Leaving Melbourne and why I hate football

The memory of a formative experience just popped into my head.

When I was a child I lived in Melbourne, Australia for almost 3 years. When I was 7 1/2 my dad's contract was coming to an end, and my parents decided we'd move back to the UK. I remember I finished at my primary school, which was just over the road opposite my house, a few days before we flew back. I guess I finished on the Friday and we flew the following Weds or Thurs of the following week.

It was December, summer time. Our house (pictured above) was a bungalow in the middle of a plot of land. It had a lawn at the front that Dad eventually covered over with pebbles, a lawn at the side with a veranda looking out over it, a concrete bit at the back that we had a sandpit on, and a drive on the remaining side. I remember early that final week, two days before we flew, I was playing in the front garden while my parents presumably did *moving to the other side of the world* things. I looked over the brick wall at the front of the house and saw that all my friends were lined up along the school's fence on the other side of the road, waving at me and smiling. I waved back. That memory lives in eternal sunshine in my mind - the warmth of the summer day, the happiness of seeing my friends smiling one last time, the excitement of going back to a place I barely remembered (I was 4 when we left the UK).

Funnily enough, it looks like the same fence on Google street view. And with the sun glaring through the trees, it does reflect some of the dreamy character my 25 year old memory has. I have to admit I don't remember there being nearly as much plantlife on that green slope going up to the school. Those trees are much more domineering than I recall. I wonder how much they've grown in the intervening 25 years?

I only remember two of the friends that stood at the fence now. Sam, who was quite a small kid and clever, and Vas, who had Greek parents with strong accents. I don't remember his actual name but he was headstrong and funny, and we both vied for control of our group of friends and spurred each other on to mischief.

Leaving Australia and my friends behind was something I drew upon when I wrote a few songs about the migrant crisis - it's the closest thing in my own experience I could get to the idea of leaving your life behind, however much it pales and however far removed it is in comparison to the experiences of actual refugees. This song in particular was inspired when I thought about where my Australian friends might be today.
I don't remember anything about the flight home whatsoever. I do remember my Grandad picking us up from one of the London Airports to drive us back to Rugby. It was freezing, night time, light snow was falling and the streetlights were wane and yellow. Not a great showing for the UK, truth be told.

A couple of weeks later I was in the depths of winter in the UK, surrounded by strangers in my new school and trying to fit in. In Australia, a nation of immigrants, everyone had the accents of the countries their parents were from. In Rugby I was the weird newcomer who came from the other side of the world but had a Scottish accent. And everything was different - the culture, the way people interacted, the teaching methods. I didn't do very well academically the following year.

I think I took a few things away from that time, however. Things which still stick with me now. Firstly, the way I deal with endings and goodbyes. They're often sad, but there's a poetry to them as well. If things didn't end, they couldn't be special. Pick any person, any activity, any event that you care about. One day will be the last time you see that person, do that thing, witness that event. Sometimes you know it at the time, more often you don't. And afterwards, you might wonder if in knowing you'd have appreciated it more. You might get lost in nostalgia, yearning for the good old days, even annoyance that you let it slip through your fingers. Of course, if we actually acted like everything was ending, we couldn't live in the moment and times of magic would lose their purity.

Second, I've got a slight jealousy for people who feel like they belong in a place. I don't think I have roots. There's a Captain Horizon song called "My Town" which deals with that. Whitty, the singer in my band, is *of* Birmingham. He has the accent, he has the outlook, he has the memories of the place going right back to the beginning of his life, and his parents are of it too. I am not *of* Rugby. The town has only ever mattered as much as my relationship with the people that live in it. My parents moved there when they were in their 30s.

Thirdly, and probably amusingly for people who know me, I think it's where I learned to dislike football. In my school in Melbourne, at break times everyone played all kinds of different sporting activities and also did other things - just ran around, explored the school grounds, chatted and laughed and argued. The school grounds were on a hill. At the back was an embankment covered in trees and bushes that led up to the back fence, we had fun getting lost in there. At the side of the school, running down the hill, was a ditch that turned into a stream when it rained. We played at damming it up with leaves, branches and the clay mud that covered the area, turning into a bunch of 6-year old civil engineers over a week of break and lunchtimes.

In Rugby, everyone played football all break time. Everyone played football all lunchtime. The playground was a flat, empty field. At the corner there were some picnic benches. I didn't care about football, I'd never played it. Nobody was prepared to *not* play football. I didn't like that.

