Apparently, the Japanese have a word for buying books and leaving them to pile up unread. It’s ‘tsondoku‘. I’m certainly guilty of that.

This week, I finally bought a Kindle. I’ve wanted one for a while, but haven’t been able to justify it to myself because I have the iPad – and lots of books made of paper.

I didn’t go for the fancy all-singing, all-dancing, full-colour Kindle Fire, nor even the one that has a screen that lights up so you can read at night. I have the bog-standard, everyday Kindle e-Book reader. That’s it in the red leather case above. It already contains all of these books and quite a few more.

And before you ask, I bought it at Waterstones. A book shop.

I am totally in love with it. It’s a complete revelation. I mean… far more than I thought it would be.

I’ve read all sorts of books and articles on all sorts of screens over the past decade, and I like to think that I’ve adapted to the point where it’s as easy for me – sometimes easier (or at least more convenient) – to read long text on my laptop than from a printed page.

But it’s not ideal. The direct light from the screen is tiring and even though I’m more accustomed to text on screens than most people I know, it’s still not a natural fit – and it has its drawbacks. Reading in bright daylight doesn’t work – and the iPad is too heavy for reading in bed or reclining on the sofa. More than once, I’ve dozed off while reading horizontally with the iPad suspended above my head. That thing hurts.

The Kindle’s e-ink trumps both traditional screen-based digital and print. It has the ‘reflected light rather than direct light’ advantage of paper (so no eye strain), and the flexibility advantage of digital text.

I can set the font size (which is important to me for reasons of reading speed), it will never lose my place, I can skip between books at will and I can carry a whole bunch of reading with me wherever I go. And it’s lighter than most paperbacks, which is handy for those of us who have a tendency to nod off at the drop of a hat.

And with the leather case that opens up like a book jacket – it feels right.

My job is ‘professor’. Reading kind of goes with the territory. I already read quite a lot every day. But I have read more in the past few days than I have in the previous few weeks. And it’s not just the novelty. My eyes – and my brain – prefers this to every other format I’ve ever encountered.

I’ve also figured out how to get some great weekend reading on the device without relying on newspaper and magazine subscriptions: Longreads.com and Instapaper.

I’ve long been saving things on the internet to ‘read later’ – and never quite returning to them. Now, using these tools along with my usual RSS reader, I can gather together all of the articles I’ve been saving up, and once a week, dump them as a Kindle file. There’s a single button on the Instapaper site that allows you to do that.

Essentially, you curate your own weekend supplement.

Even better, the free Calibre software works seamlessly with the Kindle – converting every format of ebook you might encounter and transferring it to the device. I have ePubs I’ve been sent or have purchased from Apple or Kobo in the past.

Drag, drop, and a one-button overnight conversion process has put all of my electronic texts onto a lovely, small device that I can take with me everywhere I go.

And best of all, it’s already reopened the world of fiction to me. I used to be so reading-fatigued from all of the academic texts, subject articles, non-fiction works and related analyses and discussions that I simply didn’t have the eyeball strength left for stories when the end of the day rolled around.

Which was a shame, because I love stories.

I’ve made more of an effort this year – both with paperbacks and with audiobooks – to get back into the fiction habit, but I’ve found it to be uphill work.

With the Kindle – there is no reading-fatigue. Like I say – this appears to be how my brain likes to take in words.

This is not a ‘books are obsolete’ diatribe from a technophile. I love paper books. I love the tactility and, more than anything, the smell of books. I like second hand books especially. I don’t want everything to be digital. I am, remember, someone who virtually fetishises vinyl.

But for me – this is how I want books from now on. This is what will ensure that I actually read them.

I am an early discarder as much as I am an early adopter. I’m an experimental pragmatist. I tend to try everything, and then just keep what works for me.

This works for me. I am an ex-’tsondoku’ist. If only they could work out a way to make it smell cool…

This seems absurd, but the fetishisation of youth as a virtue is pretty well entrenched in our culture. People worry about turning all sorts of ages: 20, 30, 40, 50… not because the numbers mean anything in particular, but because we don’t want to be “old”.

Old is bad.

I have a slightly different way of looking at the age thing. Two ways, actually. My two ‘age theories’. The first one is about where in your lifetime ‘old’ happens. The second is about the phases of life, where you are situated in them, and what they represent.

Theory 1: Where old happens

This is a very simple theory. On a timeline of your life, there are very few things you get to decide. You don’t get to pick when it starts, the pace of progress through it or where it stops.

