We went toThaxted by way of IKEA, because we're fast approaching middle-age, and that's the sort of thing you're supposed to do. A friend of ours, Jeff Higgot, who was at the gig, was sorry we hadn't told him because he needs some more shelves for his Billy bookcase. If we'd have known we would willingly have picked them up for him - because that's what middle-aged people are like - friendly, helpful, and community minded. Sad really, and Jeff's a good twelve years or so younger than me. It seems a good plan in future though to plot the Ikea possibilities on the way to gigs - we can take orders and use the gigs to drop them off. Because people like us are like-minded - and we're making our homes into nice places to live in. When I was a young man I wrote songs like Our Neck Of The Woods and Pleasant Valley Wednesday. Sometimes I think I need to remind myself of that.

Thaxted was a fairly bizarre experience. The landlord of the Star Inn is a very nice Essex man called Lol who looks like a member of the old Dr Feelgood entourage. He told me he'd had lots of calls about the gig but he'd tended to put people off because he didn't want the pub full of just anybody, he wanted to sit on a bar stool and enjoy it. That was fine by me as I was on a fixed fee. The pub was littered with the normal Sunday evening in the pub specimens - people in late middle-age recovering from a weekend's gardening. It looked like an advert for denture glue - comb-overs, big glasses, gin and tonics, and that stuff you put in white hair to stop it going yellow. Then the young set arrived - people like us, well, people more like Jeff really because they were mid-thirties rather than forty-seven like me. I could make a chucklesome middle-aged joke at this point about that not being waist sizes, but I'm not going to because I might be accused of taking myself seriously.

Apart from that I've been busy doing music for a short film by Karen Hibberd. Karen lives in Norwich (or 'Norridge' as we call it in honour of the great Alan Partridge). She's just finished a degree course at the art college there, and the film was part of an installation called Mind Your Head, which she exhibited as her degree show. We're all very pleased because she got a first. She's promised to cut a corner off the degree certificate so that I can staple it onto mine (if I can find it) in recognition of my part in this achievement. The world will never be the same again. We've been planning to make the film available as a CD rom - Karen advertised the idea in Norwich but so far we've had no takers so I'm going to include on a new CDR collection called Farming Today which features three of my fabulously esoteric tracks - you know the ones, like on the Sound Of Your Living Room - everyone goes a bit quiet because they don't quite know what to say. Fuck it - I'm into it, and Martin from the Lo Fidelity Allstars is into it too. He mastered all the tracks for me at their studio - made them sound twice as good. I'm planning to put the thing into production very soon now so look out for an announcement. The Sound Of Your Living Room just went double asbestos, so we're expecting big things from Farming Today.

We recorded our session for Andy Kershaw's programme last week. We did it at the BBC in Maida Vale in the very same studio that I did my first ever BBC session in - for John Peel back in 1977. It was weird standing on the same spot. It made me feel very old for a minute. A lot of things have changed but I'm still musically just as ramshackle as back then. Dysfunctional is probably the word for it. We did three numbers - Sign of the Chicken, Take the Cash (for old times sake), and a new number which we called Bone Marrow in honour of the occasion. It'll be broadcast on July 13^th at 10.15pm our time (that's British Summer Time, not Southern Domestic time). There'll be a webcast to go with it.