I’ve never understood what possesses people to buy a house, say, under the flight path of a busy airport and then spend years complaining about the unbearable noise of the aircraft.

I once worked with a designer who moved into a house in south London that backed onto a busy railway line. Not the sort of thing you could easily overlook when viewing a property to purchase I would have thought, if, that is, you were at all interested to discover potential sources of noise and irritation before signing on the dotted line. But my colleague went ahead and when I joined the company, was already involved in a long and bitter legal battle with British Rail, as it then was. He claimed that the vibration from passing trains was causing structural damage to the foundations of his family home. The poor man was almost demented. He had dug trenches, taken readings and measurements, provided photographs, written a daily journal, even made sound recordings. The kid’s bedrooms had mattresses up at the windows to muffle the noise of passing trains. He would regularly take half days to appear in court, leaving the studio with an armful of colour-coded folders containing the evidence to support his case. Alas, it was all to no avail and after months of fighting his case, at great expense and emotional turmoil for himself and his family, he lost. Unable to take any more, his wife left him, taking the children.

Last week, while in France, I came upon another mystifying error of judgement. A new acquaintance of my hosts had recently moved in to the village. A Dutchman, he had moved to the area seeking peace and quiet. So what does he do? He buys a property on the busy road that skirts the village. The house is also opposite the small park that is home to the village war memorial, where the local disaffected, unemployed youth gather to rev their motos, smoke dope, drink, make noise and generally set out to be a big pain in the ass. He also hates gardening, so naturally has a third of an acre to mow and tend. And what does he do? Complains of course. Endlessly.

Just back after spending a few - or should that be phew? – days in la belle France. Didn’t drive down this year, but took the plane. I know - planting my carbon footprints all over the earth below - but taking the car would have done the same at ground level. There is the train of course, but the difference in price is enough to blur the conscience. Booking ahead we got a ridiculously low price from Ryanair, especially as we managed to avoid the baggage hold and its surcharge by cramming all we needed in a bag measuring marginally more than a large sliced loaf and a medium sized rucksack no larger than a medium sized rucksack. And we did hire a car when we arrived, but a small one that didn’t appear to use any petrol at all for the first 50 kilometres and not a lot more after that, so that helped to ease the carbon guilt a little.

Unfortunately, taking to the skies also meant that we couldn’t drop in to see old chums on the way down south as on previous visits, at least not without the aid of a parachute, but there’s always next year. The weather was very warm verging on hot, hot, hot, but the locals weren’t that happy with the summer so far, apparently not as tres, tres chaud as it should be for the time of year. The grass in our host’s garden did look distinctly green and not burnt ochre as expected and was magically carpeted with blooming wild flowers. The rivers were flowing at more than a trickle and the figs growing outside the front door were still green and a long way off ripe. But we weren’t complaining after our hit and miss summer as we pootled down empty country roads past fields of nodding sunflowers.

As with the last two years we stayed with our next-door neighbours here in the UK, who are lucky enough to own a second home about half way between Nimes and Montpellier. The house is on the edge of a small medieval village with a large garden to the rear where Neil is happy to keep alive the peasant tradition, taking great pride in growing vegetables for the table. Ruth paints most days, working towards enough canvasses to stage an exhibition sometime soon.

We met several other Francophiles at various social occasions, one couple living in an ancient town house that they’ve been lovingly restoring, but thankfully with imagination, with regard for its tradition and history without being shackled by the chains of the past. Nothing about the place was precise: there were no straight lines; right angles didn’t and never have existed; no surface was flat; no floor was level; each door was a different size, ranging from the height and width to admit giants to the size of Alice half way to her final height after she obeyed the command to ‘drink me’. Internal windows appeared arbitrarily in walls and were carved into the stone treads of staircases. An ancient shallow sink was set into an alcove half way along a hallway. We ate an evening meal on the roof terrace overlooking surrounding ancient tiles bleached by the sun and chimney stacks crooked from the centuries, from behind one of which a curious cat appeared, to fleetingly stare, wide-eyed, at our feasting below. Drawn to the window by the sound of foreign conversation, two children waved their neighbourly greetings through blue shutters from the next street. As the light faded and the day’s heat cooled, bats hurtled around above our heads, twisting and turning in pursuit of their insect prey.

Last evening, now back at home, the bats were out in my garden, harvesting the flying ants that had emerged during the day, brought out, at last, by the warmth of our own English summer. Better make the most of it, batmen and batwomen, while it lasts.

Finally delivered the work for my exhibition of album covers and singles this morning. As usual the whole process of preparation took much longer than expected. Assembling the work, making good some of the effects of age and a certain amount of neglect, the framing, writing the descriptions, all eating up the hours and days. But now it’s done I’m left with a feeling of something achieved. A reflective time too, looking back over some pieces that date back almost forty years.