But let’s imagine you live a long and healthy life. At what point do you want to be old? Because that’s the bit you get at least a little bit of say over. Illness and incapacity notwithstanding, my theory is that the thing that marks you out as being old is the fact that you’ve stopped doing or trying anything new.

People think it’s a binary. If you’re no longer young, then you’re old. I think the majority of life is spent (or rather, should be spent) in an intermediate phase, called ‘being alive’ (or, if you prefer, ‘adulthood’). That’s the bit I’m in at the moment.

But wait… it gets better.

Theory 2: Phases of life

I divide lifetimes up into phases.

From the age of 0-15 you are in ‘Childhood‘. We basically need to figure out how to function and not cause a mess during this period.

15-25 is what we call ‘Youth‘. This is the period during which everything feels Incredibly Important. It’s a time for experimentation, mistake-making and figuring out that it’s not just us – everybody feels awkward and alone and it gets better later on.

25-45 is the first phase of Adulthood. That’s the bit where we get to jettison all of the crap that came along with youth, but keep the fun stuff. It’s where we learn to do most of the important things that will come to define who we are and what we do. We still have lots to work out, of course, but many of the important life stuff falls into place here. Lots of learning and developing happens during this time. It’s a wonderful time of life. We’re active, more or less energetic, we establish important relationships and friendships, have children and so on. Essentially, it’s an amazing period where lots of great stuff happens that sets you up to be who you are to become – and things move forward pretty quickly in all areas of your life. Let’s call it the ‘Foundation‘ phase.

45-65 is Adulthood phase two. This is where you get to BE who you have become and is the time at which you do all the things you will probably be remembered for. Everything leads up to this. Let’s call it the ‘Consolidation‘ phase. All going well – these are the two decades where you do and make the stuff that your life story has been leading up to all along. Time to settle in and get to work on your life’s mission, whatever that may be. Ideally – this is the bit that defines you.

65-85 is Adulthood phase three. You’ve probably achieved most of your big stuff by now, so you can experiment with new hobbies and adventures to please yourself – as well as do all those other things you always thought you might enjoy but never got around to. It’s where you get to sit back a little and enjoy the fact that nobody is particularly expecting you to be massively productive. This is the ‘Reflection‘ phase.

Anything over 85, and you’re well into the bonus round. Anything goes here. Do what you like.

Where I’m at

I’m 45. That puts me right at the very beginning of the Consolidation phase.

It’s time for me to look at all the things I’ve done and learned so far (and I feel like there are quite a lot of those) and try and put them together into a life that is genuinely mine. I have a few ideas about how I’m going to do that – but there’s no particular rush.

Besides, given that I’ve pushed that ‘being old’ marker as far to the right of my timeline as I possibly can, I still have lots of ‘trying new things’ and ‘discovering stuff that I like’ to be done. So my ideas about what Adulthood part 2 is all about could still change. Early days. I have twenty years of this bit ahead of me. And of course – I’m still making some fairly monumental mistakes along the way. Apparently that never stops happening. Shame, really.

I’ve said before that I want to be known for the things I do in my 50s and 60s rather than what I did in my 30s and 40s. Besides, I still feel like I’m just getting started. But this ‘second act’ of adulthood is a nice way to think about where I’m at – and so this theory of ‘life phases’ appeals to me.

Naturally, we can’t predict how things are going to play out – and the amount of variation on this framework will obviously be enormous from person to person – but I think if we act as if we’re expecting a life of optimum duration, then we’ll probably be doing okay according to this model even if things don’t go entirely according to plan.

Of course, if I was Malcolm Gladwell, I’d take that very simple idea, get a dozen case studies together that make the same point over and over, and call it a book. But it fits into a single blog post and I have other things to do. Other books to write.

Ultimately, it’s just an idea that works for me and that I find useful, and you’re welcome to it if it makes sense to you as well.

I’ve been using Evernote, on and off, for over three years now. And while it seems like a terribly clever thing, it just wasn’t that useful in my life. I take lots of notes, and I write a lot of things, but I have a number of different systems for sorting and filing those and it just didn’t make sense to add another one.

After all, which bit of my system would Evernote fit into or replace?

Turns out the answer was ALL OF IT.

I’ve been reading a few things about Evernote over the past few days, and I thought I’d try and make the most of what is actually a very simple and powerful tool.

