We have eaten the gurnard and it was good. The fillets coated with flour, egg and breadcrumbs and then deep fried. We ate them with roast potatoes and garlic, peas and tartare sauce. Shortly before cooking I had to shoot out to the shops again to buy more Heinz Tomato Ketchup. I think there is a race in the house to see what we get through more quickly – ketchup or olive oil.

The house is now quiet. One child has gone out, leaving the house with a friend clutching a bottle of Lambrini. Another child is mooching round the house having been out all day and told to be in for the evening. The odd door is being slammed but the child is keeping out of the way. The last child claims to be doing homework whilst watching television.

The biggest child is sat doing this listening to Neu!

During the course of the morning shop round Birkenhead I slipped into HMV for a few minutes. The shop in The Grange Precinct is always fairly depressing but this felt more so. The was a clearance house air about the place and the diminishing music all up for sale. that didn’t stop me buying and I came away with four CDs I probably did not need.

But the CDs included the last Husker Du album Warehouse:Songs and Stories. Now I may have said this before (its up there with my top ten lessons on rock’n’roll – along with don’t change your guitar during a gig) but there is a good argument that once Husker Du laid down their guitars and drum kit that was it for rock and roll. After them we have only been dealing with pale imitations, boys and girls, just repeating the same old pose.

Warehouse:Song and Stories wasn’t their best album but it finishes with one of those songs in which the whole noise that is made by drums and young men hitting guitars very hard mesh into some sort of glorious whole. There was a lot going on in the band at the time. Two gay men who may or may not have been in a relationship and now hated each other, drugs and a bass player with a great moustache who wanted to be a chef.

The song, You can live at home, has as its coda the words keep walking away which are howled out by drummer Grant Hart as Bob Mould seems to take hold everyof  guitar there was in the studio and beat the living daylights out of it. It is a great corruscating painful noise and after it had finished all they could do was walk away from each other without being able to do anything quite as good later.

Years after it came out we went to see a band called Zu Zu’s Petals play in a hall in Reading. It was only when we got there we realised they were supporting Nova Mob, the band Grant Hart formed after Husker Du fell apart. They were brilliant.