The blog's been quiet for a while, because I've been up North, staying with Helen for a few days. It was lovely to catch up with her, and the help she's given me in dealing with all the stuff I've been going through in the last couple of months has been invaluable. I'm smiling as I type this; it's been a very therapeutic break from my normal life.

Helen is a dear friend and she's also my confidant as well as being my unofficial therapist—and goodness knows, I need each of those things very badly right now. What we talked about was deeply personal, so those conversations are going to remain something that's just between the two of us. But right now, I'm in a much better place than I was a week ago, and that's all down to her. "You need to work on your affirmations," she told me more than once. And she's right.

It wasn't all heavy psychoanalysis, though; neither of us would have been happy if it had been. Helen dug out some DVDs of her brother's home movies and I figured out how to plug her old DVD player into the telly, so we watched some of those together. One recording of Phil from his time in LA which showed him alone in his apartment, late at night, trying to extricate himself from a Tin Man Halloween costume he'd made had me almost crying with laughter. That video has now been upscaled and digitised (because we have the technology), so if Helen ever puts it online, I'll provide a link to it here. We also talked about putting some of Phil's comedy routine cassettes on Bandcamp at some point, and those are hilarious. There are guest appearances from Lemmy and Wurzel. We have the technology to make that happen, too, because hey, of course we do!

Helen had also uncovered footage from Hammersmith Odeon from the Bomber Tour in 1979, and it was weird seeing Helen's father's camcorder footage of the audience, knowing that I was out there in the darkness (in row G of the stalls, in fact). Phil's whole family were at the show, and a very young Miss Taylor popped up in a few of the shots filmed backstage after the show. I got quite misty-eyed...

The number of birds visiting the feeders in Helen's back garden was a marvel—the house backs on to mature woodland and the River Wharfe and open farmland are visible through the trees. I took the opportunity to do the RSPB's Big Garden Birdwatch for an hour one morning while we were sitting around drinking coffee. I can't remember the last time I saw a bullfinch but I shouted in delight when one landed in the tree next to her deck. All in all, the number of different species I saw was in double figures and I wouldn't have seen that many at home.

Because we're both enthusiastic foodies, we had some very nice meals while I was there, including a splendid Sunday Lunch at Buon Apps, a pub meal at Whitelocks Ale House in Leeds while we were catching up with MHB #2 Pete Collins, and I had a very nice eggs benedict royale when Helen and I had brunch at Mondo on Wednesday afternoon. I'm pleased to say that Helen didn't do all the cooking at her place, either; I cooked a full roast dinner with all the trimmings on Tuesday which turned out rather nicely. Quite honestly, I haven't eaten so well and consistently for that length of time for a very long time and I'm now hooked on avocados. And yet I'd only put on a pound when I weighed myself when I got home.

The trip back was an adventure, to say the least. I was very glad I'd topped up with a late coffee before I set off home on Wednesday evening.

It was just above freezing outside and the Vale of York was wreathed in thick fog when I set off. The fog cleared once I'd got on the A1(M) and the roads heading south weren't that busy, so I was looking forward to a relatively uneventful trip, but it was not to be.

The first wrinkle appeared when the matrix signs announced that the M42 was shut at the top end, so I decided I'd head down the M1 to use the M69 and M6 instead, only to discover that the M1 was down to one lane at Trowell Services and it took about twenty minutes to cover the next mile. The M69 and M6 were clear, but once I got on the M42 I discovered that they'd shut it from Junction 4 at Shirley to Junction 3a where it joins the M40, so after topping the car up at the Tesco there I found myself on another diversion. But my hopes of getting home by midnight were well and truly dashed when the sign just after junction 13 on the M5 informed me that junction 14 was shut (hey Highways Agency, why couldn't you have told me that before the junction I could have used as an alternative route, mmm?) and I found myself having to drive down to Almondsbury, make a U-turn, and then drive back up the bloody M5 again. I got home at 00:45 on Thursday morning. By the time I'd unwound, put the recycling out, and had a shower, it was two o'clock in the morning and I was knackered.

