But it was my delayed birthday treat, so we decided to have a generally pottering, lolloping, dithery sort of day - and therefore had to include one of our favourite places in the world: Hungerford. It's famous for its antique shops, but the real attraction for me is the junk, genuine curios and wacky things that are also on sale.

Despite having been there many times over many many years, we had never visited Garden Art, which is a treasure trove of reclaimed and commissioned stuff for gardens, so that was our first stop. It has a converted railway carriage as a showroom, as well as a large area outdoors, filled with fascinating things. The prices suggest the place is aimed at people with big houses and even bigger budgets, but it's still worth a look round.

In the town centre is Below Stairs, which is my favourite Hungerford shop as they always have one or two postboxes for sale, although I can neither afford nor justify the £800 price tag that comes with the King George V post-mounted one.

However, it is a good shop for picking up items of local history. I've previously bought a milk bottle from Upper Stratton brewery, Morse's, there, and today I paid £16 for a large pot or jug that is also part of Swindon's history, being incribed 'Mason's Swindon' (pictured below). I'm not sure which part of its history it's from yet (as I am assuming Mason's were one of the town's many soft drink makers), but I intend to find out.

We finished off the day by doing something that we vowed to do more of, from now on - stopping off at (instead of driving by) intriguing-looking places on the road. We've passed The Halfway Inn many times, especially on our way to the Watermill Theatre at Newbury, but never stopped - until today.

In a way, we've already missed our chance as The Halfway Inn is no longer an inn, but has been renamed simply The Halfway. Although named for being halfway between Newbury and Hungerford, you could say it's now also halfway between a pub and a restaurant. Outwardly it looks like a normal roadside pub, but the telltale signs of the word 'inn' having been removed from the wall should have given us a clue that on the inside it has been turned into something else - a "piano bar and bistro".

If the truth is told, I am much more at home in traditional pubs and don't really approve of this type of fancy establishment in principle, with food that is a bit more upmarket than I am comfortable with, and slightly more expensive, and because the menu is sure to offer limited choice, as it is guaranteed to include a lot of fish, which I don't eat.

My favourite meal whenever I am out (or in, for that matter) is bangers and mash, so I had that, although I couldn't quite bring myself to call it that as the menu described it as something like "leek and pork sausages, served with mashed potatoes and onion marmalade", and when it came it looked liked an entry for Masterchef. Ideally, bangers and mash should be a large plate of mash with four or five sausages sticking out of it, planted end-first. But it turned out to be really tasty.

So we'll probably go back there, partly because the staff and the owner were all really professional and friendly, including the owner, who spoke with a French accent.

This brings me to why the pub trade is struggling, and lots of one-time traditional pubs are having to re-invent themselves as something else. In my opinion, it's much less to do with the smoking ban, the economic climate, the duty on drinks, the opposition they now face from other entertainments/amusements, or any other excuses, but a lot to do with the unfriendliness of the staff at many pubs these days, especially when it also extends to the landlord/landlady/manager.

One thing I never thought we would get today: a lesson on friendliness from a Frenchman.

There I've said it now, and now I'm out of the closet, I don't care who knows.

Sure, he can do some really cheesey, slushy stuff, but when he writes the songs that make the whole world sing, he's a true entertainer. Actually, he didn't write I Write the Songs, but he did co-write Copacabana, which is in my Top 100 songs of all time.

For some reason, it became a joint favourite of me and my friend Pete when we were young and single, and we took great delight in singing it together; it is, after all, one of the most singalongable songs ever written. And we also became Barry Manilow fans in general, although for him I suspect it was more than a little due to the fact that he briefly had a girlfriend called Mandy. But that was thirty years ago...

Despite my admiration for Copacabana (the song), I'd never seen Copacabana (the musical) until tonight, when we (me, Julie and Holly) made our now regular trip to the Watermill, Newbury, to see their production of it.

Now, anything performed on the little Watermill stage is worth seeing, so this obviously was, but it was mostly a disappointment. It was too long, for a start, at about two and a half hours, and would have been improved by losing a whole hour. And it was slow, with far too much unnecessary dwelling on a not very sophisticated plot, and too many slushy numbers when it was crying out for more upbeat ones.

In fact, it was crying out for Copacabana, which gets half-played, early on, but not again until the show is effectively over, being the play-out number that all the cast sing - even the one who died - and after the hero gets the girl. The main problem is the song has an unhappy ending, and you obviously couldn't have that happening in a musical.

I've seen several musicals performed at the Watermill, and they're usually good, with the intimacy of the venue adding to the fun, but somehow this one seemed like it was missing something. There were only three leggy showgirls to go round, for instance, when it really called for at least half a dozen.

So not the best thing I've ever seen at the Watermill, but still a night out, and at least I feel as though I have paid my homage to Barry.

Well, not a brand new kit, but a new old one, being a secondhand one. But it's a very nice one indeed, thank you.

It's a Pearl Export and we bought it off our drum teacher, Paul. We now own three kits - the Roland electronic one, our old Premier kit and now this. One for practising, one for Sean's teaching (and a bit of practising) and one for rehearsing and gigging. The new one will be pressed into service on Thursday when I rehearse with the band.

At the moment it is set up in our living room, sorely tempting us to play it, but we have to remind ourselves that we have neighbours.

That's about all there is to say about it, really, except it's lovely and sparkly, which is almost as important as the fact that it sounds fantastic. Never owned a sparkly drum kit before.

On Saturday we were at the GWR Children's Fete, the reincarnation of the old pre-War fete that used to be the highlight of every child's year in those days, and which people of my mum's generation and beyond remembered with huge affection.

As was tradition, it was held at Faringdon Road Park, although the huge crowds that used to be a feature weren't in evidence. In a way, that was a blessing because I found myself manning the Alfred Williams Heritage Society's stall, which is the beginning of our effort to publicise our projects in general and our November festival in particular. Julie was also press-ganged into service.

My job was to accost innocent bystanders and try to thrust flyers (which I designed) into their hands, and generally try to get them interested in the life and works of a bloke most of them had never heard of, who died 80 years.

