Ordinarily, I might think this was a tourist trap. Here they all are, ambling into the newly-restored church (yes, I did write church) with that complacent and vacant two-week-holiday-smile, all long shorts, cameras-round-necks, baseball caps and rucksacks. I’m reminded of Bill Hicks’ jibe about tourists wandering around aimlessly:’Why don’t you look around and start enjoying the life you’ve chosen for yourself… instead of calling the travel agent and buying the budget deal to T-shirt Nirvana?’

So why am I here too?

Well, I’m in the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields on Trafalgar Square, right in the heart of London’s summer season square mile of tourist-ville, but where there is also a regular programme of classical music as well as religious worship (and a variety of other activities, including care for homeless people). I’ve come, with my wife, to listen to Mozart’s Requiem.

I’m a dabbler in classical music. I love much of what I hear, but it has to compete with a variety of other interests (and writing time) and so I only end up going to concerts perhaps six or seven times a year if I’m in the country, often as the guest of greater enthusiasts than I.

This summer’s classical music programme has so far consisted of Verdi’s Macbeth at Glyndebourne, a mixed programme including part of Carmina Burana at the Barbican and Mozart’s Requiem and Verdi’s Gloria in D minor at St Martin in the Fields Church in London. Still to come are a couple of proms at the Royal Albert Hall: Part and Britten in the first and Beethoven in the second.

I really wanted to hear Mozart’s Requiem being performed because I think it is such a uniquely awe-inspiring work. Unlike most of the rest of Mozart’s work that I’ve come across, it is extraordinarily dark at times, providing beautiful, vivid, haunting, and at times tempestuous musical portraits of the concepts of heaven, hell and the act of divine judgement. This is hardly surprising as Mozart was ill for most of the time that he was writing the piece and, indeed, he died before he was able to fully complete it. The work to me suggests a brilliantly creative mind struggling, though fruitfully so, with the idea of death.

I wanted to be blown away by a combination of beautiful music, baroque passion, existential despair and the sheer volume of orchestra and choir combined drowning my pathetic little brain in the glory of Mozart’s music. Perhaps it was an unrealistic expectation. I did love the music and technically it seemed faultless but — and here I’m sure I reveal my shortcomings as a musical critic — it simply wasn’t LOUD enough. I want to listen to this piece being performed by five orchestras and a choir of 200. That Dies Irae (see below) should make my ears bleed. Instead, the choir of about 25 seemed to struggle to fill the small church with the volume needed to convey the full drama of the piece.

I realise that this reveals me as a philistine of sorts; a classical music lover in the same sense that the majority of people who turn up to performances of Hamlet are lovers of literature, or in a similar way to Laurence admiring his bound set of the The Complete Works of Shakespeare in Abigail’s Party (shortly before his heart attack). The type of lover of classical music who admires Beethoven’s Ninth and Verdi’s Requiem but who lacks a delicate ear and the patience required to enjoy more subtle works of the orchestral art. Should I wear a t-shirt with the announcement: ‘I like my Mozart LOUD’?

This is a slight overstatement of my true position but it’s clear that despite my slightly rude description above of tourists ambling in to the concert, I am no better — and quite likely more poorly — qualified, than they are to appreciate and criticise this music. Perhaps many of them play in orchestras and have voluminous record collections of Berlioz, Stravinsky, Handel, Bach and Poulenc which they listen to regularly. Perhaps if we had a conversation I would run out of things to say in less than a minute while they could talk for hours about the merits of Mozart’s trombone parts. I, on the other hand, would probably be limited to: ‘I enjoyed it . . . I just wish it had been a little louder. Enjoy the rest of your holiday. Bye now.’

I am currently spending most of my waking life in 1940. I dream in black & white. I am working on a fascinating writing project for the RAFBF, conceived and designed by digital agency Reading Room.

I am so busy with this all-consuming project at the moment that I haven’t time to blog or do anything else much except write — more than 40,000 words in the last month, in fact.

I hope to finish at the beginning of July, when I will begin to resume, I hope, a more normal life, with a far more modest daily word count.

