We are told airports represent ‘good design’, just as we are repeatedly told by BAA and Boris Johnson that we need more of them. But as they wrap the word ‘environmental’ and that non-word, ‘sustainable’, into queasy arguments, we blindly accept the glass, and the brushed stainless steel.

Airports look similar because they have to be. Around the world the default language for air traffic control is English, the type face used on the taxiways is Siemens sans serif. In many terminals, Frutiger is used for signage. The flow is the same; we are simply told where to go and how to get there. These structures are there to process people from the door to the gate and vice versa. There is none of that ‘romance of travel’ nonsense, only adverts that strive to point out how global difference can be conquered by the over-arching unilateral view of global banking.

The minimal design of airports is reminiscent of the aesthetics of dystopian Hollywood movies. The Minority Report look. Even the characters in their anonymous figure-hugging gun metal outfits appear to have bought their clothes from the airport boutique of Hugo Boss. Often they’re running around and everyone has a purpose and a place to be. Just like Stansted, Gatwick etc. You’re reduced to a traveller, a greeter or a worker. The point is, just as these films strive to emphasise an unnatural and de-humanising vision of the future, our airports do the same thing.

I’m sure that the architects and planners of airports believe they are designing ‘happy’ places; buildings that deliver you swiftly, safe and sound with plenty of opportunity to shop along the way. But this belief in happiness is wrong. What is happiness anyway and why is it important?

No religion pushes happiness. Islam asks us to love and serve God. Judaism to follow His law, Christianity to follow Christ and atone for our sins. Buddhism is not about happiness, it’s about the ending of ignorance through knowledge.

So are airports nihilistic? They stand for nothing, they have no intrinsic value. They’re just places where a bunch of processes happen. No, airports are atheist buildings. Their homogenous quality refuses to accept the minutia of life, the dirt, the difference, our creed, our beliefs – it is we, who must conform to the rigid design.

Just as some atheists argue for reclaiming religion as an act of defiance against theism and advocate atheological debate, it’s time to reject the hollow philosophy of global design and start celebrating difference again. Airports should be exciting, they should be thrilling; we’re going somewhere new, we’re meeting a loved one.

There are plenty of places that do this. Railway stations often seem peculiarly reflective of their place: Grand Central Station is to Gotham what Didcot is to Didcot. There are even airports that play up their locality. Jakarta is a rare example of an airport to incorporate local design – with carvings, verandas and tumbling vegetation. As a building, it’s as a thrilling as the smell of cigarette smoke in Terminal 5.

We step out of the subway and paper fills the air, falling from the open windows of a tall, blue-glass office building. Financial crisis? As we walk wind carries fragments of letters, records and spread sheets across the wide boulevard to collect in drifts by the newspaper kiosks.

In the Plaza de Mayo is a photography exhibition of the riots from December 2001. Just over ten years ago, what still threatens Europe, happened in Argentina. The country was in recession, the deficit was 2.5% of GDP, the IMF advised President de la Rua to cut $1.4 billion from his budgets.

Hopes were pinned on a quick bounce back, but within a year GDP shrank and Standard & Poor put Argentina on credit watch. More money was borrowed – from the IMF, the World Bank – economic ministers came and went – Ricardo Lopez Murphy lasted just eight days. There were strikes over cuts to civil service pensions, the highest-earning officials were effectively paid IOUs.

Then in December, Argentina failed to meet its deficit targets and the IMF withheld a $1.3 billion loan payment. People started to take their money out of the banks, flip it to dollars and send it abroad. The Government froze all accounts for 12 months. Then the riots.

Fire, petrol bombs, police beating people as their families try to drag them away – everything is larger than life with heavy contrast and saturated colour. This is as close as I ever want to get to a civil disturbance. This is blood in a drain, a man facedown and the cue-ball eye of a horse right in the camera’s lens. Here a helicopter carries de la Rua away from the palace and out of Government.