I've spent the rest of this week decompressing and doing loads of laundry. Helen's as much of a charity shop hound as I am, so as well as the inevitable haul of books, DVDs, and CDs I also arrived home with a bunch of very decent second-hand clothes, none of which cost me more than a fiver, which are now drying on the airer. But unfortunately my sleep scores have plummeted since I got home from the 100 I got on the Sunday night to a woeful 61 on Wednesday night, 78 on Thursday night, and 79 last night. The unwinding's clearly not going that well and my c-PTSD really didn't like me feeling content or happy, so it's been deluging me with unpleasant flashbacks every night. Last night was particularly bad. After sitting in the car for four hours there and four hours back, I'm also a mass of aches and pains.

But I'm up and about this morning because I have things to do, and plenty of preparations to make...

After extensive testing, the updated FAWM website is up and running and as I type this, 952 FAWMers have already logged on at least once. We'll all be attempting to write 14 songs in the 28 days of February and having a lot of fun in the process. It'll be the 18th time I've taken part in the challenge. The first year I didn't manage to finish a single song, and the second time I only managed to finish two, but after that I was off and running. In 2022 I managed a treble FAWM by writing (or co-writing) a grand total of 42 songs, but as I commented in that blog entry I felt absolutely knackered afterwards, so I won't be trying anything that silly this year.

But I've been preparing for spending the next four weeks making music by er, making music. I've been delighted with the material I've produced in the last couple of days; it definitely falls into the "Wow, did I make that?" category that I sometimes reach. I hope that this bodes well for my efforts next month.

As always, you will be able to follow my progress here.

Although I watched the Openreach contractor install Fibre To The Premises outside my house recently, I decided to leave a couple of weeks to make sure that everything had been properly commissioned, but yesterday I pulled the trigger on an upgrade to a full FTTP service with my ISP.

You might be surprised to hear that I didn't go the whole hog and order the fastest option possible. Instead, I've selected a middle tier option which is only slightly more expensive than my current contract but according to IDNet, "the minimum guaranteed download speed for my (new) IDNet service is: 500 Mbit/s and the typical downstream throughput speed is: 750-900 Mbit/s" and they reckon my upload speed will be around 115 Mbit/s. I can't really justify spending more money on anything faster, to be honest; I've managed just fine with what I've been using for the past twelve years.

But I'm really looking forward to a broadband connection that's not just superfast, but insanely fast.

As part of the broadband upgrade process I'm finally ditching BT as my phone provider. The UK's venerable old Public Switched Telephone Network will become completely digital at the end of the year and all of the remaining old copper wires (some of which will have been in place for decades) will be decommissioned. It's a nice little earner for BT, but it means that if you still use a traditional analog phone, it will stop working. Instead, you'll have to buy a Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) phone or an Analog Telephone Adaptor (ATA) that will let your phone talk to your router. That's another nice little earner for BT, although I'm sure that third-party suppliers will benefit from the demand for new gear, too.

BT have found yet another nice little earner and they're raising prices for old-style landlines in April in order to "encourage" their customers to upgrade to the new VOIP technology. And that's where I drew the line. I ordered a suitable ATA with my FTTP upgrade. If everything works as it should, I will be able to plug my existing DECT phone into the ATA, plug the ATA into my router, and be good to go.

Apart from the fact that if there's a power cut, VOIP phones don't work, that is. Clearly whichever genius was put in charge of the switchover didn't actually devote any time to thinking things through.

It's very much the end of an era for me. I've been a customer of BT's since 1986. After all, I worked for BT for more than fourteen years and they pay me a nice pension. But times change, and what used to be a publicly owned company (it was still Post Office Telecommunications when I started working for them) has become a faceless multinational corporation. Entities like BT aren't the sort of business which inspires (or deserves) any form of customer loyalty. Oh, and did I mention that IDNet's charges for a phone service are much, MUCH lower than BT's? So I'm out.