Generally, if people were interested, they were very interested, although, naturally, there were plenty who must have thought we were completely off our rockers. There were even some who shrugged and grunted at the merest offer of a free leaflet, as if we were a splinter group who had chucked out of the Jehovah's Witnesses for being too intrusive and persistent.

I have to say that the whole idea of starting conversations with strangers about things that they probably don't want to be bothered with is not something that comes naturally to me (understatement). I often tell people that I am the world's worst salesman, and I mean it literally. I couldn't sell anything to anybody, so when I am asked to promote anything in that situation, that's when my inherent shyness makes me crumple.

I've learned to get up in front of people and talk and even play the drummers averagely, but going one-to-one with Joe Public is a huge challenge. I've had to do a little bit of business 'networking' in my time, and if I say that just the thought of that makes my flesh creep, I am understating it again.

It wasn't as bad as networking - after all, I wasn't actually selling anything and the Alfred Williams Heritage Festival is going to be completely free - but after a good five hours of almost non-stop accosting, I felt completely shattered, but thankful that Julie had been there almost all day to prop me up, and a couple of other Alfred supporters had done their bit too.

At least I learned what works and what doesn't, in terms of promoting something in this way, and although the event wasn't as well attended as the organisers would have hoped, the trickle of interested people coming past our stall was just about right. Besides, it's not necessarily the quantity that is important as the quality. We managed to engage, make good contact with and probably win over the Mayor and Mayoress of Swindon, a former mayor, a councillor, the vicar of St Mark's Church, a key member of the town's Asian community, teachers and various other decent people who probably didn't go away thinking we were off our rockers.

We also managed to re-meet Ted and Ivy Poole, who are king and queen of the Swindon folk music scene (if not the whole West Country), who are fascinating people with great stories to tell, including why Paul Simon refused to play in Swindon before he was famous in the Sixties; it was because the gig was in the basement of the Communist Party offices and he was worried (probably justifiably) that it would get him on McCarthy's Witch Hunt list.

I was so busy accosting people that I didn't have much time to see the rest of the fete, but after we packed up, I did get to have a long but interesting chat to a local guy who owns the oldest Mini Traveller still in existence. It is immaculate, and one of only 25 Mk Is still around, of which only 13 are in Britain (although there are about 140 Mk IIs left). It's probably the most unoriginal way of striking up a conversation with a classic car owner, but I told him my brother Ron used to own one (number plate: 552FEA).

The most incredible thing about the old Mini is - and this shouldn't really come as a surprise - you forget how tiny they were; the second of the pictures below was taken at eye level, standing on level ground. We own two cars that we consider small compared with most cars, and minute compared with some of the beasts you see on the roads these days, but the old Minis really were... well, mini.

The Mini Traveller was also at the Queen's Park Family Fun Day on Sunday, which we also had a stroll around. The other attractions included, while we were there, were an Elvis lookalike, Bollywood dancing and then Elvis doing Bollywood dancing - all a bit of a bizarre juxtaposition, but fun.

For the record, however, I bought a new camera today (with my birthday money) and in case anybody is interested, it's an Olympus X-43.

There used to be a time when I would carry a big SLR film camera around with me, along with various lenses and even a motor wind, not to mention a tripod, but the new camera represents another phase of the revolution in digital photography, and how it affects me.

Quite apart from the fact that I can't afford a big camera anyway, I have decided that it's more desirable to have a little camera that I can fit in my pocket and not worry too much about, but which I can take virtually everywhere.

It may look like a toy camera, but I have taken a giant leap in spec, going from my old camera that was an almost embarrassing 4 megapixels and 3x zoom, to 14 megapixels and 5x zoom.

And not only is the revolution in photography amazing, but I also think it's a pretty cool-looking camera too. The choice was silver or blue, but I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that if you are faced with a choice, life is too short to go for boring silver when you can have trendy blue.

Not that we've had any disasters, but there are so many things that can go wrong and I'm still not the most confident drummer in the world...

The latest one had a first - our first performance in a marquee, thanks to being booked to entertain visitors at an end-of-term-cum-headmaster's retirement do, at a Swindon junior school.

We had to set up while the kids were doing various things on stage, and then entertain the parents who wanted to stay and see four old duffers play old songs from the retiring headmaster's era. Well, they must have liked us because we did three or four encores, and were thanked by several people at the end for giving them a good night.

Guitarist Roy recently bought a camper van which he is now going to use for transporting him and his gear to gigs, so we all assembled in that beforehand, prompting me to tell the rest of the lads that I never envisaged, in my wildest dreams, that I would ever be sat in a tour bus with a band, waiting to go on stage.

For a start, listening to other people's kids play instruments they can't possibly have mastered yet is not a recipe for fun, and when your own kid - in this instance, Holly (being the only one still at Kingsdown School) - gets up to play, you feel apprehension more than anticipation, praying they don't mess up in front of their mates. And when Holly bravely decided to play an in-progress piece, it didn't exactly make us look forward to it much more. On top of that, some of the kids play obscure classical pieces that might be all right if played by the London Philharmonic at the Albert Hall, but not so much on a trombone in an echoing school hall.

So how come I enjoyed tonight's offerings so much that I would gladly have sat through the whole thing again, as soon as it finished?

You are going to have to take my word for this - because there is no recording of it, as far as I know - but the whole thing turned out to be a thoroughly uplifting experience. I am still amazed by the impact music has on kids' education these days, especially compared to my era when the only people who played instruments were sons and daughter of musical parents, and they nearly all played the clarinet.

Not only do they all seem to be at it nowadays, but standards are really high and - most impressive of all - many of them play without fear. Some of them even write their own stuff.

Holly played her piece very well, even though she has only just started to learn it in preparation for her Grade 5 exam, and had only a couple of minor struggles with a really difficult part in the middle. And there were plenty of other highlights.