The Palace (La Casa Rosada) is at one end of the plaza and in the grounds we find an altogether different exhibition, one by the Government’s official presidential photographer – whose name escapes me (and Google) when I write later. Most of it centres on Nestor Kirchner, his death and succession by his wife Cristina Kirchner.

Argentina’s news is engrossed with the saga of her cancer, and the apparent cluster that’s claimed four other left-leaning presidents in Latin America;. Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, Fernando Lugo of Paraguay, Dilma Rousseff of Brazil and her predecessor, Luiz Lula. Is this a conspiracy? Yes, if you believe Chavez who points the finger squarely at the US. Is it a conspiracy that Kirchner’s thyroid cancer appeared at the time of her second-term election? Of course not. The glamourous Eva Peron of the 21 Century appears to be making a good recovery.

But plenty of older women look like they’re in shock – as they walk the streets with paper in their hair, or as they slice into manhole-sized steaks in the city restaurants. Don’t be fooled. They’ve not just seen one of the many dog walkers drag a maypole of tired, panting, hounds under a bus. It’s plastic surgery.

Everyone in Buenos Aires is beautiful – tanned gold, fair hair and immaculately turned out in considered wardrobe. Everyone gets old. At some point, a woman here must look in the mirror and make a decision; let time take its course or crash diet and pin anything loose behind the ears.

It’s terrible, but then what to do I know? I’m a man, and men in Buenos Aires check women out all the time. As we walk away from the square, T stops by a group of guys to ask why paper falls from the buildings. The main dude just blatantly checks out her chest and then works his way up. ‘Aren’t you freaked about by it?’, I’ll ask later. ‘No’, she’ll say, ‘It’s it’s like it has to be done before they can start talking to you.’ The only thing worse about being ‘spoken to’, is to be ignored.

So, what’s with the paper on December 30? The dude says, ‘It’s our last day of work, we finish at 11, throw our papers out of the window and then get drunk!’ ‘What about recycling?’ asks T. The dude and his friends laugh. ‘Recycling? There’s no recycling here!’

This is not true, as we walk on, pockets of Buenos Aires’ poor drag carts and collect the scraps to sell by the kilo to the paper mills on the outskirts of the city. By the Ministry of Defence we search for our birthdays in the remains of a diary. I pick up Sua Herrers’ X-Ray; March 10 2011. It looks like he (she?) has two left feet and a fracture across one dorsal surface. I hope medical records in the street are an indication of recovery.

I was in Buenos Aires only three days, but I want to go back; to the National Cemetery where we utterly failed to see Evita’s grave and to find the taxi driver who looked like a sour George Clooney. He’s there, patrolling the city in his crisp white shirt, with the seat pushed back as far as it’ll go. He still nods along to the blues CDs he keeps stacked up by the gearstick. I hope he picks us up at the airport. I hope this time he takes us to the hotel, instead of dropping us off next to a group of teenagers throwing bangers around with a curt ‘buena suerte’.

Not as easy as it sounds. They are clear plastic (my second such pair), so they refract the light and get lost in the clutter. I often knock them to the floor and that usually gets me up. Putting them on, the world becomes your world and I feel like a MacBook starting up.

Keeping them on? Well, I’ve been trying to keep them on since my Dad, with his miserable twenty twenty vision, said to me, ‘maybe you should wear those things all the time? You know, help you see properly?’ He wasn’t being cruel. For 18 months I’d been popping them on in class to stare at the board. Resistance was futile. I have rugby shaped eyeballs, my brain sighs, ‘fuck this’, when asked to work out the true aspects of anything red, I see grey as green.

I am also the worst person in the world at maths, which is ironic, because as soon as I put on my first pair (Mum lobbied for a decent, non-NHS style. Cheers Ma!), I had whole bunch of geometry to master. There’s a difference between the magnified world and the real. Footballs now suddenly surged closer than they normally appeared. Despite puberty bizarrely gifting me the skill of Roberto Baggio for a brief, two months, I found playing the beautiful game like doing trigonometry with someone kicking my head in, which in a way, it usually was.

