I have been at work today from 7.30am until 11.15pm and have spent all day in a darkened room discussing all sorts of stuff, the most memorable to be being ‘PAD’. No, not ‘Picture A Day’ but ‘Pleasure Arousal Dominance’, which is apparently a psychological model for how we relate to the things around us in the world. The ‘pleasure’ bit is how happy that thing makes you, the ‘arousal’ thing is how excited you get about it and the ‘dominance’ element is how empowered you feel in relation to it, in other words how much you control it or it is outside your control.

Personally I have no idea whether this is a truism or whether it is simply a nice group of words designed to make us all sit up and listen to the person who has raised the subject…..I know that my mind wasn’t thinking about how I felt about a prescription medicine when the words popped up on the screen in the meeting.

At 6.45pm I was allowed out of the dark room to get into a taxi that took me to another ‘dark room’ (a restaurant) where I stayed until 10pm ‘bonding’ with my colleagues. Bonding is OK sometimes but I’m always at a disadvantage in these situations because there is a clear and strong inverse relationship between the restaurant’s prices and its likelihood of catering properly for vegetarians. In this case, it was an expensive restaurant and guess what? They only had one appetiser that had no meat in it and one main course. While everyone else is choosing between all of the succulent meat dishes, I sit twiddling my thumbs and wishing I was at home, where I could eat a decent meal, rather than feel that my needs as a vegetarian are an afterthought.

So, after a long, arduous day, I arrived home at 11.15pm exhausted and tipsy. I got through the front door painfully aware of the need to get a shot and took two photos, both with the camera set to the wrong white balance so this photo has been fairly heavily manipulated to get something approximating to the actual colour of the tickets.

It has long been said (by many people, Ray included) that this would make a good shot for a PotD and to be honest this is the subject of much avid searching and comment from all who come to the house. The picture is of one of two huge clipframes from our hall wall. They are the first thing that most people notice when they come into our home. They contain a selection of tickets from gigs I’ve been to over the years and represent a fairly strong summary of my musical taste.

It’s amazing how much interest they generate and you can see, when a new person comes here, how they suddenly ‘bond’ with you because they realise you’ve seen a band that they love or, even better, that they were at the same gig! To me, one of the best tickets on here is the ‘Book of Days’ ticket, which was a Psychedelic Furs gig in a tiny venue (200 capacity) long after they were playing huge venues in normal circumstances. I also like the ligger tickets like the Radiohead party ticket (they are from Oxford and the bass player worked in a shop managed by my ex-husband), the Top of the Pops & Old Grey Whistle Test tickets are nice ligger ones too.

Best gig of all of these? I don’t know any more, just that they are all part of the rich tapestry of my life and they all represent ‘good things’ which is where I leave this posting. After such a long day, I think I should be applauded for achieving a photo at all (albeit I know and you know it’s crap) and the fact that I walked through the door and saw these two frames and remembered feeling good about a part of my life despite exhaustion and a desperate desire to go to bed.