I must be feeling a little better, as I spent yesterday morning cleaning and airing out the house. It was well past due; the amount of dust and fluff I got out of the carpets with the vacuum cleaner was extraordinary (and not in a good way). It was hard work, too; I'd soon taken off the hoodie I'd been more or less living in for the past week and I still ended up needing a shower and a change of clothes after I'd finished. But every room has been dusted and vacuumed and the piles of stuff which had accumulated on the dining room table have been cleared away, so it can actually be used for dining again.

The house looks (and smells) cleaner. I was surprised by how much better that made me feel this morning.

I had a nice evening in the pub last night with Ruth and Alex, Uncle Boris, and some of the usual suspects. My heart rate didn't spike when I walked in like it did last week and with a seat in the corner, I was able to relax and enjoy myself. But I have realised that I'm not really comfortable being part of the pub crowd these days and returning to my former habit of going out drinking on a regular (or even semi-regular) basis just isn't something that appeals to me. And if that isn't a big sign of just how radically I've been re-evaluating my priorities over the past few months, I don't know what is.

I'll probably have a glass or two of wine from time to time, but right now I feel like giving up on beer drinking entirely for a few months (if not longer); not because I'm hungover or suffering in any particularly painful way this morning, but because it makes me feel bloated and uncomfortable and I know how much weight I will (and have) put on, even after a single fairly restrained session like last week's and last night's were. Ignoring the positive social aspects of spending evenings in the pub for the moment, I just can't work up any enthusiasm for doing something that I simply don't enjoy any more. At my beer-drinking best (or worst, depending on how you look at it) I weighed nearly 18 stone (250 pounds). I have no intention of ever ending up in that state again.

I'm going to take things nice and easy today and any drinking I do will be limited to mugs of tea.

Whenever I take an extended break from making music, I always find myself wondering whether I'll still be able to come up with any ideas once I start again. I've felt so drained over the last month that I seriously doubted my ability to create would ever return. I had several false starts in the past couple of weeks when I fired all my gear up and then just sat in my chair staring mindlessly at it all for half an hour before turning it all off again and going to bed and having a nap instead.

In the last couple of days I think I've gotten over that feeling, and the music has been making itself available to me once again—for which I am extremely grateful. As of this morning, I've got more than ten minutes' worth of new material in the can. Last night I was still playing happily with iZotope's fun Stutter Edit VST plugin to mangle a synth harmony line I'd created when I noticed that it was nearly 11 pm.

For me, that's a good sign.

While I was soaking in the bath on Monday night, it all kicked off outside again, and the village was treated to another spectacular auroral display. The strongest solar storm in more than twenty years (an S4, which is the second-highest category that there is) lit up skies across the globe. Did I see any of it? Nope. It was all over remarkably quickly and by the time I heard about what was going on, there was nothing to see. I missed the whole thing, but the photographs my neighbours shared on the street's social media group looked amazing.

Before I went to bed last night, I checked Lancaster University's Aurorawatch UK website and it was still showing a red alert for expected activity, so I went out to see if anything was happening.

Not a sausage.

Don't tell anyone, but the latest version of the FAWM website is up and running for closed testing at the moment. Yesterday I took a break from music making and spent a few hours enjoying myself a lot trying out the site's new features and trying to break things so that everything runs smoothly when FAWM opens for business next week and things get proper serious.

Seriously fun, that is.

If you've taken part in the challenge before (can you write 14 songs in the 28 days of February?) I don't think you'll notice anything that's radically different, but what's going on under the hood should make life a little bit easier for users and moderators alike.

Meta have changed the code for their news feed again, so until Fluff Busting Purity gets updated in response, I've been getting subjected to dozens of "Sponsored" posts. Ugh. I'd forgotten how unpleasant that is.

