Joe Jackson has a new album out tomorrow and earlier this week The Times published an interview with the New York and Portsmouth-based musician.

The headline, ‘We’re in the no fun era’ — Joe Jackson on smoking bans and abstinence’ is a little misleading because it represents just one paragraph in the entire article, but it’s a reminder that, two decades ago, Joe was an outspoken critic of public smoking bans.

We’re going to see Our Town, a play by Thornton Wilder, at the Rose Theatre in Kingston-upon-Thames tonight.

The original play, written in 1938, is set in a small provincial town in America in the early 1900s. I’m looking forward to it because, in January 1976, I was in a school production of Our Town at the Byre Theatre in St Andrews.

Back from the World Nicotine Congress in Brussels.

A brief recap. The WNC is the brainchild of Elise Rasmussen who founded the Global Tobacco Network Forum in 2008 before renaming it the Global Tobacco and Nicotine Forum (GTNF).

Today is the 20th anniversary of the smoking ban in Scotland. I vaguely remember spending the day in Edinburgh to handle media requests but beyond that it’s a bit of a blur.

Famously, Scotland’s first minister Jack McConnell was said to be sceptical about a ban until he spent a morning in Dublin in 2004 where he was taken to three or four carefully selected pubs to witness for himself the ‘success’ of the smoking ban in Ireland, which had been introduced a few months earlier

Just arrived in Brussels, via Eurostar, for the grandly named World Nicotine Congress which begins tomorrow.

It’s nice to be back because I used to visit the city several times a year. According to my diary, however, the last time was in February 2020, six weeks before the first Covid lockdown.

Just back from having an MRI scan at Peterborough City Hospital.

In recent years I’ve undergone multiple scans (MRI, CT, ultrasound), and this was my third MRI scan. It’s not particularly pleasant (I’ve written about it before so I won’t repeat myself) but, let’s just say, it’s uncomfortably noisy with lots of loud electronic clicks and beeps.

I drove to Chester on Tuesday. Shortly before I arrived my car developed a slow puncture in a rear tyre.

It’s happened before (on the same journey, funnily enough, so I knew where to get it fixed) but on this occasion it was the same tyre that was fitted only last week when my car had its MOT. However, the damage was beyond repair so I had to buy another new tyre at a cost of £291.

I generally resist writing about bands I like because I’m conscious that no-one is really interested in another person’s taste in music.

Nevertheless, you may be aware that I have a long-standing interest in Squeeze, a band I first saw play live in 1978 when I was a student in Aberdeen and they were supporting Eddie and the Hot Rods.