I didn't intend to vanish for five weeks...

All sorts of theories about my disappearance have been suggested by my friends, but they are all untrue. I have not been kidnapped, in prison, or even any of the far more improbable suggestions! In fact - as well as still being very much alive (thanks to the people that e-mailed me to ask me just that, or various versions of it) I'd love to thank, above all, absolutely everyone who has looked after me or out for me in one way or another.

I did at least do the whole 2007 "environmentally friendly" thing by being an unwilling victim of a carbon-neutral road traffic accident. I was a pedestrian who was run over by a pedal cyclist... the cyclist luckily suffered no injuries but I ended up in hospital in Lancashire for eight days. It was simply an accident - nothing more or less - but, having experimented when I certainly didn't intend to, I can say without doubt that I don't regard this kind of contribution to an environmentally friendly lifestyle in any way worthwhile.

You might think that I had therefore had so much more time than usual to listen to, and blog about, music but actually it didn't quite work out that way. At first, and maybe apart from an intermittent headache, I couldn't understand why I felt this way but I simply had little interest in listening to any music at all. After a few days I had the desire to listen to music, but only a few albums out of those (thirty or so) that had stayed with me. The one that I listened to most - and it was the one I had most recently acquired - it had actually arrived at home, on vinyl, from a record store barely a mile from the hospital I ended up in - but the better part of two hundred miles away! This fact actually never occurred to me until I got back home and, while I've since regained my interest in all the other music I have, I've certainly continued to play that one and it is the subject of my next post. The only other I played to death in that time was very predictable: 'No Shouts No Calls' by Electrelane.