Recently at the Watusi Country Club I attempted to grow vegetables for the first time.

This is not a matter of great import since hundreds – probably thousands – of you do it every year with no special fanfare or drama. But it was a small leap into the unknown for me, my modest rows of tomatoes, peas and potatoes, and represented a significant step up from an assortment of herbs in pots, the sum of my previous ambitions.
I have yet to enjoy a deluge of actual vegetables (yes, pedants, I know: tomatoes are fruit not vegetables); the potatoes are still underground and the tomatoes are green. But yesterday morning I wandered out to where the peas are planted and proudly picked two pods that looked at least vaguely fully formed, the first actual food – aside from those occasional herbs – I have ever grown from scratch and nurtured all the way to my mouth. (I did once have a crack at grapes but birds ate, literally, every one: from an entire vine I harvested exactly not one single grape.)
And, with a brief, indulgent, and not particularly justified sense of pride, I ate those peas.
They were fantastic. Sweet, fresh, juicy, possibly the best-tasting peas I have ever had in my life. I savoured what were, in reality, two very small mouthfuls. But they were mouthfuls of sheer gastronomic beauty, and I was struck by the fact that there was nothing – absolutely nothing – you could do to those peas which would improve them. There was no manner in which you could cook them, and no ingredient you could add to them that would make those peas taste better than they did right then. No amount of pureeing, adding mint, heating, cooling, slathering with butter – nothing.
And that, if I might extrapolate for a minute, is what I wish for in 2011. In this, the year's first column, it seems reasonable to present a desire of some sort for the new year, some sort of vague hope. And, since this column cites music in its header, I aim this wish – vain and hopeless though it may be – at the world of music.
Keep it real.
That's it and it's that simple – keep it real.

Perhaps it's too late and I should be saying ‘make it real again', but not everyone has crossed the line and those who have are unlikely to return. I say this to people drawn by the temptations but yet to succumb.
So what am I actually talking about?
The music world is descending ever-further into artefact. The most recent sign of this is the absolute blanket prevalence of a not-especially-new-but-recently-much-more-cheaply-available device called Auto-Tune. Once you start noticing its characteristic sound you will hear it all over the place. It does, usually to voices, exactly what you would expect a device called Auto-Tune to do.
In a world where the majority of studios use the same computer programme (usually ‘ProTools') to record and mix music, Auto-Tune has become pretty much the most commonly-used device to ‘fix' stuff. Well, to ‘fix' singers so they sound 'more in tune”. This is not a new invention. The difference now is that the technology is universally available. And, rather than having to do it laboriously, note by imperfect note, it does it ‘automatically'. It is easy, and all the lazy want is ‘easy'.
So another layer of ‘reality' disappears. A few years back the tool du jour was called Beat Detective. Without going into the finer detail, it basically put songs in time. If the drummer's rhythm wandered a bit Beat Detective would line it up. Ironically, as anyone with a pulse can notice, when this happens a certain excitement is lost. Yes, astonishingly enough, those tiny fluctuations in timing are one thing that causes music to be vibrant and alive. And so is the fact that voices fluctuate in frequency and are sometimes, very often in fact, not exactly one hundred per cent in tune. It's the imperfections that cause and effect that most essential element of music – the emotion it imparts.
Perfection can be simply bland, and is often overrated; reality is so much more interesting and powerful.
Keep it real.