I’m sure my friend Neil would have been entirely sympathetic to my plight when we played football during lunch – if he’d known. Instead, when yet again I sliced the tennis ball we played football with (why?), wide of an open goal, he administered a frustrated shove and called me a dick. My glasses (round, gold coloured) flew from my face and bounced across the tarmac. The screw holding the right arm, frame and lens in place sheared. ‘You dick’, I said to Neil.

So after promising to ‘really look after them’, I did what any teenage boy would do; I made repairs with Blu Tack and hid the fact from my parents for as long as I could. Two weeks later, the same pair spectacularly disintegrated into my sausage and mash at the dinner table. Dad scooped everything up and went out to his workshop – where he still has the tools, skills and materials to build an engine from scratch – and quickly repaired them. Of course he had a screw! It was something he did all the time for my Mum (and still does I’m sure). But I was too wrapped up in myself, and too interested in playing the guitar like really, really well to notice. ‘You dick’, I said to myself.

I’ve now worn glasses for longer than I haven’t. I’ve had round, thin, thick, clear and half and half (they looked like the lab safety goggles in CSI Miami). One pair fell off my face in Regent’s Park and shattered neatly in two, one pair is somewhere in the surf off Goa, but despite that, they’re very much a part of me. I’ve been cajoled to try contacts (painful and a hassle), and I’ve vetoed any attempt to investigate laser surgery. You can’t polish a turd – although there are plenty of videos on Youtube that refute that claim.

Besides, I think glasses soften my appearance. I have weird eyes, and seeing as I often stare into space as part of my job, they make me look less of a loony in the office. I wouldn’t have it any other way. By all means ask someone what it’s like to wear glasses, just don’t ask to try them on. Bad style.

It’s something I tried to grapple with fairly recently. I’m writing about a fictional band and after a couple of purple attempts to describe their music, I decided to simply not bother, shifting instead, to focus on the story of the band.

To me, this is where music journalism is at its best; interviews and lately, oral histories of scenes, bands and movements. Here are some of the best:

Please Kill Me by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain
Legs was the man who gave the world ‘Punk’ (as the title for his magazine), Gillian worked at St Mark’s Church where Patti Smith and Jim Carroll gave their first readings – there are few people still alive who could match the amazing oral story they’ve curated about the birth of East Coast punk.

Starting with The Velvet Underground, the book tells the story of the Stooges, CBGBs, Television, Richard Hell, Johnny Thunders, the rise and fall of the New York Dolls, Patti Smith, Iggy Pop and how David Bowie basically picked him up, dusted him down and wrote for him a whole bunch of classic songs. I have missed some acts out, but if they lived in New York from 1970 to 1990, you’ll find them in these pages. You’ll learn about the sheer resilience of the human constitution, the last hours of Sid Vicious’ life and why Johnny Thunders couldn’t tour more than three hours from New York (hint). Not surprisingly, at times it’s a sad read, but certainly an essential one.

Spotify playlist of some of the bands

Gimme Something Better by Jack Boulware & Silke Tudor
Punk may have found a home in New York, but that didn’t mean there weren’t plenty of angry young men pissed off with just something. While Hermosa Beach was the home of Black Flag (the Lewis and Clark of punk rock), further up the Pacific coast in San Francisco’s Bay Area, bands were busy getting their own frustrations down on tape. Gimme Something Better is a pretty broad effort at capturing an oral history in a similar manner to Please Kill Me.

This book does suffer from poor layout – you’re forever flipping to the Who’s Who section to work out what these bands are talking about, but it’s worth persisting. As the title suggests, this an altogether more optimistic scene. I mean, Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys ran for city mayor. The all pervading sense of NYC gloom is missing.

There are still homeless gang kids fighting, awful squats and Flipper’s astonishing capacity for hard drugs, but there are also women in bands, promotors trying to set up unique spaces such as the Gilman and the story of Maximum RocknRoll magazine. It’s more about ‘make’ than ‘destroy’.

