I knew from long ago—hi, if you're reading!—and we all talked over our long breakfasts and our even longer expeditions to castles and bird hides, along roads wiggling over hills and down through valleys. Of course, to A I was nobody, so I wasn't overly worried about moody teenagedom amongst so many strangers, although events since then provided some background. I talked shop with S and R and did what I could, but I don't know how much it helped.

The valleys of south Wales mostly run north-south, so that's what I followed to get myself to Chester. Somewhere on the A49 a tree had come down. 'I wish I'd bought one of those when I had the chance!' said a friendly policeman to me, nodding approval at my rather massive motorbike and equally massive luggage boxes hanging off each side, before he explained the diversion route. I got to ride through a flood, too.

It would have been stupid not to carry on following Mark Williams' Industrial Revelations, or 'sites of special scientific interest' you might say. I'd done Dinorwic, the huge slate quarry by Llanberis; I'd been to see my carved stone lions of the Britannia Bridge; I travelled through the Conwy tubular bridge and up the mountain railway; this time my trail led to the great Pontcysyllte (say "pont-keuh-sidll-tie") aqueduct that strides magnificently across the River Dee between Trevor and Froncysyllte, and atop the eighteen stone arches, the merest ribbon of an iron trough that carries the Llangollen Canal. It was brass monkeys weather and blowin' a hoolie, so naturally I clumped out to the middle to take photographs and, of course, to look down.

In the safe and familiar—remarkably familiar, I have to say: even on my first visit so many years ago it felt peculiarly like I'd been there before—streets of Chester, all top-heavy, half-timbered history interspersed with the worst that the 1960s could create, I met my friend J. Such are the complexities of modern life, we manage perhaps to see each other once every two or three years. And such are the burdens of modern life, it's always in Chester. For a change though we ate tapas as we caught up, and I walked the long way back to my last hurrah of luxury: a B&B with woodwork, high ceilings, and paintings of vintage British fighter aircraft on the walls.

At Tebay the next day, for where else does one stop when motoring up the M6?, I happily cooked myself on a huge boulder and ate Dairylea for lunch. By the time I turned off the motorway I was back to warming my hands on the exhaust, while chatting to a guy who had thirteen motorbikes. And by the time I was on the home run it was so foggy I missed the final turn. I had to ride all the way into Big Town before I could turn round.

I'd had nearly 800 miles of wind, rain, frost, sleet, floods, and sunshine, and I bloody well did it.

I can't unimagine the events of eleven years ago; I can't unsee them in my mind, but now I can perhaps try to put them to bed. Like a child who gets shouty and stampy when they're over-tired, a child who cries and cries when the light goes out, a child who can't sleep all the way through the night because mummy isn't there, to say nothing of a full grown adult who ought to know better than to drink two glasses of water before getting into bed, the memories will resurface sooner or later at a time and circumstance of their own choosing. With any good fortune I can temper them, blunt them and leave them in a damp shed to go rusty.

May brought me up to date with what was partly a tribute to my Grandad, who I'm sure would have had kittens, or possibly sabre toothed tiger cubs, had he known about it. I comprehensively failed to live up to his—and my own—engineering expectations, but I share his deep and endless love of nature, particularly insects, and especially moths and butterflies. Despite already having modest artwork on my back and my foot and ankle, I wanted something else, something bigger, something stylin'. I'd initially convinced myself that I wanted it on the inside of my arm, very 21st century and relatively easy to hide, but it was an awkward shape with which to work. While I was fiddling around last year, looking in the mirror and drawing lines on my arm with my lip pencil, someone had asked me, 'Well, where would you want to have it, if no-one else cared?' Where indeed? That was why Morag at Tribe was finishing off my half sleeve tattoo that we'd been working on since the summer before.

'I thought you said this was going to be just a touch up!'
'Oh, well I'm just indulging myself. I'm a bit of a perfectionist.'

More than one person has quietly voiced an expectation that it will extend, inexorably, beautifully, down and around. It may.

What goes up must come down, sooner or later. I kicked off June by talking to my doctor about something I'd never dared discuss before. I touched upon it last time. I'm supposed to be clever, capable, caring, strong, self-assured, self-aware. People like me get into a funk, we get moody, bummed out, depressed, sure, but people like me aren't supposed to have depression. I was scared—I am scared—that it might be true.

I then outdid myself by breaking my beloved touring bike. The alternative was to ram right straight into the little girl who appeared around a corner on her way to school. I would often say that my Lightning was the bike that had never, ever hurt me. Now with its neat little fork folded underneath itself and jammed sideways into my front wheel, my plans for camping at the York Rally two weeks hence were in immediate disarray. It's hard to articulate just how much I love that bike, and how much the damage upset me.

My York backup was my RANS Sequoia, recently converted from smooth commuter to gnarly bikepacking monsterbike. My Lightning goes onto trains without a problem, it's one of the reasons I bought it. My Sequoia is just slightly long wheelbase, and consequently does not easily go onto trains, especially those with bike cubicles and godawful hooks that make me glad I have height and at least a degree of upper body strength. CrossCountry, Virgin/Avanti, and LNER, I'm looking at you. Why do you hate cyclists so very much? I spent the first half an hour of my journey to York arguing with the train guard because my bike didn't fit, and I fumed for ages before eventually calming down with two albums' worth of the most soothing music I could find.

