The latest is that my dad (who was born in 1923 and died in 1977) had an older brother who died aged 58 days (Donald Hamilton Carter, 19.1.22-16.3.22). We always thought that my dad was the eldest child - and so, we believe, did he.

There were also two later children whom we were previously unaware of - one who died after four days (Anna Carter, 2.1.26-6.1.26) and another unnamed daughter, who was stillborn (sometime between February and June 1932).

Not only have these three children never been spoken about before, to our knowledge, but we don't believe that my dad even knew about them, even though the third child died when my dad was nine. For him to not know about it, it surely must have occured during a period when he wasn't at home. My dad, along with his brothers and sisters, was taken into care, because of apparent neglect by my grandfather, but I've always assumed that happened after his mother died.

If he wasn't there, maybe he just never got to know about what was happening at home. More significantly, it seems he wasn't told in later life, either.

And the plot thickens. About twenty years ago, I made a couple of visits to meet my grandfather's younger sister, Flo, and we talked a lot about the family history. Despite this golden opportunity to tell me about these three children, she never did - yet she must have known.

I can only guess that there was some kind of feeling that although infant deaths were still not uncommon, maybe at least the first two deaths could have been avoided, which led to a concerted effort among those who knew about the three dead babies to 'hush up' their existence. The cause of death for the elder brother was dyspepsia (which is just indigestion, according the dictionary), plus 'general debility' - which sounds like the baby could have been disabled in some way. The saddest thing of all would be if the hushing up occured because the family felt some kind of stigma at having a disabled baby. I'm still only guessing here, but I wouldn't put it past people of that era to have lunatic morals and philosophies like that (nor some people today).

There was also a stillborn child on my mother's side of the family. She had a stillborn sister. Even with that more straightforward case, the story handed down in the family is probably wrong. My mum was told the baby was born one day and died the next. But that would have required birth and death certificates, and we haven't been able to find either. Stillbirths, on the other hand, weren't registered in those days, and is therefore much more likely.

It seems incredible to us, now, that the basic facts involving something as major as a death in the family should get muddied, let alone be brushed under the carpet completely.

Returning to my dad's side of the family: the fact that he was the oldest surviving child was significant. His mother died when he was just ten years old, and because of the aforementioned neglect by his father, as the eldest, he was left with responsibilities for bringing up - or at least looking out for - his younger brothers and sisters.

Michael Jackson's was definitely not my kind of music, and I have never owned any of his records if you don't include the duet he did on one of Paul McCartney's albums. Neither do I think that he had quite the influence on music that people are saying he did. He was the king of pop in the Eighties, for sure, but perhaps only because, in terms of musical creativity and originality during that "MTV generation", he was more or less the only one who turned up. And if you analyse the time when he was at the top of his solo game, it was a relatively short period, with a handful of memorable hits, and a long time ago.

That's not to say that he wasn't a great showman, because he was, but it has to be said that the world's other great showmen have never stooped as low as he did to get publicity when they ran out of ideas.

A lot of the talk on the news channels has been about how we must try to remember him for his music, not his eccentricities, some going close to suggesting that because he sold so many records, we should even try to forget that he was almost certainly a paedophile ("Oh yes, he had unnatural relationships with children, but he didn't mean no harm...") Are we to think the same of Gary Glitter?

I also watched some preacher come out and say how Jackson was a hero and a great example to black people. This time we were being asked to turn a blind eye to the fact that if he taught anything to young black Americans, it was surely that they should aspire to spend a fortune on cosmetic surgery so they could turn your backs on their roots and have the face of a white man.

Mind you, the news coverage was compelling, especially during that time when the BBC was holding its breath, not totally convinced that we weren't witnessing one last grotesque publicity stunt. Then they started grabbing his friends for interviews and digging out archive footage, which only served to prove one thing: they are as nutty as he was.

Uri Geller, David Blaine, Liz Taylor, a chimpanzee: these are not people I'd like to have speaking up for me when I get to the pearly gates.

There was Holly's usual homemade one (always the best kind) and Sean's laugh-out-loud one that is exactly my kind of humour.

The gifts included three bottles of real ale; a T-shirt; a travel journal for taking on holiday, plus pens to write it; chocolate; liquorice allsorts; a homemade paperweight; a 3D ruler with wobbling penguins; and a really cute little (2cm across) bookmark in the shape of a camera (pictured).

Perfect.

So we were really keen for her to go out in style, which she did, winning two of her three matches at a four-team contest in Tiverton, Devon, even though she was board 3, which means she was ranked third in the team, and therefore had to play the other boards 3s from the other counties. In fact, only two of the other three counties were actually counties - Berkshire and Devon - as the other was half a country (South Wales).

As is always the case, the game she lost was a long, drawn-out affair - nobody ever beats her quickly - and it was against the Berkshire board 3, whose team ended up winning the competition. Wiltshire finished third out of the four.

So it was a worthwhile trip that both me and Julie took, and it was made even more worthwhile by the fact that while Holly was slaving over chess boards, we sloped off to visit my sister Carol and her husband Dave, who live an easy, scenic (and today sunny) drive away from Tiverton.

Their special offer seemed too good to be true - a USB turntable for £50.

My last record player broke down about 20 years ago, and there never seemed much incentive to get it fixed or replace it, what with CDs, and then that gift from the gods, the iPod. But I've slowly started to miss all those obscure albums and tracks that you can't get in digital form, or else would cost too much - such as a Joni Mitchell album (Shadows and Light) which I'd love to hear all over again, and a few one-hit wonders and B-sides still lurking in a big chestful of records that I keep in the loft.

We'd already decided to be the first in the queue when Aldi sold the turntable this morning, but if I needed proof that we were doing the right thing, I got it at the Strawbs concert on Friday. They produced a classic album called From the Witchwood, which I mostly own the tracks from in digital form, but there are a couple missing, and I don't own it as a complete entity, except as a record. It's expensive to buy on CD, but now I am able to get the vinyl out again and not only listen to it, but also digitise it, and put it on my iPod.

