I live in a little bubble of cosiness, surrounded by bland, unthreatening things, and I’m really quite happy about it. I’m staunchly against anything that changes my daily routine, if ‘routine’ is really the best way to describe a lifestyle that’s more in the ‘stay in bed until your friendships start to wither’ vein. I’d say I prefer to keep within my comfort zone, but that implies that I’ve ever made an attempt to leave it, and I don’t want to start this off on a lie.

Naturally when my friends got wind of this they thought it would be just hilarious if they could find a way to prod at me in my thick blanket of docile contentment. ‘No Free Will’ is their large sharp stick and each week I will be poked at with a new social hindrance. (Two paragraphs in and I’m introducing semi-erotic analogies. Only way is up.)

There are no real criteria for the blog, other than that I must be seriously, seriously inconvenienced, either physically – think ‘carry a bowling ball everywhere’, except don’t, I hate that idea – or mentally, which is the umbrella that this week’s task falls under.

I’m going to listen to London-born artist Just Jack’s 2007 single ‘Starz in Their Eyes’ 100 times a day for a week, from tomorrow – that is, Monday 6th of February – until next Sunday. The full album version of the song clocks up at four minutes and fifty-three seconds, and 700 repetitions of it will take around 57 hours. There are 168 hours in a week, and I’m asleep for a third of them, which means I’ll be listening to the song for more than half of my waking hours.

I don’t want to take any shortcuts. There’s a radio version of this song that’s two minutes shorter, but I think it would be dishonest not to use the song that originally sprang from Jack’s mind. I’m not allowed to be asleep for any of the listens – I doubt I’d be able to, really – and it always has to be loud enough for me to hear the lyrics. When possible, I want to hear the song from speakers rather than headphones, because if I’m headed to crazytown I’d like to take my housemates with me.

Why Just Jack? I think because he perfectly toes the line between bland everyman singer and one-hit wonder. I haven’t ever heard the song in its entirety, just snippets of the chorus on Chris Moyles, but I hear it’s really quite nondescript apart from when, at one point, it breaks down into a spoken-word interlude. I know from cautious Wikipedia-checking that it never quite got to number one on the UK charts, but it did sit in the top 10 for a respectable length of time, which really tells me nothing.

I don’t have much of an idea what this experience will do to me. On the one hand, the unrelenting repetition could lead me to deconstruct this song, then music as a concept until it no longer has the capacity to carry any kind of meaning for me. On the other, it could do nothing; I could turn off the listen part of my brain and life could carry on exactly as normal.

I hope it falls somewhere in between these two extremes, because the former would be painfully pretentious and the latter just dull. One thing which I can say with certainty is that I’m not going to have much mercy on anyone who permits a situation where I hear ‘Starz in Their Eyes’ after this week. I hate it already, just from the title. Why ‘Starz’ over ‘Stars’? Was that a conscious decision he made, or has he always spelled it that way? And why does ‘Starz’ get a streetwise ‘z’ and not ‘Eyes’? Maybe these questions will be answered by Just Jack in the course of the song. I’m not holding out much hope for it.

I’ll be updating every day, mostly to soothe worried friends and family who doubt that I have enough mental strength to pull through the week. The blog is very much reader-interactive, and if you think you have a good idea for an upcoming week, please do say down below. Or, if you just want to offer some care and sympathy that’s also fine. I’m going to need it.