I've been blocking every account which encourages me to use AI tools as a means to create music or visual art in seconds, and as FB's algorithm is so stupid that it doesn't realise I'm interacting with these accounts solely in order to block them, it's been showing me posts from all the other accounts that have drunk the "I'm a serious artist, look at me make stuff" Kool-Aid so that I can block them, too. It's a win!

(Actually; no, it isn't. I don't think I'll be logging on to FB again for quite a while.)

Having a fully-functional bathroom once again is doing wonders for the amount of reading I get done. We're just three weeks in to the new year, and I've already read and reviewed six books, which means that I'm already 10% of the way towards my annual target of reading 60 books by the end of December.

A few beers in the pub on Friday afternoon seem to have helped sort me out. It's always nice to sit in front of a roaring fire in the snug with a nice pint of Butty Bach or two and catch up with my pals, so that's exactly what I did—although if my fitness tracker is to be believed, I was so overwhelmed by walking in to a crowded pub after spending three weeks alone at home and completely isolated that my pulse skyrocketed to 193 bpm. That's... not really optimal.

I had a decent night's sleep last night. I have resolved to be much more disciplined about my sleep hygiene this week and it appears to be having the desired effect, as I experienced far less perseveration than I usually do (oh, the joys of Autism; believe me, ruminating thoughts are a complete pain in the arse). Soaking in the new bath for an hour or so beforehand and reading about how the brain makes us happy appeared to help, too.

I think I'm going to consult the doc tomorrow, though. Just in case.

I spent a very pleasant Saturday afternoon working on music. That long ambient piece I mentioned last time has gradually evolved into something that's a lot proggier, because of course it did. There's lots of electric guitar on it now, for a start.

The countdown to FAWM continues...

You would have thought that I'd have learned not to say things like "I think I'm okay" by now, wouldn't you?

Nope.

I've been pretty much wiped out since that last blog post. I've been clobbered by c-PTSD stuff and it turns out that the aftereffects of getting COVID at Christmas were not even remotely ready to leave me alone. I've spent most of the last week feeling very sorry for myself and I've been sleeping for up to twenty hours a day. Today I feel a tiny bit better (more than half my sleep last night was NREM sleep, and I haven't done that for a while) and this morning I ventured out to fill the car up with petrol and do a load of shopping at the local branch of Tesco (where I rapidly felt utterly and completely overwhelmed and on the verge of a panic attack; yeah, when I say I'm not well, I mean it). But I've agreed to let the usual suspects drag me off to the pub this afternoon, so I hope they will help me to get back to normal. I have not been having fun.

I need to get better quickly, though. After all, it's nearly February. Yesterday I finally had enough energy to fire up the studio and record something, and I have the bones of a new weird, ambient piece that clocks in at more than six and a half minutes so I won't be completely out of practice once FAWM gets under way again. Just being able to do that has really made me feel better.

This morning, Openreach were running new fibre to the manhole in the street right outside my front door, so it looks like Gigaclear have lost their monopoly on providing full-fibre Internet to the village. So of course I've already checked with my ISP to see what's on offer. If I plumped for the top package that's available, my connection (which at the moment is a none-too-shabby 69 Mbps down and 18 Mbps up) would jump to an estimated download speed of 1625 Mbps and an estimated upload speed of 120 Mbps. Which is insane.

