Ever noticed how the older you get, the more invisible you become? Since turning 60, I’ve become more and more aware of this. I wrote “Nobody Noticed Me” first as a poem, about 6 years ago, and I always wanted to put it to music. When we were making the “Souvenirs & Sabotage” album at the start of this year, I came up with a tune and recorded the song on guitar and keyboards. This track was then used as reference for the final AI production. I wanted a cool indie vibe for the song, and after many attempts at this, Eleven Labs finally came up with exactly the right sound. The lead vocal was created by sampling and re-engineering the “Noel Jarvis” voice we created for Sonny Key’s first album “Cocktails & Consequences”. I could not be more delighted with the result. You can listen to the track here:

Here are the lyrics to “Nobody Noticed Me”, along with a links to listen FREE to the whole album, or order it on vinyl!

Someone said my name, but they meant someone else.
I put it in my pocket, and then excused myself.
I tried a careful laugh, but it was the wrong time.
It landed on the floor like a discarded rhyme.

As far as I can see, nobody noticed me,
In the looking glass, I was fading fast.
I closed my eyes and I could recognise,
That no, no, no-one, nobody noticed me.

I went to the kitchen, and opened a four pack.
I looked in the mirror, and nobody looked back.

As far as I can see, nobody noticed me,
In the looking glass, I was fading fast.
I closed my eyes and I could recognise,
That no, no, no-one, nobody noticed me.

I was background noise at best, a footnote in someone else’s quest,
No departure, no discrepancy, from whatever I was meant to be.

[Verse & Choris Reprise]

Listen to the whole album FREE | Buy the album on vinyl

Living in London has become utterly intolerable. Repeated intense heatwaves, plus the moronic new trend for tuning cars and motorbikes to sound like machine gun fire has had a terrible effect on my nerves, and ultimately on my health. So far this summer I’ve spent more time hiding out on the coast than I’ve spent at home.

The result is that Georgina and I have made the very difficult decision to leave London for good. In fact, we’ll be moving into our new home on the Norfolk coast in a couple of month’s time, and life is going to be very different. As soon as we get settled, and I’ve had a chance to set up my studio again, I’ll be re-starting the podcast. It’ll be very different this time – hopefully resisting the temptation to rely on heavily formatted repeating items, and synthetic running characters.

That said, I really enjoyed making all three series of “Luff Actually”, particularly the weekly process of writing songs for “Sonny Keys & the Flat Notes”, and discovering for the first time the awesome possibilities of AI assisted music production. I’m very proud of the new album - you can listen to it free here, or you can buy it on vinyl

And if you want to catch up with recent episodes you can find the podcast here

In other news, I was excited to learn recently that my screenplay for “Muddlleton” has won an award for Best Unproduced Screenplay at the CKF International Film Festival in the UK. It was also a nominee at the Prisma Film Awards in Rome. If you haven’t got around to it yet, you can read the novel here

When “Muddleton” finishes serializing at the end of next week, I’ll be publishing another of my novels on this Substack. Called “The Trench Foot and Bullnose Morris Men”, it’s set in World War One, and it picked up an unproduced screenplay award at the Venice Film Festival in 2023.

Thanks for continuing to subscribe to this Substack. More updates soon. Stay cool.

Subscribe now

Every human being on Earth shares one quiet, inescapable burden: we all have to decide what to say when someone asks the question, “How are you?” It’s an impossible thing to answer. It’s too big. How am I? In what sense? Physically? Emotionally? Spiritually? Financially? Do you want the headline or the full investigative report?

Because the honest answer is always something like, “Well, I’m holding it together.” Or as my late mum always used to say, "As well as can be expected." Society has mutually agreed that this is a performance. You must say, “Good, thanks!” even if moments ago you were staring into space like a Victorian ghost. And then, crucially, you must return the question.

It’s conversational ping-pong with no winner. “Good, thanks—how are you?” “Good!” comes the reply. Nobody’s good. Statistically, this cannot be true. Occasionally someone breaks. Someone says, “Actually, not great,” and the entire system collapses. Alarms go off. You weren’t equipped for this. But we all keep doing it. Every day. Billions of tiny, identical lies, politely exchanged. Not to deceive, but to protect each other from the sheer gothic horror of being alive before coffee.

Welcome to my Substack. I’m launching it because the older you get, the more important the words become. I’ll use this space to share my long-form fiction, my articles, and my reviews. Lots of new stuff and stuff you might have missed. There might even be the occasional poem. Stick around, sensation seekers.

