Live Aid Day was twenty-five years ago today; half a lifetime ago for me, give or take a few days. I meant to type a few words in its memory five years ago, but didn't get round to it, so I'll do that now. It was surely one of the seminal moments of post-war British popular culture.

I was very keen to record as much of the BBC's coverage of the event as possible, so I bought two four-hour VHS tapes. Some time that morning I had the idea of connecting the stereo audio inputs of the family VHS recorder to our HiFi tuner, so I could record BBC Radio One's stereo 'simultaneous transmission' in place of the BBC One (mono) TV audio. I drove round to a little electronic shop in Hartlepool's unfashionable Murray Street to buy the necessary plugs and cabling, and I had soldered them together about twenty minutes before Status Quo kicked off proceedings at Wembley Stadium at midday. This worked beautifully, as it turned out. Stereo VCRs were exceedingly rare in those days; indeed they were almost pointless, and I suppose I must be one of very few people to have original video recordings of Live Aid with stereo audio.

My girlfriend at that time, Sara, had come round to share the occasion with me, and Live Aid Day is one of the happiest memories of that relationship. For some reason I can't recall my parents had gone out for the day until quite late, and we kept ourselves entertained during the less interesting performances by having sex on the carpet or the sofa, about five times. She was seventeen years old; I was a dirty old man even then. To this day I feel slightly sore whenever I hear Dylan's Blowing In The Wind.

And speaking of old men, it's strange to think that Quo's Francis Rossi and Rick Parfitt, even in 1985 considered middle-aged relics of a bygone musical age, were still in their mid-thirties. In the stagnant popular culture of the 21st century, music careers last much longer before they reach their sell-by date.

Interestingly it's mostly the established artists from the '70s who participated that are best remembered. The surviving members of the Who reformed for the day, although the transmission of their set was truncated by a power cut. Phil Collins performed on both stages, at Wembley and at Philadelphia. He took a helicopter from Wembley to Heathrow Airport and was in Philadelphia less than four hours later, something that's not possible now. Later in the evening he played drums for a reformed incarnation of Led Zeppelin, in a performance rendered shambolic by Jimmy Page's incoherent guitar playing. Eric Clapton's set in the US sparked off something of a renaissance of his career.

And by any reasonable assessment, Queen were the day's winners. Theirs was the performance that was destined to represent the spirit of the day for prosperity. Freddie Mercury projected his considerable presence into every corner of Wembley Stadium, into every corner of every living room with a TV tuned in to the show.

It was the first of a long tradition of high profile, international charity events that continues to this day, but none since has caught the popular imagination the way that Live Aid did. Politically, it had provided a new way to crystallise the public conscience into action, even if it worked partly by the power of self-congratulation. Musically and culturally though, I think it was a sort of high water mark. The naive charm of the '80s seemed to ebb away slowly from that moment, as the likes of Duran Duran, Nik Kershaw, Culture Club and Spandau Ballet gradually gave way to soulless artists in double-breasted suits, singing records manufactured by Stock, Aitken and Waterman.

It's the last day of my forties, and I thought I might mark their passing by attempting to summarise my last ten years in a blog piece.

Of course, these decade labels depend on quite arbitrary boundaries, don't they? The idea that, by virtue of the first digit of his or her age, a 32-year old somehow shares some meaningful attribute with a 39-year old that he or she doesn't with a 29 year old is really quite bogus. Nonetheless, they help us to carve our experience up into manageable slices when trying to make sense of them, so here goes.

Ten years ago I was living and working in London, but I woke up on the morning of 9th July 2000 at my house in Derby, which I was keeping as a sort of weekend retreat. I felt ill, vulnerable and debilitated. I'd been quite uncomfortable at the idea of being forty years old for some time, and now the actual experience seemed to bear out my worst fears. Then I remembered that I'd drunk quite heavily the night before, in the company of my dear old pal Shaun Appleby, and I realised that my new-found debilitation really had nothing to do with being a day older, and everything to do with the ill effects of alcohol. I felt a bit better after that.

