Thirty-five years ago tonight, I had arrived in Newcastle, roughly a 45 minute journey from my home town, and was about to attend my first rock concert. My two friends and I arrived about an hour before the concert as I recall, and decamped to the City Tavern, a pub along the road from the venue.

I sipped my beer slightly apprehensively with my two chums, in a dark corner. I think this may actually have been the first time I’d drunk alcohol in a pub, and I was a bit nervous about being caught, a few weeks before my 17th birthday. It wouldn’t be legal for me to drink in a pub for another year. But soon enough we wandered along to the venue, through the main doors, and into the foyer. People were milling around there, queuing for badges and programmes – I still have mine, of course – and it all seemed very exciting.

Then when we entered through the big door into the hall, I could barely believe my eyes. The stage was so close .. it was all a lot smaller than I’d expected. I’d somehow formed an impression of concert venues being huge, cavernous places. Which they usually are, now, of course. But this seemed smaller than a cinema. It was in fact a theatre venue with a capacity of about 2,100 seats.

I took my seat and read my concert programme. You’ve probably seen the online version if you’re a Rush fan. It’s the one in which Sounds magazine’s Geoff Barton writes an entertaining little story about the Priests of the Temples of Syrinx, managing to work the band themselves into the plot.

But I kept glancing up at the stage. I couldn’t believe my heroes were going to be right there .. here in the same room as me! They must already be in the building somewhere! It seemed unreal. Neil’s drums were already on the stage, with a little Starman logo on each of those two big ones that sit on the floor!

I’d managed to cultivate a quite unhealthy obsession with Rush by this time. I had nearly worn out my illegal cassette copy of the band’s live album, All The World’s A Stage. I had closed my eyes and immersed myself into that concert in Toronto, recorded for posterity exactly one year earlier, dozens of times.

The support band – Stray – were really good. I was impressed by the light show. And they were LOUD! A lot louder than my parents’ HiFi. Wow!

By the time the lights went down, I was almost sick with excitement. My heart was pounding, and the crowd was roaring.

Then suddenly, my life changed, forever. The stage burst into light, and Alex was there, leaning over a Gibson guitar, his blond locks tumbling forward, cranking out Bastille Day, louder than I’d ever imagined it. It is a moment that is burned into my mental retina for all time. The crowd was going wild around me; everyone was on their feet. Geddy was strutting along the front of the stage, grinning widely, wearing what appeared to be a bed sheet as a cape, coaxing bottom-end loudness from his Rickenbacker bass. And Neil was hitting those drums hard! And already twirling his sticks, something I hadn’t expected at all.

My jaw dropped. It was sensory overload. I probably went into shock, slightly.

The show seemed to pass so quickly. A rip-roaring By-Tor And The Snow Dog gave way to The Necromancer, a tune I confess I’d never heard but was very intrigued by. And “side one from our latest studio album” – 2112, of course – was astonishing; emotional, intense and powerful. There was a new song called Xanadu. With double-neck guitars! Wow.

It was over all too soon, but even after a rowdy and rousing second encore, What You’re Doing, the crowd hadn’t had enough. We shouted, stomped and begged very loudly for what seemed like about half an hour, to be rewarded by Alex walking back on stage, grinning from ear to ear and looking incredulous at the reception he and the band had received. The other two joined him and after a very loud, highly energetic and frankly joyous performance of Best I Can, it really was all over this time.

As we spilled out of the City Hall into the cool of a Newcastle summer evening, my ears were ringing and I felt oddly intoxicated and elated.

Four weeks later I hand over a tenner or so at Boots, and become the proud owner of Fly By Night, Caress Of Steel and 2112, the three most recent Rush albums (and there are only four, in July 1977). And if you’d told me that I’d be looking forward to getting my hands on a new Rush album in 35 years’ time, I think I’d have been quite surprised.

Here’s an odd thought that occurred to me earlier today. I can remember the events of that night 35 years ago quite clearly. 35 years before that, World War Two was just getting into its stride.

Wow.

I imagine that this is one of very many pieces published today as a personal recollection of the events of September 11th, 2001. I’d lost my job at a US investment firm at Canary Wharf in June that year, and in September I was still enjoying what amounted to an extended holiday in London. I was idly surfing the Internet with the TV on behind me in my South London flat, and at the end of the programme a news bulletin appeared. It showed a live image of the World Trade Centre from a camera a few blocks away. The second plane had hit the South Tower a minute or two earlier.

Confusion reigned at this point, of course – but it seemed clear that an act of terrorism had taken place. I was particularly shocked since I’d often worked in New York over the previous few years, and the towers were a familiar sight. I’d been to the top of the South Tower myself, on my first visit to New York in 1987. I still have some photos taken from (and of) the observation platform, and they seem quite surreal now.

