Home on the Range

I've got a week's holiday and this week and I'm taking it easy. No rushing up to London to see something arty or to spend too much money in Fopp. This week I'm relaxing and reading.

Remember reading? Books? The dead things we used to read before the living web became so much a part of our lives?

You've got to make the effort, haven't you? But I'm not used to reading at home. I'm used to reading on the train, to a background of chatting and coughing and whoo-whooing and chuf-chuffing.

I can't have silence. But I can't have distractions. Daytime telly is too distracting. There's so much on!

I need music. But music that doesn't need the attention of the whole of my brain. No words for a start. If there's a beat, it's got to be a slow beat. Nothing that makes me want to move my feet like Booker T & the MG's or Jackie Mittoo.

Dub reggae is good. Ambient house, too. Pan Pipes, Richard Clayderman, James Galway, Mary O'Hara...Go to any market and you'll find hundreds of albums which will perfectly accompany any book from Harry Potter to Wilbur Smith.

But my personal favourite, one which I go back to again and again, which I can't recommend highly enough...

Brian Eno's Music for Crematoria.