Following the success of my wheel-procuring ventures last week, I have just spent a bank holiday weekend swanning about the country in a new car, mainly attempting to work out the function of the huge number of buttons, dials, knobs and screens that modern cars contain. So far, I’ve discovered that my car doesn’t agree with my changing lane without indicating, and it gets very cross when I try to exceed 30 miles an hour. What I haven’t discovered yet, is how to adjust the safety features relating to lane changes or speeding. I’m sure I’ll work them out. In the meantime, I’m developing excellent upper arm strength as I continue to wrestle control of the steering wheel from my car.

During a particularly long and mainly motionless journey as I returned home from my weekend away, I was able to combine testing the car’s audio equipment with practising for this week’s upcoming karaoke evening. My choice of songs was somewhat limited by my inability to work out how to sync my iPod with the stereo system, so I was mainly restricted to shaking it off with Taylor Swift, and saying hello to Adele. After several renditions of both, I managed to access a second Adele song. A Million Years Ago. I doubt this will be one of the options at Lucky Voice karaoke bar on Wednesday, which is a shame, as there aren’t many high notes, and I’m not great with high notes. Mind you, I’m not that great with low or mid-range notes either. That thing happened when you’re stuck in the car with the same song playing on repeat for a really long time. I started to listen to the lyrics and think about them. Adele wishes she could ‘live a little more, look up to the sky, not just the floor’. Well, she’s previously spent quite a bit of time chasing pavements, so she obviously has a level of affection for the floor. But I know what she means. It can be really tricky not to get caught up in the immediate right-in-front-of-your-face stuff, and it’s easy to miss everything else around you. Lots of which is the big, important stuff. Then suddenly you look up and hardly recognise where you are, and you’ve kind of missed the journey.

I’ve been trying to look up more, and to appreciate who and what’s around me. Two things: firstly, there’s a lot of good stuff around, so it’s definitely good to make the effort to look up more, but occasionally you find something good on the floor too – a pound coin for example – or you spot something nasty and manage to avoid stepping in it. And secondly, there are likely to be some occasions when staring resolutely at the floor is absolutely the appropriate thing to do. I’m anticipating that Thursday morning, following an evening of office karaoke, might be just such an occasion.