I bloody hate Camden.

I went to a gig at Dingwalls, Camden in that there London, last night. I was on my own, to see my current favourite band, Dawes. Train after work to Paddington, quick bowl of pasta then the Tube to Camden Town. A walk up a very cold Camden High Street, a pint and on to the gig. Don't get me wrong, nothing made me deviate from that plan, but.... Look,I'm 56. I don't do, student-chic. I don't do dog-on-a-string. I don't do macrobiotic lentils with poached cabbage. I went into 2 pubs and felt not so much 'ancient' as from another aeon! Even the bar staff were 12 years old. The place screams out "This is not for you. You are an old bastard and you don't belong." Luckily, Dingwalls was full of my kind. People with grey hair, trimmed beards and women drinking white wine. The gig was one of the best I've been to in 41 years of gigs. I went home to my wife, my warm, middle-class house in Berkshire and vowed never to go to Camden again. Unless there's a decent gig, obviously. Dawes and "A Little Bit Of Everything."

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One of my favourite days of the year.

I am married to an Event Organiser. Janet books conferences and company incentives, worldwide. She organises for a living. So it's no surprise that she is totally organised herself. Take Christmas. She buys next year's paper, tags and cards on Boxing Day. Wherever we are (and we travel a lot)she is always thinking of gifts for friends & family that then get stored in the wardrobe until today. Today is wrapping day. Today is a huge glass of wine, a 77 song playlist of Christmas songs on her iPod, rolls of Sellotape, rolls of paper and the kitchen table surrounded by bags and boxes. When everything is wrapped it will all get split into nice gift bags (bought last Boxing Day) for each person. In two weeks time she'll drive up to Mum & Dad's near Walsall and drop off presents there, at her sister's and her best friends. She absolutely loves the whole process and is extremely good at it, too. So, today is one of my favourite days of the year. Because it makes my gorgeous wife so happy.

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Nat king Cole. The Christmas Song.

Most things I worry 'bout never happen anyway.

We have friends in Lancaster, Philadelphia. When I say friends, we've met once. Dublin, May this year. We were on a travel package to see Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers. So were Bill & Liz. They had combined it with a European trip. We were sat together at a fantastic gig and then stayed up in the hotel bar, for hours. You know when you just click with people? That was it. They flew back to the States, we flew back to London. I found Bill on LinkedIn (the only use I've ever found for it) and e-mailed him. Since then we've kept in touch quite a bit. Last night, watching the devastation of hurricane Sandy on the news, I suddenly had a horrible feeling of impending doom. I e-mailed Bill and got a scary reply. The town was being evacuated but they were staying put. They'd boarded up, sand-bagged, all the things we would do. They have a beach house on the Jersey shore which was being hit at that moment. I sent him our best and went to bed. Which just looks crap when you read it like that. I e-mailed again this morning and several more times today. Slowly, his replies got more hopeful until, this afternoon, he explained that, incredibly, they and their house, were fine. Even the Jersey house looks to have survived, although the water in the town is 12 feet deep in places. I joked back, told him how pleased we were, and signed off with a line that I have tried to live my life by, in the past few years. I used to worry about everything. I mean really worry. Then, 18 years ago, something happened which changed my world. By the time I got through it, my outlook had changed. We met Bill & Liz for 9 hours but I couldn't be happier that they and their family are safe. I don't know what that means but I shall raise a glass tonight. The sign-off line is the title of this blog entry. It's from this Tom Petty song, Crawling Back To You. Stay safe everyone.

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I used to be in the Beatles, you know.

My wife and I went to see the musical Let It Be last week. It's actually a live gig by The Beatles. No, really. Four lookalikes and brilliant soundalikes rock their way through just about every Beatles song you could want. It's a proper loud, live gig. I got caught up in the atmosphere and the whole feeling of being that close (third row) to people singing these great songs that I have loved almost all of my life. At one point Paul, George and John sit for Blackbird, Two of Us and then In My Life. I wept, quietly. Beautifully staged, crystal clear sound, the four actor/musicians play brilliantly. George's solo in While My Guitar Gently Weeps was wonderful. I had a really, really good time. My Dad used to work for the electronics and defence side of EMI. This meant that, through something called Staff Sales, he got early access to Beatles records the week before they came out. He would bring them home on a Friday night and for the whole weekend, my brothers Kevin and Phil and me would be The Beatles. Tennis rackets for guitars, (I was Paul so I had a left-handed tennis racket) and singing the new songs so much that, by the time we went to school on Monday, we could sing the new Beatles record before anyone else in the playground had even heard it. Let It Be was very, very good. For some of it I was 10 years old.