I remember phoning my mum to get her to turn on the news, and I said to her that we were watching events that would live in history. I went onto a US messageboard that I frequented, to see what people were saying over there. People were stunned, speculating as to what had happened and reacting to news of the attack on the Pentagon that had just broken.

I sat watching News 24 for another half an hour, then drove to Lordship Lane where I had a brief appointment. While walking from my car I remember hearing a man in his ’60s talking to someone in the street. He was saying that the Americans had thrown their weight around for years, and now someone had done it to them. Ten years later, it remains a more cogent analysis of the events of that day than many I’ve heard.

From there I drove to Sainsbury’s at Dog Kennel Hill, and then came the moment that brought home the enormity of what had happened. I was listening to a special news programme on Radio Four, just as I parked. The presenter announced, with audible emotion in his voice, that the South Tower had collapsed. I couldn’t believe that. I had never imagined that the attack would prove to be so devastating. I drove home and sat in front of News 24 until the early hours of Sept 12th, trying to take in what had happened.

I will admit to feeling nervous later in the evening. It felt as though the world had turned a corner, along a darker and more dangerous path. I had an awful, apprehensive “what now?” feeling.

The media and the public dialogue on the Internet were full of confusion in the following days. I remember one or two ridiculous hoaxes appearing. And unfortunately at this point, an odd psychosis appeared to overwhelm America; one from which, a decade later, I don’t think it has yet recovered. I was surprised at the reaction from Americans on message boards, suddenly immersing themselves in patriotism and flag-waving, some insisting on a massive military response, as though terrorism could be defeated with the application of military force, like a nation state. Sales of guns in the US went through the roof around this time, as I recall – it seemed that Americans were anticipating shooting it out with Al Qaeda operatives in the street.

Some perspective. As dreadful as the attacks were, they did not cause the most catastrophic loss of civilian life in history. Something like three-thousand people were killed in the attacks of September 11th, 2001. Most people have never heard of the MV Wilhelm Gustloff, a German ship torpedoed by the Soviets in 1945. More than nine thousand were killed, most of them refugees. And of course, the American military killed more than one hundred thousand civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In September 2004 I wrote that, three years after the attack, the terrorist leaders would be taking a measure of satisfaction from the West’s response to the atrocities of September 11th, 2001, and that the governments of the US and the UK had, sadly, played into their hands beautifully. Seven years later, I have no reason to revise that bleak assessment. The Islamist extremists got exactly what they wanted, and much more. Our governments had been provoked to destroy in subsequent years many times the number of civilian lives taken on 9/11. I doubt that bin Laden and friends could have dared hope that Bush and Blair would turn out to be such dramatically powerful recruiters to their cause.

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 shopping district 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 in total. 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 colourful, flamboyant, 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.

I’m not saying that the battle is won
But on Saturday night all those kids in the sun
Wrested technology’s sword from the hand of the war lord
Oh, oh, oh, the tide is turning

– Roger Waters, The Tide Is Turning (After Live Aid)

It’s the last day of my forties, and I thought I might mark their passing by attempting to summarise my last ten years here.

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 journal 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 notice that, as I type, I haven’t written an entry since June 25th, yet the last few months have easily been the most eventful for me since I started this journal.

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, as it happens.

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:

• A freezer
• A decent brand of vodka
• Vermouth
• A cocktail glass
• Bottled water
• A lemon, or lime, 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 90ml of vodka, and 20ml of water into a container. I like to use Smirnoff Black Label 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.

Other acceptable brands are Russian Standard and Finlandia. The latter in particular is very smooth while the former has a pleasing peppery bite. There’s an English brand called Chase which is made from potatoes and is phenomenal, but it’s about £40 a bottle.

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

Now prepare a lemon twist. You do this by peeling a length off the lemon peel, as though you were peeling an apple, with a sharp knife. You want about 60mm, though that’s not critical. Try not to descend into the flesh of the lemon, though it’s not a showstopper if you do. Trim the sides so it’s nice and straight, and twist it. This is not merely an aesthetic exercise – twisting it will coax some of the lemon oil out of the peel, onto the surface. You can use a lime instead of a lemon if you prefer (as indeed I do, but I think my taste is unusual in that respect). Throw it into the glass.

Alternatively, if olives are your preference, skewer up to 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 half 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.

On 5th March 1984 began one of the most important, pivotal episodes in the 20th century UK political timeline – the 1984-1985 Miner’s Strike.

This was a bitter, year-long dispute, pitting Arthur Scargill’s National Union of Mineworkers against the Conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher. Ostensibly a dispute over the closing of uneconomic mines, in reality far more was at stake. This was the rule of the mob against the rule of law; militant trade unionism against the primacy of democracy. The government had been elected by a huge majority only a few months previously; in contrast the Union which tried to overcome it had not even balloted its own members to seek a mandate for its action.