In July 2000 I lived in East Dulwich, South London. I was attached to a charming Hong-Kong Chinese girl called Polly, who had just moved back to Hong Kong after studying and working in London for a few years. I'd met her at the end of 1998. I was working on the top floor of One Canada Square, also known as the 'Canary Wharf Tower' - still the highest building in London. I think the department I worked for had moved into that building in March or April. I was growing disillusioned and dissatisfied with working in that company, an American investment firm.

But I stayed there until April 2001, when along with several hundred other employees, they asked me to leave. The firm had invested heavily in the dot-com bubble, and now that it had burst, it was hemorrhaging cash in industrial quantities. I'd already given notice that I wanted to do something else, so I was an obvious candidate for redundancy. They gave me a generous "separation package" - in other words, a large sum of money - and allowed me to stay at home doing nothing for another two months on full pay, after which I became officially unemployed.

I stayed in London, basically enjoying a long holiday there, until I decided in February 2002 that I couldn't continue to pay a mortgage in Derby and rent in London simultaneously any longer. I very reluctantly packed the last of my belongings into my car, and vacated my flat for the last time, for what I over-optimistically hoped would be a "tactical retreat" to my house in Derby. I drove north through London up to the M1 very sadly, taking in the surroundings as a resident of London for the last time on the 14th of February.

The one consolation about returning to the East Midlands was that I'd see more of my best friend, Shaun. But he died, from complications following an operation, in July 2002. And quite honestly, I already felt as if I'd beaten him to it. I used to say that if you could still drink beer and use the Internet when you were dead, then death would indistinguishable from living in Derby.

The first year or two there were fairly awful, really; beyond depressing. For someone used to the vibrancy of living and working in the capital city, waking up each morning on an anonymous housing estate on the outskirts of what's really a provincial town, with no particularly good reason to get out of bed is fairly soul-destroying.

But I made the best of it. I'd walk the three miles or so into Derby's so-called city centre on some days, and get a bus back, or I'd just sit at home in my study, listening to Radio 5 Live, tinkering with my PC, and surfing the Internet.

I suppose the Internet was something of a lifeline. I'd been a keen participant in discussions on Internet mailing lists and message boards for years, but now I became far more prolific, arguing at length about politics, about the perennial, corrosive ignorance of religious faith, surely something of a defining stupidity for humankind at its present stage of naivety - and about music. The Iraq war in 2003 was an absorbing diversion, provoking huge quantities of argument on various political fora, and I saw my position on that handsomely vindicated in the following years.

I punctuated my time in Derby with occasional day visits to London, usually on the train and usually on Saturdays. These were more than merely coming up for air. I would emerge from Charing Cross station into the bright light of the Strand and the West End, just as I used to each Saturday when I lived there. And within minutes I could feel my body absorbing my identity again, a dead man coming back to life.

I must mention my forty-second birthday, eight years ago tomorrow. I'd decided to spend it in London. As I was driving down there I switched on the car radio and found a documentary about Douglas Adams on Radio 4. A short while after I'd tuned in, contributors to the programme discussed the significance of the number 42, famously representing the "meaning of life" in Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. Adams had chosen it because it was an "ordinary, smallish number". Later that day I realised that I was wearing my IWC 'Gadebusch' MK XV Fliegeruhr wristwatch, number forty-two of a limited edition of fifty. And a few hours later as I drove home, the Radio 2 show I was listening to played a selection of numbers from the musical 42nd Street.

I split up with Polly some time in the middle of 2003. We'd seen each other a couple of times since she'd moved back to Hong Kong, but my future was uncertain and it was the best thing for both of us. She remained a dear friend. I started dating another Chinese girl in September; a university lecturer. That didn't last very long but again, we remained friends for a long time. She was called Xiaohong. I'd had a penchant for women of Far-Eastern ancestry since I worked for a Japanese bank in the '90s, but Xiaohong was the last one, as it turned out.