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A week is a long time in.....

Back from a wonderful trip to Ireland, heavier but happier. My birthday was on the Sunday, a week ago, the 2nd day of the trip. We got back late on Wednesday, spent Thursday feeding the washing machine and slobbing before a couple of great days in London. My wonderful wife had tipped off the hotel that it was my birthday and they made a fuss, which she loved. We had lunch at The Wolseley and she had primed them, as well. The point is that she loves to make my birthday last a week, if she gets the chance. Birthdays never used to mean much before I met her. In the fifteen years of my previous marriage they were never a big deal. So, to find someone who just wants to make them as special as possible is fantastic. My life has changed so much in the last 18 years. When JB and I met I was a wreck, not looking forward to the next day, let alone looking for a new relationship. We'll have been together 17 years soon, 12 of them married. So, a week is a long time in birthdays. Long may it last.

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Beautiful Kerry

We're off to Ireland for my birthday, this weekend. This is the hotel in the Kerry Mountains. We discovered it 12 years ago, had our honeymoon there and have been back umpteen times. It's a beautiful, peaceful spot. This trip is important to me. When we are there I always remember my late Dad in a particular way. He introduced me to Guinness when I was a baby, sucking it off his finger. I love a pint but can't do more than two, these days. Anyway, at some point on the trip I shall go to the bar in some remote pub and buy a round. There are four of us going but I will buy an extra pint of Guinness. When we leave I'll write PB, his initials, in the head and leave it on the table for him to drink later. I've done it for years. It makes me very happy and my wife thinks it makes me who I am. I don't know about that but I know that this trip is important to me. It's especially important because of my Dad. That's him, at my 21st, in 1977. He looks great, happy. His Derry eyes are smiling and he looks well. Which is deceptive. He'd already lost one kidney and, less than 4 years after this photo was taken, he would be dead from cancer in the other one. On this night, he was 51 years old. He'd been grey since the age of 19, so we always thought of him as "old". I am Peter Brannigan's second son and, like all 6 of his children, I miss him terribly. So, this trip is important to me because, on Sunday 30th September, I will wake up and be able to say something my Dad never could. "Today, I am 56 years old." Slainte PJB.

Grief is not a competition.

Yesterday was the announcement of the findings of the Hillsborough Panel. A day of shocks, of sober reflection, anger and respect. Respect for the families and what they have gone through in the last 23 years. Respect for our system, much-maligned though it may be. Without it, the freedoms it brings and the eventual accountability, we might never find out when these kinds of injustices occur. We might as well be living in a suppressive, totalitarian state.

Social media was full of anger, some calm reflection and some links to great writing about the day, 23 years ago, when so many lives were needlessly tossed aside. Some friends and people I follow on Twitter wrote beautifully on their blogs about their thoughts and how the announcement had touched their lives. I went to bed last night, having re-watched the ITV documentary 'The Search For Truth', and found that it took a long while to clear my head and sleep.

This morning I checked Twitter and found a comment from someone stating that it was interesting that some regular tweeters had been very quiet yesterday. I followed the thread for a while. One of the replies noted 'there was a lot of Southern opinion missing.' At that point, I turned it off.

I had kept off Twitter on Wednesday and I live in the South. I kept off Twitter because I was too busy taking in the news, reading as much as I could and gathering my thoughts. I kept off Twitter because it seemed trite to vent my spleen on a day when the world I know and love had tilted off its axis, just a bit.

Grief is not a competition. The fact that Hillsborough was inflicted on people from Liverpool is irrelevant to me. I would feel the same if it had been people from Reading, Southampton or Tottenham. It was inflicted on football fans because they were an easy scapegoat. It was inflicted on football fans because that's the way they were treated, what they were used to. It was inflicted on football fans because they were football fans.

Grieving, caring and loving aren't part of some emotional It's A Knockout event. As I say, grief is not a competition.