I had been offered a last minue gig for tonight. However, I had other plans. I am helping out with a sketch show at the Fringe this year. It's the descendant of the show I worked on last year. They want me to tech it, but also provide some musical elements for its start and end. The idea of tonight was to co-write the opening song and work out how the show might fit together and how the ending song might then reprise it and tie it up into a bow.

I decided to cycle to the place where we'd be doing the song-writing. This place was in East Finchley in London. Obviously, it's too far to cycle to London directly from Reading. I say that, but I will be giving it a shot at some stage. Not in one evening, though. So I cycled to the railway station, with my guitar strapped to my back, took the train to London and then did the journeying in London by bike.

A few things transpired.

Firstly, my guitar still whacks me on the back of the head while I'm cycling with it. This is not cool.

Next, I remembered how good it is to have a couple of hours of train journey/reading a book time. I read loads of a book I'd started but not quite gotten fully into.

Then I remembered how I seldom get to where I'm going in London by bike without detours. The worst of my detours was when I discovered that the massive hill I'd just sped down at nearly 30 mph (29.4 - so close) was in fact the wrong way. Luckily, I'd climbed so many hills to get that far, the actual climb to back on track wasn't so bad.

We wrote the song and recorded a quick run through of it, which is quicker than trying to learn or transcribe it.

At 11.30pm I left my friend's house, came home, via another cycle ride and then declared my evening over. It had been about 20 miles of cycling. Job done. And coke.