One kid got up to play the guitar and sing Chasing Cars, a song that is hard to sing and hard to play because it has an unusual sequence that throws up verses where you don't expect them. Our band tried to play it, a while ago, but we gave it up as too difficult, so to see a teenager even attempt it was impressive enough. Then there was another angelic and shy-looking kid who got up with his guitar and surprisingly did equally well with a Coldplay song.

There were also three drummers to see, which is always interesting for another drummer.

But best of all was our nextdoor neighbour, Jordan, playing his ukulele(!) while an infectiously smiling girl sang an unusual arrangement of Somewhere Over the Rainbow and What a Wonderful World (combined) so beautifully and with such charisma (both of them), that it was literally one of the most enjoyable performances I've seen since... since... well, ever, probably. Fortunately, Jordan's mother couldn't get there in time to see it, so they repeated it at the end - and the second time around it was even better!

This is something the Government should think about during its current enthusiasm for cutting public services, especially education; you can judge the quality of a generation most effectively by looking at its music, and we should do everything we can to encourage them to play, regardless of cost.

I would have liked to have seen Germany win it because they moved the ball twice as fast as everybody else and with twice as much precision, only to be stifled by a stangely wormanlike and spoiling Spain in the semi-finals.

In terms of football, it was sadly lacking in characters, incidents and charm, which was summed up by a final in which probably the most fascinating question was how long it would be before one of the Dutch players got sent off. Their uncompromising and sometimes brutal attitude made them no friends, which is completely the opposite to what you would normally expect from the Dutch.

In a tournament in which not even Brazil showed much flair, it was ultimately too much to expect the world's second most attractive footballing nation to show much finesse this time, in complete contrast to their previous two final appearances, in 1974 and 1978.

But they weren't the only team to play out of character, because all of them resorted to styles that other nations used to adopt. Spain played like Germany used to; Germany played like Holland; Holland played like Uruguay;ÊUruguay played like Argentina; Argentina played like Spain; Brazil played like France;ÊItaly played like Wales; France played like Luxembourg; South Africa played like Mexico; Ghana played like Cameroon; Australia played like New Zealand; New Zealand played like Australia. And England played like Scotland. On a bad day. The only team who played like they normally do were Ronaldo and PortugalÊ- over-rated, charmless and a pale imitation of the Spaniards.

Two other things that must be said: Spain are the scruffiest team ever to win the World Cup, and if ITV never get to broadcast a World Cup match ever again, it will be too soon, what with all their ad breaks, over-done graphics and unnecessary background music - and especially their SHOUTING COMMENTATORS.

Despite all this, and even though it seems so long ago that England were knocked out that I can't even be sure they were ever in it, the tournament was a massive success. It may not be as beautiful a game, these days, as it has been in the past, but it still has the power to inspire nations or - in the case of this World Cup - a whole continent.

It has been so successful and so uplifting for seemingly everybody in South Africa that the media virtually gave up trying to find people with bad things to say about it. No doubt they are saving it up to slag off the 2012 London Olympics.

Anyway, the real drama today, apparently, was not at the World Cup final, but at my nephew Richard's house, where his father (my brother) Ron was helping to build a bannister until he put a circular saw through his finger (as reported on Rich's blog).

To cut to the quick - in a manner of speaking - he ended up severing an artery and a nerve, and cutting nearly done to the bone, but not through a tendon, so was able to have it all stitched up.

But the episode underlined, once again, the extremely unfair way in which coping-with-blood-and-gore genes have been distributed in our family. I have precisely none of them. Ron, though, no doubt took it in his stride - he has had a heart transplant, after all - and Rich found it interesting because he's a paramedic and doesn't usually get to see the accident happen!

And the moral of the story is obviously if you really have to put a circular saw through your finger, it's always a good idea to do it at the home of a paramedic.

Julie and I had planned today as my little birthday day out, just the two of us, but events got in our way.

Firstly there was a late booking for our band to play at the Swiss Chalet tonight (which actually went pretty well), so we had to be back in town in plenty of time for that. Then the responsibility of running a free teenage taxi service meant that we had to get Sean to Lydiard Park in the middle of the day, where he was helping to set up stages for the bands playing at the Big Arts Day.

Since we had been cursing the timing of this event anyway, because we were due to miss it, we decided to ditch our original plans and go along. And we're very glad we did.

The Big Arts Day had all kinds of attractions, the main part of which was the stages that showcased local young people's musical efforts, and there were loads of other stalls concerning artistic, crafty and cultural pursuits. At one stage we even got dragged into listening to some storytelling, which was mainly aimed at children. But, hey, I can think of a lot worse things to be wasting my time with on a Saturday afternoon.

The best thing about the Big Arts Day is it was so well supported. By 4pm, when we needed to get home and had been there for over four hours, the place was packed, but there were queues of people still waiting to get in.

It's ironic that some twerp had had his letter published in the Adver in the morning, slagging the town off as being "soulless", and making the monumental mistake of thinking the soul of a town exists in bricks and mortar, not its people. In the end, an estimated 20,000 souls turned up at the Big Arts Day to make the point.

Negative people like that also like to refer to Swindon as a "cultural desert", but the only reason they don't see the culture all around them is because they don't get off their backsides and find it. It didn't take much finding at Lydiard Park today.

So, to sum up: the Big Arts Day actually made me feel proud to be a Swindonian, and the next person who tells me how bad everything is, especially round here, can, quite frankly, sod off.

I should be long past the age when I get excited about birthdays, but I still do. Furthermore, I should be past the age when I get a lot of pleasure from getting some childish things as presents, but I still do. This was again a theme of the joint presents that Julie, Sean and Holly assembled, and Holly went to a great deal of trouble to wrap up perfectly (see above).

So I got another toy VW camper, sweets, chocolate, a wooden car kit, a runalong robot to make and a book on how to make mechanical toys out of card, as well as some big boys' stuff - a book of cryptic crosswords (which I have recently got hooked on), beer, drumsticks and six Marx Brothers films on DVD.

I didn't get to open them, or my cards, until late afternoon, it being far too complicated, these days, to try to organise such things in the morning, like we did when the kids were younger.