But for the time being, I am flying in Hurricanes, avoiding barrage balloons, smoking woodbines, buying food with my ration book and growing potatoes in the garden, and writing about all of it.

I will return to the present only when my own summer Battle of Britain is over.

I’ve spent the last few days in Kirriemuir, east Scotland, birthplace of J. M. Barrie, whose cricketing exploits I have chronicled in my book Peter Pan’s First XI. Kirriemuir was celebrating the 150th anniversary of Barrie’s birth with a number of events.

I gave a brief, impromtu talk to the Strathmore Speaker’s Club at North Muir Hall, whose members seemed such good storytellers that I wondered whether Barrie was as extraordinary as I had previously thought, or whether he was in fact just the most famous and spectacularly successful incarnation of his home town’s talent for weaving narratives.

I did a talk and signing at Kirriemuir library, two signings at Whatley’s Books, one at the camera obscura and cricket pavillion that Barrie bequeathed to the town in 1930, and one at Barrie’s birthplace, where I sat at Barrie’s old desk. I also did a reading from my book and shared a stage with three poets: Douglas Lipton, Tim (not-Brooke!) Taylor and Robert Ramsay. It was a busy few days.

And I somehow found time to get up to the hills where I did a walk from Glen Clova up to Loch Brandy and around, where snow still lay, most spectacularly in a gully that had a long white streak of snow cut into three parts, stretching down toward the dark waters of the loch (picture below). I hitched a lift back with a ranger who worked up in the hills who offered me my first taste of small-town fame - ‘I stopped because I saw your picture in the paper’, he said. On Saturday night, around midnight, as I stood at the bar in a pub in ordering a pair of drinks another man stood next to me and also told me that he too had seen my picture in the paper. ‘You looked bulimic’, he said to me, somewhat enigmatically, like a line from a Pinter play. ‘But I think your book sounds interesting.’ He got his drink and took a sip and looked at me, very stony-faced. ‘You looked like you were about to vomit.’

Storytelling was not limited to the speakers’ club. One man attempted to relate to me the entire story of Homer’s Odyssey in the bar of the Thrums Hotel. Dave Torrie, an ex-editor of the Dandy comic and a keen cricketer who played for Kirriemuir for many years, told me the story of Ian Hamilton’s heist of the stone of destiny from Westminster Abbey, as well as many other funny stories.

I’d like to thank everyone who helped to make my visit to Kirriemuir a success, and in particular John and Kay Dorward, Lis Hill and Sandra and David Affleck.

And finally I also recommend the great cafe called 88 degrees in Kirriemuir, run by Philip and Johanna, that serves some of the best and most reasonably-priced food of its kind that I’ve eaten anywhere.

Back in London I was surprised to be greeted by queues of people in my living room waiting for a signed copy (see picture). What a welcome home!

I’m heading to Kirriemuir on Wednesday, May 12, the town where J. M. Barrie was born on May 9, 150 years ago, in 1860. It seems like the most fitting place to be for the official publication of my book Peter Pan’s First XI, the story of J. M. Barrie’s curious cricket team the Allahakbarries.

I’m very excited about the trip. I will be participating in a number of events, a programme of which you can view here, and will be attending others such as “Speaking of Barrie”, an evening of talks, readings and fun at the Strathmore Speakers Club.

So far it’s been a decent week, helped by a good review in The Sunday Times written by Andrew Holgate, which made Monday morning all the more bearable. Today I signed books at Hatchard’s Bookshop in Piccadilly, helped, appropriately enough, by a lovely chap called Barry.

I’ll be blogging again from Kirriemuir to provide updates on what has been happening in a small town between the North Sea and the mighty Cairngorms over the next few days. I’ve been told that there may even be some cricket . . .  I’m packing my gloves.

I noticed a very interesting article today on how ‘two-thirds of the water used to make UK imports is used outside [the UK's] borders’.

A report by Engineering the Future argues that this is an unsustainable approach to water usage.