I remember back when when I first moved here in 1995, I was using a 2400 baud dial-up modem to get online. When I started the blog eight years later in 2003, I was still complaining bitterly about the fact that my 56k modem couldn't sustain a v.90 connection. Things got a little bit better in December 2004 when I switched over to ADSL for connecting to the Internet. That was the first time I'd ever had an always-on connection at home, and I'd been online since the beginning of the 90s. "Broadband" was quite a revelation back then, but my connection stayed at around 475 kbps down and 370 kbps up for the next three years. The exchange was upgraded in 2007 and that saw my download speed jump to 1400 kbps, but I didn't see much of an improvement on those speeds until October 2012, when Falfield exchange was added to the 21st Century Network and I started getting 2500 kbps down. My upload speed barely changed, though: it was stuck at a very disappointing 380 kbps. But less than two years later, BT started to install Fibre To The Cabinet in the village and of course I signed up on the spot. This house's FTTC connection was commissioned at the end of October 2014 and there was much rejoicing, but since then my connection speeds haven't changed at all. To have absolutely no improvement in speed whatsoever over a period of twelve years doesn't seem right, does it? Hopefully that's going to change in the very near future—although of course I'll be paying a hefty premium for such a marked improvement.

Look, I maintain terabytes of musical instrument libraries on my studio and mobile recording PCs. I send and receive audio files from all over the world when I'm collaborating with other musicians. It's going to be so worth it.

The Fnatic keyboard into which I managed to empty most of my breakfast latté back on New Year's Eve did not survive the experience, so it has been despatched to recycling Valhalla and I'm still using my old Microsoft Natural 4000 instead. And apart from the fact that it doesn't have a backlight, I've been managing with it just fine.

I haven't rushed into getting a replacement, but that's mainly because I can't find a decent backlit keyboard with Cherry keys that appeals to me. I really don't like the stripped down, minimalist aesthetic that the gaming community (who drive high-end keyboard trends) have glommed on to these days. I'm more of a maximalist. I loathe the way everything is crammed together on the keyboards I've been looking at today. I want a separate line of function keys on the top, please. And a number pad that is visually separate from the rest of the keybed. Is that really too much to ask?

(Apparently it is. Maybe I'll go shopping for vintage gear on eBay.)

I know that only a few days ago I was writing about what a celebratory mood I was in, so this blog entry is probably going to strike you as somewhat irrational. I can't argue with that. Right now, I still feel more positive about my life than I've done for many years. But I know I can't just wish away the fallout from trauma as if it never happened. Its effects have stayed with me for my entire life. Drop being Autistic into the mix as well, and who knows how complicated all this can get? Becoming more enlightened about what's going on inside my head and why it's happening has been an incredible help, but that knowledge isn't going to fix things. The brutal fact of the matter is that a lot of what's wrong with me can't ever be fixed; instead, I have to learn better ways to cope with what's happened to me, accept who I've become as a result, and work at living the best life that I can within those parameters.

This week is always a challenging one for me. The Christmas decorations have been packed away, the visits to friends and family are over, and the cold, dark days of January seem to stretch out forever. Yesterday, I felt like I might be sliding into another bout of full-on depression. My mood was definitely much lower than usual and I couldn't even work up enough enthusiasm to stay awake for an entire day at a stretch. On Monday night the temperature dropped even lower than it had at the weekend, falling to -9°C (16°F) and after that I just couldn't get warm. Even after retreating under the duvet with a book for most of the afternoon on Tuesday, I felt cold and out of sorts. I spent almost all of Wednesday asleep.

But how I'm feeling right now is likely to have a lot to do with catching COVID at Christmas. My recovery is taking me a lot longer than I'd expected, and it has taken me until this week to realise that I'd been brushing it off as being a lot less scary than it actually was. It finally sank in when I looked at my watch's health app for the day:

Physically collapsing, a pulse that had plummeted to 35 bpm and losing consciousness isn't just "feeling a bit flu-ish." I'd been seriously ill, in proper "nearly ended up being carted off in an ambulance" terms. It's bound to have knocked me for six; why would I think otherwise? The sensible response to all of this is that I need to take things easy for quite a while yet. My body has obviously already figured this out, but hooray for mindfulness in helping my brain catch up as well.

