Back to normal?

What passes for normality 'round here? Work? School? Housework? Gardening?

'All those things and a peripatetic son who keeps taking the family car to Hereford; locking himself away in my office (the 'spare' bedroom) for days, and only emerges to eat or to tell us he has written another new song or finished an illustration. He's been firing off job applications too.

He seems to get a gig with his band most weeks, but the big tour approaches in October. I'll keep you posted. Meanwhile he allowed me to play flute on a new song. I really enjoyed using his little studio set up on my iMac using Garage Band. The trick seems to be having a decent mic, and knowing what all those buttons do.

When Nick is a way, Dan takes over the room. I'm typing this on Nicks Mac while Dan is on mine. Dan has also stolen my iPod which I normally use to keep up with friends or the Guardian on-line. Since I'm stuck here supervising Dan (you can't leave him for a moment) I have been alphabetizing our CD collection. I used to store them in an assortment of wooden crates, in random order. Often the jewel case was in one box while the CD was somewhere else. If you listen to BBC Radio 1 (and why would you?) you get the idea. They just play about five songs because they can't find any of the others. I bet their studio is just like my bedroom, only with coffee.

I found that IKEA sells enormous towers that hold 180 CDs each, so I bought two. That should hold my whole collection, I reckoned. I have a tiny number of A's because I don't like Abba much but a huge "D" section made up of Dylan and Miles, a massive "S" collection and a load of "M"s dominated by Joni Mitchel and John McLaughlin. In fact, 360 CDs only takes me up to 'S'. Poor old Stevie Wonder, Steve Winwood, Weather Report and Van the Man; no space for them, or even James Taylor who merits a whole crate to himself. I have a few Zs too; Joe Zawinul, Zappa, the Zutons, ZZ Top. We need another trip to IKEA. More Swedish meatballs!

Talking of which, did you know that IKEA is not even a real word, and that it isn't Swedish? The company is registered in Holland, as a charity! There was an expose in Mental Floss (a great magazine, worth checking out) a few months ago.

To get Dan away from my iMac, we found him a perfectly good 2nd hand PC. A friend of mine, Paul Lippet, has replaced all his old stuff so we got three decent PCs; two for work and one for home. Dan isn't interested: It has to be a Mac. He's so into cool gadgets.