At 12 I began the transition from childhood to sub-adulthood, a process marked by a couple of key moments.
I bought my first work of art: Machine Head by Deep Purple.
I attended my first concerts in High Wycombe Town Hall - the earliest I can recall being Deke Leonard's Iceberg (ex-Man) and a prog rock outfit called Fruupp.
I flew to Paris with a brown paper luggage tag labelled 'Unaccompanied minor' tied to my jacket, like Paddington Bear, and was kissed by Sylvie Caplan, aged 13, on my cheek on arrival at Charles de Gaulle airport - that first soft gentle feminine peck as her lips brushed for a second against my skin marking the initial stirrings of my manhood. I can still feel the touch, on my right cheek - which I avoided washing for as long as possible, so as not to wash away the feeling of love and tenderness - and the exciting bewilderment in my body.
At 24, still very much a child emotionally and intellectually, I conceived my first son. I married into an artistic family, having grown up in a science-based one, and was drawn to the other. My wife had grown up in South East Asia and Africa, and introduced me to the visual arts, although she had few words to help me understand what I was looking at.
At 36, still with childlike attributes, I met the person I consider to be my sensei, and who would eventually teach me everything worth knowing about life, one way or another.
At 48, I learned a couple of important lessons.
That art is the voice of humanity, and artists speak for all of us. Art is the social glue of human communities, the vehicle of our culture. That good art is transcendental - artists have a way with words, or paints, or music, or physical expression through dance, and so on, that transmits their human experience to us, that resonates within us, and triggers emotional responses - the greater the art, the more triggers it pulls.
I also learned, or finally accepted, that we are designed to be social - just as parents are designed to love their children, we are designed to build ever stronger bonds with those around us - our family, our friends, and if we are lucky enough to find one, our partner.
If these bonds are cut, through death or divorce, we feel intense pain - grief, remorse, sorrow - even if we didn't feel like we particularly got on with the departed. This is the Diana syndrome - a woman with whom I felt little in common, and in whom I had never been consciously interested or cared about, but when she died I grieved along with millions of others.
This suffering is a demonstration of our humanity. As the Buddhists say, life is suffering. As Basil Fawlty says, what's it all about? God knows. We have just got to get on with it I suppose.
We live through those around us, through socialising. If we are cut off, or cut ourselves off from those around us, we are not being alive. We can cope with being in prison - in a way we all are anyway, rubbing along with our fellow prisoners - but we are not designed to deal with solitary confinement, which is perhaps worse than death. And yet this is what some of us sometimes put ourselves through.
As with people, we also need to build bonds with a place, to develop a sense of physical belonging, a sense of continuity stemming from a secure past and leading into a reassuring future. We like our routines - to walk a certain way to the local shop, to find our regular product waiting for us on the same shelf as it was last week. We are naturally loyal customers - we have loyalty cards imprinted into our DNA.