I don't subscribe to the silly view that vinyl sounds better than digital, even if you can get rid of the scratches. I've heard it said that vinyl sounds "warmer" or something, but if it does, I can't hear it. But there are plenty of other aspects of a record that are desirable - and which you only fully understand when you get the record out and play it again: actually handling it and caring for it; the labels, which were a kind of sub-culture with important themes and loyalties; the information on the label, such as the writer and year of creation, which you have to search for on the CD insert, but which are integral to the understanding and enjoyment of the recording; and the sleeve itself, of course, which was not only a great and noble artform, but part of the experience, and something that made the product great value for money (especially compared with the shameless overpricing of CDs by a morally corrupt industry).

When we got the turntable home, we also enjoyed the sight of Sean - somebody who is very 'up' on music technology - trying to come to terms with something that, to him, was like it just landed in a capsule dropped by a flying saucer.

He had to ask us how to properly place the stylus on the record, and wasn't quite sure what the evenly spaced lines were on the surface of record, until we confirmed they were the gaps in-between the tracks.

Funnily enough, it was by no means the scariest part of the evening. I still find the whole idea of playing drums in front of an audience a terribly challenging thing, which, if I thought too much about, would probably cause me to black out or something. I still approach it thinking that of all the things I could be doing with my Saturday night, setting myself up for something like that has to be the dumbest imaginable, and I'd rather be somewhere else instead.

So when it came to my turn to sing, half-way through the second set, I was still thinking that drumming in front of people is bad enough, and it couldn't become much more of an ordeal. At least there wasn't much of a crowd in.

In the end, the song passed off pretty well. I sang slowly, which is an achievement because your impulse is to rush it and get it over with, and, after all, it is a slow song. I also managed to keep the click going, using a single stick on a jam block (a kind of wood block sound), which is harder than it sounds, especially at the points where the melody goes outside the rhythm. I didn't feel as though I projected it as well as in rehearsals, however, but Julie, who was in the audience, said it sounded good, and didn't sound as if she was necessarily humouring me. I even managed to fool most of the audience, who maybe didn't realise that I had taped the words to one of the drums (above) - because singing without having the lyrics in front of you, to fall back on, is like tightrope walking without a net.

Like Fields of Gold, the rest of the gig went OK, and I thought we sounded pretty good at times. We even managed to play a request - a Gary Moore song that I had not only never practised, but didn't even recognise. I was told to play a swing beat and seemed to get away with it - until somebody hummed how the song actually goes, and I realised there is a distinctive drum part. Still, in the circumstances...

I've been a fan of theirs for many years - about 37, I reckon - and it was really nice to see them playing some old favourites, several of which are in my all-time Top 100.

Whenever you explain the Strawbs to everybody you have to say that a) their huge hit, Part of the Union, was untypical of their work, b) you either love or hate the voice of lead singer Dave Cousins, which is very distinctive, and c) they are the finest embodiment of a proper folk-rock band you could ever wish to see.

These days they divide their appearances between a rock band style and the type I've seen three or four times in the last five years - the so-called 'Acoustic Strawbs', a trio.

There's not much more to say, except you can't beat a bit of live music, and I could happily sit and listen to the guitar of Dave Lambert and the voice of Dave Cousins every night.

The latest treat was a thoroughly enjoyable production of Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit, at the Watermill near Newbury, a theatre we are trying to make a habit of going to regularly. They do a new production about once a month, and although certain plays in the programme don't appeal to me very much, the general rule is that most things are worth seeing, if only because the place ouses atmosphere.

For productions like Blithe Spirit, it is probably at its best because the set is a compact little sitting room, which makes the venue even more cosy than normal, and you really get a sense of being in the room with the actors, rather than watching from outside.

One thing about more or less any professional theatre production, these days, is the actors are almost always highly skilled at their craft. They wouldn't last five minutes in the profession if they didn't have genuine talent for it, unlike on TV, where any gormless prat can find himself in front of a camera. You hardly ever get any duff acting on the professional stage, but you often find yourself marvelling at just how good some actors are. This production had the added benefit of some clever ghostly effects - and we're still not quite sure how they managed to make the ghosts materialise and dematerialise.

Because tickets are only £12.50 each on Monday nights, which we think is an absolute giveaway, you can't go wrong.

This is the biggest chess competition in the world, and today it was the regional (Wilts and Dorset) final (called the Megafinal), from which the qualifiers go on to the national Gigafinal - something that she has done every year for the last six or seven.

These days, on account of being the only under-14 girl competing in the two counties at this level, she only has to turn up to be the Wilts/Dorset 'Suprema' for her age, and would qualify even if she lost all six games on the day.

So it becomes a matter of pride or honour or something, and she always wants to do well in qualifying. Even though she now has to compete against kids who are sometimes much older than herself (as they combine the under-14-18s), and play mostly boys, she won her first four games. Then she came up against a wildcard under-17 in the fifth round, who had come down from Yorkshire because, for some reason or other, he couldn't compete in his regional final and needed to qualify for the Gigafinal as he has an astronomically high grade. She eventually lost that one, then settled for a draw in the last game - so four and a half points out of six on the day, and a well-deserved cup and rosette to add to her collection.

Some people like expensive restaurants because they are expensive, but there's no getting away from the fact that although it was gobsmackingly expensive, the Pear Tree is very creative with its food. Not only was it very tasty, but it somehow managed to be surprisingly filling, too. And speaking as somebody who is always hungry and could always eat a kebab on the way home, that's no mean feat.

I thoroughly enjoyed it, although even if I could afford it, I wouldn't go back to The Pear Tree in a hurry. It's too much of a special treat to make a habit of it.

She's one of those anatomical models, designed to show you the innards of the human body. I found her in a skip and instantly thought: "That's got to be worth something on eBay." Although she's made of plastic, she seems quite old, her hair being in a kind of 1940s style, so even as anatomical models go, she's unusual.

She's missing the whole of her front part, which was once held on by clips, and all of her removable organs have been removed, plus her nose is slightly bashed, but she's definitely a conversation piece and might be considered valuable by somebody who runs a pub or a cafe or a shop or something and is looking for an interesting ornament. Or even a film set dresser.

To eBay or not to eBay: that is the question.