The best thing is that Evernote will pretty much take whatever you throw at it – from voice memos to photos, PDFs to single lines of text. I’ve even been forwarding certain project-related information emails there, so that I can find them later. I trust Evernote’s search far more than I do Mail app’s.

You can tag, file and sort everything later, and it’s all incredibly searchable (and therefore findable). For someone who does a lot of writing, being able to locate all of the information you’ve ever bookmarked or saved on a particular subject (and likewise being able to clip it from your browser) is utterly invaluable.

I’ve created Notebooks for all of my different projects and have started organising on that basis. It’s a great way to have all of my research, all of my important documents – all of the papers I need for everything all in one cross-platform, OCR-scanning tool.

My ambition for the next month or so is to slowly go through all of the papers that I keep for one reason or another and scan as many of them as seems reasonable into Evernote and then throw them away. Some documents, of course, need to be kept for various reasons – but not nearly as many as I have in the house or at work.

So – the trick is not to dabble in Evernote – but to use it for EVERYTHING.

This Lifehacker article is worth a read if you’re inclined to give it a go.

I’m quite lazy, and so I look for shortcuts and efficiencies.

Don’t get me wrong – I like to do a lot, and I like to do that stuff as well as I possibly can – but I also like to do it with the least amount of effort and time spent. That way, I can do lots of other stuff too. Or just hang out. That’s fun too.

I’ve been trying to get a little healthier and fitter recently, but exercise requires time and effort – things I like to minimise. Also, gyms can be expensive, and I travel a lot – so really, what I need is a workout that takes very little time, uses no gym equipment at all, and does everything I need it to – i.e. keep me alive, well and feeling good – with energy to spare for other, more enjoyable stuff.

Lifehacker, the New York Times and the Health and Fitness Journal of the American College of Sports Medicine to the rescue.

This interval routine takes around 8 minutes, and “science” says it works. Essentially, you spend 30 seconds on each of the above exercises in this order, with 10 seconds rest in between each.

Now, I’m already doing the 10,000+ steps a day walking thing, as well as having at least one fresh fruit & vegetable juice per day whenever possible (and not the full-on, slightly scary ‘juice fast‘ that people seem so keen on) – but I thought I’d give this a try as well for 30 days just to see how I get on.

So far so good. It’s not easy – in fact, it’s pretty full-on – but it’s over quickly.

However – looking at the chart and setting timers is a pain. It’s distracting and hard to manage while you’re actually trying to do the exercises or move from one to the next. So I came up with a neat solution.

With Jake‘s help, I recorded myself introducing the exercises (“Next: push ups…”), indicating the halfway mark (“15 seconds…”) and counting down (“10… 5,4,3,2,1… and stop.”). That way, I can just listen to my iPod and do the exercises without having to continually look at the charts and a stopwatch.

Jake added a house track, which times in nicely so that (at 120bpm) the countdowns are in time with the beats. Works very well.

If you’d find it helpful, let me know if you’d like a copy of the mp3 and I’ll send it to you – with or without the music. Whatever works for you. Not everyone likes house music. I find it keeps me going and the repetitive beats take my mind off the unpleasantness of the task.

I can’t recommend the programme unreservedly, as I am no health scientist, and this is only day 2. But it’s worth a try. And it does seem to have been well researched by people who know far more about this stuff than I do.

Plus, I’ve had time to write a blog post about it rather than trudging back from the gym in the rain.

I just spent a week in Jinja, Uganda, speaking as part of the Doadoa East African Performing Arts Market. I gave a presentation about music marketing.

It was, it has to be said, a very different presentation about music marketing than the one I gave at the Cheltenham Jazz Festival the previous weekend – though I guess some of the key principles remained the same.

Chances are the vast majority of African musicians you’ve actually heard of are West African musicians. In East Africa, generally speaking, there’s very little in the way of infrastructure, not much happening in the way of performance opportunities and hardly anything you could call an independent music industry.

There are, of course, some fairly big name pop stars in Uganda, and indeed, one of them played out the back of our hotel at deafening volumes until 2am on Saturday night – which seems an odd thing for a hotel to allow. But in general, there’s not a great deal going on for most people.

If you want to start a career as a musician or you want to be a music industry worker in Uganda, then your options are fairly limited in the grand scheme of things.