I don't remember much about the early part of 2004 other than that I studied for a computer networking professional certification, I had broadband installed and I bought a WiFi router. I started this blog in May that year. I'm sure I spent most of 2004 sitting in front of a computer, listening to 5 Live and feeling vaguely lost and numb. But in November I met up with some other Rush fans that I'd got to know from a fan community on the Internet, on the occasion of a visit to Manchester of Rush, my time-honoured Favourite Band Ever, on their 30th anniversary tour.

One of those fellow Rush devotees was a lovely Finnish girl called Sari. She lived in Helsinki, yet the novelty of meeting each other face to face somehow inspired us to embark upon a long-distance romance. I visited her in Helsinki twice, and she came to Derby twice, most memorably over Christmas 2004. That relationship had run its course by the summer of 2005, and we split up. Long-distance relationships really have to be able to focus on a discernible non-long-distance future to survive any length of time, I think.

And shortly after that, things started to change, finally. My long sabbatical from gainful employment came to an end in August 2005, when I accepted a fairly mundane job as a technical support operative at a company with a large office in Derby. I hated that job though, and to my relief quite honestly, the Derby office was closed down at the end of that year and I was made redundant again. My final day there was 31st December 2005, and I returned to my former sedentary, 5 Live-listening, Internet-inhabiting, wilfully numb existence on 1st January 2006 as if nothing had happened.

But not for long, fortunately. In February I had a call from the managing director of a small web-hosting firm in Beeston, on the outskirts of Nottingham. I'd seen a job for a technical support role advertised in the Nottingham Evening Post, and had applied for it. After a brief telephone interview, I was asked to come in for a "technical test". I was offered the job shortly after that and started in April. I very much enjoyed working there, in a team of friendly and professional people. I felt as though I'd finally climbed out of the deep hole of uncertainty I'd been trapped in for years. At around about the same time I met the woman I was destined to marry, Sue. She lived in Coalville, in Leicestershire, a half-hour drive from Derby, and we started to see each other every weekend. We became engaged in September 2006.

On 1st August 2007 we were married on an unusually dry, sunny day in what was otherwise a miserable, rainy summer, at a hotel in Quorn. We honeymooned in Sorrento. I'd gained not only a wife (for the first time, at the age of 47), but two teenage stepdaughters.

And I changed jobs again. Just before we'd left for Italy I'd corresponded by email with a research laboratory at Nottingham University, with a view to replacing their system administrator, who was returning to Canada. They asked me to come in for an interview on my return from Italy. I did, and they offered me the job shortly thereafter. This turned out to be a wonderful opportunity. I was working with brilliant people in a stimulating environment at one of the best research Universities in the world, and best of all they trusted me to just get on with running their technology myself. I was more or less autonomous. Their technology infrastructure become a sort of personal train set, and I took great satisfaction in developing it, and making it run as smoothly, as efficiently and reliably as possible. And if I asked if I could buy a new server, a new RAID array or whatever, the answer was always "yes", even if once or two it was qualified with "but try not to spend too much"!

Sue and I didn't actually live together for the first two years of our marriage. Sue's younger daughter, Darcie, was still at school in Coalville, so we'd determined that we were going to live there when we did buy a place together. But I'd decided that getting married, changing jobs and moving house all at the same time was just too much upheaval, so I put off selling my house. For the time being we spent weekends together, usually in Derby. I found this to be quite an ideal arrangement in some respects quite honestly, but Sue didn't quite see eye to eye with me on that.

Sue sold her house in February 2009, and she and Darcie stayed with my mother-in-law until I sold mine, in September. We'd hoped to buy a rather charming semi-detached house in a leafy avenue with a long, secluded garden and had agreed on a price - but that fell through when the sellers were unable to arrange a mortgage to buy a new property, and took it off the market.

