Jack Frost

It's 1.15am and I'm desperately trying to sort out the midi files which I'm going to be taking with me to PK's studio in the morning. Sadly, none of the computers in the house are playing ball, and, having worked on these blessed scores all day, I'm no closer to being able to see the light at the end of the tunnel. This could be a very late night indeed.

I stopped working for long enough this afternoon to be able to take myself to the gym. The headphones I took with me for the treadmill fell out of my ears every ten paces which became so irritating that, as a punishment, I threw them across the gym floor and left them where they fell for the cleaners. I put the iPod itself in my shorts pocket for safe keeping. An iPod Nano is a stupidly tiny device, which gets lost whenever it's left for more than a few seconds without an enormous pair of headphones attached.

My running shorts are also suitable for swimming in, so after jogging for a bit, I took myself to the pool area, swam ten lengths, had a sauna and a shower and only remembered (with horror) that I'd left the iPod in the pocket of the shorts when I took the soaking things off to change back into my normal clothes! Oddly the iPod was still working at that stage, but electronic products are renowned for working for a few hours after these sorts of calamities and then promptly falling apart. Anyway, I dried the thing with a hairdryer - prompting some rather strange looks from the Kentish Town gym bunnies - and the iPod is now sitting on the radiator in my kitchen in a bag of rice!

I went out of the house for a final time at about 8pm to buy some halloumi cheese for tea. A tree under a lamppost was casting the most eerie shadows on a brick wall at the end of our alley. One particular leaf, which must have been right next to the light itself looked like the silhouette of an enormous bat, fluttering about under the eaves of a house.

The sight took me back to my childhood. I used to lie awake in my bedroom terrified by a similar phenomena which was often projected onto my own window. Our garden was very dark, so I'm not sure where the back light was coming from which caused our apple tree to turn into a terrifying monster with sinister long sinewy fingers which seemed to caress the window, but for many a night the monster kept me awake, particularly when he was accompanied by the hollow moan of wind. I used to rush into my brother's bedroom and sleep on the floor in there.

My bedroom window used to freeze over in winter. I'd sometimes wake up in the morning and find Jack Frost had paid me a visit, and left beautiful trails of ice, like prehistoric ferns, on the actual inside of the glass. I used to get a tuppence, heat it up on the radiator and make a peep hole so that I could peek out and catch my first glimpse of whatever winter wonderland lay waiting for me.

Right. Back to the dreadful business of creating midi files. It's almost 2am. I'm going to do another hour and then knock things on the head. I'm not a student anymore! I can't do an all-nighter without losing my mind.