I was asked to research some local D-Day stories (the 65th anniversary falling today), and came up with a nice one about Americans being billeted in Swindon in the run-up to D-Day, then looked into the death of Alan Fowler, a Swindon Town striker who was killed in Normandy, just over a month after D-Day. He is twelfth in the club's all-time goalscorers list.

After delving into his story, I discovered something that nobody else has realised before: he was killed by 'friendly fire'. You can read the whole story here.

It proves something that I've always believed: if you delve deep enough into anybody's story, you'll always find something more interesting than you thought.

A while ago, we saw OTTC's production featuring three classic British TV comedy episodes (Dad's Army, Hancock's Half Hour and Fawlty Towers), and because it was so good, we decided to see the sequel - Best of British 2, this time featuring classic episodes from Yes Minister, Only Fools and Horses and Blackadder II.

Funnily enough, Yes Minister proved to be the best one, even though it's a programme I never watched when it was on telly. There were several very good performances, especially Bob Charman as Hacker.

Then it was Only Fools and Horses, with Bob Charman this time playing Boycie, and producing one of the best impressions I've ever heard by anybody, of anybody. It was spot-on. Stevie Nicholls was also good as Grandad, but they all made great attempts at capturing their characters.

Last and, in this case, least was Blackadder II. The performances were good enough and it was well done, but it's probably my least favourite episode, being the silly one about the drinking competition with comedy boobies, Puritans and a "turnip shaped like a thingy". I wish they'd chosen the one with Baldrick reciting his war poetry in the trenches, which is surely the best, or at least one with Captain Darling, darling.

Still, it was a really enjoyable night, as it invariably is at the theatre.

Still, it was a beautiful late spring evening, with great scenery and great pubs, and it provided some useful exercise. The only problem with that is: I am at the age where, instead of making me (and making me feel) fit, exercise just makes me tired.

She was in a works team - called Capitallstars, who surprisingly nearly lived up to their name, qualifying for the semi-finals out of about 20 teams.

In scorching weather, all the competitors seemed to be having a whale of a time - though some, like Julie, will regret getting too much sun tomorrow, while every bone in their bodies will be aching.

There are more, Capita-oriented pictures on Flickr.

Our friend Lukey (pictured, above, with his wife, Julie) is taking early retirement from being a director of a busy printing company, having decided that a couple of health scares in the last couple of years should be heeded.

I've always thought of him as an incurable workaholic, but if there is any doubt that he is doing the right thing, you only have to look at his hobbies to see that they are eminently suited to the lifestyle he is switching to. It's not just a case of removing stress from his life, but rather of spending more time on things that actively and positively promote relaxation and wellbeing, such as gardening, walking and watching cricket on telly.

Given the chance, I'd do the same thing tomorrow. Or rather: today. Except the gardening. Hopefully, he won't find too much time to practise tennis, as we play mixed doubles against him and Julie every week, and we're hoping to extend our winning streak.

His do was at The Victoria, Swindon, where we joined with lots of current and former workmates - some of whom I knew - and we were treated to some custom-made entertainment. Firstly, his two sons, John and Frank, along with Frank's girlfriend, played three songs, starting with a slick interpretation of Al Stewart's Year of the Cat - all of which was excellent. Then what I believe is the Vic's house band, including Frank and his girlfriend, came on. They were also very good, especially lead guitarist Frank, who looks so much like a rock star, you think he can't possibly live up to expectations, but does.

I'm saying this much sooner than I ever imagined, but: happy retirement, my old school chum.

So any pleasure you can derive from watching a match is welcome, and I certainly took great pleasure in watching Manchester United lose 2-0 against Barcelona in tonight's European Cup final. In fact, I can't remember when I last enjoyed a match quite so much.

Some people have suggested there is some kind of disloyalty in wanting the British team to lose, but I counter this by asking what Manchester United have ever done for us.

They are the biggest single reason why British football has become a money-grabbing business, not a sport. They have the players most likely to crowd round the ref and shout in his face following those rare moments when decisions go against them. They are a club that is mostly supported by people who don't live in Manchester and should be supporting their local team instead (so don't talk to me about loyalty). They are also the team that shows disdain for the FA Cup by putting out weakened sides, and in 2000/1 virtually proclaimed themselves bigger than the competition by pulling out of it altogether. So what have they ever done for us?

On the other hand, tonight's opponents, Barcelona, are the biggest local team in the world, being the embodiment of Catalan (not Spanish) identity (and they were partly founded by Englishmen).

Like United, Barcelona are a very very rich club, but whereas United just seem to get richer and richer while little clubs get poorer and poorer, Barcelona give something back by wearing the Unicef logo on their shirts, not the name of any sponsors. They give £1million a year to the charity, which doesn't sound like a large proportion of their budget, but it has been estimated that shirt sponsorship would cost £15million if you could buy it (you can't).

The match also vindicated my long-held belief that Ronaldo is the most over-rated player in the world, as he once again proved himself to be incapable of doing what defines truly great players - turning a match when the chips are down and your teammates aren't responding.

All these things considered, it was indeed a pleasure to see United not only beaten, but thoroughly outclassed by a much better team.

It's another of the books that Sean has been reading for A Level English, but unlike The Kite Runner, the other one on the curriculum that I've (partly) read, this one has something going for it.

It's about the wife of a cotton plantation owner in a southern US state in the 1820s, and her relationship with her husband and the family slaves. She's a thoroughly misearable character who deserves her brute of a husband and her miserable plight, so I'm not sure how the author manages to make the story so compelling or elicit any kind of sympathy in the reader.

But she does. We should be well and truly on the side of the slaves, whom the husband deals with through senseless violence, and the heroine treats with complete disdain. Yet there are times when you are rooting for things to be all right for her in the end, even though she deserves everything she gets.

It's not the best-written book I've ever read, often lapsing into a breathless, almost juvenile style. And the story is sometimes a bit thin, especially at the end, when it fizzles out, but it is quite an interesting look at attitudes to slavery. The most interesting point it seems to be making is the owners didn't care about the slaves - not out of inhumanity, but simply because their privileged lifestyles meant the possibility that they might be morally wrong simply never occurred to them.