As I said in the foreword to the exhibition, during that time I’ve seen recordings go from LP and 45 single, through cassette and cartridge, music video, CD, DAT, mini disc, to MP3 file and download. I can’t help feel that as far as cover designs go, I’ve seen the golden age come and go. Not that I regret the demise, I’m just grateful to have been around while it happened. It’s been a fantastic way to earn part of my living, first at Decca, then EMI, next as a freelancer, finally with my own company Clinic.

Fitting then, that the soundtrack playing along during much of the preparations was an album that was a favourite spin on the studio record deck while I was at EMI. It’s an album I’ve been promising myself as a missing part of my collection ever since those days and I finally ordered the CD from Amazon a few weeks ago. It’s by Todd Rundgren and it’s a double album (and CD) titled Something/Anything?

As soon as the first notes spilled from the speakers I was taken back 30 years or more. Now I’m not always that hot on nostalgia, agreeing with Dylan that it can be death. But this was not so much nostalgia, which requires wallowing, but more a rediscovery. Because music is cyclical these songs could have been recorded today by someone with a keen ear for retrieval, a generous word for rip-off. In terms of my trade, a healthy interest in all kinds of sources and styles has lead to some retrieval on my part, something which is acknowledged in the descriptions that accompany some pieces in my show.

On the album Todd himself has also found inspiration from the musical generation that preceded him. It’s divided into four parts. Part 1 described as ‘a bouquet of ear-catching melodies’. Part 2 continues, ‘this is the cerebral side. In fact is so cerebral it’s almost embarrassing’. Part 3 ‘the kid gets heavy’ and Part 4 ‘a pop operetta’, the whole thing adding up to many minutes of music, pretty much every second proving to be thoroughly fine entertainment.

The rear of the CD booklet pictures Todd, back view, standing barefoot on a debris strewn coffee table, guitar around neck, arms outstretched, fingers of both hands in Nixonesque two-fingered ‘peace’ salute, the sunlight streaming through the closed curtains of what appears to be an hotel room littered with recording equipment, the light falling in a diagonal beam across the concrete stippled ceiling. Kind of sums up the whole shebang really and the time I’ve spent listening to it: verging on chaotic in parts but somehow all falling into place in the mix.

We shut the door as the last ones left, turned and faced inside. Across the hallway, criss- crossing in every direction were trails of muddy boot prints. Walking into the kitchen, every surface was littered with their mess. Crumpled packets left strewn where they’d been emptied, a pile of broken biscuits, empty cups and mugs, scummy and stained and on the floor, floating in a puddles of brown water, the trampled remains of food.

We began to clear up and she said, ‘ Maybe we should start going to church’. I didn’t answer. I thought of the routine commitment and Sunday school as a child, collecting stamps illustrating bible stories and sticking them in an album, but this wasn't reward enough and I soon stopped going. Before I could reply the front door opened and in burst a gang of men, dressed in t-shirts and shorts. They were carrying an electric barbecue and other unidentified equipment. They plugged the barbecue into the hall socket and hoisting themselves up, began opening the skylight that lead onto the roof. I confronted their leader, a squat surly man with black greasy hair sticking to his oily sweating forehead. ‘Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?’ I said my voice rising in anger. ‘You can’t just barge in here unannounced’. His helpers looked away, shifty and embarrassed by the confrontation. ‘I’m the building manager’, he said.

I took a deep breath to reply. Then I woke up. Aren’t dreams strange?

In my haste to post yesterday's verbal spanking of Mark Steel, I paired Wooster with the wrong Gieves, I mean Jeeves. Thank you SeasideMan for for putting me straight. Gieves is, of course, the other half of Hawkes, the finest in men's tailoring. Defining quality since 1771. Wouldn't be surprised if Bertie hasn't graced their emporium at 1 Savile Row himself, don't you know. What!

As long as there are commentators like Mark Steel around, class prejudice in this country will never be allowed to quietly fade away. Why? Because he makes a career out of talking and playing up the class divide. In his column in today’s Independent (2 July), he mocked the Home Counties population of home-made jam eating, harvest festival attending, medal wearing, housing estate hating, regionalist retired admirals, for their disgraceful failure to throw their support behind Scottish tennis player Andy Murray: all outdated, hackneyed, stereotypical, inaccurate drivel which no doubt Steel will continue to trot out to keep class war myths ticking over long enough to see him through to the time when he can draw his private pension.

Sorry Mark, but the world of Jeeves and Wooster and Colonel Blimp has gone. We now have Wayne and Coleen and Colonel Sanders. As for people not supporting Murray because he’s Scottish and doesn’t support the England football team, so what? What’s good for partisan Scots is surely OK for the English. Why should the freedom to extend or deny support for whom one chooses be denied on the grounds of nationality?

Then there are the issues of stiffness, Tim Henman and his swooning Home Counties supporters. I live in the Home Counties. I have never voted UKIP, swooned, and happen to think Tiger Tim was never good enough to win Wimbledon and should probably have chosen to become a stockbroker, like every other person, give or take the odd retired admiral, who resides in Mark Steel’s fictional version of the Home Counties.