Jonathan Kay, the world-renowned fool, gave an edgy solo performance on Saturday night at The Basement on Kensington St., as an inspirational addendum to his 2-day fooling workshop. From the moment he entered and ad-libbed Titanic's arm-spreading scene while getting the entire audience to sing the movie's theme song, nothing about theatre could be taken for granted. Even the price, which was a donation based on how much you liked what happened, forced you to think about money and theatre in a new way.

His knitted fool's cap with giant wings was the only rehearsed element to expose how this experimental theatre would turn into fooling. The stage was bare except for a wooden chair and a treasure chest-sized box, and these were the springboards for his improvised repertoire. He leaped, shuffled and rolled into an evening of riffing off the audience and playing every sort of character, from Little Red Riding Hood to a dead badger, in order to achieve a barrier-breaking audience experience.

I was in the minority of the audience that was not part of the fooling workshop, and the mood of the crowd was one of sharing and openness. He broke the ice by ad-libbing off his prop, pointing out that most of us live our lives in a safe little box. He primed us for the rest of his offering with the idea that you have to say "yes," because if you say "no" the performance stops and you have to start again. Audience members happily contributed to his anarchic imaginations, being singled out and answering questions. This was personal. There was a sense in which he wanted to know each of us. He even described the efforts he was making on stage as "giving love."

But it wasn't all happy clappy — there were perilous moments too. I was singled out by Kay despite keeping a low profile. He initially asked me to hum, and then he asked me my name. Then he started approaching me and asked if I wanted a kiss, one of the running gags of the evening. I replied in his own vernacular by simply humming, so he upped the ante by suggesting the entire audience would have to kiss me. Mercifully, he then let me off the hook by caricaturing how I would later congratulate myself for making such a big contribution to the evening by humming.

The moment that epitomized the truth that can emerge from all this fooling around came when a 20-year-old audience member told us that he had just dropped out. Kay suddenly burst into a crazy tableau of a man dropping out of the sky and another man on the ground trying to catch him. As the drop-out lay fallen on the ground, he reckoned his future plans were to drop out of dropping out, leading Kay to point out that this strategy was the first step on the road to becoming a fool. At that moment the running gags crossed the finish line.

My agent Sylvia Tidy-Harris just asked me to join Twitter, the telegraphically brief online social network. Brighton being the European digital media capital it is, I dutifully created a profile and made my first update. When you log in to Twitter, you see the photographs of the other twitterers you have chosen to follow next to their most recent updates. Since each update is limited to 140 characters, your eyes can quickly scan what everyone you care about is doing.

On the plus side, Sylvia says Twitter is free publicity. I am my own brand, and Twitter provides a business-like reflection of what I am doing without the friends, photos and party memorabilia that make Facebook such an obvious professional liability. Twitter also makes you feel more connected. After I started twittering, I was almost immediately found in California by a former bandmember from ages ago. I felt both heart-warmed and amazed, because I joined Twitter as an experiment and told none of my friends about it. Unfortunately, I learned nothing about Todd because he chose to remain mute on Twitter, watching others while guarding his own privacy.

This is the minus side. I think it takes a particular kind of person to broadcast about himself to the world. Even though I constantly give talks to students and to the public, my lectures are very interactive, almost like giant seminars. I like getting second-by-second feedback from the students' body language and from their answers to my questions. Also Twitter made me feel like I wasn’t trying hard enough. From following my agent's daily exploits, I learned that she is interviewed by the national media nearly every day, while my specialist opinions are sought once per week at most.

This I can rationalise. Because of confidentiality I cannot talk about my job at the medical school, which is what I spend most of my time doing. This means that the movie of my virtual life on Twitter-world has a stroboscopic effect where the snapshot moments of my public and business life are interrupted by vast and plentiful black spaces. Without the full narrative, there is no meaning. I am not really interested in the sound-bites, the name-checks and the unlabelled group photos decontextualized by the ADHD-styled national media.

Where does all this leave Twitter? Well, in amongst Twitter's banter and chatter, there are important events and cool places referenced, and it is all personalised to us, the end-users. My fellow consumers and I can learn about the people we know rather than the celebrities and villains that journalists have foisted upon us as neighbours in our dystopian global village. The problem is that none of it joins up the dots. As lovely as free publicity is, I don't expect to persist with Twitter. I just don't think that I can glean the meaning of what's going on in 140 characters or less. Maybe I should hire someone to do it for me. But then it wouldn't be free publicity.

When Tina Gonsalves, the Australian video-artist, spoke at the Lighthouse on Kensington Street in February, she invited me to visit her new home in Berlin. I was already scheduled to talk in Berlin later that month at an international drug safety meeting, so we did it. My plane arrived in the midst of a freak hail storm, but the German buses and U-bahn were unaffected, unlike their London counterparts. Tina, Matt and their son lived in a high ceiling flat in Friedrichshain right next to all the bars. I suddenly realised she lived on the coolest street, in the coolest district, in the coolest city in the world. And they owned it. Artists, eh?

Joking aside, Berlin's real estate is the most affordable you are going to find in any capital city in Western Europe. As a young city dating from the fall of the Wall, Berlin has none of the industry or money that shape Munich and Frankfurt; some parts of Berlin have unemployment exceeding 25 percent and serious problems with drugs and alcoholism. I aimed to see it.

So I went on a Pub Crawl offered by New Berlin Tours. This is what I yearned for when I arrived in Brighton: a late night being introduced to the city's bars and clubs in the company of friendly strangers. It started predictably enough, as I found myself at Zapata's talking to some young students from Doncaster. In the first bar I met the happy Norwegians, and I found people can still smoke inside some of the bars. Between bars we were provided with nasty pre-mixed shots of spirits to steel us against the cold. It ended up with dancing at Tresor, a club located in an old power station. This real estate was too mainstream.

So I joined the Alternative City Tour, which focuses on the graffiti and squats in Berlin; it is also run by New Berlin Tours. Our Californian guide's name was Summer, and she insisted A) it was her real name, and B) her parents were not hippies. She had a university degree in street art, but said she had never been to Brighton, although she had heard about our exquisite graffiti murals. By contrast, there is an ugly edge to Berlin's street art. There are crews competing, sometimes with violence, to jaggedly paint their names on the tops of tall buildings. There are a few appealing giant murals of the Brazil national soccer team, but these are betrayed by little white swishes from their sponsor. A lot of the graffiti is just territorial, like the man who paints hundreds of sixes all over town. There was tagging all over the swathes of fenced-off wasteland in the middle of this teeming city — remnants of the war — that reminded me of pre-lottery England under the Tories. Combined with the concrete architecture, much of Berlin comes across as a rough council estate. Lamentably, none of Banksy’s "public" artworks have survived in Berlin; they have all been stolen. What vandals!

I am currently writing a book about music, pleasure and the brain. The following blog records my thoughts and progress as I write.

The classic examples of territory in music that I have used are

• teenagers turning the music up after they slam the door
• Young men playing music very loudly out of their car window
• Hare Krishnas dancing to the Maha Mantra
• English Rugby crowd singing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”

Thus far, the way the book is written, the chapter that has the most explicit and complete discussion of the role of territory music is the chapter “Does violent music make people violent?” In that chapter I go into detail in various units in the US security use music to break the enemy. One of the most famous examples was on 28 February 1993 when the ATF (The US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms) attempted to break the siege of David Koresh’s followers, the Branch Davidians, in Waco Texas. They played very loud rock to break the spirit of the group, but they also played Tibetan chants so that the media could get some footage of how to (politely) break the will of a anti-government rebel. It did not work.