Uncle Fred's celebration family dinner at the Kembrey Inn was supposed to have happened around his birthday in November, but you can't rush an 80-year-old - and having it in May meant it coincided with a couple of other family birthdays. After the meal, the family made the most of the surprisingly glorious Bank Holiday weekend weather by lounging about in our garden.

It also gave us another chance to see my brother/sister-in-law's new puppy, Millie, which duly produced a cat-meets-puppy picture (by Steve) of almost unbearable cuteness (below).

Kevin's evening party - at the County Ground - reminded us of how lucky we are to have good neighbours all around us. We even enjoy that old-fashioned neighbourly spirit which is supposed to be rare these days, and the party gave us the chance to get to know each other a little more. It's only in those situations that you appreciate that you don't know each other as well as you thought.

I discovered that Don, the old guy across the street, who is 79, was orginally from the East End of London, and he told me how he survived a Doodlebug attack in 1944, when he was 14.

He was working in a shop that was next door to one that took a direct hit. Of eight employees in his shop, only three survived - including him and a man who told him to dive under a hefty table when he realised the Doodlebug was very close. They were buried under the rubble for five hours. The other man had a broken arm, but Don only had a black eye.

He said about 35 people were killed by that single bomb, and remembers looking back at Burton's, the shop that took the direct hit, which was reduced to a single wall. A dead body was hanging out of one of the windows and couldn't be retrieved because the wall was unsafe.

Curiously, he said he didn't hear the blast, only the sound of the building coming down around him. He reckoned they were too close to hear it, being consumed by the blast instead.

He never actually saw the Doodlebug arriving, but on other occasions, he watched others flying across the sky. Londoners often recalled dreading the sound of the engines suddenly cutting out, because that meant they were ready to fall to their targets, but Don said it was the sight of the flames at the back suddenly stopping that he remembers, rather than the sound stopping.

It's amazing what stories people have to tell, if only the opportunities to tell them come up, and you can get them to tell you.

I've just sat through two hours of Star Trek - the new movie that borrows the original characters and the Enterprise, but otherwise has virtually nothing to do with Star Trek.

Everybody else seems to love the film, but for me it was nothing more than a space-themed action movie, and my problem is: I hate action movies. I've never watched a whole James Bond film, nor a Terminator, Die Hard or anything else of that genre. That sort of thing leaves me stone cold.

Unfortunately, you always get an action movie, these days, whether you like it or not, no matter what you go to see. I think I was the only person on the planet who didn't like Slumdog Millionaire - because that degenerated into a silly gangster movie, after a promising beginning.

Well, Star Trek doesn't degenerate. It is an action movie, from the outset, and apart from the fact that it's set in space, it has virtually nothing to do with science fiction as I understand it. I'm no expert, but surely the point of science fiction is to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no man has gone before, rather than being another excuse for more fist fights, explosions and cliffhangers every ten minutes.

When Kirk is hanging by his fingertips from a precipice for the third time, I'm sat there hoping he falls. He spends the rest of his time doing un-Kirklike things, such as picking fights in bars. All of the fights are unnecessarily bloody and violent.

Sure, there were often fisticuffs in the original Star Trek, but it was always over in seconds, and it was always a last resort or portrayed as futile. In this film, Kirk is beaten nearly to a pulp no less than three times - the last time by Spock, who used to be the last person in the whole of the universe who would resort to unnessary violence. He also used to be the last person in the universe who would think about having a secret affair with Uhura.

Even the Enterprise is out of character. The orginal, brilliant design was minimalist, but now it's filled with bright lights, shiny consoles and over-elaborate computer graphics - but that's in keeping with the film as a whole, the Enterprise being just one more element in a glorified shoot-em-up video game of a film.

Surely the point of Star Trek - its absolute, over-riding, unshakable essence - was that all the problems they ever came across could be solved with varying quantities of Kirk's wisdom, Spock's logic and Scotty's ingenuity. That's why it was so great.

Before the film, we were treated to subjected to two trailers for yet more action films. One was the latest Terminator garbage, and the other was something about some renegade saving the world from aliens, which I can't remember the name of. Thank goodness I'm not here to watch crap like that, I thought.

But I was.

I'm going to be running a course (probably) called The Secrets of Impressive Writing. It's a six-week, two-hours-per-week evening class at New College, Swindon, due to start in October.

I have my band colleague Dave to thank for this. He runs beginner guitar courses there, and suggested I got involved. That was months ago, but I've only just got around to/got up the courage to do something about it.

I got to thinking that, just lately, I've been doing stuff that I'm not especially good at and find really challenging - drumming, tennis, even singing - and thought it was about time I did something that I find easy, just for once.

I've always found writing easy, and really enjoy it - hence this blog - but have noticed most other people find it really difficult or, if they think they find it easy, don't realise they are doing it all wrong. The world is full of people who can't even punctuate properly, even though it's the next easiest thing after breathing.

When I phoned the college to suggest a course, I was told they already had people doing vocational feature writing courses and creative writing, thank you very much - but my idea is for something different. Basically, it's all about teaching people to write to impress, which is achieved, firstly, by being correct in grammar, punctuation and spelling, then by applying some easy-to-understand rules and tips, which, I think, can easily elevate anybody to the top five per cent of writers. So, whether they want to write letters of complaint, job applications or novels, they can make their pens mightier than the sword.

Well, that's the plan, anyway. It only goes ahead if at least eight people enrol, so we'll see what happens when it goes in the autumn prospectus.

In the meantime, I've started pulling together material, and came across an interesting web page about split infinitives in general, and the opening words of Star Trek in particular. It's well worth reading - if only to realise that those few words have to be some of the greatest ever written. Not only would William Shakespeare have been chuffed to have written them, but they include several of the very devices I am going to be explaining if I get my eight students to prey upon.

I'm not quite sure why it's entirely fitting that his buildings should be made into Lego sets, but it is. As Simon and Garfunkel once sang, "Architects may come and architects may go and never change your point of view", by which they meant that Frank Lloyd Wright did change points of view. He's the only major architect I know much or care much about, and his most famous buildings, The Guggenheim Museum and Fallingwater, are the first two to be made into Lego sets.