The big tip-off for me was the complete lack of record stores. This is the first place I’ve ever been where vinyl shopping was simply not an option. Nobody owns record players, and nobody sells records. Seems it’s always been this way. You can buy a CD – burned to blank disc according to your specifications from an old PC in a small roadside store. But other than this – no music retail. And not much else in the way of music business either.

However, there are, of course, musicians. Great musicians. Some good producers too. A couple of really wonderful venues.

Here’s a brief sample of some of the music we encountered or caused to happen.

There just hasn’t been any real consolidation of the pockets of activity happening around East Africa or any clear route to market. So one of the things that Un-Convention has been involved with here for the past year has been the establishment of the Bayimba Co-op, which brings musicians and other artists together to share knowledge and contacts – the idea being that collaboration provides an opportunity to build sustainable careers within the arts for local people.

To see musicians working together towards the creation of a whole new industry, built on principles of cooperation rather than competition has been fantastic to see, and it’s an amazing place to be – for all sorts of reasons.

It’s my first time in Africa – let alone Uganda – and it’s been a fantastic introduction.

I’ve been very busy the whole time, of course. I swam in the Nile, hiked alongside waterfalls, watched some of the most incredible percussionists I’ve ever seen, danced to one of the best live reggae bands I’ve heard, won hundreds of thousands of shillings at the roulette table (nearly £30), and saw some amazing animals.

I was there with a fantastic bunch of people and have many, many stories to tell…

I also took about 500 photos, which you’re welcome to wade through, if you feel so inclined…

I hop between projects and even between writing locations so that each small piece of writing feels like a fresh thing, and something that only takes a little of my time.

‘A little and often’ has sort of become my catchphrase.

But what I’ve found along the way is not only that fairly obvious thing about how it all quickly adds up (more than you’d even think), but also, more interestingly, that the pieces fall together.

By that, I mean that the writing takes on an unexpected shape, and the fragments of writing, when you come back to them, all seem to slot together well in a way that you might not have been anticipating, but which gives the finished product a far more interesting and complex tone.

More than that, it reveals hidden patterns. Recurring themes. There are a couple of things that I’ve written recently – including today – where I have discovered that the thing I was writing was not about the thing I thought I was writing about – but rather, something far more satisfying. Less obvious. More useful.

I think what happens is between bursts of writing, your brain processes stuff in the background. Finds threads. Makes connections. And then, perhaps while you sleep, it joins the dots.

It’s always quite pleasing to read back over your work and find out what it’s for and what it seems to be saying. And then, with a little rewriting and polish, you can make it look like that’s what you meant to do all along.

I had a day of good companionship and interesting conversations. Some of these encounters were planned, others unexpected. Along the way, some rather exciting projects moved along in a rather exciting fashion, some new ideas were formed, some laughs were had, and some good work got done.

But it was a surprise dog that set the tone for the day. I was going for my morning hike, which has become a bit of a habit for me. It involves an early start, an audiobook, a flask of coffee and a series of parks and trails that will usually take me four or five miles with a break about halfway. And today, this dog joined me.

There’s something really nice about walking with a dog. I don’t mean “walking a dog”. Walking with a dog. There’s a difference. We didn’t talk much, but we were headed in the same direction so we wandered together. And when we were no longer going the same way, we parted company. We may meet again and walk, and we may not – though I hope we do.

But I also noticed that I enjoyed being with the people I spent time with today in much the same way that I’d enjoyed the company of that dog. We happened, metaphorically speaking, to be travelling along the same path at the same time and so we chose to do so in each other’s company.

And that seems like a good way to be. Even with people. Possibly even especially.

I went to Swindon today. It’s not the first time it’s happened, but it doesn’t happen often. I was invited to give a guest lecture to two mixed groups of Music Technology and Media Studies A-level students.

The teacher had been careful to prep me with the curriculum and the kinds of questions the students would be tested on in the exams, but of course, I had slightly different ideas. Not that I told them the wrong sorts of things, but I took a step back from it all and asked them to question the whole premise of their research.

They were looking at the impact of the digital world on the music industry, and had been allocated two case studies and given the freedom to pick a third. The two shared case studies were Beyoncé and Take That. Examples I was given of third choices included Radiohead and Amy Winehouse.

But these case studies aren’t indicative of anything. They’re outliers. Extreme cases. It’s like trying to learn how people go about making a salary by using Bill Gates and the Sultan of Brunei as case studies. It’s like trying to learn about the housing market by examining the White House and the Houses of Parliament.