York was sunny and warm. I wandered over to the Abbey, over the river, for lunch, and it was really lovely. I had a great chat with the lady in the chemist, when she asked about my tattoo, as I was buying suntan cream. The morning sun the next day helped the inside of my tent reach 40ºC and was just too hot to lie in. After breakfast I propped myself up in my chair and read my book for what felt like hours, before ambling around the Rally. It was much the same as last year. Small trade tent. ICE Trikes. Brew York. Junk stalls that make The Bike Station look posh. By the mid-afternoon I'd had too much sun and half-slept in my tent. By teatime I was reaching for the co-codamol, which at least did the trick in time for our annual ride down t'path t'pub.

I upped sticks on Sunday afternoon, even though I was booked to stay another night. The weather forecast for the night was thunder and lightning, which was fine except I didn't want to have to pack my tent and sleeping bag and everything the next day in pouring rain. But overwhelmingly, I was amongst sort-of-friends and mostly-bikey-acquaintances, at an event for which I'd been there and got the t-shirt, and I was lonely as hell. So I decided to please myself and found a bed at a rather nice hostel in town. Over dinner I struck up a conversation with tech journalist Deb Shadovitz, and spent Monday morning visiting an old friend. But the windmill was shut. The nuclear bunker I didn't know about before was also shut. I took myself to the railway museum and spent a lot of time pottering amongst the warehouse while the weather, once again so happy that I was in town again, emptied a cloud's worth onto my bike and sleeping bag that was still attached to my handlebar. I caught my train home, went to Mum and Dad's, and had a long cuddle on my own with my cat and cried a little bit.

July came and went.

August was my summer holiday that wasn't. Three weeks with nothing planned wasn't so bad because I had a mountain of DIY to catch up on. I like a spot of DIY. Except I couldn't even enjoy that because, at the last minute, I found I had a job interview to prepare for. That meant I couldn't, and didn't, dare go away anywhere. I stole enough time through the month to make substantial progress rebuilding door jambs and rehanging doors and painting and everything, all the while with half a mind on questions and examples. Later I was back at my doctor to discuss mood and some treatment options, and didn't want to go home afterwards. I walked up the road, around the park the long way, I watched the birds and photographed toadstools, and came back along the main road on the other side of the village. D-Day came, I did my interview, and I sped out of the building as soon as I could and rode home the long, long way.

I so very nearly got the job.

After Chris Squire died, his old sparring partner, frequent collaborator and one-man record industry Billy Sherwood took over the low end in Yes. For his earlier tenure with the band for their The Ladder album, I once described Sherwood as "dull as ditchwater". I actually haven't listened to very much of anything Yes-wise since their Heaven and Earth album, Squire's last, for two reasons.

Firstly, some bands, like Rush, were formed as though forged out of friendship, and stayed together forever and ever. Britain's cerebral, classical, counterpoint to the Canuck trio however was always something of a revolving door. After Jon Anderson left the band, not for the first time but quite possibly for the last time, and Rick Wakeman had left the band, not for the first time either, and indeed a while after Trevor Rabin had left the band, Yes was a hotchpotch of new and old: Steve Howe came back, grew his hair again and looked about a hundred years old; Wakeman, son of Wakeman, tinkled the ivories here and there but the role more properly belonged to Geoff Downes, once of The Buggles, always of Asia, sometimes of Yes. Jon Davison is Jon Anderson, with a velvet voice that could shatter glass; and Sherwood is a Spector guy and not Rickenbacker. Ho hum. They've made so many 'best of' albums that anything new is as likely as not to go under my radar completely.

Back in the day when Yes was effectively Yes West, ABWH came along, Bruford bringing with him the ageless King Crimsonite Tony Levin on bass and stick, and it was otherwise entirely the old Yes. ABWH excited the old guard, made a hi-tech sounding but otherwise rather mediocre album or two and then disbanded, back to KC, Asia, Vangelis, or if you're Wakeman, back to simply cranking out the solo albums. ABWH was a product of its time, the white heat of digitality. Wakeman's cheesy widdling on black plastic Korgs and Rolands was perfectly met by Bruford's hexagonal drums and bonkers sequencing of bleepy sounds that probably belonged in a Doctor Who episode.

ABWH didn't interest me then, and doesn't interest me now. Ah, but what was this? ARW! Anderson, Rabin, Wakeman. Even better, they were playing at the Usher Hall! And then I discovered that tickets were £75. Jaw? Floor. Floor? Jaw. Not so much Yes as Aye, Right.