For the time being, while we looked for our dream home, we rented a three-bedroom detached house in Coalville. I hired a van, and took a few days off work to pack my belongings into cardboard boxes in Derby, and drive them to our rented accomodation twenty-five miles away.

It was quite an unreal and emotional moment to leave my house for the last time. I'd owned it for eighteen years, although I'd spent seven of those years in a rented flat in South London. It held many memories for me. When the last of my things had been loaded in the van on the last day, I took a few minutes to sit on the floor of my empty living room, and reflect on the times I'd spent there since 1991, good and bad.

The blunter realities of marriage - the usual sort of marriage where you live in the same house, not the alternative version to which I'd become comfortably accustomed - required a period of adjustment. Still, I was happy to have opened a new chapter, to have started a new life, and I quite enjoyed our time in the rented place. But in October, only a few weeks after we'd moved in there, we found a suitable house for sale in a village just outside Coalville, a few miles away. This time our purchase went smoothly, and we moved into our new home, a spacious and modern three-storey house overlooking a village green, at the end of November.

We're still in the process of settling in of course, even seven months later. Cardboard boxes remain in the garage, still packed. We still have to redecorate some of the rooms, and buy new furniture for others. But we've enjoyed getting used to our new tranquil surroundings, and we love it here.

And that, pretty much, brings me up to the present day, on the precipice of my fifties! Let's do this again in ten years' time.

I'll add some photos later.

I'm typing this from an extraordinary time and place in the landscape of British political history: the aftermath of the UK General Election of May 2010.

You know what happened, of course. We went to the polls on Thursday, and no outright winner emerged. The Conservative Party made huge gains, won the largest share of the vote and parliamentary seats, but failed to reach an overall majority. The Labour Party lost 91 seats, and with them the majority they'd held since 1997. The Liberal Democrats did considerably less well than expected with only 23% of the popular vote, and ended up with less seats than they had before the election, only 57.

Five days later, we still don't know what shape the new government will take.

The Lib Dems made a promising start to their new role as third party in a hung parliament, assuring us that they'd negotiate in good faith with the party with the most votes and seats - putting the national interest and stable government first.

An agreement of some sort between the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives seemed to be the only realistic option. The Lib Dems and Labour combined don't have enough seats for a parliamentary majority, and would be dependent on support from minor parties to do business in the Commons.

But after three days of talks with the Conservative Party that they'd described as constructive and positive, it transpired that they'd held duplicitous secret talks with Labour as well. Labour are now offering, as far as I can tell, immediate legislation to introduce a new voting system. Their leader, long considered an obstacle to co-operation with the Lib Dems, has promised to step down following an election contest. The Conservative Party's negotiating team has offered a referendum on electoral reform.

Yet Clegg told us he didn't want to be a kingmaker, that the people would make that choice. Have a closer look at the results, Nick.

It's become clear that, for the Lib Dems, these talks are not about negotiations to provide stable government in the national interest. No. What they wanted was a horse trading contest in their own selfish interest, to find out which of the other two parties will offer them the bigger concession on a voting system to give them more seats in the Commons.

To their credit, two senior Labour statesmen, both former home secretaries, have spoken out against Labour's unedifying efforts to cling onto power. John Reid warned that the electorate would be enraged if Labour "cocked a snook" at them. David Blunkett argued this morning that a "rainbow coalition of the defeated" could only take place on a very bad day for democracy, and the electorate would do the job of getting rid of Labour properly next time.

In my view, Clegg has decidedly overplayed his hand. He's turned an opportunity to demonstrate the advantages of proportional representation and its consequences into a rather vivid health warning against it. He had an opportunity to enhance his reputation as a responsible statesman, and in my opinion he's made himself look like a prostitute instead. This has become a farce.

And this is more or less exactly why I dislike PR. The hung parliament which is its inevitable consequence exaggerates the power of the third party, very disproportionately. The Lib Dem tail, with 23% of the votes, is vigorously wagging both the main party dogs. Arguably, it has just taken out the second party's leader. It has extracted from the Conservative Party a pledge that a new voting system will be put to a referendum; a measure that none of their voters have approved. And it's seeking to emphasise in government its own manifesto, rejected by three-quarters of the voters.