Just in case anybody reading this is wondering what to buy me for Christmas, I'd prefer Fallingwater*, but I'll settle for the Guggenheim.

*There's a nice computer graphic video of Fallingwater on YouTube.

He's usually the one listening to me, in my drumming lessons, but today was all about how to do it right, rather than being mostly about what I'm doing wrong.

The Monkey Dolls have been going for a few years and I'd seen them before, but today they had a brand new bass player, and Paul took on some of the singing, as well as drumming. So the gig, at the Fox and Hounds in Wroughton, was a bit of a relaunch.

As I've said in this blog before, drumming and singing at the same time is hard enough if you're playing simple rhythms and no fills, but almost impossible if they are complex rhythms and fancy fills, like Paul's. But he coped well with the challenge, and the band not only have a nice, strong sound, but also good taste. Some of it was newer stuff - Muse, Coldplay, Green Day, etc - but they included some classics by The Police, The Jam and The Undertones. If you like that sort of music, you can't go wrong with The Monkey Dolls.

One of the consolations of my own drumming efforts is that while I may not be great myself, what I have learned about the art means I can appreciate it more when other people are playing well. It always helps to know why something is good, even if you can't do it yourself. The same goes for watching live bands. Having seen it from the other side of the fence, I can get more out of watching other people play live. If nothing else, I can appreciate and understand the challenges they are overcoming.

As in many walks of life, the trick is to be inspired by quality. In other fields, I am often inspired by excellence, but when it comes to drumming, for some reason I am much more likely to feel dejected by the realisation that "I'll never be able to do that". For a while now I've had the sneaking suspicion that the solution is to go out of my way to watch bad drummers, not good ones, so I can come away buoyed up with a sense that "I can do better than them."

The same may also be true of tennis.

Ever since putting down the BNP and saying positive things about the community spirit of the Broad Street/Manchester Road area of Swindon, you could be excused for thinking the place has descended into anarchy, and on the face of it, my sentiments look ridiculous. First there was this firebomb trial. Then, last night, this stabbing.

I was thinking I had maybe given the place the kiss of death, but wait. On second thoughts, I'm sticking by what I said. People always fall into the trap of judging things on insufficient information or on random incidents which might seem to tell the whole story, but nothing is ever proof of anything if taken in isolation. It's a bit like the idea that was going around a few years ago, that all football supporters are hooligans. That sort of thing is best left to the Daily Mail and its readers.

Who's to say that this report isn't a more accurate representation of the community?

Perhaps most revealing about the way news is presented and the way people receive it are the readers' comments below this good-news story, which generally seem to be saying that no matter how many good vibes comes out of the area, they are only going to acknowledge the bad ones. They seem really disappointed by the Adver's admirably balanced and responsible approach to reporting what goes on in the area. The exception is a reader who calls himself (or herself) Tiger13, who is by far the most qualified to comment and is by far the most positive. Tiger13 is also the most fluent and accurate in his/her argument, while few of the others seem to have mastered the basics of punctuation, spelling, grammar or vocabulary. This is one of the best reasons I can think of for disregarding what they say.

Well, that was my fate tonight as we went along to the wedding of one of Julie's former school friends, whom she's got in contact with again in the last couple of years. Five or six of them meet up, occasionally, to go out for posh meals.

Apart from one of the group who, coincidentally, also used to work with Julie, I'd never met any of them, except to give them a lift, so they'd never really met me either, apart from the back of my head.

It all sounds like a recipe for disaster, and for an agonising night of feeling like a right prune - so how come it turned out to be a really enjoyable night?

For a start, the bride, Kay, and the groom, Kevin, were both the kind of people who you needed to spend no more than one second with to be able to make the judgement that they were both nice people and very welcoming.

Then it turns out that out of about 100 guests, whom you could say were more or less a random selection of people from Swindon, from my viewpoint, several weren't strangers after all. My cousin Nicola and her husband were also there, plus the parents of one of Sean's school friends, along with a lady who used to live opposite my brother, who remembered also seeing us at a concert in Marlborough. And one of Julie's gang of friends turned out to be the niece of a late friend of mind. We'd both been to his funeral. Julie's friends and their partners were also so friendly that it was easy to forget that we hardly knew each other.

Another interesting thing about wedding guests: at nearly every wedding I go to these days, there's a man wearing a kilt.

The wedding coincidences are just some of a whole series that have sprung up lately. For instance, our mum's new friend at her care home has talked to us about her two sons on several occasions, and I've just realised that I not only used to work with one of them, but for about a year, I sat opposite him.

Most people would say "Small world!" to all this, but that's the wrong way to look at it. It's more about probabilities being generally more likely than people imagine, and about the vast number of people you connect with during your life - especially by the time you get to my age. I should be more surprised about the days I walk through town and don't see anybody I recognise.

I was going to speculate on whether this ancestor could have had a distant view of Sydney Opera House from his house, as Rozelle isn't so far from where it stands, but it's easy to forget that it was completed nearly a century after he arrived - in 1973.

We became the proud owners of a wonderful new Mac - this time a super-duper MacBook. We hadn't intended to get one, but Sean needed something fast and powerful to run some music software he uses at college, and which he will continue to need in further/higher education. And since our existing G4 Mac laptop is now more than three years old, we decided to invest in the new model.

That brings to the total of Macs we now own to four, including an ageing back-up I have in my office plus my main work/leisure machine. And when you add Sean's PC that he bought for college/internet/games/music, we now have five computers in the house (if you don't count Julie's work laptop that she sometimes brings home).

That means we have more personal computers in the house than people.

I'm perfectly serious when I say I could have watched it for hours.

Then, today, I discover this amazing picture (above) on the NASA website, apparently taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, showing the Space Shuttle Atlantis passing in front of the sun before coming around again to dock with the telescope.

Thanks to Discovery, we were able to watch Atlantis lift off at teatime, carrying equipment to beef up the Hubble Space Telescope. If I live to be 500, I'll never tire of seeing what NASA is up to, and it's our privilege to live in an age that has pushed the boundaries so far.