I also had to be out early because our band was playing at - of all things - a private birthday party. It was for a 12-year-old girl and had a Beatles theme as the whole family, including the kids, were apparently Beatles mad. We'd been asked to learn some Beatles songs to play, which we did, and I even sang Back in the USSR - twice.

But the highlight for me was playing Birthday (from the White Album) which was not only appropriate but also good to play because it is one of those many album tracks that are usually unsung - in more ways than ones.

So it was a birthday that took on a life of its own and never seemed quite under my control, but a memorable one, all the same.

A truly lovely person and aged just 45, she died two weeks ago after battlling cancer for about two years, having been ill for about half the time since she and her husband Kevin moved in next door.

The service, at St Philip's Church, which was packed, was as nice as could possibly be expected in the circumstances, although by the time the close family went off for the private burial, there couldn't have been a dry eye in the place.

I must say how much admiration I had for the honesty of the vicar, the Rev Carol Stone, who not only delivered a thoughtful address but admitted that she was at a loss to explain why somebody so young and full of life should die so tragically. I have to admit I have a big problem with that too.

Gill had apparently planned much of the ceremony herself and had been keen that she should not be forgotten, but had already achieved that by the type of person she was, being one of those precious people who it is impossible to picture without a smile on their face.

For that reason it is no exaggeration to say the service was one of the most difficult hours of my life, and also because, for the first time in my life, I was attending the funeral of somebody who was younger than me.

I've sung with our band before, doing Fields of Gold a few times, but it just didn't sound right, so we dropped it. I'm not entirely convinced it was my singing that was the problem. Sometimes, the song just doesn't fit the band.

But tonight I made my comeback, singing Back in the USSR at our gig at Swindon Conservative Club, which went OK.

I find drumming difficult enough at the best of times, so singing at the same time is a huge challenge. If all the words and the stresses fell on the beat it would be easy enough, but they obviously don't, so the only way through it is to play a pop beat that is so basic that I can do it on 'automatic pilot', leaving my little brain free to worry about the singing alone.

It's all very well singing along to bits of a song in the shower or the car, or when you are not under pressure, but when it comes to remembering all the words in front of an audience, including how the verses and choruses fit together, it's suddenly not so easy. Fortunately, being a lifelong Beatles fan, the words of Back in the USSR came to me fairly automatically. As long as you can remember the first word of each verse, you're half way there, and if you're lucky, the rest just follows.

Then the only things you have to crack is making sure your microphone is in the right place and the lead is tucked out of the way of the sticks - which I only partialled remembered - and singing at the correct speed.

Keeping time and the correct tempo are the drummer's job, even if he's singing, but this is much more difficult than you might think. Not only is there a tendency to rush it, especially if you're singing, so that you get it over with as quickly as possible, but a lot of songs are actually much slower than you might think - Back in the USSR being one of them. Another is Rocking All Over the World, by Status Quo, which plods more than races, and which I have been known to play much too fast.

So, considering the number of things that can go wrong, my song, like the rest of the gig, went remarkably smoothly. It's all a bit of a blur to me now, but as far as I can remember, it was done at more or less the correct tempo.

It says a lot about the repertoire we have built up that we played for about two hours and 20 minutes - nearly an hour longer than standard - and still had a dozen other songs we could have played. We even did a request, playing Mustang Sally, even though we'd never done it together, not even in rehearsal, and even though I hadn't listened to the song for years, couldn't remember how it started and - most crucially of all - had only a vague idea of where the drumming is supposed to stop, mid-way through the song. Nobody noticed.

I still get a bit apprehensive before a gig, but not exactly nervous, and the best bit of the night is still - and probably always will be - getting to the end and breathing a sigh of relief that I've managed the whole thing without dropping my sticks.

He's now sat all his A-Level exams at New College (music technology, English and Business Studies), which seemed to go well, and although we're obviously hoping he's got good passes, they are not crucial because he has no intention of going to university.

That's because his plans to one day become a full-time drum teacher are still on course. He already has his first student - a 43-year-old who comes for an hour's lesson every week - is still doing evening and after-school sessions for the Swindon Music Service's Rock School, gets a few days' work assisting with music exams at Swindon Music Service and has been asked to do some more (unpaid) drumming, which is great experience and for getting his name around.

He also nearly landed a perfect two-and-a-half-day job at a Swindon school as a music technician, which would have been perfect for getting experience and a reliable income while still having time to build up his teaching. He had an interview, but didn't get the job.

Meanwhile, much of his spare time is spent writing songs, improving his guitar, jamming with his mates, practising drums for a diploma he is due to sit in November, and there are even plans for his band (in which he plays guitar) to go on a little tour of Denmark, Poland and Germany in August! A bit like The Beatles did, though hopefully not so seedy.

He's also passed his driving theory test, which means he can now apply to take his driving test.

So Daisy Pulls It Off was very welcome indeed, even though I've seen it performed twice before.

This time we took Holly - her first visit to the Watermill since we took her and Sean to a kiddies' show, many years ago, and too many for her to remember much about it - and I think it's fair to say we can put her down as a convert.

It almost goes without saying that the acting - like the atmosphere - is always brilliant at the Watermill, so the cast performed it with all the enthusiasm necessary. The whole play relies almost entirely on one joke, being a parody of all those jolly hockey stick stories from public schools, where the pupils get up to all kinds of stunts, such as midnight feasts and searching for hidden treasure.

Whenever books, plays, films or anything else starts sending up things that are almost send-ups of themselves, I get suspicious (unless it's The Simpsons), but the sending-up is so cleverly done here, it works really well. It's all frightfully over the top, and just when you thought it couldn't go over the top any more, the cast turned the melodrama up a notch to produce the funniest bits of all.

So, as probably the best character, Trixie, liked to put it: "Jubilate!"

I was given this book for Father's Day, at my own request, and decided to let it jump the queue of books I'm trying to read because it is really only a little humourous pocket book and very easily read.

The idea is simple: stand-up comedian Mark Thomas recently did a tour, and before each show asked the audience to suggest things that they wanted to become law. Then they voted on the ideas during the show, and the best ones have been condensed into this little book.

