So a percept or a concept’s meaning, on a personal level, is the mode into which your mind flows in response to it.

Is it valid to generalise a little and suggest that meaning is precisely the flow of your “state” of mind from one moment to the next? Every moment of awareness is the result of your brain/mind interpreting patterns of sensory stimulation or memory; working out what patterns of light on the retina mean, what a memory means. Meaning isn’t something inherent in the things or scenes we think we perceive; it’s literally what the brain does, what the mind does. What the mind does next.

Is the Meaning of Life… what Life does next? Ongoing metabolism, ongoing ecological relationships, more life?

Is the Meaning of It All… the universe flowing into its next moment, according to its history and its laws?

It took various people and many years to convince me that you do most of your work on a mix by taking things away, not adding them.

“Subtractive EQ” means cutting frequencies from a sound rather than boosting them, and results in a more laid-back, less distorted sound that’s easier to mix with everything else. And I’ve learnt to enjoy turning things down – now, my mixes typically have one or two sounds up front, then a much quieter layer of sound off in the distance.

And of course there’s classic analogue synthesis, which is also subtractive: your oscillators typically make huge, wideband sounds which you filter and chip away at until you’ve sculpted, revealed, the (lesser-yet-better) sound you want.

I’m now convinced that this principle applies to the rest of my life, too. I won’t become happier by eating more food, or if the food I eat is richer; I won’t become happier by watching more TV, or seeing more films, or reading more books – by consuming more culture. The best solution to a cold winter might not be simply to turn our central heating constantly on and high.

Perhaps I should be looking for subtractive solutions. If winding myself up with films and music hasn’t made me happy, how about seeking some silence? If 3000 calories, three lagers and seven coffees a day haven’t made me blissfully satisfied, what would happen if I ate and drank more simply and sparingly? If working 14 hour days and preparing every night for intensely agenda’d meetings the next day didn’t bring me wealth or pride, what would happen if I sought a simpler job, one which paid less than the last one? Which aspects of my life could be improved by consuming less, by seeking less, by doing less?

Because… when I try to meditate, I struggle with too many thoughts, too much mental chatter, too many distractions. That means I’m suffering from having too much, so the key question is what I can give up, not what I can gain.

I’m always on the lookout for things I can claim are addictive, because I have a fairly inclusive definition of the concept of addiction: in my book, any stuff which leaves you with a need that can be answered by more of that stuff is potentially addictive.

• Jack eats a Mars bar. His liver panics about the insane levels of blood sugar, and goes into insulin overdrive; half an hour later the Mars is long gone but the insulin has caused a blood sugar crash, and he’s itching for another chocolate bar.
• Jill does some heroin. It numbs her, washing away all her pain and discomfort, making her feel wrapped in warm cotton wool. Over time her nervous system habituates to the heroin, so that when she’s straight, she feels more uncomfortable, in more pain than she did before she started taking it, and keen to take it again to numb the discomfort.

When I was a child I was definitely a sugar fiend. Absolutely. I used to think I was a light user because I’d buy just 10 Jelly Wellies each afternoon. That’s probably 20 teaspoons. I’d love to know what proportion of adults in the UK (or the world) relate to sugar in a way which might be described as addictive; me giving up sugar in tea was like a tedious reinterpretation of the film Trainspotting timestretched by a factor of 40000.

When I was first teething (and whinging from my cot) I was given Woodward’s Gripe Water, which as it turns out was alcoholic, being about as strong as Fullers London Pride. I didn’t drink it in pints, but I wonder…

Anyway. Our neighbours across the street have recently had their first child, and they took him into hospital for a check-up because they were concerned that he might not be feeding enough. At the hospital, he was given a bottle of formula milk to supplement his breast milk. And when they got him home, apparently they had all sorts of trouble getting him off formula milk and back onto breast. They think the problem stemmed from bottle milk being easier to drink, so the child wasn’t work so hard but was getting more of a meal; so little baby James started demanding more milk than he could easily get from breastfeeding, and the temptation was there to give him another bottle…

So how about formula milk as the foundation of an addictive personality? Formula milk and sugar as gateway drugs? Baby’s first addiction.

When I’m down, or stuck with something, there’s often a whingeing mental voice telling me that what I’m doing is pointless, or that the way I live my life is pointless.

But I don’t know that anything is pointful, if you analyse it rigorously enough. You’re going to die and you can’t take it with you; your kids, your precious grandchildren are going to die and they can’t take it with them, either. In four generations’ time, your genetic/cultural influence will most likely be forgotten or spread so thinly as to be negligible.

