I was walking through the city centre this morning when I happened to overhear a snatch of conversation. An earnest looking man was talking forcefully to a woman. "What are you looking for?" he asked. "Are you looking for answers?"

I didn't hear her reply. I had already walked past. I don't know what religion, cult or political group the man was lobbying for, and it didn't really matter. I had already started to ask myself the same question. Am I looking for answers? And I came to the conclusion that I'm not. I'm looking for questions, not answers. You see, answers are the end of enquiry. They're a full stop. There's nothing beyond them. Because of that, answers are easy. They're comforting, unchallenging and they don't take us anywhere beyond. Questions are the opposite. Questions are a journey. They make demands of us and they are uncomfortable. They make us move on.

It occured to me that the man was doing this woman a disservice if he was lobbying for a religion. A good religion doesn't offer answers. It asks questions of us. It demands that we examine ourselves. It doesn't coddle us or let us sink easily into comfort. It doesn't let us lie in unexamined preconceptions or prejudices. It doesn't let us escape from consequences. It doesn't let us become lazy. It doesn't hand out answers on a platter.

So the next time I'm walking through the city centre and someone says, "Are you looking for questions?" then I might stop to talk to them. Otherwise, I'm probably just going to walk on past like I did today.

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I bought a new album today. It's called "Blood and Belief" and it's by Blaze. Blaze Bayley was singer with Iron Maiden for about five years in the mid to late nineties. He didn't do terribly well with them, for reasons that weren't entirely his fault. His vocal style didn't really match their natural music. What they produced was good, but never quite clicked. Since going solo, though, he's produced some of the most astonishing heavy metal albums of the last five or six years. This is his latest. I've just started listening to it, and so far it's great. Certainly, it's looking like a candidate for one of my favourite albums of this year. Give it a listen if you can.

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Steph gets back from Vienna today. I am so glad. We are not good at being apart. I've missed her terribly, and so has Nika. It's only been a few days since I got back myself, but it feels like forever. I was listening to an audio diary where a guy was starting to cycle from England to Shanghai and was leaving his girlfriend behind (she was going to write up her PhD thesis while he was gone). It was just unimaginable that I could do that, just go off for so long. I guess it wasn't as easy as he thought, either, because he kept delaying departure until everyone was asking him "haven't you gone yet". In the end, his girlfriend had to go away for the weekend so that he could bring himself to leave. The first thing he did was to cycle out to where she had gone to stay, just to say goodbye again. I know exactly how he felt.