Of course, eventually I settled in and made friends. It helped that 9 months later, we all moved up to year 4 and from primary to middle school. In the new environment everyone was plunged into, there was enough novelty and social turbulence to forge myself a place in friendship groups. But that time, from January to August '93, I think was an important one because it might be one of the last incidences that forged my psyche - the way I deal with the world. You know that saying, "Show me the child at 7 and I'll show you the man?"

I think it's interesting, the way a minor event such as a child moving abroad can cast such long shadows. To this day, I have a slight disconnect with my surroundings and the situations I find myself in. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Not really. I am who I am, and I'm comfortable with that. However, it's only natural to be curious. sometimes I played the what if? game. Who would I have become if my family had stayed in Australia? Who would I have become if I had never gone there at all?

Looking Down-River

Last week an old friend from my Uni days in Scarborough passed away.

It's affected me more than I thought it would, and today I'm going to spend a bit of time thinking about why that might be.

His name was Bill. About a week before he died, he put up a note explaining he had terminal liver cancer and didn't have long to go. He said he didn't want any messages, he was at peace with it and in some ways excited to experience what was a totally natural part of life. As I read his note I'd just got back home from having a tooth extracted from the dentist so was in some discomfort myself, and I think that contributed to my having a little sob. I'm not exactly the model of the emotionally repressed male, and I'm comfortable with crying when I feel the need. Despite that, I'm also au fait with repressing uncomfortable emotions, so there are things that should make me cry but don't. The big things. Life frustrations, setbacks. I've not cried at the news of friends dying in the past. I think many people would relate to this. Isn't there something daft about losing it at the end of Forrest Gump, which we know isn't real or even based on real events, yet stoically ignoring the real sadnesses in life, whatever they are for you? An example would be my parents going through a "rocky patch" from about 2007-2010. There was a lot of sadness at that time. And yet, I didn't really cry about it because it was such a huge event that it just became the backdrop of my day-to-day existence. And I continued to not cry about it until they'd got back together. Suddenly I could see the entire event in perspective and how it had effected me, and one random night, when everything seemed to be safely resolved, the sadness of the whole time period hit me. I cried about it then.

So when I read that an old friend i'd not actually seen in person in 11 years was going to die and got weepy about it, it took me aback a little.

I felt like a fraud, in fact. And that's a feeling that's stuck with me through the news of his death and the week that's followed. Getting sad for the sake of getting sad. Surely I'd got over an old uni mate by now? There are lots of people I've spent more time with in my life the news of who's death I'd probably meet with a sad shake of the head and lifting of the eyebrows before storing the news away as essentially irrelevant to me.

But somehow, Bill's death feels more relevant to me than I'd imagined it would.

A big part of it is that I think Bill represented something special. There was a lot to admire about him; his outlook on life - his attitude to the trials and tribulations of having to exist - was second to none. He thought about stuff - really considered his beliefs, opinions, perspectives on things in a way very few other people do. And this considered approach led to something I'd not seen in 2003 as an 18 year old fresher; a man in his late '40s who was OK with letting you know when he either hadn't worked something out yet, or just didn't have a view about something. A man who was still exploring the world afresh. This came as a shock to me. Adults, up 'til then, were set in stone, complete and finished people. I went to them for answers, not questions. I didn't probe how they'd arrived at their answers. In fact, the idea I'd question the answers and perspectives an adult gave me wouldn't even have occurred to me! Because to me, the answers they provided defined who they were, and were lessons I should just accept and take on board. Because they were finished people, and I was still under construction.

Bill was still under construction, and that was his finished state. It was who he was. So I related to him, and I think my other friends of my age did as well. He was one of us, but better, because he had decades more experience of being one of us. We could look up to him as an equal.

We were on a music technology course together and that gave us shared experiences. We were in a band together - Bill primarily played the MIDI Clarinet, an instrument that was in equal parts amazing, baffling and very funny. I was on Drums, and my other mates Jim, David and other David were on Guitar, Bass and Keyboards respectively. (Or Guitar, Keyboards and Bass - that works too, respectively).

We spent many many hours jamming in the various uni studios, and sometimes we recorded stuff. I've still got some of those recordings, and listening back to the noise we made I don't think you'd believe me if I told you there were no drugs involved. It was really out there, free-form stuff encompassing every musical style you could think of. At the end of the year we were marked on a live performance, which I really enjoyed but I remember Bill being quite uncomfortable with being on stage. He got nervous and that, combined with not really being able to hear himself, meant he couldn't gauge how hard he was blowing into the mouthpiece of his strange electronic woodwind contraption. This was a problem, because the strength you blew into it was sensed and used to pitch bend the notes.