Aside from Dead Kennedys, Operation Ivy, NoFX and Green Day, most of the bands will probably be unknown to most. But the story of Avengers, MDC, Flipper and others, is an important part of the story of American hardcore. Talking of which…

Gimme Something Better Spotify playlist

Get In The Van by Henry Rollins
Where to start. Why are Vans popular? Why did Nirvana make it? How did independently made and distributed music actually start? The answer to all these questions could easily be Black Flag. They were the first band to kickstart hardcore – fast, guitar punk underpinned with a oompah, oompah beat (see, told you describing music is really hard), and they did it by getting in a van and playing pretty much everywhere, all year round for about seven years.

The book starts with Henry Garfield, manager of a DC Haagen Daaz ice cream store catching a Black Flag show in New York. Pretty soon (and perhaps this is an indication just how ‘out there’ they were as a band), they ask Garfield to sing for them. Enter, Henry Rollins, lead singer of Black Flag. This is his diary and it ends with the band’s acrimonious break up.

It’s an incredible read. The work ethic of the band mirrored that of its relentless leader, guitarist Greg Ginn. When the band weren’t crossing the country on sixty-date tours, they practiced eight hours a day (including Christmas), lived in abandoned offices, poured all their money into their record label SST and some of them ate dog food balled up in buns. Oh yeah, the LAPD utterly hated them. Their music was fast because the cops would turn up and start hitting the audience twenty minutes into the set.

Reading Henry’s account of how he went from a fairly earnest fan, to a tattooed, muscled unit who basically hated humanity, the first question that trips across the mind is, ‘why’d you do it man?’ As much as I like some of Black Flag’s music, their habit of recording loads of albums (four in ’84 alone), means a lot of their output is quite poor (and sloppily put together). It can’t be the legacy. No, the answer is ‘freedom’ and ‘hey, ‘I was in Black Flag – it was incredible journey’. Can’t argue with that.

Listen to Black Flag 

Our Band Could Be Your Life by Michael Azerrad.
If you’re my age, this is an essential book. Named after a Minuteman lyric, the book starts with a concise history of Black Flag and it’s worth reading this chapter to discover what the other band members really thought of Henry Rollins.

Then you’ve got a history of the Minutemen – perhaps one of the few examples of a perfect band, albeit one destroyed by the horrific car accident that tragically took guitarist, D Boon’s life. And this sense of unfairness is carried into the story of Mission Of Burma, a band who were simply before their time.

Black Flag’s SST label exerts it influence in the chapters on Dinosaur Jr (who it seems hated one another except on stage) and Husker Du who would be one of the first acts to sign to a major label.

This is an incredibly comprehensive book – there are chapters on Sonic Youth, Mudhoney and Big Black, but also those of less known acts; the bitter sweet tale of The Replacements, and the optimism of Beat Happening. The chapter on psychedelic punk rockers, Butthole Surfers is worth the price of the book alone. You will drop it laughing.

And let’s not forget a fair slice of Our Band is devoted to DC Kingpin, Ian MacKaye. Minor Threat are my favourite hardcore band and it’s interesting to see how they split from the scene that threw them together to form another influential label, Dischord (still going), and then one of my favourite bands, the intense post-punk outfit Fugazi.

But it doesn’t matter if you’ve only heard of just a few of these bands, this book throws a light on what it’s like to earn money from art. It’s hard, often tinged with sadness (especially when the drugs start appearing), but it seems it’s always worth it. The world in this book has disappeared – the indie radio stations are gone, the music press is fractured into blogs, even the venues are not there anymore. It’s hard to imagine bands climbing into vans and slumming it like they did. I’m not saying it’s worse, just different. Recording engineer, Steve Albini, (Big Black, now Shellac) equates music to, ‘like playing tennis’. Most acts go for the bucks, embrace corporations and sponsorship, rather than reject it. Is this right? Can you survive on your own terms as a purely new act? Maybe the genre of witch house is one exception. Depending on what you read, It’s either a joke or a rejection of music categorisation as many of the proponents chose to name themselves using unsearchable diacritical marks. Anyway, I bet Madonna’s made some calls.

Here’s a Spotify playlist of the bands.