Some of the 'laws' in the manifesto are brilliantly surreal, such as "Goats are to be released on to the floor of the House of Commons (no more than four); MPs are forbidden from referring to them, ever."

But most of the others could and probably should be considered as genuine laws, except people with vested interests would make damned sure they never were. These include:

• To introduce 'None of the above' on ballot papers
• Politicians should have to wear tabards displaying the names and logos of the companies with whom they have a financial relationship, like a racing driver
• MPs should not be paid wages but loans, like students, because they get highly paid jobs after they graduate from Westminster as a result of attending parliament. They should therefore pay back the loan they received while in office

The People's Manifesto would also have been better as a bigger book, because I would have liked to have heard a few more suggestions. Then again, I suppose the trick is to always leave the audience wanting more.

They're right, of course. Yesterday, I bought a bag of marbles at the Old Town Yard Sale - not for playing with, you understand, but - have I mentioned this before? - I have a kind of obsessionable fascination for marbles, which I consider the most beautiful thing on the planet (save for naked ladies).

So I absolutely love little brightly coloured presents like the ones I get on Father's Day, especially as Holly always goes to such lengths to personalise them.

And do you know what the best thing is about Father's Day? It's that my birthday is always hot on its heels, less than a month later.

Nuts in May was a feature-length TV Play For Today, written by Mike Leigh in 1976, and starring Alison Steadman. It was the play Leigh wrote before the much better remembered Abigail's Party, which made stars of him and Steadman. Both Nuts in May and Abigail's Party were partly scripted and partly ad-libbed, and were therefore forerunners of The Office.

Like Abigail's Party (and indeed, The Office), Nuts in May is all about excruciatingly narrow-minded people who don't realise they're dull. Steadman's character is Candice-Marie, a hippie with all sorts of green/vegetarian/new age ideas, except most of them are the result of brainwashing by her husband Keith, who is even duller than she is. He is played by Roger Sloman, an actor whose career never really went much further, even though he is quite brilliant in the role.

The story is about Candice-Marie and Keith going on a seemingly idyllic camping holiday where they befriend a Welsh rugby player called Ray, and which turns into a disaster. The characterisation is excellent and there are some great lines, the best one being when the nerdy Keith surveys the landscape and says: "Oh look: there's a car going up the B3351."

This may lose something in translation, but trust me - it's comic genius, and so well acted.

I haven't seen Nuts in May for a few years because although I've watched it many times on video, we never got around to getting the DVD version, and now our video player has virtually been consigned to history.

But I did put Nuts in May as a 'like' on my Facebook profile, which meant that I was invited to become a friend of Candice-Marie - obviously somebody pretending to be her. I thought it would be a bit of fun, so I accepted and posted a message about spotting a car going up the B3351, which is probably a fairly standard first message to Candice-Marie, who has about 700 friends.

It was only later that I discovered that of all the people in all the world, the person who is Candice-Marie turns out to be somebody I'm related to, and I had no idea she had even heard of Nuts in May. This is either an amazing coincidence or shows that there must be something in our genes that makes both of us have a similar liking for a fairly obscure Play For Today from 1976. Or maybe both. Unfortunately, I am not at liberty to divulge the real identity of the Facebook Candice-Marie.

Now, I hesitate to do this last bit, because you need to get into the characters for it to have the full comic effect and I would have preferred it to have been the car going up the B3351, but here's a YouTube clip...

At least it proves that ad-libbed cringeworthy character comedy was invented long before Ricky Gervais thought of it.

As I've been saying for years, the only issue here is why otherwise brilliant players - Rooney, Gerrard and Lampard - are incapable of doing, in a white shirt, what they do so effortlessly in a red or a blue one. Any manager who can find an answer to that conundrum is assured of immortality.

At the start of the World Cup, we resisted the temptation of buying naff St George's flags from Poundland and sticking them on our car, but bought a football-shaped cushion instead, which we put in the back window of the car. I told the family - who still haven't been cured of that terrible thing that grips England fans, every time we play in a major tournament: namely hope - that the ball would remain there until England were knocked out.

If you bear in mind that England were drawn in the World Cup's easiest group, it was reasonable to expect it to stay there for at least a couple of weeks. I'm not talking about the easiest group in this World Cup, but the easiest group ever.

Well, I have to report that the ball has been removed - not today, but last Sunday morning, the day after we failed to beat the USA, when, although people said I was being too critical, the writing was already clearly on the wall for all to see.

The ball will not be placed back in the car again until such time as England put in a performance they can be proud of, and until that happens, it shall be called The Ball of Shame.

So, driving off to band practice tonight, I was thinking I really didn't want to put my mind to anything. And anyway, how dare the world go on with its trivial business when there are much bigger things to think about?

But the good thing about being an average drummer is this: to make any kind of acceptable effort at being in a band requires your undivided attention, so for about three hours I had no option but to focus on what my hands and feet were doing, not the clouds on the horizon.

Of all nights, this turned out to be the one when a bit of an ambition started to come true. When I first took up drumming, about seven or eight years ago, I told Paul, my drum teacher, that I really only wanted to drum along (in private) to The Beatles. But although I've played lots of other things, including much that I never imagined I would, I've hardly played any Beatles at all.

Roy, our lead guitarist, is not a big fan, and it's not easy to find a Beatles song that goes well. The trouble is their songs are so familiar and the sound so distinctive that covers of them sound like pale imitations at best, and butchery at worst. When I was a teenager, I used to think that any cover of a Beatles song was sacrilege. At one stage we nearly added Get back to our regular repertoire, but I found that really difficult to play, so I was happy to see it given up as a bad job.

Now it turns out that one of our upcoming gigs is a birthday party, and the birthday girl's teenage daughter is a big Beatles fan - and "could we play some Beatles at the party?"

So we decided on - and quickly became good enough at - I Saw Her Standing There, and had a reasonable stab at the difficult Here Comes The Sun. Then I suggested Birthday - with some irony as it will be my own birthday when we play the gig.