This piece was in The Sunday Times yesterday:

A very enjoyable little ditty about the Daily Mail:

This morning I came across this fantastic, and very funny, quote from Jonathan Meades on ’sustainable architecture’:

‘The very act of making a building is energy hungry and vastly wasteful, even if the building is an eco igloo of fair-trade otter droppings, carbon neutral panda scraps, ethical vegan meat, organic yoghurt blocks, recycled slurry and bio-degradable avocado face wipe. The only truly sustainable present is one in which we do not build.’

I am currently helping my good friend Milton Crawford to produce The Hungover Cookbook — a collection of recipes for the morning (and afternoon) after.

It’s tough work and we’ve been piling on the pounds sampling dishes like shakshuka, devilled kidneys on toast, ice cream smoothies and breakfast tortillas.

In order to share the work around a bit we thought that we’d start the hungover cookbook breakfast club, on occasional Sunday mornings in April.

Please get in touch if you think you might like to come along.

I had to laugh when we were sat in a cafe in Mamallapuram in Tamil Nadu and I heard a young American tourist complaining about the amount of plastic rubbish on the beach . . . whilst drinking a PLASTIC bottle of mineral water. Hey, dude, what do you think’s going to happen to your bottle once you’ve finished with it?

In a hot country, like most of India is, you have to drink a lot of water — at least two litres a day — and in India tap water is not recommended unless you’ve spent a lot of time getting used to it. And even then . . .  But if you buy two or three bottles of water a day you’re contributing to the increasingly visible problem of plastic waste. Last time I went to India I added to the mountain of plastic to the tune of about 150 bottles in two months. This track record does rather dent my righteousness on the issue.  But this time I was determined to treat all my drinking water myself.

There are a number of different ways to do this, and I chose to take along the equipment to try out three of the most practical and commonly used methods: ultra-violet (UV) sterilisation, chlorine tablets and liquid iodine.

I have been delivering the UV treatment with a product called the SteriPEN Traveler. It is the quickest method of the three, producing almost instantly drinkable water, though it does also have its downsides. The ‘pen’ is formed of a silver plastic case about 15cm long. Underneath the cover at one end is a glass tube, the bulb that delivers the UV light. It runs on two CR123 batteries which are able to treat  50 litres, or less with rechargeable batteries. This is one of the main problems with this technique -– it still produces waste in the form of batteries, and batteries run out. The sterilised water only lasts for 24 hours –- the UV light doesn’t actually kill bacteria in the water, it merely stops it from reproducing. The SteriPEN is also breakable and expensive, retailing for around 80 GBP in the UK. It has also not been completely reliable –- it should be possible to choose between whether you want to sterilise half a litre or a full litre, but the mechanism to do this does not always work which leads to wasted battery life. And then, after four months on the road, it packed up completely. I’m planning to take it back to the shop where I bought it — Snow & Rock — and either get a replacement or my money back.

Liquid iodine tincture is a very reliable method for making water safe to drink. Just add three to four drops of 2 per cent solution to a litre of water using a dropper and it takes about 30 minutes to make it safe. It is cheap and a little iodine lasts for a very long time. But it is not possible to use iodine over an extended period of time – the maximum amount of time as far as I’m aware is three months. The taste is not great but you adjust to it and it’s possible to buy neutralising tablets that take away some of the iodine tang. Also, you have to carry a dropper and the iodine is generally bought (from a pharmacy) in a (breakable) glass bottle. And the stuff stains like hell if you spill it.

The taste of chlorine tablets is also not so great and, as with iodine, you have to wait for 20 to 30 minutes before you’re able to drink the treated water. These small tablets make the water taste a little chlorinated but it’s hardly like a swimming pool and they’re extremely easy to carry — lightweight and non-breakable. You can also use neutralising tablets to make the taste a bit better. They’re available from camping/travel stores like Cotswold Camping and Nomad Travel.

There are mechanical filters available to buy also but I haven’t had the opportunity to test one of these yet. Perhaps when I do I will update this blog post.

The amount of plastic waste produced by tourists may seem like a tiny amount compared to the waste generated by the local population in a country like India but if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. So if you’re going travelling you might want to consider investing in some form of water purification method and if you don’t, at the very least, please don’t bitch about plastic pollution when you’re helping to create it.

Plastic bottles on beach no. 5 on Havelock Island, Andaman & Nicobar Islands, India