I was going to go to an open mic tonight, and practiced three songs of mine and one cover in preparation.

I then banged my head on the entrance to a medieval alley – York, knock it all down and start again – and took longer than I expected to make dinner. And lo, was escape velocity lost.

The people of York don’t need to hear my songs, even though one of them is explicitly how they moved their local team to the retail park.

And more importantly, this gave me the time to write a new song, which was always the plan for this week. Well, I had hoped to write at least three.

But even one, that I’m happy with, is a rare achievement, and this one was a bit harder than most.

And anyway, any time not spend on boardgamearena.com is a triumph that must be celebrated.

I’m not a savant but I might be an idiot. Nevertheless, my approach to writing songs is an idiosyncratic one, as far as I know.

It involves not wanting to know how a song is structured, or what a chord progression is, and just making it up on the spot-ish and hoping that it comes out alright.

And if not Alright, well, Supergrass’s other song (Going Out) is just one long chorus with an instrumental break, and people seem to like it.

The song I wrote tonight has four distinct parts to it. I am loathe to call any of them the chorus, though I think there might be a couple of bridges. There is definitely a verse, but it doesn’t entirely fit with the rest of the song.

But I love it. About half of it has been in my head and my fingers for about a month, after I felt sad and noodled and hand-picked some beautiful nonsense.

I sent this nascent version to my fellow Highchurches songwriter Martha, and she wasn’t too impressed with the lyrics. No, no, I said. The lyrics are just placeholders. What do you think of the melody?

Tonight I returned to that half a song, and wrote another 2/3rds of a song. I welded them together, like a dodgy 1980s car dealer, and now I have a song that has wing mirrors pointing in different directions.

And so I came to replacing the nonsense lyrics with slightly less nonsense lyrics.

This took about an hour once I was in the zone, which is longer than usual. And harder than usual, which is never a great sign.

But slowly, a theme and some memorable lines emerged. I would say I’m 60% happy with the lyrics, but they need further tweaking.

Again, an unusual sign. But I love the tune and I don’t want to waste it on lyrics I don’t believe in. And my lyrics are… I guess they need to be somewhere between heartfelt and flippant, or both, preferably during the same couplet.

I don’t know if I’m explaining this well, but I know what I want my lyrics to sound like; I just don’t want to write or think them.

I want them to happen, stream of conscious style, whether it’s the first dip into said stream or a late wade through the sewage.

There are a lot of rivers in my songs.

This one sounds like Simon & Garfunkel and George Harrison, so I’m worried if I’ve accidentally ripped off Simon & Garfunkel and George Harrison.

The lyrics might need to be honed, and the various parts of the car cut and shunted into different positions.

But it’s already a song. I can hear the bass, and the fiddle, and the harmonium, and the banjo, and the adoring fans screaming at us on Top Of The Pops.

I can see the pop video, and I have already figured out what I’m going to say about the lyrics when interviewed by an NME journalist with a silly name.

It’s gonna be good.