Although he barely knew it, and with only a single play-through of the original off my iPod, Roy soon had the lead part and, to my amazement, my making-it-up-as-you-go-along effort on the drums fitted nicely, which is really gratifying as the drum pattern on the song is like nothing you'll hear anywhere else. After three or four run-throughs, I thought it soundly really good, and as a big Beatles fan myself, I know it will go down well with other fans.

Our fourth offering is going to be Back in the USSR, which again came together in remarkably quick time. The complex process of putting a song together somehow just clicked, and things were going so well that I had a bit of a brainstorm and volunteered to sing it. What the hell?

Apart from having real trouble starting in the right key - which is much harder than you think - it went quite well, and as long as I could remember the first two or three words of each verse, the rest just popped into my head. So, still thinking what the hell? we agreed that it was already good enough to put on the list.

Paradoxically, singing the song is a bit of a cop-out for the drummer. The drum part is not straightforward, so the only way I can sing and drum at the same time is to keep it simple and forget about the fancy bits. So I played little more than the simplest, basic pop-beat, which is so automatic, even for me, that my hands and feet can get on and do their job without any interference from my brain, which needs all its energy to concentrate on getting the words out of my mouth in the right order, and not looking too much of a prat while I'm doing it.

Then it was back to reality on the drive home, where even the endless joy that The Beatles give to me and the rest of the world seemed dimmed in comparison with some things.

Then I made the mistake of listening to the news on the radio, which told me that the Government have come up with more ideas for saving money and reducing Britain's trade deficit - something that we are told is essential, and which the whole country seems to have blindly accepted as the number one priority in our lives, even though the people telling us to do it are bankers and financiers and people with vested interests, and even though these are the very same people who, in the last couple of years, have re-written the dictionary definitions of selfish and callous and corrupt.

They had chosen today of all days to reveal that the previous Government's plans to build a brand new hospital are - if we let them - going to be scrapped.

Last month's walk along the Ridgeway, organised by Stuart (a colleague of Julie's) was pleasant enough for another to be arranged today, and although there was a lot of crying off at the last moment, we turned up - and were very glad that we did.

Despite aggravating my back - and here's an irony - while doing up my walking boots, I was able to enjoy the walk from Great Bedwyn, down the canal to Crofton, then across to Wilton and its windmill and back to Great Bedwyn through the fringes of Savernake Forest.

We - me, mainly - decided to see Crofton Beam Engines properly first, which is the second time I have been there, but the first for about 40 years. The last time was a school trip, of which I can remember very little, apart from eating soggy cheese and tomato sandwiches from our packed lunches in roughly the spot where the above photograph was taken.

The pumping station is almost exactly 200 years old, and was built to pump water from a well to the top of the Kennet and Avon Canal, and the steam-powered beam engines (built in 1812 and 1846) have large rockers (the beams) on top. The original beams were wooden, but were replaced by cast iron ones, soon after, which had to be brought in through a hole in the brickwork, which you can still trace.

There is a Swindon connection because the GWR eventually took over the K&A Canal and stepped in, about a century ago, to firstly provide a locomotive as a makeshift boiler and then supply boilers built at Swindon Works, which are still worked on certain days of the year - though sadly not today.

Still, we did get to have a wander around the whole building, which has walkways and steps that are so arranged that you really get to feel as though you are getting right into the body of the thing, seeing it from every conceivable internal angle.

As ever with machinery of this age, its creators went to an amazing amount of trouble when making very functional things, and the elegant levers in one of the pictures below is as good an example of this as you'll find anywhere. There was an elegance in a lot of the details that are so unexpected in what should be just a big, lumbering beast.

Just as impressive, in its way, is Wilton Windmill, which I've also visited before - in this case about 20 years ago. We decided not to go inside this time, which I started to regret, until I realised that staring up at it with a cup of tea can be just as inspiring as seeing and hearing about all its internal workings.

It was built in 1821, which was quite late as far as windmills are concerned, and the reason for building it was, surprisingly, the canal, which caused all the local watermills to go out of business. It brought a kind of synchronicity to the walk.

I had hoped the walk, which was about eight miles (I guess) might put paid to my bad back (probably sciatica), but didn't, and I am typing this with Julie's monkey-shaped warmer in the small of my back, and trying not to make any sudden movements.

After more than 20 years as a journalist, I have become used to the unwelcome sight of my face inside the paper, but somehow, today I ended up on the front page.

There in the 'puff' - the promotional blurb that tells you what's in the paper - was my cheery face, along with a suggestion that readers turned to page 8 first, where they would find my column (this week about my involvement with the Alfred Williams Heritage Society and how we have lost the knack of finding heroes).

To be honest, I'm quite chuffed, because the column has now been running for four or five years - so long that I can't recall exactly how long - and is therefore quite a survivor. These things either last a year or two or threaten to go on forever. In fact, if it goes on for just over another year, its title will need changing from Roaring Forties - being about life in your forties - to reflect that I am now almost within sight of my fifties.

The column rarely produces any reaction from readers, but somebody must like it, and I'm surprised by the number of people I meet who say: "Aren't you that bloke who writes in the Adver?" or even "I read your column every week."

Mind you, I had to laugh when I noticed that my face is juxtaposed with the headline, "Sicknote", which is over the front page lead story about the level of long-term sick leave at the Great Western Hospital. Actually, this is quite ironic as I've been struggling with what I assume is sciatica for three or four days, which has made it difficult for me to do any work. Not that freelancers have the luxury of sicknotes.

Juxtaposition can be a dangerous thing in newspapers. There are cases where people have won damages for deformation of character because they have appeared next to unsavoury stories. There was one famous one where a politician's picture appeared too close to a headline about a rapist or some other pervert, and although I forget the details (it may have been Neil Kinnock), I've always remembered to avoid doing it by accident because you may be accused of doing it on purpose.

Not that there was any intention or damage done here. Far from it. It has perked me up a bit to think that I am slightly more famous than I was when I went to bed last night.