While Yes were distracting themselves with lineup changes and Cruise to the Edge for all y'all jet setting high hiedyins, I forged a new best band ever. Strangely, it wasn't Gentle Giant, whose multi-instrumentalism and baroque-and-roll stylings supplied me with plenty of enjoyment until I tired of Derek Shulman's precious frontmannery. I don't care that he went on to sign Bon Jovi and, rather more impressively, Dream Theater and Pantera. Hell yeah. I was more drawn to the softy spoken and even more softly sung Kerry Minnear, on Minimoog, clavinet, recorder, cello and a dozen other things. In fact, I was drawn more to the renaissance elements, the more gentle side of Gentle Giant. Put them in a barn with bales of hay, lose the fraught delivery, lose the stomping drums, add someone absolutely shredding on recorder, and replace Precision Bass with bassoon, and you might end up with Gryphon. Who?

The second reason, and this is quite important, is that Gryphon is one of the few bands to give Yes's musicianship a shock. One of the few bands whom you wish had played a longer support set. The last band I saw do that was Skin, who very nearly blew Thunder off the stage. No stranger to the revolving door, the Griffs made five albums in the good old days then went away for thirty years to do professorships in being terribly clever, and perhaps create Kerrang! magazine. And then they came back as though nothing had changed, except possibly Brian Gulland's youthful excess of hair. A new album appeared, no less, and Gulland busily re-establishing himself in the role of class clown could only mean one thing: concerts. And better still, make the tickets less than £20! GG? ARW? Dinosaurs.

The only good thing that came out of my speed bike training with the ARION boys two years ago was a remarkably quick and pleasant working knowledge of Liverpool, a city that I liked a lot. With moderate travel costs and accommodation as cheap as I could find, I was jolly well going to see Gryphon performing. In a way, I wouldn't have wanted them to play anywhere else.

I sightsaw for the afternoon, pottering around the docks and looking at railways and bridges and tunnels. My hostel was scraping the barrel though: the window in my dorm was squint and didn't shut properly, my mattress was full of lumps, the oven in the kitchen didn't work, and the only bread knife I could find was less sharp than school scissors. Still, I was sharing a room with a guy who did a drag act so it wasn't all bad.

The concert, in a grand church a short bike ride from the city centre, was excellent. Gryphon played lots of stuff from the new album, various pieces from the first and second albums, plus a medley of bits from the third. The irreverent onstage manner and modest audience—I reckoned on a hundred or so people there—made the show feel much more like a cosy gig than a concert, and the time they afforded everyone during and after the show, to sign a bit of vinyl or a poster, was lovely. As I was chatting with the two guys from my row, they realised how far I'd come. They said I ought to get a poster or a photo with them. I wasn't much for doing that, and dithered a bit, but went with some encouragement. Before I knew it, the main man from the Liverpool Prog Society rounded up all the band members and got me into the photograph.

October I seemed to spend mostly babysitting. My neighbours came over for tea one day. The little ones were full of beans. We played at being helicopter pilots with my motorbike helmets, and they climbed on me for a while and we did some jumping before having food. But by the end L and I were at the ends of our tethers, the little ones were now bored, because my house is not full of plastic toys, and I was running out of enthusiasm and ideas, so they went home and I flopped.

Another time, my neighbours were away to an evening do, so I took over to lay down the law amidst semi-organised chaos. We did some more jumping, and we played with a balloon, but we eventually resorted to computer games. Bedtime took an hour or thereabouts; afterwards I realised I didn't know how to work the cable TV. Fortunately paperbacks require neither instructions nor electricity, and I got through entire chapters. I stayed a while longer once my neighbours returned, to make sure they were OK, because they were slightly the worse for wear and even more friendly than usual. Possibly thinking out loud, L said it was hard to get any emotions out of me. I was tired, certainly, I was tolerant, I was watchful, but I was also emotionally wary, and embarrassed for them. I've never been in that state, ever, and I daren't, and it's impossible to match the freely flowing love that comes from chemically losing your inhibitions.

I started to wonder if I'm actually habitually anti-relationship. It would explain a lot. There are aggravating factors that I spoke to my doctor about and which, rather unexpectedly, nearly had me in tears. But I go to work on my own, I come home on my own. I read by myself. I listen to music by myself. I play music by myself. I write by myself. I travel by myself. There is a convenience to having the wherewithal and the bloodymindedness to please oneself, temporally if not financially, but gosh darn it when it comes to enjoyment it feels like I'm damned if I do and I'm damned if I don't. I spent Boxing Day morning tinkering in the garage. I wrapped a couple of late Christmas presents, and then…I sat staring at my Christmas tree, as though I was all dressed up and nowhere to go. I could go anywhere and do anything. I could've been out having a microadventure, but I wasn't, and I don't: I think endlessly about the possibilities. I sit, my brain finding its own imagination far more interesting than real life, and without any concrete objectives that might otherwise come to the fore while the weather is agreeable or the day is young, I write about how I can't bring myself to do any of them.

After Christmas, in lieu of objectives I had a last minute, last ditch random ride on my motorbike to the other side of Big Town to watch a train, which turned out to be a different train. I rode around the coast in the hope of photographing some ships but failed to actually do so. There was nothing else for it, so I rode home and dyed my hair purple.