The union barons had grown accustomed to wielding the power of veto over the democratic franchise, bringing down government after government by inflicting power cuts and industrial disruption until the electors had had enough.

But they had picked a fight too far, this time. Scargill had underestimated the reserves of coal in the power stations, had underestimated the reluctance of key sections of the mining industry to strike without a ballot, and perhaps most critically, had underestimated the resolve of Margaret Thatcher’s government to defeat him. She knew that this was a contest the British People could not afford to lose.

A year later, we had won, and the political landscape was transformed. The hard left unions had been neutered. Their corrosive capacity to disrupt British industry and send jobs abroad, as they had done to such devastating effect in the ’60s and ’70s, was greatly diminished. And they had forever lost their power to superimpose their own hard left agenda over the people’s choice of government.

Spare a thought today for David Wilkie, a Welsh taxi driver killed by striking miners for taking one of their colleagues to work.

Some time in the summer of 1973, or possibly 1974, I was surprised to be awoken from my slumbers late one night by my mother, who, in a surprising and highly unprecedented gesture, invited my little brother and me to get up and watch a TV programme of which I’d never heard, called M*A*S*H. I loved it, and watched it whenever it was shown after that.

Some twelve years later, after the series had finally come to an end, the BBC started a long run of M*A*S*H repeats from the very first episode. I recorded as many of them as I could, onto VHS tapes.

Eventually I had a large collection of VHS recordings of M*A*S*H. I kept them for many years; until the series was released on DVD in fact, two or three years ago. But I never watched them. Somehow, even after I had every single episode on DVD, the mood to watch one of them just never took me.

It vaguely bothered me for years that I could never get round to watching this programme I loved so much as a young person. And it irritated me especially that for about 20 years a large stash of video recordings had taken up space in my various homes, never to be watched.

Well, in February this year, I finally mustered the resolve to watch them. I decided that I would watch every single episode, in sequential order, in 2008. I started my M*A*S*H marathon at the end of February with the pilot episode, originally broadcast in 1972, with the intention of sitting down some time on or before December 31st to watch the final episode, Goodbye, Farewell and Amen, first shown in 1983.

In fact, my journey came to an end tonight. I have watched every one of the two-hundred and fifty-one episodes of M*A*S*H in the last eighty-two days; an average of three per day. There hasn’t been a single day in that time when I haven’t seen at least one episode. On most days I have watched two or three, and on some days I have watched four or five. I have watched M*A*S*H on the train to and from work on my Nokia handheld, I have watched M*A*S*H on my computer at work at lunchtime, I have watched M*A*S*H on the TV in my bedroom and in my living room. The Korean War lasted eleven years for TV viewers in the 1970s and early 1980s. It lasted three years in reality, but for me it lasted twelve intense weeks. I honestly had tears in my eyes when the joyous news came tonight that the war was at an end.

Incidentally I discovered a few days after starting my epic journey through M*A*S*H that I had commenced it twenty-five years to the day after the series came to an end. Goodbye, Farewell and Amen was broadcast originally on February 28th 1983, to a record US television audience.

Earlier this year, Theos, a UK-based “public theology think tank”, as if that wasn’t a contradiction in terms, commissioned a poll to measure public opinion on religious matters in the UK.

The results are interesting. 58% of those polled consider that “Christianity has an important role to play in public life”, but more promisingly, 42% agree with Professor Richard Dawkins’ assertion that “faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate”.

I view religious faith as possibly the most demeaning of all superstitions, a process of wilful non-thinking intended to allow the believer to adhere to any comforting fantasy they wish despite any and all reason and evidence to the contrary, and I am delighted to know that so many in the UK generally agree. Of course, 42% is not really enough, but it’s a very encouraging figure nonetheless, and I think that the numbers of people hostile to these ignorant, backward myths can only grow. The survey results are published here.

Incidentally, I bought Professor Dawkins’ excellent The God Delusion in London a few weeks ago, and would recommend it to anyone still seeking enlightened help with the “God” question.

The last decade or so should have taught us, by now, never to be surprised at the mendacious depths to which BLiar will stoop to congratulate himself.

But even after 12 years of spin, manipulation and outright dishonesty, I was genuinely appalled to hear the catalogue of self-serving half-truths and lies dished up by this shoddiest of British Prime Ministers, in the form of a final speech to his party’s annual conference, yesterday.

The Labour Party in government has always, inadvertently or otherwise, been a liability to the people it has unfortunately been elected to serve. But where once Labour administrations were characterised by economic incompetence, small-minded class warfare and craven, servile cowardice at the feet of the Trade Union barons, now, thanks to Phony Tony, Labour in power is about unending media manipulation and spin, cronyism, hypocrisy, corruption and sleaze, seedy indulgence in the trappings of power, disdain for democracy and contempt for truth.