What's democratic about that? Has the party that's so very keen on proportional representation forgotten that the proportion of the voters it represents is less than one quarter?

If a sordid Lib-Lab coalition of the losers goes ahead, a squalid bigamous marriage of convenience between more or less all of the parties except the one that got the most votes, I believe that Labour and the Lib Dems will pay a heavy price at the next general election.

In terms of the national interest, it would be a nightmare. Unstable, unpredictable, undemocratic and vulnerable to blackmail from the nationalist parties, keen to dip their fingers into the English taxpayers' wallets.

But quite honestly, the Conservative supporter in me is thrilled at the prospect. They would face withering, righteous opposition from an reinvigorated Tory Party with a huge presence in parliament and an unshakeable foothold on the moral high ground. I believe that the voters would crucify them as soon as they get a chance.

It is a Tory landslide waiting to happen, long before 2015.

Do it, Nick. Please. Climb into bed with Miliband, Mandelson, Campbell and friends. It will be the last time you'll ever have any influence after a general election, and the last we'll see of Labour in power for a generation. In the end, you'll have done something in the national interest after all.

More than any previous election in modern times, this one seems to be a three horse race. The Lib Dems appear poised to improve substantially on their number of seats in the Commons, no party has a commanding lead in the polls and there is a strong possibility of a hung parliament in the United Kingdom General Election of 2010.

Such a scenario, in which no party has an overall majority, tends to amplify disproportionately the power of the third party, which then holds the balance of power, and with it, effectively, the keys to Number Ten Downing Street.

Is there anything the two major parties can do to defend themselves, and the interests of their voters, from a Liberal Democrat leadership in a position to make demands? Is there a way to level the playing field a little?

Well, yes. Actually, there is. David Cameron and Gordon Brown can form a pact.

I don't, of course, mean an agreement to work together in government. The rank and file of each party would tend to reject that rather firmly and such an agreement would be fragile indeed in the Commons. While both Labour and the Conservatives might be prepared, reluctantly, to forge a parliamentary alliance with the Lib Dems, they won't do so with each other.

No. I mean an agreement, drawn up secretly and witnessed by senior members of each party, detailing a list of policy points which neither party would be prepared to concede to the Lib Dems. So for example, Cameron and Brown could agree that under no circumstances would either permit Britain to enter the Euro without a referendum. They could agree, say, that neither would be prepared to enact legislation to introduce proportional representation.

Because make no mistake, Nick Clegg's position in the event of a hung parliament will be strong indeed. Even with fewer seats than either Labour or the Conservatives, he would have greater negotiating power than either of his two other main party counterparts. The electoral triangle is not equilateral. He can work with either of the other two parties, but the Conservatives and Labour will never share power between themselves. Barring a vanishingly unlikely breakthrough on the part of one of the minor parties, if Cameron and Brown need to look for an ally in government, Nick Clegg's Lib Dems are the only show in town.

But with a carefully negotiated agreement in place between the two bigger parties, if Nick Clegg should come to chat to David Cameron next Friday, then when he (perhaps) offers to support a Conservative government in return for abandoning Trident, Cameron can turn him down politely, assured in the knowledge that he won't get that concession from Brown either.

Shouldn't the two major party leaders be thinking about having a quiet chat in their mutual interest sometime in the next few days?

A badly edited version of this piece appeared in the Leicester Mercury newspaper on Thursday, 29th April 2010 and can be seen online here

As I type, Gordon Brown is on his way to Buckingham Palace to seek the dissolution of Parliament. The long-awaited General Election of 2010 will be held on May 6th, five years and one day after the last.