Not that those self-appointed miserable gainsayers over at the BBC were impressed as they took time out from being the (again self-appointed) official opposition to the government to tell us what a useless piece of junk Hubble is, with the ever-present suggestion that those gormless duffers at NASA don't know their Uranuses from their elbows.

The rapidly deteriorating BBC News Website carried a report that is a strange mixture of sensationalised dumbing down and proper scientific reporting, which suggests that either a sub-editor or the editor himself got at its author, science reporter Paul Rincon. Or else they have brainwashed their scientific experts into succumbing to the BBC's glass-three-quarters-empty mentality.

According to their report, "Hubble has been hit by failures to its science instruments and to the onboard gyroscopes that are used to point the observatory at targets in the sky", and they were also keen to point out that the "risky mission" was to "fix" Hubble. As the astronaut brought in to help commentate on the launch on Discovery said to the host: "I wish you wouldn't call it 'fixing'. We call it 'servicing'."

Something else the BBC is at pains to omit is the fact that Hubble was designed to last 15 years but has already lasted 19, and the refit will, according to NASA, "improve the telescope's discovery capabilities by up to 70 times while extending its lifetime through at least 2014".

This is the kind of dross the report includes:

"At a news conference after lift-off, NASA's Michael Moses said the Shuttle had experienced two minor malfunctions during the climb to orbit: a circuit-breaker problem and a 'flaky' transducer which had set off alarms. Neither had much effect on the launch."

Wait a minute. If they were "minor malfunctions" and "neither had much effect on the launch", why are we being told about them? They're irrelevant. The first rule of journalism is: put the interesting and relevant stuff at the top of your report and the not so important/irrelevant stuff later. Yet this crap is near the top, and we have to wait until near the end before the BBC admits: "Launched in 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope is now regarded as one of the most important instruments in the history of astronomy. It has made a remarkable contribution to our understanding of the origin and evolution of the Universe."

I wish the BBC would not treat all its viewers like it treats those who watch EastEnders, that unremitting bad example to young viewers of which it is so proud. We don't all want to be presented with wall-to-wall conflict, pointless accusations and terminal negativity every time we switch on the BBC. Just once in a while, when the human race pulls off something truly magnificent like the Shuttle and Hubble, it would be nice for somebody in the media - and especially the BBC - to celebrate it, instead of trying to find some way to knock it.

Well, when I say "out in force", that's relative. I counted half a dozen of them, loitering with intent behind a wallpaper pasting table that was pressed into service as some kind of stall. Actually, there were seven if you count the hefty bloke nearby, who was sat against a tree, reading the Daily Express. But he looked as if he might only have been there in case trouble kicked off. Hopefully, that is the extent of their membership in town.

They were giving away newspapers and trying, in vain, to hand out leaflets about pulling out of the European Union, but for some reason, they had set up outside the old Clarence Street School, on some waste land, behind a bus shelter. I think their idea must have been something to do with recruiting new members from the streams of people walking from the Spring Gardens car park to the bus station, from where buses were ferrying people to the Radio One Big Weekend, which is in Swindon this weekend. Sadly for them (but not for Swindon's reputation), they were 300 yards away from the prime location, and probably would have encountered no festivalgoers whatsoever, where they stood. Obviously, thinking things through is not their strong point.

I passed them on my way to the barber's, and again on the way back, by which time their membership was depleted by another one, to five. I expect the other guy had gone off to pick up some medication or something. I had a good look at them this time, but without making eye contact, trying to work out what sort of people they were. For some reason, something that one of Rowan Atkinson's characters once said popped into my head: I wouldn't trust any of them to sit the right way on a lavatory.

Two minutes further down the road, I entered the Broad Street/Manchester Road area of Swindon, which has by far the highest concentration of the town's Asians, who are probably the people the BNP would most prefer to see driven out of their homes. It's not the richest part of town, but it's not an intimidating place to walk through, either. There always seem to be lots of people about, just getting on with their lives, and in the last couple of years, a lot of little shops, selling groceries and fresh fruit and vegetables, have sprung up, creating a nice community feel.

I know who's side I'm on.

Later on, it occurred to me that the BNP crowd had exactly the right number of people to be able to make up a team to enter in Eggheads.

Then again: perhaps not.

This is possibly the worst book I've ever (partly) read, having only managed 75 pages before I threw it down in dismay. It's certainly the most miserable book I've ever had the misfortune to own, being a kind of fictional equivalent to 'misery-lit' - those true stories of child abuse and other depressing subjects that are popular these days, especially with women.

For a start, The Kite Runner is badly written. The author's biggest sin is continually hinting at impending doom and melancholy in an attempt to whet the reader's appetite for even more misery. Rather than doing this with symbolism, like a good author might, it's blatant. For instance, the narrator, Amir, has a friend called Hassan who has a hair lip, and when he has that fixed, any feelings of joy or even relief for him are obliterated, even as he is beaming after the operation, as the author tells us "that was the last time I saw Hassan smile".

Charming. So we know he's in for a bad time, and it's no surprise when something bad happens to him: he gets raped by the local yobbo. Why raped and not beaten up? We don't find out, except the whole thing seems to be an excuse for the author to bang on about his friend Amir's regret that he didn't step in and prevent it when he had the opportunity. Thus, any sympathy for Amir becomes impossible, and there seems to be no point in reading the rest of the book, apart from wanting Amir to get his comeuppance.

The only good thing I can say about the book is you do get to learn something about how people live in Afghanistan, which is quite enlightening.

I decided to read the book because Sean is studying it for his A Level English, but unless they are studying it too, I have some useful advice for anybody thinking about reading this book: don't.

But you're only young old once, and I always say you should try (nearly) anything at least once, so I thought I'd give it a shot.

Last week, our band decided we didn't have enough slow, smoochie songs in our repertoire, so we started kicking around ideas about what to include. I've never liked any of the songs bands and discos always play for people to slow dance to, so we inevitably ended up suggesting and even choosing some that are, quite frankly, dismal - no other word for them.

