Man, have I had a crazy few days. It’s been insane. Madness. Schizo. Mentally ill. I’ve had a mentally ill few days. I’m trying to say I’ve been busy. But having said that, sitting at Lord’s last Thursday watching England play New Zealand in chilly temperatures and light drizzle probably doesn’t count as being busy, as such, but it certainly stopped me from doing anything else useful. I was sitting behind an enormous man who spent most of the day loading up miniature pork pies with mounds of salad cream, calling out to his friend 6 rows in front – ”OI! OI! D’ARCY!” – waving the pork pie around for D’Arcy, and then popping it into his mouth. I thought about calling out to Kevin Pietersen on the boundary in order to let him know that I was about to take a bite of my egg sandwich, but thought on reflection that he probably wouldn’t give a shit.

On Friday I drove to Brighton – primarily to sit on a panel discussing music and blogging at the Great Escape Festival, but also for Jenny and I to take advantage of a cut-price hotel offer and attempt to make a night of it. The panel was interesting, although for some reason the representative from Beggars Banquet seemed to joyfully embrace the wholesale devaluation of music (maybe he’s retraining as a plumber, who knows) and it was left to cynical old me to suggest that yes, this love-in between musicians and people who download music for free is great for the egos of artists watching hit counters, and glorious for the spoilt music consumer, but don’t pretend you’re ever going be able to monetize it, long term. 99.99% of bands have never been able to monetize their music, certainly not at any meaningful level. Even bands that get signed spent most of their time living off onions and crying. It’s an expensive hobby. So enjoy giving your MP3s away, rejoice that you don’t have 2,000 CDs in your shed like I do, and don’t think about it any more deeply than that. That was my basic point, which I hammered ad infinitum.

If a town is swamped with festival-attending yout’ on a Friday night, the best thing to do is retire to a pub about a mile outside the city centre, which is what we did, before going to Blanch House for unnecessary digestifs, although we’d probably lost the ability to discern between aperitifs and digestifs by that point. Next morning I had to get up at 7.30am and slog across the south coast to Dorset, to research a piece I’ve just finished writing for the Independent that’s full of rude words. After three hours of pure filth it was back in the car to London, then jump on a tube train to Highbury at about 5.30pm, and subsequently receive a call to tell me that this massive cross-country slog had been completely unnecessary because the gig I was playing at didn’t start until 10.30pm, after all. Rats. I threw my umbrella at a wall to try and make myself feel better.

Keith, Tom and I ended up playing on a roof of a block of flats in Bethnal Green road in the dark, in the rain, in the cold, in front of 30 or 40 shivering punters at about 10.45pm, bracing ourselves for the inevitable megaphone interruption from police telling us that we were breaking umpteen byelaws and to come down in the lift with our hands above our heads. But that didn’t happen, it passed without much incident, and we packed up as the DJs began what was supposed to be a 5-hour all-night session. I hate being involved in that kind of thing, mainly because I’m the kind of person who’d immediately get on the phone to the council, the police, Samaritans, my mum – anything, in fact, rather than confront the bastards who were making all the noise. I went home and fell asleep in front of the Colbert Report – now showing every week-night on the FX channel, god bless them.

Yesterday I woke up with my fourth cold of the year and peered out of my window to watch three men lay a concrete base for my new shed in exchange for an envelope full of cash. None of them spoke English to any understandable level, so I was relieved to go out there this morning with a tape measure to discover that the shed will actually fit on the concrete base. JUST. The main guy, an Iranian chap, had one vaguely acceptable joke, though, which he exploited ruthlessly. “How many bedrooms you like?” he asked me at various points during the day, laughing and pointing at the 7-foot square slab of concrete. “One,” I replied, humourlessly, on each occasion.