I can't say this was necessarily the most welcome of interventions, but it certainly beat the bagpipe man from a few weeks ago. He played for a full afternoon, on deadline week. Bagpipe man was not particularly popular.

Anyway, the jazz band outside got me to thinking about summer. It's nearly here. Finally. This will be my first full summer in an office for a couple of years, and perversely I'm looking forward to it: a summer wasting is only really fun when there's people to waste it with.

And I'm also getting nostalgic again for the summers of the past, twenty-seven of them (counting, of course, the ones where I discovered for the first time the joy of unblurred vision, and teeth, and words). There's post-exam joy in there, of course, and blankets under trees, and ironing a shirt before a ball. And, further back, having schoolfriends round for dinner, and punk-pop on the stereo. (It should upset me that, in the nursing home, it'll be Weezer and New Radicals that make me misty-eyed, rather than your Franks and your Glenns. But it doesn't.)

All of this is a good reason to forget all the stuff — the lack of money, the increasing age, the tiredness — that gets in the way. And the 'publish' button, which scares me and stops me writing as much as I should. It's summer, which, if nothing else, means jazz bands and not bagpipes.