As I write, my gaze strays to the 1977 Guild D40 guitar which takes pride of place in my lounge.
As always, I recall the story behind it with a mixture of humour and embarrassment. In the 1970s, I taught English in Qatar.
It became a tradition to drive home to the UK and back in the three-month summer break.
Setting off in convoy, we would first make for the Qatar-Saudi border, where customs officers would take the contents of our cars apart and then obligingly repack them much more professionally than we had done.
Then it was 1,000km up the Trans-Arabian pipeline across the Saudi desert, with nothing but sand to see on either side.
After a night in the desert it felt like being in an oasis, drinking a beer on a hotel verandah in Jerash - especially after negotiating the Jordanian border.
(On our first trip, the customs officer at the desk told the wives to go back to the cars. Of course, he then decided that he needed to see them after all.
Luckily, the next year, the same officer was on duty. When he tried the same trick the women just hid round the corner rather than go back to the cars.
His face, a mixture of surprise and annoyance, made the hassle worth it!)
Next stop, Damascus, the capital of Syria, before pressing on to Turkey, where we would spend a blissful four or five days camping at the BP Mocamps, strung out along the Mediterranean coast.After that it was a ferry across the Bosphorus into Greece and then another ferry to Brindisi, Italy, before travelling up and over the Alps into France before the last dash for home, which was always overtaken by a yearning for the old country and a weariness with driving (7,000km) and one-night stop-overs.
While home after the first trek, we bought a house. After the second journey the following year, it was time to start decorating and furnishing. That's when the argument started.The missus had set her heart on a bedroom carpet, but I had set mine on a new guitar. (I'd recorded a few songs for Qatar TV and radio and decided that that warranted an upgrade on the image front).
Four hundred quid in old money. One or the other. To my lasting shame, the guitar won.
The summer passed without much further incident and suddenly it was time to go back to work. The convoy gradually came together, some joining at Dover, others across the channel or in Arabia.
After several days of hectic driving we were all assembled, cars packed to the gunwales with stuff we couldn't buy in Qatar at the time (including a rotary clothes line), and ready for that long, hot trek across the Saudi desert back to Doha.Another difficult choice, but in the end there was only one thing for it: the precious guitar would have to travel in air-conditioned luxury in one of the other cars while the missus toughed it out in the heat and dust with me in our Renault R16, a heat not dispelled by the glacial silence of the journey.
Ah well, as a friend in Cape Town reminded me, "No man is totally useless - he may at least serve as a bad example".
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