331/3 Spiderland by Scott Tennet
There’s precious little written about Slint, so Scott’s book covering their sophomore album fleshes out the story of the band and why such a young group of men from Louisville managed to craft what’s arguably one of the most influential rock records in the last 20 years.

It would be a mistake to think it was happenstance. This book squarely establishes Slint as not just competent musicians, but experienced ones. The band was born out of local favourite act, Maurice (who never recorded), and Squirrel Bait (who are also worth checking out). Every element of the Spiderland was considered – right down to whether the guitars would pick up or down on a given song.

This level of detail is fascinating. Spiderland although beautiful, is an uncanny album – one part balls out riffing and one part whispered confession that’s so solemn in its intensity. This book perfectly captures the spirit of this jewel of a band.

Listen to Spiderland

And yet I’ve eaten five of them in the space of three years. Crash #1 was by far and away the worst and the reasons as boring as the hurt. No one smashed into me, instead I was so worried about work, I didn’t see the pothole, my foot slipped, hit the front tyre and I landed on my head. I wasn’t wearing a helmet.

I had a six hour wait in A&E to be told the tennis-ball sized lump on my head was mostly water, but proof of two things; I was an idiot for not wearing a helmet and I should start updating my CV and portfolio.

Crash #2 was like a pitch for a Matthew McConaughey movie; a pretty ad intern smashes into the back wheel of a copywriter. I’m no McConaughey (no, seriously), and I’m happily with awesome T, so I didn’t get her number, or give her a job in the agency I‘d just set up with my goofy mate played by Jason Lee. There was no marriage in the Hamptons. Just a bill for a bike rebuild that I paid for, talking of which…

Crash #3 is pretty simple to explain; I pick up my bike after the rebuild, ride on it five minutes before the back wheel falls off. Everything freezes and I tip over in a heap. If any of my crashes were going to appear in the slam section of a skate video this would be the one. Twenty minutes later a cab delivers me back to the shop where I walk through the door, covered in blood demanding they fix the bike and pay for repairs to my laptop.

Crash #4 was a blink and miss it. I was at the lights in Whitehall, on my way to get my passport at Victoria. The lights changed, I set off and a woman on a Pashley darts across my path. I hit her and tumble over my handlebars, to land on my feet! She was okay, I was angry, but fine. Five minutes later I was locking my bike up outside the Passport Office like it never happened.

Why do I keep crashing? I don’t know. I don’t jump lights, I don’t ride at the side of the road, I pedal pretty slowly. Look at what happened: foot slip, a shunt, a wheel isn’t put in properly, someone drives in front of me, I get hit by a friggin’ 4×4. I don’t want to sound like a teenager, but why me?

I know loads of people who ride each day, just like me. Many don’t even wear helmets (although I wish they would). Some of them ride fixies with no brakes. How do they get away with it? It doesn’t matter, the problem lies with me and I think I’ve figured it out. Before I got my hands on my beloved Adorni racer, I rode a Marin mountain bike. At the time I lived in South London, and although the Elephant and Castle roundabout might look from the saddle like a swirling mass of moving steel, most of the roads south are straight and wide. Provided you can be seen and ride with purpose, you’re generally okay.

We’re not moving south, so I’m stuck with north London’s toffee hammer tarmac. But that got me thinking about my bike. Sat on the Adorni, my centre of gravity is high, I’m pitched forward over the head, the high top bar means I can’t get off quickly – there’s no room for error. Something goes wrong, I’m off, usually over the bars.

So I’ve been looking at other bikes. I like mountain bikes and in some ways they’re perfect for north London – big chunky tyres, suspension, low centre of gravity and an angled top tube. It’s harder to fall off and you have somewhere to go should anything go wrong.

But mountain bikes are complicated, over-engineered and heavy. So that leaves hybrids. But that’s like riding a Volvo. It’ll be Camper shoes next. So instead, I’m thinking of building a ride around a jump bike frame. The angles look good and I like the stripped back nature of the bike; it’s made to do jumps. There are just enough gears to get you up the hill. Question is, could you ride one to work?