I introduced the students to a little Media Ecology, explained to them why MySpace was not a digital company but an electric one and other tales.

I think it might be wise for the two groups to compare notes. I seem to recall saying completely different things and telling completely different stories to each. I think the core messages were the same, but it would pay to check.

But it was such a luxury to get two packed, attentive young audiences. I’ve been used to groups of 4 and 5 MA students and individual postgrad supervision tutorials. Between 16 and 19, and still at a point where they’re there because they’ve chosen to be for the first time in their academic lives, there’s an energy and interest that is such a joy to teach.

Plus, I got to tell them things that a) they were interested in; and b) had NO IDEA about. Had a few “wait… but that means… NO!” moments visible on their faces. Lots of fun.

I have a writing project I’m particularly enjoying at the moment, partly because my ritual is to go to a local cafe/bar near here when they open at 5pm, grab a table near the window at the back which lets in the afternoon sun, buy a medium glass of Malbec (175ml), and type until my wine is finished, usually about an hour and a half later.

I’ve been doing it for a couple of weeks now, and although I’m a reasonably recent addition to the bar staff’s own experience of regularity, I was asked today how the writing was going, and did I want my usual?

And in fact, the writing’s going rather well. Had something of a breakthrough today, actually. I continued tapping away at it when I got home and have carried on doing so long into the evening. What had been intended to be between 60 and 90 minutes of progress has now been five and a half hours of chipping away, getting it just right. Reordering, adding paragraphs, deleting sentences, reading back and moving forward.

I’m sure there was a whole bunch of other stuff I was going to do this evening – but given how sticky this new writing project seems to be, I’m making the most of this early bout of enthusiasm and indulging it to whatever extent it will tolerate. As a result, ten thousand words that didn’t exist last week exist this week. All of them are subject to change – but they’re a start.

Though my evening has completely vanished.

Confession: I have lived for eight and a half years in walking distance of Moseley Bog and had never actually visited until this morning. Not entirely sure why that is, or what it was I’d pictured that had prevented me from setting foot inside until now (despite having been past thousands of times), but it’s where I’m going to be going walking pretty frequently from here on out.

It was a lovely way to start a crisp, overcast spring morning and it’s only going to get nicer as the weather improves (assuming it ever will). The place is far bigger than it appears from the street. These things, I’m starting to find, usually are.

There are multiple paths and walkways through Joy’s Wood (named after the woman who spearheaded its preservation from the threat of developers just 15 years ago), some signposted and boardwalked, others more of a dirt trail through thin, moss-laden trees that lead to open grass areas.

You don’t have to venture far from the road to lose the sense of suburban South Birmingham. The traffic noise in the distance fades into the constant rustle of the trees and disappears beneath the bubbling songs of the finches and jays and the repetitive rapping of the woodpeckers who live there.

Didn’t even know we had woodpeckers.

I’m led to believe there’s also an incredible display of bluebells in Spring, if that’s your kind of thing (and it’s starting to be mine), though they’re late this year because of how cold it’s been. Something to look for each time I go back, I suppose.

I picked a tree stump on the edge of the wood as a place to sit, drink my flask of coffee and write. I’ll be doing that again, weather permitting. Perfect spot. The occasional dog walker to say hello to, but other than that, quiet and fairly isolated – a broad, undulating grassy area on one side, a tangle of trees on the other.

It made me think about the fact that these places – the woods, the parks, the rivers – are not situated in neighbourhoods, but rather – the other way around. Neighbourhoods are cut out of these places. Built around and within them. The further I walk into the green areas around South Birmingham, the more I realise that the terraced houses and suburban streets are more of a facade than they are representative of the area.

And while we may have tamed these spots, built barriers around them, constructed pathways and erected helpful signs, I’m increasingly reminded that they were here before we were. And the more time I spend in these places, the more I feel like this is my neighbourhood rather than the Poundland on the Kings Heath High Street or the endless wall of brick houses on every side street.

Yesterday, I managed an eight mile hike that took me alongside streams, out the back of Sarehole Mill, along the river Cole on trails through woods and then onto the canal system through the back of Digbeth and into town. I was never far from civilisation, but it felt like a different part of the country. A different part of the world.

Or maybe I’m only just starting to figure out what this part of the world is actually really like.

Anyway… today, I walked less than half that distance, and the fact that I was so incredibly close to home the whole time was the thing that really stuck in my head. This has been here all along.

I should probably make the most of it.