Let’s talk about group chats. The only place where silence becomes suspicious and typing indicators feel like psychological warfare. You open your phone and suddenly there are 147 unread messages, most of which are either “LOL” reactions or a full philosophical debate about what someone meant by “ok”. Meanwhile, the original question died fifteen hours ago but the chat keeps going like a party nobody can leave without disappearing socially for ever.

Somehow every group chat has that one person who sends messages like they are narrating a live, feature-length documentary. You mute the chat to get some peace, but muting it feels like betrayal, so you still check it every five minutes anyway, like a hostage with Stockholm Syndrome.

The worst part is when someone says “can someone summarise this for me” after 200 messages of chaos that no longer contain information. Just vibes and anger. So you scroll, scroll, scroll, until you forget why you opened the app in the first place. Group chats are democracy with no exit door and too many emojis and yet we still join them every time, like we have learned nothing at all. Like a monk wearing a hair shirt and beating himself repeatedly with a rose bush full of thorns. Repeat after me: "WhatsApp is for narcissistic masochists!”

Fitted sheets are a cruel prank that society refuses to admit it is collectively playing. You begin with confidence. A clean rectangle of fabric, corners politely marked, optimism still intact. And yet the moment you approach the mattress; physics seems to quietly resign.

The sheet behaves as though the bed is not a bed at all, but a mere suggestion of one, and it responds accordingly by becoming a windblown puzzle. You locate a corner. That corner disappears. You locate it again, somewhere further away than before. Meanwhile the elastic edge is performing acrobatics that would be impressive if they weren’t happening specifically to spite you.

There is always one moment where you believe you’ve done it—where three corners are in place and you feel briefly like a competent adult—and then the fourth corner reveals that it has been watching you this entire time and has decided to invert reality. No one ever warns you that fitted sheets require either four hands, a mild philosophical detachment from universal order, or the ability to fold time and space like Stephen Hawking.

Yet fitted sheets are sold as if they are a convenient thing. “Easy fit,” they say. Easy for whom? An octopus with a mathematics degree? In the end, you accept whatever torn and mis-shaped configuration remains stretched unevenly around your mattress. It is not smooth. It is not correct. But it is technically on the bed, and that feels like a small victory, if you squint at it, don’t touch it again, and don't try and sleep on it.

Why is it that every single time you open a packet of something —rice, pasta, frozen peas, snacks—it is sealed like it contains state secrets and/or the crown jewels of a minor European monarchy?

There’s always that first moment of confidence. You think: “I’ve got this.” You tug. Nothing. You tug again. Still nothing. You escalate to scissors. Then you read the “tear along here” line, which is clearly only decorative. It’s not an instruction. It’s a merely theoretical suggestion. Then there’s the teeth. You rip and tear at the packet like a ravenous beast.

Once you finally get in, it’s not a clean opening. Oh no. It’s lie a controlled explosion. Rice everywhere. Pasta on the floor. A rogue chickpea bouncing into the floor and somehow into another dimension. Never to be seen again. Meanwhile, the resealable strip—oh, the resealable strip—now refuses to reseal out of spite. It worked perfectly before you needed it. Now it behaves like you’ve personally insulted its entire lineage.

Somehow, the packaging always wins. You end up decanting spaghetti into a mug like you’ve given up on civilisation and are just waiting to be reassigned to a simpler life, perhaps as hermit or a lighthouse keeper who only eats soup that somehow comes miraculously pre-opened. And don’t even get me started on opening bottles of pills or medicine.

Danny Baker summed it up beautifully. He said that the palace of Westminster would make a great hotel, but they’re not going to convert it into one, are they? So why did they turn Television Centre into a hotel?

Danny' was right. BBC Television Centre is still as much a part of the fabric of Britain as Yorkshire pudding and fish and chips, and I believe that future generations of BBC Executives will bitterly regret disposing of the building, just as they now regret wiping all those classic programmes in the 1970′s in order to generate a little more shelf space in the Spur.

I went back there recently. Just to have a look. I stood in the courtyard in the centre of the famous doughnut and a thousand memories cam flooding back. I’ll let you into a little secret. I was there when that Great Tape Wiping Disaster took place. In fact, I couldn’t have been any closer to it. It was my first proper job. I was in my late teens. As a staff video tape librarian at TVC from 1976 to 1978 I more than likely personally deleted hundreds of irreplaceable episodes of Dr Who, Dixon of Dock Green and Grandstand. But, like the defendants at Nuremburg, I swear I was just following orders.

One of my VT library collegues, however, took the law into his own hands and chose not to follow those orders. Captain Video (as he likes to be known) saved many pop classics by choosing to ignore orders from the Top of the Pops office to erase priceless material. Instead, he “wiped” the programmes on the paperwork only, and returned the actual tapes to the shelves with secret new tape numbers that only he knew.