I remember typing a blog piece at the equivalent moment before the last election. I loathed (and still loathe) BLiar with a passion, and was desperate to see the end of NuLabour in power. I was disappointed of course, but there was more or less no chance of a change of government. I remember maintaining a faint hope that BLiar would trip over a massive political banana skin that would cause an upset, but on the whole it's fair to say that it was a General Election that didn't happen. From the outset, no-one seriously expected that a change of government was on the cards. And in any case, in terms of ideology and policy there was hardly anything to choose between the two main parties. They more or less fought over who was more competent to manage the business of government. The most memorable campaign pledge from the Conservatives was to make hospitals cleaner. We didn't really have an argument on our hands.

This time however, there's a clear choice between two distinct economic strategies, and anything could happen. A hung parliament is widely predicted, with no party holding a majority of seats in the Commons. In that scenario, either Cameron or Brown could be Prime Minister on May 7th. There's half a chance that Labour could hold onto a reduced majority in the Commons, but it's more likely I suspect that the Conservatives will gain the majority. I expect that the Conservatives will win by about 20 seats.

I don't hold Gordon Brown in the same low contempt that I did BLiar by any means. I find him dour but likeable and honourable; basically a decent and honest man. But he's also an ineffective Prime Minister and more importantly for me, the political party that he leads has, mostly at the hands of his loathsome predecessor, become a byword for institutionalised dishonesty and corruption. And while the current government may not have caused the financial meltdown and consequent global recession that has been the most prominent feature of the political landscape in the last parliament, I have no doubt that they made us more vulnerable to it, and handled it badly. We eventually emerged from recession one of the weakest economies in Europe, having gone into it one of the strongest. I don't have any confidence at all in Labour's ability to lead a recovery or take the necessary steps to reduce our massive deficit.

And quite honestly, I've loathed everything the Labour Party stands for all my adult life and then some.

You may have noticed that I haven't mentioned the Liberal Democrats so far. Or equally likely, you may not have noticed. They are a party of opportunist lightweights and amateurs without a credible policy base. Their most recent idea, for example, is to spend billions of pounds on reopening miles of disused railway track at a time when public spending badly needs to be cut back. I don't take them seriously as a political force except as a repository for tactical votes, and happily they have zero chance of forming a government.

I love an election campaign, and I'm very much hoping to see the end of NuLabour in government next month. Bring it on.

I wonder why I keep a blog. I notice that, as I type, I haven't posted an entry since June 25th, yet the last few months have easily been the most eventful for me since I set up this site.

I finally sold my house in Derby, and moved to Leicestershire, where I'm happily co-habiting with my wife for the first time since we got married in 2007.

What to write about, then?

I could write about the experience of stepping out of my front door for the very last time, in September. I'd spent the previous twenty minutes sitting on the carpet in my empty living room, recalling the key memories from the years that I lived there, all of them concerning women, of course.

Perhaps I could write something about the process of looking for a new house - the disappointments, the disagreements, the stress, the anticipation, then the elation when it's all gone through and an estate agent hands you the keys. Or a few words about our new home - a charming, modern three storey house overlooking a village green.

Or I could write about how nice it is to finally be living with my other half, or less positively, perhaps a paragraph or two on the challenge of adjusting to the endless compromises, the sudden scarcity of solitude, and a 17-yr old stepdaughter with a short fuse and an unusually self-centric worldview.

Or maybe, on the penultimate day of the decade, I should post a sentimental retrospective of the last ten years? For me, the noughties, and of course the current millennium, began in a flat in South London. I was with my girlfriend, Polly. I spent the next two years in London, then moved back, highly reluctantly, to Derby in 2002.

Tell you what, I'll write about something useful instead. Here's how to make a vodka martini, without a cocktail shaker. For this, you will need:

1. A freezer
2. A decent brand of vodka
3. Vermouth
4. A cocktail glass
5. Bottled water
6. A lemon, or olives

Now I grant you, the time-honoured methods of preparing a martini involve ice in some way. But whether you shake it or stir it, the ice has two purposes - to reduce the temperature of the vodka, and to dilute it. These can be achieved by other means.