The British people have at last come to regret misplacing their trust three times in the dishonourable charlatan who has so demeaned the office of Prime Minister. Sadly, the lesson has been learned rather late.

went back to London for a few hours yesterday.

I took my bicycle with me, on the train – I had never cycled in London before. The idea was to revisit some of my old driving routes; it was intended as a one-off idea. But it was so much less hassle than the tube and it made the trip home from Derby railway station a lot easier too. I will definitely take it next time, even if it’s only for the usual walk around the West End. I really should have bought a bike when I lived there.

I wheeled the bike out of St Pancras station at about 11:15, climbed onto it and slid south through the busy city traffic, past the Barbican, through London Wall and east along the river to Tower Bridge.

When I worked at Canary Wharf, I was fortunate enough to be able to turn up at work roughly whenever I liked in the morning, except when I was on call – on these relatively rare occasions, I had to be on site at the very beginning of the trading day, so I would drive to work to be sure of being there at 06:30. I would typically leave work at around 16:00 on those days, and I’d make my way home to South-East London across Tower Bridge. It’s a journey I have remembered often, one I must have made around a hundred times. My overriding memory of it is the speed at which the trip across the bridge gives way to an anonymous, dreary grey urban landscape just south of the river; from one of the world’s great city landmarks to nowhere in a few turns of a steering wheel.

Four years later, I repeated my journey south to Dulwich across England’s most famous bridge, this time by bicycle – into Bermondsey, across Old Kent Road and into Camberwell, west along Denmark Hill, then the long descent along Dog Kennel Hill to East Dulwich. It took about 30 minutes to reach my old flat in Glengarry Road, probably about 5 minutes longer than the same journey by car at that time of day. I rode around East Dulwich, bathing in bittersweet nostalgia, and took a few photos. Although I’ve been back to the West End many times, I’ve only been back to Dulwich three times since I lived there. It hasn’t changed a lot. Did I really spend seven years there? It seems more like seven weeks.

I spent a few minutes on the northbound platform of North Dulwich railway station, one of my very favourite places in the world, remembered with great fondness for time spent waiting for a train to the West End on Saturday mornings. I contemplated leaving my bike there and doing the same this time, but instead I climbed back onto it and pedalled in the direction of Blackfriars bridge, repeating my old route to my rifle club. I took a left turn into Fleet Street and continued onto Strand. As I passed the Twinings tea shop, I remembered that I had been meaning to visit it for quite some time, to obtain some of their Rose Pouchong tea – a South China blend with a delectable rose perfume, which I’d last drunk as a resident of London. I secured the bike to the nearest lamppost and entered, only to be told that it had been discontinued in the packaged, teabag form by which I had made its acquaintance. Happily though, they still sell it in loose tea form, so I acquired a 125g bag.

Four minutes later, I fastened the bike to a cycle stand just off Strand, about two minutes’ walk from Trafalgar Square. I had been concerned beforehand that I wouldn’t be able to find a place in the city centre to park it, but in fact there are little clusters of bike stands all over the West End .. I honestly could not remember ever having seen a bicycle parked in London before, but I must have walked past stationary bikes there hundreds of times without ever noticing them. I set off to wander around the West End for a few hours in my usual sentimental fashion, in search of the spirit of 1996.

A few weeks ago I finally came to the end of my supplies of deodorant and shaving gel from the gargantuan stash of toiletries I bought five years ago, so I was looking forward to buying some more; I have resolved always to buy my bathroom products in London, as a kind of token of my status as a satellite citizen of our capital city. I bought three deodorant sprays and three cans of shave gel at Boots near Charing Cross, in ‘3 for 2’ offers. I had brought with me the last few empty aerosol sprays to discard in London, and I committed them to a waste bin at Trafalgar Square (I’d actually intended to throw them away in Dulwich to be quite honest, but I forgot). I can’t tell you how cathartic it was to throw them away in the city where I obtained them, only to leave them standing in cardboard boxes in a South London flat, eventually to be transported to Derby where they remained years later.

I also picked up a tub of old-fashioned shaving cream from the Jermyn Street branch of Taylors of Old Bond Street. I tried their lemon & lime shaving cream a few years ago and very much enjoyed using it on those rare occasions when I could be bothered to use my shaving brush; this time I chose the rose fragrance, to establish a sort of theme for the day in conjunction with my earlier choice of Twinings tea. I will probably crack it open on Christmas Day.

As I relaxed on the train on the way home I realised, with a measure of regret, that I’d bought roughly a two-year supply of shaving products.

In the CD player: Adapt Or Die, ten years of Everything But The Girl remixes.

In the whisky tumbler: Highland Park. A thoroughly decent single malt, but rather ordinary.