He was hopelessly out of tune, and we all had a good laugh (including Bill) when we got a recording of the incident the following year.

As young adults, we lapped up the stories and anecdotes he told us. He'd worked as a teacher in the Middle East. He'd traveled overland from Glasgow to India as a penniless man in his early 20s. He'd grown up a tenement house in Glasgow, and in that I felt an extra kinship as that's where my Dad grew up. I sometimes fancied that they might have known each other, unlikely though that'd have been. He told us about his thoughts on spirituality - his time in retreats, his meditations, his feelings on the soul, the mind, universal consciousness. But don't think he was some airy-fairy hippy. He really wasn't. He questioned those views, met what I guess you'd call eastern mysticism with a sceptical, clear and level head.

One of the ideas he taught us that really appealed to me was the idea of who we actually are. When we strip away the physical things - the bodies we walk around in, our sensory experiences, the memories, the emotions that are little more than flashes of endorphins and other hormones in our meat brains, what are we? We wrap all those things around us and use them to define who we are as entities, but what's at the heart of it all? What actually experiences all those things? And when you strip all that stuff away, what's left? Well, we're all the same thing. Yet we spend our lives convincing ourselves that we *are* our bodies, our names, our memories, our feelings and our experiences - all these things we've had no say in or choice over! He called his image in photographs and mirrors "TOG" (For  "That Other Guy".) TOG's name was Bill, and the world would try to trick him into thinking that he was Bill. But he was onto them, and remembered that it was just a clever trick, a game even, that the world plays on us all.

Now, there's a certain kind of person who will read that and think it sounds insane. That's fine, we all have our own views. But I also suspect there are people who will deliberately NEVER think about this stuff or form any opinions about what is essentially the unknowable. And again, that's fine too. But I think it's far more insane to never think about it!

We went to Bill's flat on occasion to hang out and he led a few meditation sessions with us. They were fun. The conversations were always interesting, and I enjoyed my views being challenged afresh. He told us about the way he looked at time. We in the West think of ourselves as moving forward through time. The past is behind us, the future spreads out in front of our eyes. If you believe in the capitalist, individualist narrative you might even feel like you're rushing forward, reaching out to achieve your dreams. But if you give it some thought, that doesn't make much sense.

We don't go anywhere. We're not striding boldly forward through time. Time flows past us as we sit, forever, in the moment that we call "now". We can't see into the future. We can only look into the past. We're imagining ourselves facing the wrong way! Bill told us time is like a river. We're standing in the shallows, looking downstream. We can see what's already gone past us but we've got no idea what's coming from upriver.

On the last day of the final semester there were gigs, events, drinking etc going on all day on campus and Bill came in. We spoke briefly, he asked when I was leaving to go back home, I told him and said I was sure we'd see each other soon. He gave his trademark grin and said he wouldn't be so sure - in his experience people made these promises to each other but they didn't always come true in practice - people move on with their lives pretty quickly, so it might be better to say bye. We said bye. But I didn't believe him. We'd surely meet up soon, we had all the time in the world!

Well, I believe him now. I saw him a few months later at the graduation ceremony, admittedly. He didn't actually attend the posh bit, but afterwards he wandered down to the venue to see us and say hello. I have to admit, I don't remember much about that day and I don't remember saying bye again.

That said, when I look back on 2006 from today the penultimate goodbye was the one that mattered. He was comfortable that our time together was ending in a way that I don't think many others could have been - he was living in the moment, and the moment was moving on for us both whether I realised it or not.

In some ways, Bill moved on from the Bill I knew. In the days after he died I went back and re-read his blog. It's a very satisfying read, made complete now by the fact Bill's life has come to an end.

I remember one time, probably early 2006, we went round to his flat and he was finishing up a webchat with a lady from the Philippines he called Dolly. We waved hello before he said bye and ended the chat to begin entertaining us.

His blog begins in late 2008, when he's making plans to fly to the other side of the world to meet her. It continues through his months out there. His decision to marry her. His return the the UK the following year. The trials and tribulations of the UK's immigration system, resulting in his return to the Philippines late in 2009 to marry her. And then in 2010 the last of these regular entries is shortly before she arrives in the UK.

