Yesterday was spent in the company of 3 accomplished string players at Ant's studio in Stoke Newington. By which I don't mean they coaxed beautiful sounds out of lengths of twine, rather a violin, a cello, and another violin respectively. Ant was reluctantly sweeping up detritus from the previous session that his colleague had been responsible for when they arrived. We introduced ourselves. “Hello, I'm Cleaner,” said one, and the sheer effort it took for me not to hand her the broom and say “well, best get sweeping then” was so immense I almost gave myself a hernia. It later transpired that she was called Calina.

We added luscious harmonies to various tracks on the forthcoming Spearmint album over 7 long hours, and by the end of it I became tired and weary. I'm not the kind of luvvie who would claim that committing music to hard disk is as physically tiring as working down a mineshaft – nor as dirty, or badly paid, although it is more heavily unionised – but I do always feel shattered afterwards. At the end we discussed occasions when we had burst into tears during a recording session. Obviously no-one else owned up to any, but I recounted both mine:

1. Recording Spearmint's My Missing Days album in November 2002. I was suffering from what I believed to be piles. The pain was appalling. I sat on a particularly soft cushion, and grappled with editing up a vocal take on “Time Is Now” which was proving particularly troublesome. After 30 minutes of pushing waveforms about, the computer froze, and I started to cry. I left the room for 10 minutes. No-one came to see if I was OK, so I went back in and got on with it. Men, you see, do not speak of bottoms and tears in public. I ended up having to go to see a proctological doctor.

2. Recording The Keatons Ex Vide Betamaxi In Honda Cotopaxi in Decin, Czech Republic, 1992. We had a Czech engineer who didn't speak any English, and as usual I had taken it upon myself to worry about all the various musical issues as the rest of the band were busy going for a walk, or begging for small change from the locals to buy food. It was a long, arduous day, mainly spent urging Dave to play his guitar vaguely in time with the drums, and saying “Just One More Take” to the engineer. Towards the end of the day, we had to endure the hideous daily event of drawing straws to see who would sleep in the van, which had no lock on it and thus needed guarding overnight. No-one liked sleeping in the van. You were rarely able to sleep in the van in any case, so what you were actually drawing straws for was sitting in the van between the hours of midnight and 8am. As we drew the straws, I said “after today, I bloody hope I don't get it.” Of course, I did. Dave began to laugh hysterically, and I began to cry.

These days, I'm more manly.