Years later, Captain Video helped the BBC to rebuild this “lost” collection, and as a result became one of the most celebrated music archivists of his time. He worked in television until quite recently. He had his own video post production company.

Sadly, there was no modern day equivalent of Captain Video to save Television Centre. The vandals from Salford signed off the destruction and it could not be stopped.

I worked at Television Centre many, many times. First in that infamous tape library, then in later years as a staff promotions director, a digital producer on the comedy web site, and finally as a visiting web producer for Endemol. In the mid nineties I was even seen in vision as an occasional contributor to daytime children’s BBC. So I’ve seen that damned building from every angle, in every weather. There are few corners of TVC that I haven’t skulked in. Few tables I didn’t sit at in the old bar on the fourth floor.

I stood in a lift with Morecambe & Wise. I paid for my food in the canteen standing next to Roy Wood in full Wizzard make-up. I wandered pissed around the Blue Peter Garden. I was actually in the studio when Emu attacked Michael Parkinson. So I feel I have just a little piece of ownership of that building.

I, like so many others, sensed the ghosts of showbiz greats in the endless, circular corridors. I also felt the deep, festering frustration that can only come from working for the BBC. I both love and hate that corporation, and I both love and hate that building. But there’s one thing I do know: It should never have been turned into a goddamn hotel.

I'd like to discuss the almost-impossible social contract of pretending to recognise people? Because adulthood turns out to be just walking around squinting politely into the middle distance.

Here's the thing. Someone waves at you from across the street. You wave back immediately because not waving back could be socially catastrophic. You get a bit closer, and you realise that you do not know this person. Never seen them before in your life. But now it’s too late. You’ve committed.

So you both continue approaching each other with decreasing certainty. Then comes the conversation. “How are you?” Good question. How about "WHO are you?" You start fishing for clues. “How’s… everything?” They say, “Yeah, I'm still there.” Still where? What have I accidentally endorsed? Then they mention a child, a dog, an office, a surgery, a divorce, and now you’re trapped assembling a human being from fragments, like a detective in a battered raincoat.

Meanwhile they clearly know exactly who you are, which somehow makes it worse. You cannot ask. Society has decided that this is forbidden. You’re allowed to ask someone about their deepest fears. You can ask their salary. You can ask whether they think civilisation is collapsing. But you cannot say, “Sorry, who are you again?” So instead you take gamble. “Well, say hello to… everyone.” Everyone? You're covering all possible outcomes. Or are you? Then you walk away and six hours later remember. It was your mother's dentist. Note to self. Never talk to anyone. Ever.

Today’s subject is people saying, “we should do this more often.” No. No, we should not “do this more often”. Nobody has ever said “we should do this more often” and meant it. It’s the absolute low point of human interaction.

You’ve just had lunch. Or coffee. Or stood in a doorway discussing weather and someone suddenly says it. “We should do this more often.” Should we? Because five minutes ago you were checking your watch under the table and pretending to receive a notification from absolutely nobody. And then both of you start to simulate agreement. “Yes! Definitely.” “When are you free?”

Brilliant. So not only do we not want to do this more often - we're about to schedule a re-match. “We should do this more often” has become a polite way of saying: "although this was pleasant enough, I’d ideally like to avoid the possibility of future contact."

Nobody wants dates in their diary anymore. People want remote contact and loose affiliation. We don’t want dinner next Thursday. We want to remain theoretically available forever. And the worst part? Every now and then somebody genuinely means it when they say “we should do this more often.” You say “yes, absolutely,” expecting the ritual to conclude—and suddenly they’re opening the Outlook calendars on their phone. Now you’re trapped. You’ve accidentally converted vague social fog into an actual event. That’s not friendship. That’s unnecessary admin.

Let’s talk about queue discipline. There are two types of people in a queue. The first type understands the queue. They see the queue. They join the queue. They become one with the queue. The second type arrives with the confidence of a diplomat and begins asking questions like, “Is this the line?” while standing visibly beside twenty-three people arranged in the internationally recognised shape of waiting in line.

Then comes the drifting. Tiny experimental movements. One step. Another. Suddenly they’re not in the queue; they’re conducting exploratory research adjacent to it. And of course nobody says anything. We are British, after all. Everyone makes eye contact that silently means: “Are we all seeing this?”

Eventually someone politely says, “Excuse me…” The queue-jumper acts astonished. “Oh! Were you all waiting?” No. We gathered here in coats and expressions of resignation because this is Britain’s newest outdoor immersive theatre production. Repeat after me. People who jump queues should have their heads boiled in oil.