The blog is fantastic. At times, I had to stop reading to re-compose myself. It's a snapshot of Bill and very well encapsulates who he was as a person far more than the photos of TOG. It's part introspection, part travel-blog, part ruminations on the meaning of love, life, the roles we're expected to play by the wider world. Bill takes you by the hand and lets you into his heart, to get across what it was like to travel the path he walked.

And, most poignantly of all, it all but stops once Dolly arrives in the UK. I think he must have been truly content to move on into his new married life. and I'm glad that he had those subsequent happy years with her.

Through this time I was aware of things going on with him of course, mostly through the dubious miracle of Facebook. More and more, I feel like Facebook gives the illusion of connection. But that's a story for another post! The point is, he was always there in the periphery of my awareness and I assumed there he would remain until some future time when we could re-connect properly.

The events of the last few weeks therefore came out of the blue, and rekindled memories I thought I'd neatly sorted through and packaged away.

The news of his death has taken me back to that time I spent in Scarborough, and it's the shock of experiencing something I thought had been left behind that has led me to feel the emotions I think you can probably sense if you've read all of the above. Nostalgia, regret that I didn't go back and maintain real, human, physical contact with him, and probably at a more deep level an awareness that Bill represents a time in my life when there were many paths open to me and the world was an amazing, exciting and scary place. I was incomplete, impressionable, and Bill influenced my outlook on life at some pretty deep level. However, I also feel blessed to have known him, and appreciate him all the more. Even his death is part of a lesson he had for me, and a hard one. It's one we should all know. It's one I'd have claimed to know, but knowing isn't the same as understanding:

Time passes us by, things come to an end. People's lives end. And when that happens, there's nothing you can do about it. You just stand there and watch them drifting away from you down the river. They're still there, and they always will be. It's just that from where you stand, they recede into the distance, the water carries them round the next bend and they drift out of sight, on their way to some distant ocean beyond our understanding where all things go in the fullness of time.

Pictured: Me and TOG.

MFN Arena, Nottingham, 15th May 2013

Setlist;

The Light
Shadows and Vampires
Patch
Stop
Leave the Truth Behind
Anxiety Breaks us All
Bottom of your Heart
Judge You
My Town
Torn up My World
The Sun has Set
------------------------
Radiostasis

Notes;

Best sound we've had at the MFN, and monitor mixes weren't too bad either. We're used to not being able to hear anything so it's nice when you can actually hear your vocals etc. Was able to have amp at sweet spot too which was nice. Not much guitar on Bass side of the stage, but wondered over there a few times all the same, trying to stay conscious of not becoming boring! Nice full room at the start, thinned out a little by the end of the set but I guess that was mostly bikers heading for home. Atmosphere was quite strange - felt like performance was solid and confident, never manic, but the room just kind of soaked it up and watched rather than going crazy. Main thing is they were listening I guess! It's awesome to have people who'll actually travel on a Weds night to see us play. Kinda hard to take in actually.

Start of set feels very solid at this point. "The Light" intro solves the problem of it not being the most obvious set opener, and being able to launch straight into Shadows from there gives us momentum that I think is very important at the start of the set. Funny when we were choosing the first single, Shadows felt like the obvious choice - catchy, concise and energetic. But someone said last weekend that it's almost a "song without a chorus" and I think that's fair - the "chorus" as I think of it feels more like a bridge, and the kick off comes after the middle section.

Patch is just Patch, when we start playing that I tend to start getting into the zone. It's hard singing a delicate falsetto only three songs in, feels very exposed, but I'm learning that the softer I do it, the better it feels. Whitty let the middle section go another repetition before coming in and I quite liked that breathing space. As always, the ending makes me feel very confident. It's almost "I know you're all on board with who we are now. And if you're not, forget about you!"

Stop's a funny one. It used to HAVE to be the opener or we just wouldn't feel it. But with this bunch of songs, it feels good in position 4. It's a bit more catchy and lighthearted, more fun, but still fits with the opening three and keeps the energy up. I think I need to work on my guitar sound a bit though - verses felt too clean and pre-chorus chords need to explode more volume wise. End riff was a bit woofy too. That's a technical term. :D

Now, Leave the Truth Behind. When we wrote it last month I thought it was the best thing ever. I still think it's got loads of promise, but something's not quite connecting yet in the way we play it. I think it needs some shaking up to properly bring the frantic mood of the lyrics out more. I know it's got the potential to be brilliant, but at the moment it feels like we're playing it and people are listening and thinking "hmmm, ok a new song fair enough". I want them to be too awestruck to think anything. So, time to work on that one! I'm not too worried - Anxiety was shit for the first 6 months of playing it live. Sometimes you've just got to get on stage and try things to find out how you really feel about them.

