IN my wild and foolish youth, I came across a very strange book called The Dice Man. Writing under the pen-name Luke Rhinehart, George Cockcroft’s 1971 novel concerns a psychiatrist who decides to put his entire life in the hands of a die. Rolling a ‘1’ could mean that you shoot your neighbour, ‘2’ that you punch the delivery man in the face, ‘3’ that you have sex with the family goldfish, and so on and so forth. These, I’m sorry to report, are my own examples, but when the book’s fictional protagonist starts attributing his potential actions to each of the six numbers on the cube his life becomes completely unpredictable and forcing himself to obey the results – regardless of the consequences – means that he quickly descends into a world of rape, murder and transgressive sexuality. Eventually, this radical craze sweeps across America and even affects the day-to-day running of the Government.

Now, whilst I never went as far as Luke Rhinehart does in the novel, I did pass through a brief phase whereby I found myself experimenting in a far less extreme fashion and would often carry a die in my pocket and allow it to make decisions about when and where I should alight from a train or how I should behave in relation to both friends and enemies. Unpredictability is a very curious and intriguing phenomenon and spontaneity itself certainly makes life infinitely more interesting. Each day, for good or ill, becomes an adventure.

I used to import tyres from Germany with a close friend of mine and during the 1990s and 2000s we made around fifty visits to the country, driving from London to Dover in a truck, across on the P&O ferry to Calais and then back in the truck for another five hours through France, Belgium and Holland before making our way to Cologne or one of the other western cities. Whenever we got caught in heavy traffic on the autobahn we would perform Folk and Bluegrass songs to amuse ourselves, me on vocals and acoustic guitar and he on the mandolin and harmonica.

We also listened to audio books, plays and an enormous amount of music and began looking in the cheap ‘bargain bins’ on the ferry, to see if we could find any interesting cassettes. As you can imagine, those fateful baskets of iniquity were full of the most vile rubbish that you could ever hope to lay your hands on and we began competing to see who could unearth the most insidious soundtrack for the ear-battering journey that lay ahead. As a result, the vastly unpredictable nature of this exercise led to us attempting to torture one another with the likes of Jimmy Shand’s Accordion Greats, German Beer-Drinking Songs, The Wurzels’ Greatest Hits, George Formby’s old classics and a wealth of folk bands that were so utterly corny that we often found the covers just as entertaining as the music.

Ironically, we laughed so much that we eventually fell in love with this material and began to take it very seriously, meaning that it soon became part of our staple diet and woe betide anyone who dared criticise our newfound heroes. As my friend always says: “One day the laughing stopped.” Such is the nature of unpredictability and, as the great Bilbo Baggins once intoned, the road goes ever on and on.