Today he gave his first drumming lesson to his first student - and not only that; his 'pupil' was a chap not much younger than myself.

He's a guy who has done some very rudimentary drumming before, but has just enrolled at Swindon's Adult Rockschool, so wants to get more of a grounding in what it takes to play in a band.

The hour-long lesson took place in the 'drum room' I built which takes up half of our garage, and apparently it went very well. There is even talk of Sean teaching the guy's two sons.

I'm not sure whether we should be surprised that Sean wasn't nervous about it, because when you really know your stuff and you have so much trust in your own ability, I should imagine teaching comes easy. Whatever challenge he saw in it, he seemed to be relishing it, and said he enjoyed it.

So how are we feeling about this? Proud, obviously, but only partly because Sean has fulfilled his promise as a drummer. That's down to him, not us, and also luck that he had the talent in the first place.

What we are allowing ourselves to feel genuinely proud about is we've encouraged him to try to make a career of it, while less open-minded parents might have discouraged such a thing in favour of getting a 'proper job'.

It also helps that while other kids of his age only have plans to make money from music by becomoing rock stars, which is pretty unlikely, Sean's feet have never left the ground, and he's also worked hard at teaching himself guitar and learning about music production - again, not in case he gets lucky and becomes a star, but to supplement his drumming talent.

He still has a long way to go, of course, but we think he has a good chance of being able to make a decent living out of music, which is very important to us because we've always told our kids that doing something you enjoy is more important than all the other reasons for taking a job put together.

We had a few chores to do in town, including me finally spending my Christmas book tokens on Bill Bryson's new book, At Home. I'm still only a third of the way through two other books I'm trying to read, so I am going to have to put off reading Bill for now, which is a shame because he is now undoubtedly my favourite author. But I couldn't resist reading the introduction, which was typically eye-opening and justified spending £10 on its own (it's in hardback but half price in Waterstone's).

While we were in town we stopped by to watch some (presumably genuine) Maassai tribespeople who were singing, dancing and selling wares on a stall, which was all very colourful but somehow a little bit low-key - mainly because it would have been better if done somewhere more central than the upper floor of the Brunel Plaza.

Next on our list of cultural things to do, after lunch, was a visit to a BBC Springwatch spin-off event at Stanton Park. But we were slow in getting going and then found we had to be bussed in on a park & ride from a nearby industrial estate, so by the time we finally arrived we weren't sure whether we had time to take part in the main point of it all - guided walks by wildlife experts.

So we settled for looking around the handful of stalls, and a little peep inside one of the buildings where they have a nice little children's room with information on fungi, including giant illuminated mushrooms and toadstools. We especially enjoyed talking to the borough dog warden who also has a personal interest in deer. He told us more about them in five minutes than we previously had learned in the whole of our lives.

He said there are six species of deer in Britain, but only two are native - the red deer and roe deer. Incredibly, considering how little you actually see them, there are more than 800,000 roe deer in Britain. You might think that most of them are in Scotland, but only half are, so there are hundreds of thousands in England. I can only think that most of them are hiding behind trees or have evolved some way of making themselves invisible.

I'm now on a roll with the random deer facts, so I need to say that of the four species that are not truly native to Britain, muntjacs are the most intriguing. They were only introduced here a hundred years ago - and specifically to captivity at Woburn. But now there are more than 150,000 of them running wild - every one descended from animals that escaped from Woburn over the years (more amazing deer facts here).

So our badly planned trip wasn't such a flop after all, and we also got to have a stroll around the park and lake, and I managed to satisfy my uncontrollable urge to point my camera at everything to see if it makes a decent picture.

Despite what happened - or rather didn't happen - on the pitch, it was a great family day out, with all four us of - me, Julie, Sean and Holly - setting off from a soggy Moonrakers car park at 9.30am on a coach organised by my sister-in-law Sarah, on which everybody was either called Carter, related to one or a friend/colleague of one.

We had a Swindon Town quiz and plenty of laughs on the way up - and surprisingly also on the way back.

Wembley lived up to its reputation for providing a great atmosphere and the perfect stage. I'd seen Town win three times at the old stadium, and this was my first visit to the new one, the vast height of which is truly impressive.

Sponsors Coca-Cola also did well to try to turn the match into a real occasion, with sausage-shaped helium balloons holding up giant club badges, fireworks, vertical flame-throwers and more. And there was no doubt who was the man of the match: Town mascot Rocking Robin.

But the less said about the team's performance on the day, the better.

I've also added this panorama.

In my capacity as the Vice-chair of the Alfred Williams Heritage Society (AWHS), I was able to wangle an invitation to inspect the local author's collection of books, held under lock and key at Wroughton.

This is a big chunk of the 500 books he owned, rather than the ones he wrote, although two books of poetry and a copy of his most important book, Life in a Railway Factory, are among the collection.

I tend to use the word 'fascinating' too much, but the hour and a bit I spent poring over the books and searching for personal touches was, indeed, fascinating. But rather than go into any detail about it, I'll just link to the article I wrote for the AWHS website.

The collection is not open to the public and requires a special invitation to view it, which is really sad because the one sure way to engage geeks like me in their heritage is to allow them to get their grubby little hands on the real stuff.

It's almost as if nothing could ever be any good if it comes from around our manor, no matter what the evidence is to the contrary.

I say this after our lads' night out (LNO) tonight, which was a shorter than expected bike ride and closer to home than planned, on account of logistical problems that I won't go into detail about (the van was too small).

It involved sampling a pint of Arkell's 3Bs at the Sun Inn, Coate. Bizarrely, it was my second visit to the pub in two years, but also the second in two days - and if Town beat Millwall on Saturday there is talk of going there again.

Anyway, the thing to say about the 3Bs is it was absolutely lovely - and lovely to drink on a late spring evening where the temperature was perfect.

I can vouch for the quality of Arkell's ales with some degree of authority, being a former member of CAMRA and somebody who only drinks real ale (which is not to say it's 100 per cent of my liquid intake, but if I drink beer, its only ever real ale).