First, make sure you've got a cocktail glass in the freezer. It's best to keep a couple in there at all times, I find. Depending on the mass of the glass, I think it needs at least 15 minutes in there.

Next, pour roughly 75ml of vodka, and 120ml of water into a container. I use Russian Standard or Absolut combined with Buxton spring water in a small glass jug. You can vary the quantities to taste, of course. If you keep the vodka and the water in the fridge as I do, it will be ready in about 20-25 minutes. If you leave it much longer, it will turn into a sort of vodka slush puppy. You don't want that.

When glass and vodka/water mix are adequately chilled, remove the glass from the freezer.

If using lemon, then cut a slice and halve it. Wipe one half-slice around the inside of the glass and leave it in the bottom. If in an ostentatious mood, you can make yourself a lemon twist - but I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

Alternatively, if olives are your preference, skewer three of them with a cocktail stick and place in the glass.

Dribble a small quantity of vermouth into the glass. Half a capful is too much. Really, the easiest way to ruin a martini is by pouring too much vermouth in it, and overpowering the taste of the vodka. One way to make sure you don't do that is to swirl a little around the glass and pour it down the sink. Honestly, what's left clinging to the side of the glass is enough.

Finally, pour the vodka/water mix into the glass. If you're using olives, you might try a teaspoonful of the brine from the jar, for a 'dirty' martini. But that's an acquired taste. Keep the olive jar in the fridge if you're going to do that.

Of course, you could use gin instead of vodka - in which case you can use slightly more vermouth, because the flavour is a fair bit less delicate.

Now drink it while it's cold. See you in 2010.

A Twitter follower asked me if I was a vegetarian following an idle tweet about nut burgers yesterday, then presented two subsequent questions which I've often been asked in the last twenty-four years: why did I become a vegetarian, and why aren't I a vegan? (the latter query is often framed in the form "do you wear leather shoes?").

The answers are too long for the two or three sentences afforded by Twitter, so I thought I'd compose them here.

I was twenty-four years old when I first seriously thought about what I was doing by eating meat. A cousin had been vegan for a while, and that had piqued my interest. The Smiths, one of my favourite bands at the time, had recorded an album entitled Meat Is Murder. And a year or so earlier, on its opening night, Channel 4 had shown a disturbing documentary on the welfare of animals used for food.

I pondered the idea of becoming vegetarian for a while. I think the key moment was in January 1985 when, on returning home following a beer or three at a pub in Hartlepool, I dragged the New Year turkey out of the fridge and started picking at it. The ugly reality of what I was doing was suddenly clear to me: I was pulling dead flesh from the carcass of a deceased bird, and putting it in my mouth. This was something of an epiphany.

But I didn't give up meat there and then. I thought it might be too hard to give up bacon, ham sandwiches, turkey at Christmas. But I kept thinking about it and thought that I should at least try. Eventually, one lunchtime in late January or early February 1985, I removed the pieces of bacon from the top of the pizza I'd just microwaved, and decided that this would be my first meal as a vegetarian. I wasn't sure whether I'd be able to maintain this status indefinitely, and in fact it was more complicated than I'd anticipated. A lot of otherwise innocuous products like treacle pudding and wine gums turned out to contain animal products when their list of ingredients was inspected. But in fact that carefully modified pizza had been the final turning point, and I had turned my back on eating meat forever.

After a few weeks, the very idea of meat eating had become repulsive to me, in a way that I hadn't expected. There was no longer any way that I'd be prepared to put pieces of dead flesh in my mouth. Twenty-four years of eating from animal corpses in a society where it is regarded as a normal practice had desensitised me to the grim reality of it, but now I was starting to see things much more clearly. I no longer thought of meat as a kind of food that I didn't eat. I didn't think of it as food at all.

I honestly believe that most meat eaters just don't think about what they are doing. The problem is that the necessary confinement and destruction of living creatures is not really apparent in the brightly labelled packet of sausages on the supermarket shelf.