Your house and garden will eventually collapse over the cliffs into the sea. Everything the illusory entity you call “you” thinks that it “knows” will be “proven” false. Your expertise will evaporate into Alzheimerian haze. Russia will invade. Entropy will increase. The Large Hadron Collider will conjure up a black hole which will swallow Europe. China will invade. There’ll be a holocaust, there’ll be an asteroid strike, the solar system will become unstable and collapse into the sun. The sun will inflate into a red giant and engulf the Earth. The Milky Way will collide with another galaxy. Another Big Bang will take place just around the cosmic corner. All the atoms will decay into quarks. The Leichtensteinian empire will invade. All the quarks will decay into superstrings and then the superstrings will decay, presumably into normal strings.

It must be the wrong question. If you find yourself asking it, that’s a warning bell: simply learn to live more skillfully, just engage with that learning process, regardless of outcome; and one aspect of engagement in the process should be to avoid whinging about whether there’s a point.

I recently bought a Sigma Style fountain pen, designed by a guy called Howard Kettle up in Cheshire. He buys the mechanism from Schmidt in Germany, designs the pens, chooses the materials, and has the components machined by engineers in the South West.

And it’s gorgeous. I don’t know where it sits in the hierarchic pantheon of writing implements but it has a lovely, laid-back weight and traces a deliciously smooth line on the page. The fresh ink sits proud of the paper, like black dew; then seeps into the fibres, and I imagine I can hear little rippling, kissing sounds as it sinks.

My girlfriend has a fountain pen too, and she took it to work (she’s part of the management team at a local primary school) . A colleague borrowed it and applied the nib upside-down to the paper. The kids couldn’t believe that the ink was a different colour to the barrel. I bought my mum a Sigma for her birthday. She’s felt that perhaps she should put it in a display case rather than use it: she’s not the world’s most intense egotist.

I love looking directly at where my hand’s working. I love pausing to twiddle the ink plunger when the reservoir runs half-way dry. I love pausing to refill it when the reservoir empties. Little pauses for thought. I love how it asks me to write in bright, natural light rather than in low-reflection gloom.

It seems to encourage thoughtfulness and ritual, while the computer promotes distraction and bad habit. And I’m off to have a go now, because I’ve been on the PC all day and my eyeballs ache.

The concept of style is going out of style.

In the street the other day I heard a young woman on her phone complaining about the behaviour of a friend or lover, saying “That’s manners! It’s fucking manners!” – meaning that the behaviour was unacceptable to her. I found myself annoyed that she didn’t qualify the word (”Madam: would it not be more meaningful to say, ‘That’s fucking bad manners’?”). What annoyed me was that a word which previously meant something like a person’s style of behaviour (literally, the manner in which a person behaved) meant only bad behaviour to her.

Then I realised that the word “style” is often used to mean something more like “accurate conformity to norms of dress”: another, similar word’s meaning has been made more specific, less to do with adverbs, ways-in-which, and more to do with quantities. Someone once told me, in reference to my hair, that he’d “seen more style on a piece of shit.” Style becomes something that we aquire in greater or lesser quantities. And we attach a value-judgement to it: “style” is inherently good, “manners” means something bad.

And when I’m asked how I am, it’s tempting to say that I’m “good,” to give the contemporary North American response, rather than say that “I’m well,” according to the linguistic tradition in which I grew up.

But… I think “I’m well” is much better, because it means “I am, in a good way.” It feels like it’s describing a process, the process of my being, rather than a static thing; and I love the idea that being is a process – that we’re processes, or expressions of a process, rather than static things. In fact, I love the idea that there’s no such thing as a static thing, that the idea that anything is static and unchanging is a myth.

“I’m well” also carries another meaning, something close to “I am, in a competent manner.” It has almost Buddhist overtones of skilful being, which serve as a reminder that we can learn how to be, that we can improve our way of being itself.

I’m not sure whether there should be a rule that all replies to the question, “how are you?” should be adverbial: “I am, confusedly” sounds at least as clunky as “I’m good”; but perhaps “I’m good” is only the latest victory in a process of aggressive de-adverbisation of language. Perhaps it works well for globalised capitalism if people think in terms of objects that are either good or bad, rather than in terms of dynamic processes of being.

I’m rambling(ly). But anyway, bring back the way-in-which. Bring back the adverb.