This qualifies me as a discerning drinker, and although I generally like most real ales, the Arkell's was far and away superior to the Abbot Ale and the Greene King IPA I also supped, even though they are mighty fine ales in themselves.

Most of the people who criticise Arkell's beer are doing it for no other reason than it's local and therefore rubbish, or they aren't proper bitter drinkers or simply because they don't know what they are talking about. And 3Bs - which stands for Best Bitter Beer* - is not even literally Arkell's best. That accolade belongs to either Kingsdown Ale, Moonlight or Noel.

I still can't quite decide which is the overall best, but it's great fun trying.

* Although 3Bs is 'Best Bitter Beer', I used to know a landlord who liked to say it stands for 'Big Boys' Beer'.

They change completely when you consume them out of doors. Not better or worse; just different.

We popped in to see my drum teacher, Paul Ashman, perform with his band, The Monkey Dolls, at the Sun Inn, Coate - ironically the venue where we celebrated Town's victory over Leicester City on the night of the 1993 play-off victory at Wembley (see below).

I have seen remarkably few open-air rock performances in my life, with the only ones I can remember, outside Florida, being The Ludwig Beatles at the Old Town Bowl and Elton John at the County Ground - which is a bit of a letdown when some people's main musical experience comes from open-air festivals such as Glastonbury.

I just noticed our Wembley tickets for next Saturday don't actually say who's playing. The reference to Charlton/Swindon on it is all about the possible winners of the semi-final, and there's no mention of Millwall.

All 36,000 available tickets were, apparently, taken to the second leg at Charlton, and the winning team got to take them home on the team bus.

This one will eventually be added to my large collection of used tickets - not just for football but for all kinds of events and visits to places I've been to - which I keep in a drawer and which sort of define my life.

This one isn't going to make sense when, in years' time, somebody starts going through them and tries to work out why this one seems to say we played Charlton, not Millwall.

This is just one of the incongruities of life that some people would never give a second thought to, whereas I am cursed by being bothered by such loose ends and the need to go round, tying them all up.

Holly and her friends have been planning what they were going to do for their other friend Debbie's birthday for what seems like weeks, and decided on a hippy theme for their birthday meal that included making their own tie-dye T-shirts and other impressive fancy dress.

Here's Holly after returning from what I understand was a very successful celebration...

To be fair, they probably don't get the point of the Games at all - not just in London but anywhere - and they probably couldn't see the point of going to the Moon, either. They are the same people who don't get the logo, and they are probably moaning into their lager about how much all this is going to cost. They probably couldn't even spell Paralympics, and the complex thought processes that went into the design of the mascots were a couple of light years above their heads because, apparently, they wanted a lion.

No doubt the Daily Mail wanted a lion too.

I repeat: they just don't get it.

They didn't get that these mascots need to appeal to little Japanese kids and little Mexican kids and little Egyptian kids, not just the child victims of our national narrowmindedness, and they didn't get how significant it was for the two mascots, representing the Olympics and the Paralympics, to come as a pair for the first time.

For the record, I absolutely didn't want a lion, but I did want the Games to be radical, innovative and bold, and I wasn't too bothered exactly what the mascots looked like, as long as they fitted these criteria. And they do.

Roger Mosey, who has the strange title of the BBC's Director of London 2012, does get it, and I take my hat off to his blog. Sadly, tacked on to the end of it are the customary kneejerk reactions from the public, one of whom greeted the mascots in no doubt the same way he has greeted everything new since we lost India, which was to say they are "too clever by half". Which is another way of saying he is too stupid by half.

Actually, I was heartened that more people than I expected did get it, but any random selection of comments expressed produces a long list of what they like to think are "ideas" for alternative mascots but are actually nothing more than gormless reflex twitches of their tiny brains. These included: a mini Nelson, Churchill, Shakespeare, a "cheeky bulldog" and anything fluffy.

My favourite comment was a lovely tongue-in-cheek one: "These look like poor people's mascots. At my private school we not only attend chapel on a regular basis but also have the money this country does not have to make some bloody good, damn impressive, toffing spiffing mascots. I am outraged. This is a disgrace to the country. My peasants could have designed better mascots. My father will have something to say about this..."

But the whole affair is summed up by some self-appointed expert on design who certainly didn't realise he was inadvertently hitting the nail on the head when he said the mascots are: "One-eyed, like the organisers."

Obviously, nobody told him that in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

Anyway, looking out of my loft (office) window on this fine spring day, I decided to compare the view with a winter scene (actually from 2009 rather than this year's much longer colder snap), which is quite interesting, I think.

Note to self: about time you sorted out that moss in the gutter.

I decided it was finally time to succumb to the phenomenon, even though I could never quite work out what Facebook had that a combination of other things on the net didn't.

You want to send messages to people? You use email. You want to tell the world what's on your mind? You write a blog. You want to get in touch with people who don't talk to or meet as often as you'd like? Email again. Like text messages (which I still don't get), Facebook didn't seem to offer anything new.

I also didn't get into Facebook before because I have no wish to eavesdrop on the secret world it has created for teenagers. Holly was absolutely horrified when she found out I had signed up (which didn't take her very long), but she needn't have worried because if I want to know what she's up to, there is a more reliable method that us grown-ups use: talking.

Having said all that, I am enjoying being on Facebook, even though I am surprised at just how user-unfriendly it is for newcomers, and even by the usual standard of so-called help centers, theirs incredibly little help if you are trying to find your way around.

It's clear to me that Facebook is too different things to two different generations. For the younger generations it's Gossip and Trivia Control, while I can see that for the older folk it has a nice potential for keeping in touch with people you don't get to see as much as you'd like to.

In other words, I'm a fan.

I've also discovered the fun of Twitter, although you can't help feeling like you are the world's saddest person when you first joing and start writing tweets knowing nobody is following you.

It's also a shame that it seems to have much more value for following the lives of famous people than so-called 'ordinary' people, which is a disappointment for people like me who generally has far more interest in the latter than the former, with only a few exceptions (Stephen Fry being the obvious one).