But we also came up with two that I like a lot - Elton John's I Guess That's Why They Call It The Blues and Sting's Fields of Gold - both of which I'm really keen to have in the set because a) they're good, and b) they make up for the boring ones. The former has an excellent bluesy drum groove that's a pleasure to play, and the latter is a simply beautiful and beautifully simple song which has always been in my Top 100.

Well, the Elton John one is just too difficult to do without a lot of preparation, so we're working on that, but we immediately tried Fields of Gold, with guitarist Dave trying the vocals. But he's more used to the Eva Cassidy version, and his voice just didn't fit the song. All the time he was trying to sing it, I was humming it and thinking I could reach all the notes. That was last week, and after a week of deliberation and advice from my drum teacher (Paul Ashman), I decided to volunteer to give it a try.

There are many drawbacks to this. Firstly, not having sung before, I didn't have a clue whether I could get away with it, or even how to do it. Even if I could, I wasn't sure I could drum at the same time. Even if you're a great drummer - and I'm not - it's incredibly difficult to drum and sing at the same time. Just drumming on its own is much harder than most watchers ever realise, and for most drummers, it's only remotely possible to sing, too, if you keep the drumming ultra-simple.

Unfortunately, I have no intention of doing it without the psychological 'protection' of a full drum kit between me and the audience, so, if I can't sit behind it while I'm singing, I won't be doing it in public. But as I first needed to find out whether I could get away with it at all, before trying it with drums, my first few attempts were sans drums. And boy, was that a weird experience.

The scariest thing about singing is not other people listening to you - which is scary enough - but hearing your own voice coming back at you. I was amazed to be singing into the microphone with one voice and hearing a completely different one coming out of the amp, compared with how it sounds in my head. It's much less mellow than I thought, and higher, which was disappointing.

However, it wasn't too bad. I did reach all the notes, stayed in tune (apparently - I couldn't really tell) and the other guys were encouraging. But there was no doubt there was something missing. What I'd discovered is: it's not enough just to sing along. You have to project, rather than (as lead guitarist Roy accurately puts it) sing into your chest. And since Fields of Gold is a gentle, restrained song, if you try too hard to project, you'll end up spoiling it. If I doubted the power of Sting's voice before, I certainly take my hat off to him now.

After about four attempts, I think I was making progress, so then tried it with the drums. The song has a very nice off-beat bass, but that would have to be sacrificed, which is a shame. Putting it in would call for extra thinking, and what little scraps of conscious thought I could muster after concentrating on singing were swallowed up with all the other things I needed to process - counting to make sure I come in at the right spot, trying to remember the words, trying to remember to keep my mouth near the mic, trying not to look terrified and wondering what the hell I am doing putting myself through such torture. I couldn't even tell if I had kept in time, but was told I had.

So the only way to do it was with the simplest of beats, which I can play more or less automatically, and this worked fairly well. The only problem is it was possibly too overpowering for the song - especially as I had even less control than usual over how hard I was hitting everything. We tried it with no drums except a rim click (the drumstick brought down flat on the rim of the snare drum with my left hand), which was OK, then just a tambourine, which didn't fit. Finally, I did it with just a jam block - which sounds like it's made of hardwood - and that worked best of all, especially as I could play it with my right hand instead of my left.

For the last attempt, I even had my first audience - of one. The lady who runs the club where we practise came down to have a listen, and seemed to really like it, although I'm not sure whether she applauded the choice of song or the performance. Probably the former.

Whether or not I ever get to play it outside rehearsal is another thing. The band haven't ruled it out, but I will need a lot more practise before I can do it for real. Or have the nerve to.

The reason for my bus trip today was it was our monthly lads' night out (LNO). We try to do something different every month, and this month's organiser, Pete, had the idea of a trip to Wootton Bassett for a couple of drinks and an all-you-can-eat Chinese meal. Partly for practical reasons but also to add some spice to it, instead of going by car, we went by bus - me and James on the number 6 to the bus station (pictured below) and then all five of us on the number 55 from the bus station to Bassett.

It's a parallel world because the bus-riding people who ive in it have a significantly different lifestyle to me. They visit streets and places I never go to, sit next to characters and personality types I don't meet, and - here's the bad bit - become slaves to the great bus inspector in the sky.

Buses are supposed to give people a kind of freedom - to travel where they want - and this would appeal to my nature if it were true. But, far from feeling liberated, buses make me feel like a slave who is bound by routes, timetables, bus stops and tickets. I just can't be bothered with all that working out of routes, trying to decipher timetables, finding the exact location of bus stops, calculating which ticket is most economical and scratching around for the right fare because they don't give change. It just seems so much bother. It's not just that cars are so much more convenient, because I'd also rather walk or cycle than try to make my way by bus.

Some people don't like buses just because they're snobs. They don't like rubbing shoulders with the great unwashed, and I once heard it said that you are a failure if you travel by bus. That's the sort of thing that is put about by people with an unnatural obsession with car ownership (not just with cars), especially those people who drive big, ugly ones to match their egos and their faces. So don't give me that. If anything, resorting to driving is a kind of failure, particularly in these green-conscious days, and it sometimes makes me feel guilty.

I'm also pretty sure that the nature of bus journeys has changed since the dim and distant days when I used to ride the 485 into town - at least if tonight's experience is anything to go by. Riding the number 55 is like taking a mystery tour of Swindon town centre, West Swindon and Wootton Bassett, via a convoluted and sometimes bizarre route. I seem to remember buses were invented to take you from A to B, but this one took in lots of places along the way - more like an A to B via C, D, E, F, G, H and I. Even at the best of times, they never seem to take people from A to B any more, and unless you are really lucky, the best you can hope for is A to B via C. All these roundabout routes seem to enslave bus travellers even more.

Yet buses are surely the transport of the future - especially mine. Not only are they the green alternative, but bus travel being free for the over-60s means that the only sensible thing to do from 2021, when I will qualify, is going to be to hop on the bus much more often than once every 25 years.

There is an entertaining blog based on Swindon buses, called Swindon Centric, although the best bit - Top Ten Things Overheard on Swindon's Buses Last Week - is an idea borrowed from another site.

No, I'm 95 per cent sure they were cirrocumulus. That's my educated guess after watching a strangely impelling programme on BBC4 last night (first broadcast the day before, I think), called Cloudspotting, and based on a book of the same name.

