Until then, allow me to remind you that tickets are still available for the Enormous gig with 80s popsters B-Movie at the Town Mill in Mansfield on the 20th of November – an evening when two great bands will come together for one massive supernova of a show. Don’t miss it.

Well, the gig should go ahead. I am slightly worried about whether the Earth will still exist in the weeks and months ahead. As you may be aware, physicists at the big laboratory in Cern – clever people who obviously have nothing better to do - will switch on the Large Hadron Collider and begin creating black holes on September 10th.

One hopes that their experiment does not end in disaster for us all.

If it does, and we all disappear, I would like to say this: It has been nice knowing you – all of you, especially you. (You know who you are.) You have all made a big impression on me, every last one of you – John, Mike and Cindy - and more than anyone else, I’ll never forget what’s-his-name.

Dressed in black leather and sporting a huge peroxide hairdo, he was shouting the lyrics to the Sex Pistols song Pretty Vacant at passing shoppers as he went about his soapy work. I thought he hadn’t seen me but I was wrong. ‘Madman!’ - he calls everyone Madman - ‘Mr Lawrence of Arabia! Dogshagger! Hendrix is a punk rock window-cleaner! Been buying yer new booties?’

‘Hello, Hendrix. No, you can’t book the studio.’

My friend, the drummer Sonny Starr used to play for The Sikboy Federation, Hendix’s old band for whom I once had the misfortune of hosting a three-day recording session. They were a nightmare in the studio: drinking and vomiting, defecating on toilet seats and urinating on visiting black men. Their band motto was We Shag Dogs.

Unfortunately, amongst many other depraved things they did at the time to bolster their notoriety, they actually did abuse Alsatian dogs in this way. They had various video nasties of themselves raping and torturing the poor animals.

‘Bye, Hendrix. I already told Sonny I don’t want anything to do with you.’

‘Dogshagger!’

Many people expect recording studios to be rather glamorous environments, don’t you know.

I remember thinking at the time that it was one of the best lines I had ever written; but now it sounds clumsy and artificial. I must have been alluding to sex in some way. I think I was trying to be ironic. It made me smile, though, reading it again. In fact, I’m not sure I didn’t steal it from somewhere – Woody Allen, probably.

It does make you realise how, at the time, some things can seem like truly astonishing and inspired acts or pieces of work, but are later revealed to be self-conscious and contrived examples of gauche nonsense – like marrying a French woman, for instance.

Right, back to work for me now, creating and producing magnificent things - and I had better get a move on: The Queen has threatened to have me publicly disarticulated if I do not start coming up with the goods soon.

You will not know how to react to this apart from telling him: ‘Well, that’s alarmingly honest of you, sir.’

You will, however, by some miracle of sympathy, know exactly how he feels.

Last night, the two biggest ones – I named them John and Yoko – gathered their little brood of beetle-children about them and headed off from their quarters in the mixing desk to pastures new.

The situation had become intolerable: one simply cannot have enormous insects making their homes in the studio hardware.

I despatched them humanely by placing them in a tiny cardboard box and feeding them to a lizard – well, I didn’t actually have a lizard directly to hand, so instead I released them back into the wild. I carried them to the bottom of the garden, opened the box slightly and waited for them to emerge, which they did, rather tentatively, a few seconds later.

Next: Bees – Slaughter of the Innocents.

As Audrey and I were passing his house this morning, he erupted from his front door and pulled us inside. The interior was just as I had expected: very tidy but covered in dust. In fact, how one little house can contain so much dust is beyond the laws of science. There was a lot of dust.

As he gabbled on excitedly about using the studio, Reg couldn’t help drumming nervously on his thighs with an expensive pair of maple sticks. He was approaching his new leisure pursuit with all the methodical precision of an enthusiastic amateur. He noticed me frowning. ‘I’ve been practicing,’ he said under his breath while trying to count a racy eight-beat tempo.

‘I can see that.’

The room we were standing in had a massive fireplace. ‘You could roast a small Frenchman in there, Reg,’ I told him. ‘Who’s that?’ I pointed to a framed photograph on the dust-covered marble mantelpiece.

He put down his drumsticks and reached for the picture. ‘That’s me with the wife - God rest her soul - and my very first kit. Thirty-five years ago. I used to play all the time – couldn’t stop me. Right little Cosy Power, I was. Back then.’

Reg is really annoying, but I like him a lot. The last time I saw my father was when I was fifteen and since then I have, I suppose, been searching for a suitable replacement. Reg would make a good father; he would certainly keep you entertained.

I looked at the faded photograph. In it, a twenty-something Reg was staring lovingly at a gorgeous wooden Gretsch four-piece drum kit. Standing next to him was an incredibly beautiful young woman with red hair and Irish freckles. Her face was turned towards the camera. There was a look of murder in her determined eyes. ‘I really miss her,’ he whispered, almost inaudibly.

Insects and other creepy-crawlies love it in there: spiders, earwigs, flies, beetles, even Audrey – who is, of course, not an insect – has chosen an area under the mixing desk as her favourite sleeping-place in the whole house. And whenever anyone comes to visit, they always gravitate upstairs, eager to sample the comfy delights of the studio sofa.

Earlier today, I was unplugging some cables from the back of the effects-rack when three massive bees shot out from beneath the Drawmer 1960. You’d think that they would have headed straight for the open window, desperate to return to the fresh air of the outside world; but no, they couldn’t wait to get back to the dusty glow of the warm tubes in the back of the expensive compressor.

I poked at them with a pencil for a few seconds but by the terrifying sound of the furious buzzing that was being directed at me, I could tell that they did not want to be moved. After a final assessment of the situation - and being the coward that I am - I made the executive decision to retreat. Please, God, don’t let them be having sex. (Though, thinking about it, a thriving bees’ nest in a recording studio might get us some publicity in the local press.)

It must be some magical electrical ambiance or an abundance of positively-charged ions that is attracting everything and everybody to the control-room – who can say? I do know this, though: beautiful women seem to be – so far, at least - immune to the effect.

‘I don’t know how you can eat that crap,’ I told him. ‘There are probably enough preservatives in that one sandwich to pickle a horse – how even your stomach can digest such rubbish is beyond the laws of science.’

‘I like it.’ He brushed an avalanche of greasy crumbs from his pronounced midsection and continued reading his newspaper.

On the front page was a big spread about Hillary Clinton’s recent enthusiastic endorsement of Barack Obama. ‘Do you think he’ll win?’ I asked, trying to sound jolly.

‘No. They will never allow it.’

I haven’t the foggiest idea what he meant by this.

Seeing that the usually talkative Reg wasn’t in the mood for light-hearted conversation or rigorous political analysis, I made what I thought was an ironic bow and wished him a good day.

On the Fantastic hi-fi today:
Sam’s Town – The Killers

‘I did something similar a few months ago,’ I told him. ‘Feels good, doesn’t it.’

An old woman in a flowery dress and badly applied makeup wandered over. She smelled of lavender and gin, as do all old women. ‘I hope you’re throwing away your Gary Glitter LPs,’ she warned us, ‘because my nephew said –’

‘Never had any.’ Reg quickly jumped in before she could bore us to death with her nephew’s views on the glam-rock paedophile.

I’m ashamed to say that, although like Reg I never actually owned any Gary Glitter albums, I do have an old 45 rpm single somewhere of Leader of the Gang. And even more embarrassing is the fact that Enormous used to cover that very song in our live set a few years ago. We used to do it as an encore and it always went down a storm. Funny old world.