Most people, I hope, would be saddened to see a dog killed in an accident at a pet shop. Why then are the same people for the most part happy to have a pig killed for them, when they could eat something equally nutritious instead, probably more cheaply? Do they imagine that the pig has less to lose than a labrador, or would prefer any less to remain alive? Would they feel better if the dead dog were to be chopped and fried, then served between slices of bread? It doesn't make sense.

One day I'm convinced that the animal holocaust will be remembered as mankind's defining, single most enormous crime. The sheer scale of our industrialised exploitation and destruction of other creatures is breathtaking. Twenty-three million chickens are killed every day in the United States alone; hundreds of unnecessary deaths every second.

So why am I not a vegan? In fact I did give veganism a go. In 1990 I decided that I should try the next logical step, and make my lifestyle as ethical as possible, so I removed dairy products and eggs from my diet as well. Unfortunately, whereas a healthy diet as an 'ordinary' vegetarian is very easy to maintain - I've honestly more or less just eaten what I felt like - a vegan diet does need to be considered quite carefully, and I was just too lazy to do that. Friends had started to tell me that I looked thin and pale (or "fluorescent", in the words of one of my colleagues) and at the end of 1992, weary of chocolate substitute and of feeling tired most of the time, I returned to ovo-lacto vegetarianism (that's the regular, egg and dairy product-consuming variety).

So, it's a compromise to a degree, I accept that. I'm settling for a low impact lifestyle within my own comfort zone. In an ideal world, I'd have something to put in coffee without making it taste worse that wasn't extricated from an imprisoned cow. In the meantime I'll settle for the knowledge that animals aren't killed for food on my behalf, and for setting an example of a life free from eating meat that's healthy and easy.

"To animals, all people are Nazis. For them it is an eternal Treblinka" - Isaac Beshevis Singer

As of today, it's 20 years since I set foot in Derby, the East Midlands town where I live. On the afternoon of 13th April 1989, I drove into town in my Talbot Sunbeam and parked it at the Friary Hotel, where the nuclear research and design company Rolls-Royce and Associates had booked a room for me, and about ten other hopeful undergraduates. I was due to attend a second interview at their premises the following day.

I checked in, put my things in my room, and walked along Friargate, into the so-called city centre, to see what it was like. I remember walking into the Eagle Centre - then Derby's main shopping mall - and feeling slightly disappointed by the nondescript mundanity of it all. Derby has changed a lot over the last 20 years, and especially in the last three or four, but on the whole it's recognisably the same place, and above all it retains at its core that same trademark banality.

I remember being nervous. I knew that I was expected to talk about myself for a few minutes in front of the rest of the attendees at a "group interview", which I found quite a daunting prospect at the time. I remember making notes about my degree course when I returned to my room, intending to talk about that when the time came.

I recall little else about the time I spent in that hotel other than that I watched the old sci-fi thriller This Island Earth on the TV in my room. I haven't watched it since, but I'll be indulging in a special 20th anniversary commemorative viewing this evening.

A small fleet of cars came and picked us up from the hotel reception the following morning and conveyed us to the company premises on Raynesway. The interview went very well, for me anyway, and they offered me a position as an Analyst/Programmer, conditional upon my gaining a 2:2 or higher when I graduated that summer. I got a 2:1, and took it.

And I worked there for five years, from August that year until August 1994. I commuted from Leicester at first, where I lived with my girlfriend back then, Sara. I eventually moved to Derby at the very end of 1990, and bought my house in April 1991. And apart from a seven-year chunk spent in London, I've been here ever since.

The Friary, pictured above today, was a charming if unassuming traditional hotel in 1989. It's a slightly awful bar now. I went back there this afternoon, and recreated my inaugural walk into the town centre.

It's remarkable really that I should have spent all this time in Derby. I don't particularly like the place, I have no family connections here, no friends here, and apart from a few months I'd rather not think about in 2005, I haven't worked in Derby since 1994. I think it's called inertia.