It's only a few weeks since I volunteered to be interviewed on a middle aged man's experience of well...middle age.

Sat in front of a softly spoken, occasionally questioning, American psycho-therapist, I talked for almost an hour about this life period I'm in travelling through.

Good for the person listening as he needed this for a research project; good for me to be able step out of the daily cacophony and put things into perspective. I've perhaps a more ordered and sequenced mind than many, but that's not to say the cataloguing does get out of order from time, and an opportunity like this can only help.

I had mixed reasons for putting myself forward: intellectual curiosity, what would I learn not just about me but from the situation itself; an actual psycho-therapist's study offers the chance to sink deeper into the world of leather couches, Freud and those nervy, worried characters that live in Saul Bellow's world. Call it empathy.

Then, there was a sense of altruism. The need to leave something, however momentary, behind something that another in years hence might draw from, maybe nourishment, even hope, or just weary recognition that the place they're in is the the place that so many of us have walked through.

The desire to leave a trace behind after I've gone is very powerful for me. I live on my own, have no kids, no immediate family so there's not the chance of a familial memory being passed along if only for a few generations.

But that's not one tenth of it for me. It is for me the need to leave footprints in the sand that hold their shape after the first wave has swept in, the one which traditionally sweeps away all evidence of who passed.

And it has to be a foot print that someone can benefit from, whether it be the sense I referred to in the last paragraph, or simply from someone reading this blog. Something lives on. Rumbles on if I take up the cue of the thunderstorm that's edging over West London right now.