It was an hour and a half of stuff about the different types of clouds, and packed with interesting information. I can honestly say that those 90 minutes went by like five, it was so interesting, even though Julie and the kids were dumbfounded that anybody would want to watch a programme about clouds. And they were ready to dial 999 when I said I was considering recreating one of the experiments from the programme - making a cloud in a bottle.

There is only one problem with cloudspotting: you can't be sure you've identified cloud types correctly. You can visit websites like the official Cloud Appreciation Society's, which featured heavily in the programme, and Wikipedia, which define the different types, but it's hard for a novice. In fact, sometimes clouds can be gone before you make up your mind.

This uncertainty goes against my sometimes obsessional need to find out the exact details of things, and having 95 per cent confidence in getting your facts right is not enough - by five per cent. As very few things in the world are more ethereal and temporary than clouds, it's always going to be that way.

However, there is a certain sick satisfaction to be had in knowing that the best clouds of all are called crepuscular. These are the ones with holes in, so the sun can stream through in beams - a sight which makes some people think God might appear at any moment, while others can't help imaginging the coming of a white-haired, bearded cartoon bloke, as seen in Monty Python, depending on their grip on reality.

Seeing Al is not exactly a new experience for me as this is at least the 19th time I've seen him in concert (I've lost count), but the first time since November 2006, when he was appearing at the Albert Hall. In that one he was backed by a large band, but this time it was back to the usual format of the last 10-20 years - just Al with a guitar, accompanied by a great guitarist. Not that Al is a bad guitarist himself, but this time he played with Laurence Juber, a very highly respected fingerstyle guitarist whose main claim to fame is that for a while he was the lead guitarist with Wings, and has collaborated on several of Al's more recent albums.

Al, whose biggest hit, Year of the Cat, is now 33 years old, is now 63 himself, but looked fit, well and very happy to be playing tonight. He was in excellent form and was also happy to talk about each song before playing them - always a big part of the entertainment, because the subject matter of his songs is always interesting.

The atmosphere was good, too. The venue - I saw him there before, a few years ago - doesn't look very promising from the outside, being a converted old estate pub, but it holds about 300, and was full, including a surprising number of younger people, so it's nice to know he is being discovered by a younger audience. We stood right down by the stage, almost as close to Al as it was possible to get.

I haven't listened to much Al stuff recently, because I've been busy trying to drum to various other songs our band plays, and because I've been trying to broaden my horizons with contemporary stuff - Fleet Foxes, Elbow and Seasick Steve, especially - so it was nice to be reminded of what a great songwriter Al was and is.

He played the best tracks from his latest album, Sparks of Ancient Light, and included some gold-plated Al classics - Lord Grenville, Carol, Night Train to Munich and Soho (Needless To Say) plus The Coldest Winter in Memory, which is almost certainly the only song to be written about King Charles XII of Sweden in the last 300 years.

I've listened to these songs so much over the years, to hear them played live again is like meeting old friends.

Today it was the turn of my sister Carol's younger son, Gary, who married Natalie - one of those people it's easy to take an instant liking to. If it wasn't already a great weekend, Holly was also one of the bridesmaids - for the second time in her life - which naturally made us proud parents too.

You'll never go to a wedding and see a couple more obviously suited than Gary and Natalie, and as they have already been living together for a while, they are also living proof of a little theory I have formulated to explain why weddings are more enjoyable than they used to be. Nobody gets married these days without first finding out whether they actually get along together first, so these days you're not just celebrating a wedding based on hope. You're celebrating a successful marriage.

The wedding was in Exeter and the reception in Cullompton, Devon, where they live, and we travelled down and stayed two night's at my sister's in Wiveliscombe, Somerset. There was a wedding eve gettogether with skittles on Friday, and we popped back to the reception venue on Sunday morning, for a wedding breakfast with the happy couple and half the guests.

As far as we could tell, absolutely everything ran perfectly to plan, except the choice of honeymoon - their intended destination of Mexico being ruled out because of swine flu. The poor souls have to make do with Barbados instead!

As ever, I ran around like a mad thing during the day, taking 300 pictures, knowing from experience that if I took loads, I was sure to end up with enough decent ones to fill a separate page. They're here.

Here's to the next family wedding - another nephew, Trevor, who's marrying his partner, Conny, in August.

I may be wrong about this, but I think the current media frenzy over a flu outbreak on the other side of the world may be going over the top slightly.

You could tell, straightaway, that the BBC were determined to report mountains, not molehills, when they started talking about it becoming a 'pandemic'. According to my dictionary, this is something that is "widespread over a whole country or a large part of the world", which swine flu clearly isn't. Even the lesser 'epidemic', which they would have talked about in the old days, is too strong, because it means "a widespread occurrence of an infectious disease in a community at a particular time", which I don't think even applies to Mexico, given the fact that the number of deaths there is a tiny fraction of the population - Mexico City being one of the largest and most overcrowded places on earth.

The correct word would have been the one I've already used - 'outbreak' - although as that would not have sounded nearly as melodramatic, you won't find many news reports calling it that, not until the hysteria starts to subside. Those of us who remember the last would-be plague - bird flu - will need more convincing.

Of course, things may change, but hundreds of thousands of people die, every year, from flu, and it doesn't become a true pandemic until the deaths reach the millions, not a couple of hundred. The mere threat of it becoming a pandemic, which is surely true of many other strains of flu, doesn't make it news, and doesn't justify playing on the insecurities of readers/listeners/viewers who are prone to panic.

If you want a good example of the Corporal Jones effect, there was one in yesterday's Swindon Advertiser. In contrast to the silliness displayed by most of the media, however, this nice little story was brilliantly reported, being one of the best examples you will ever see of getting a point across by carefully under-writing it. Read it here.

Two final thoughts: is the way the media have reported the threat of swine flu the same as the way they report the threat of terrorism? And notice the way they don't report what many people, including me, consider more pressing threats, such as climate change.

Oink, oink.

(From www.web-l.com/free-pics/Harry-Potter-is-Star-Wars/)