Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top is known to play guitar with a Mexican peso coin instead of a plectrum, as it gives him a sound that no plastic pick could achieve. Queen’s Brian May uses an old money sixpence piece on the grounds that it has perfect rigidity for maximum control. (I just checked his Wikipedia page, which states that ‘he is known to carry coins in his pockets specifically for this purpose’. The temptation to change this to ‘specifically for buying things’ was almost too much resist.)

This weekend I went one better than both of them:

Or rather Joe did. For some time now we’ve been throwing ideas around as to how we should spend the modest advance we received from our publisher for Live Fast, Die Young – something we can look back on in years to come and remember the first time (hopefully not the last) that somebody paid us actual cash-money to write words. Joe, as you can see in the blog post below this one, thought long and hard about a suitably literary memento, and bought a hat. (Your guess is as good as mine – a thinking cap maybe? Stop the words escaping?)

But his track record for buying other people gifts is rather better. For my thirtieth birthday he rallied a posse of work colleagues who clubbed together and bought me the nicest, most thoughtful present I have ever received. I’ll say no more about it here than that it’s a piece of art by a highly respected ‘art terrorist’ we both love, and has pride of place on my living room wall. The real telling of that story is reserved for the book, which – fingers crossed – you’ll enjoy when it comes out in May (although by all means pre-order it now). Suffice it to say that it has been one-nil to Joe in the thoughtfulness stakes for a long time.

I hadn’t decided what my gift to myself would be. A nice writing pen perhaps, or a new laptop. Then Joe went and bought me this, as a thank you present for the joyful experience of writing the book together:

I like to write and play guitar. That’s a solid gold plectrum engraved with … well you can see what it’s engraved with. If you can think of a more perfect gift that Joe or anyone else could have bought me, I’d like to hear about it. I don’t mind telling you I had to fight back a tear when he gave it to me on Sunday. Don’t mind telling you one bit.

Thank you, author and friend.

Missing Parsons continue their quest to ‘live the music’.

In this episode, Chris finds out what it’s like to think of a calico bonnet all the way from Cheyenne to Tennessee, just as his hero Gram Parsons does in Return of the Grievous Angel.

But will he do it? Can he make it through Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Mississippi thinking of nothing but a calico bonnet? We’ve condensed five states, an awful lot of thinking and a smattering of facial hair into one four-minute video so that you too can enjoy the tedium.