Having been brought up close to the analytical tradition - two close schoolfriends have become philosophers, one working in the philosophy of science, the other in metaethics - sceptical of the metaphysicians, wary of the transcendental, I don't really believe that music does the work of metaphysics in any rationally engageable way. It is rather that in gesturing towards the unsayable - incoherent efforts as far as the analytical philosopher is concerned - music seems to me to do a more convincing job than the mystagogues of Paris and Frankfurt. What we cannot speak about, as Wittgenstein realised in his late philosophy, we do not pass over in silence, but endlessly mull over in art, religious doctrine and, perhaps above all, music. What is extraordinary is the continuing pertinence of the Romantic era's vision of musical transcendence to our own age. "Music," as Beethoven had it, "is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend." True or not, we are still in thrall to such aspirations.

This month, I've been feeling distinctly corporeal. When all is well, singing is the sort of physical activity that brings with it a sense of release, of freedom and even exaltation. When all is not well (quite frequently), one feels the rustiness of the mechanism, its unwillingness to respond. Coax it like some temperamental engine and eventually it will respond. But when it comes to rather routine illnesses - in this case flu but more often a cold - things can seize up rather disconcertingly, a reminder of the brute materiality of what can seem a rather refined exercise.

To move from metaphysics to melancholia, as a singer it's not difficult to appreciate the relevance to daily and seasonal life of some skewed version of the old Galenic humoral theory, with its choleric, melancholic, sanguine and phlegmatic temperaments. My life is governed by phlegm to an extent which utterly disgusts my friends and family - even eight years of child-rearing have not desensitised my wife to this aspect of the human condition, and her opinion on the colour of the day's sputum is not usually canvassable.