Bottom of Your Heart and Judge You - two album songs we've not played for a little while (Bottom might have been the album launch, Judge you was Feb in Derby). I'm never totally convinced by Bottom live. I feel like it's a brooding slow builder with a big paypoff and that's fine, but it's so hard to do live when the payoff is in the backing choir then huge explosion of guitar tracks at the end. There's only ever one guitar track live and when we get to that end section it can feel a bit forced - I find myself hoping the audience are feeling generous! Judge you felt brilliant though. It's short, bittersweet, and personal to me so I love it when it hits. Played it on the Explorer too which is a change I quite liked.

We've done My Town three times now, and each time multiple people have come up to us and said it's brilliant. This pleases me. Feels good to play too.

Torn Up and The Sun has Set are fun set closers for me. Torn has a guitar solo, And Sun has Set lets me glower at the crowd. It's slow and moody but picks up at the end and I think leaves people wanting more. Nothing quite like shouts for an encore to make a bunch of guys feel loved. Came back and did Radiostasis, which I've always enjoyed playing, and giving Mez a chance to mess around at the end is only fair.

Overall the general pacing and song choice felt great. Still work to be done on Leave the Truth, and I think Bottom of Your Heart just isn't cut out for being awesome live until we're playing arenas and have a symphony orchestra to back us up.

The Asylum 2, Birmingham, 11th May 2013

Setlist;

The Light
Shadows and Vampires
Patch
Stop
Leave the Truth Behind
Anxiety Breaks us All
My Town
Climbing the Waterfall
Torn Up My World
The Sun Has Set
Radiostasis

Notes:

Set started 5 mins late due to faulty mic lead, so got told we could only play one more song after "Waterfall" finished. Dropped last two and did Radiostasis instead. Sound was great, mains and monitors. Have started lifting mic higher so I don't slouch and have to face out into the crowd more, helps my performance. Also think I prefer being stage left - easier to interact with Alex+ Whitty without having to worry about guitar headstock.

The Maze, Nottingham, 5th May 2013

Setlist;

The Light
Shadows and Vampires
Patch
Shell
Torn Up My World
The Sun has Set

Notes;

Very very hot room, sweating horribly by end of Shadows - sweat pouring off arms etc, stinging eyes. Mental. Very small stage and short changeover time. Sound guy had trouble getting both DI boxes for sampler and acoustic guitar to work. Took him ages and then by the time we played The Sun has Set the acoustic had broken again and the Sampler sounded way too loud. Definitely separates the men from the boys, that song! But The Sun has Set possibly isn't that sensible for this kind of gig due to the extra complication it entails anyway. Also felt a bit flat, like we were pouring cold water on the room in the middle of a high energy festival.

Shell is fun and high energy but we've been playing it live for a looooong time. On a personal level I feel like it needs a very different guitar sound to the other songs we're doing live at the moment.

Started using Zilla 2x12 again. Live, it's better. More oomph, control, clarity, and directional so easier to position to not annoy the soundman.

Out of the Blue

Where do songs come from? What once was not, suddenly is and even if you're the one who did it, that doesn't stop it being a surprise sometimes- that moment when you do a double take and think "oh, hang on, this is a song!" Finding the genesis of a song or idea is often like finding the source of a river. You go upstream, constantly being met with decisions over which fork to take, and eventually you make it into the mountains before thinking "fuck it, this is too hard and now there's a cat in the way". Hang on, that's what I just thought now. Forget the mountains... Radiostasis, then. Where did it come from? It started out almost as an acoustic guitar, strummy, campfire, mock Johnny Cash song. You can kind of hear it if you listen to the melody. It probably wouldn't have become a Captain Horizon song were it not for a cunning little app called 'Bloom'. Designed by Brian Eno of Roxy- and ambient- music fame, it's just a rectangle of colour. Touch or click it, and a note will start to play ever now and then. Touch a different part and a second note joins it. Eventually you get your own little ambient music piece, which is nice. Well, one evening I touched in some essentially random notes and promptly left the room. I played the Radiostasis idea for a while, then came back upstairs and walking into my room to find a cool, melancholic sequence of notes playing to me out of the Bloom program - over the time I was out, the music had evolved into a haunting little riff that I knew I had to put with the idea I'd just been working on. It totally changed Radiostasis, and next time you hear it spare a moment to think that the guitar riff which opens the song is just a happy accident, written by a computer! I came up with the music that would become 'Patch' in 2006. I showed it to my band mate at the time, he hated it, and I gave up on it for a few years. It had a set of lyrics, but one morning I was driving to work and Radiohead were on radio 4 - a tribute they'd written to Harry Patch, the last living person to experience ww1 trench warfare. I've always been fascinated by the First World War, and I thought Radiohead's attempt was a bit weak so I wrote another set of lyrics to Patch. Still, it took two years before I demo'd it to show the rest of the band. I had no idea people would think it was good.

