Music for the end of summer and the beginning of autumn.

It has rained a lot lately. Norwich is almost entirely flat, except for two hills, one of which I live on, and one of which is almost alpine by Norfolk standards, two and a bit miles to the north-west, crowed by the mossy burren of Mousehold Heath and a big retail park. And the world's most dangerous crossroads - a four-way hellmouth of implausibly wide roads, frothing joker-faced drivers, and nano-second timed traffic lights - just enough time for you to take one ill-advised step before the Multipla horde crushes it to the texture of a rillette.

The point is, when the land is as flat as it is around here, and pock-marked with strands of wan trees, mainly poplars and sad little elms, nothing drains. Things that get wet stay wet for a very long time. My front garden has been squishy for over a week now. The garden path is turning into a rectangular strand of Rannoch Moor. The only thing that seems to enjoy the rain are the Garden Spiders - those bulbous, tawny-coloured ones, each with a white cruciform blaze on its abdomen - which have strung up webs like silk awning from every surface. Each strand is spangled with dew-light in the morning and is bright and lovely and easily avoided, but by evening is rendered entirely invisible and makes walking up to the front door an excercise in limbo. Still, few things are more entertaining than watching a guest perform a mad spastic dance in the front room, squeaking frantically, after realizing that they are liberally coated in spider web and are probably the new target of an exceedingly large and miffed garden spider.

Rain does different things to different people. Generally it makes me brood at the window, hands knotted behind my back like the shade of Peter Cushing. But this time around - probably because the persistant damp and me being struck down with flu basically turned me into an unshaven hermit for the best part of a week - it made me listen to lots of old music and read lots of old books, wander about in my head and rummage in dust-boxes and thought of the tails of summer and the beginnings of autumns that weren't quite so wet - some of them weren't wet at all - and put them together as a playlist.

Making a playlist is my kneejerk reaction to peaks and troughs. Each playlist is a bit like making a very exact, very subtle, very responsive puzzle - each placed piece turns a remembrance or a smell or a quality of light in my head. Each song has to compliment the others but not be identical to it. Each song has to lead you down a path somewhere and hopefully give you some kind of destination that is natural and progressive to its beginning.

This all sounds very muso, and I don't mean it to be. The best way to think of it is just another kind of story.

The inspirations for this playlist for me were a handful of the following:

* Being clonked over the head with an oar by mistake by a friend of my parents while boating on a big pond in August when I was four, maybe five. I remember seeing Great Crested Newts flitting under the amber water. That, and a big bump on the back of my head.

* Trying to run on a black-tarpaulin sheathed hay-bale in the manner of a running machine. And failing. Falling off was fine, being crushed underneath said bale was not.

* Drinking a strange blue energy drink and eating Discos on top of an abandoned tank-trap in a valley in Northiam in the dog days of summer, or having haphazard BBQ's in that same place in the pissing rain, each one of us druidic with our hoods up, blue cordite smoke unwrapping from within the hood as we puffed on our Lambert & Butlers. The very particular scratches on the legs and forearms from cornstalks.

* Sitting on a bench on what is probably my favourite place in the world, The Firehills near Winchelsea, on an fiendishly foul November afternoon, with the sky nothing but a boiling pan of shredded clouds and fucking great ball-bearings of rain smashing into your raincoat. If you sat very still at a very particular angle then it was possible to be completely circled by warmth and bone-dry while the gale whirled around you. The slightest twitch to the left or right and you'd get a mouthful of blasted sea-spray and rain to the face or a jet of frozen wind down the sleeve, and that was part of the fun.

* The public bar of The Rock pub near Chiddingstone in Kent. We moved when I was eight, but the bar-tenders, locals, the lot of them are friends with my parents and have been, as far as I can see, more or less from the year dot. Some friendships are rooted in the bone, and some familes are outside of the blood. The Rock has a paved, slightly uneven brick floor and low oak beams that are slightly warped through years of rising beer fumes, pipe smoke, the braying laughter and spittle of a certain kind of Kentish local and the steamy exhalations from a hundred dynasties of damp dogs - some of them quiet working-dogs, some elegant and docile Dalmatians with peanut-sized brains toted by ladies from Tunbridge Wells with spotless Hunter Wellies who would cautiously circumnavigate a puddle in their shining Range Rovers in the pub car-park after a hearty Ploughmans and maybe a half of IPA on a drizzly Sunday afternoon.


What you take from it is up to you - suggestion and insinuation are much more fun than dictation, after all.

http://open.spotify.com/user/trade_winds/playlist/4FJrndb8FPw44jmRXZ77KT

Love, Nick.