Summer Afternoon

Some things just find you. A memory found me today and I’m glad it did.

It’s a summer afternoon. Fluffy white clouds drift slowly across the sky, and a gentle breeze stirs the leaves on the tall trees that line the fence of my back garden. They whisper, a gentle rustle that answers the chirping murmur of birdsong. I run across the lawn, chasing my younger brothers in a game. Midway through the long expanse of the summer holidays, school is a forgotten memory and all that matters is now. The year is 1995, and I’m 10 years old.

My dad’s in the house, upstairs in his study which has a big window that looks out over the garden. He was working earlier but now mum’s shaking her head and tutting from the kitchen because he’s got his bloody guitar out. It happens once a year (if that), and today’s the day. He throws the window open and starts to play. It seems very loud from outside, and he’s playing some kind of old fashioned music. I recognise a couple of tunes from last year’s afternoon of guitaring. There’s one that goes “If God was one of us...” and another that seems very upset about something; “Is it getting better... or do you feel the same...?”

I like them both, but I’m mostly happy Dad plays guitar because it’s just another thing he does that proves he’s cool. I walk in from the garden, through the kitchen, and the muted rumble of a little practice amp turned a bit too loud forces its way downstairs. Mum’s still grumbling about “that bloody guitar”. I’m only 10 but I know not to be underfoot when mum’s grumbling, so I go to the living room and fire up Sonic 2.

An hour or so later, Dad’s exhausted his repertoire of half remembered lyrics and licks. I’m pretty sure Smoke on the Water was featured at some point. He comes downstairs and turfs me off the Sega Megadrive so he can watch some TV. I saunter upstairs and find myself in the study. The guitar’s there and unusually there’s still a lead connecting it to the amp. I’ve seen the guitar, unloved and shoved into an unused corner of the room, for as long as I remember. It’s nothing special. But today it looks different. I notice it in a way I didn’t before. I study the amp’s control panel and find the “power” switch. Flick. There’s a pop and a hum starts. A little red light comes on.

The guitar’s on a stand. I have no idea how to hold it so it stays there. The strings feel a bit sharp so I treat it with caution. I sit cross legged on the thick green carpet in front of this object that’s suddenly caught and held my fascination, reaching out gingerly, vague worries about sharp metal strings and electricity in the back of my mind.

My fingers touch the thinnest string. A gentle squeak emerges from the speaker. I pull my hand back a little, place my thumb against the string, and pluck it.

The note fills the room. It sounds and feels different to anything I’ve heard before. It doesn’t just stop - the rich and pure sound carries on, gently receding towards the silence I pulled it from. I just sit and listen. It fades, fades, and after 30 seconds I can’t hear it any more. Even then I know it’s still there, quieter than I can fathom, ringing away. I want to hear it again. I pluck the string once more, and move from right to left, each string thicker, deeper and more sonorous than the one that preceded it. The thickest string makes a sound I can feel through the floor. I move back up the strings one by one, then with a final flourish rake my finger down all 6 strings. The notes vibrate the air and beat against each other. The chord I made from the open strings is dissonant and not particularly musical but that just adds to its wonder; this isn’t a sound I’ve heard before and within the noise I can hear possibilities, different notes fighting each other and hinting at melodies I won’t find for years. I sit, hypnotised, as the notes once more fade to silence.

I have no idea what the frets are for and I won’t find out for another 6 years.  The guitar stays on its stand and, having exhausted the possibilities offered by the open strings, I turn the amp off and go back outside to chase my brothers in the garden under the long afternoon sun.