One thing I've had to learn over the last seven months or so is that I'm nowhere near as resilient or hardy as I told myself I was, and I have a very limited capacity for coping with day-to-day life these days. After keeping a much closer eye on how I'm feeling (and that has been nowhere near as straightforward as it sounds, as I'll explain in a moment), I've realised that I get overwhelmed very easily, and I think that's probably also part of what's going on at present. Given the news at the moment, I wouldn't be surprised if you told me that you were feeling the same way. But I'm being overwhelmed by all the emotions being stirred up as I put a lot of my c-PTSD, Autism and ADHD puzzle pieces together. I might have made a breakthrough over the past year in finding out so much about what is wrong with me, but that hasn't changed the fact that I'm still a mess. And trying to deal with it all has left me feeling exhausted all the time, because the implications of everything have been hitting me at random, at all hours of the day and night. So I can't see how everything that I'm going through emotionally at the moment wouldn't also be having a significant effect on my physical wellbeing.

But there's another problem (there always is). Keeping track of how I'm feeling ought to be a ludicrously simple task, but it turns out that it's a real challenge for me. When I read the comedian Pierre Novellie's book about being Autistic last month and discovered what alexithymia was, I recognised the condition instantly. I have always had difficulty in identifying and processing the emotions I'm feeling until well after the event. For someone who is experiencing trauma, I can see how that might actually be beneficial, and I know that it's also very common for Autistic people to have it. Some events hit me immediately, because the consequences are right there in front of me and unavoidable; but I think you would be genuinely shocked by the number of things that happened to me in my life that literally took years to affect me. It must have been incredibly hard on Heather to live with me when I wasn't reacting to things which should have left me upset or raging. I also now realise both how much some people took advantage of that, and also how much I suffered from not being able to feel things at the relevant time or process them in the correct context. Remember how I said I felt strangely calm after I'd discovered I was Autistic, all the way back in July last year? Now that I know about the condition, I'm certain that the inappropriate calmness was the alexithymia taking the pain away until I was in a better state to deal with it. Some of the feelings which I've been experiencing this week feel like they ought to be ones that have finally surfaced from last summer. Staying with family gave me a safe place to process them without putting myself at risk, even if those feelings didn't bubble up until after I'd got back home.

I think that in part, those feelings might also explain the extreme reaction that I had to the book by Stephanie Foo which I finished this week. It certainly gave me lots to think about. I'm just not the sort of person who does things like suddenly bursting into tears; it's not an aspect of my personality I recognise, so when it happened a few days ago it really shocked me. Having said that, my reactions are also entirely understandable in the context of the book; Stephanie's story is full of descriptions of things which happened to her that are guaranteed to trigger flashbacks of similarly unpleasant things (severe illness, emotional neglect, and protracted physical and psychological childhood abuse) which happened to me. Even getting COVID at Christmas turns out to have been a trigger.

So that's been my week, and this is the narrative I've come up with in order to make sense of why I've been feeling drained; maudlin, and more than a little bit lost. I now recognise that as being my default, c-PTSD state. I know that the healing process won't happen unless I let all of these emotions come to the surface and deal with them instead of keeping them buried, but it's a completely alien experience for me. And it's also proving to be a very painful one. Am I oversharing with all of this? Of course I am; I freely admit that. But I doing it anyway because I need to get all of this written down. Seeing all of this expressed as text detaches it from most of its emotional impact and that makes it easier to deal with.

As for finding a way forward, Ms. Foo writes about the benefits of reparenting and how it was integral to her healing, but I have not been finding it an easy process, no matter how sensible it seems or how effective it proved for her. In fact, my Autistic brain seems to have rejected it altogether, judging it as a form of play-acting; to me it feels like a way of generating an intentional but very watered-down version of Dissociative Identity Disorder (which is not to denigrate it; both processes happen in order to protect a person who is suffering from an unpleasant or intolerable situation). There's just something about the technique which makes my subconscious yell "False! Make-believe! Not true!" and I'm well aware that this sounds completely irrational, because it is.

It might sound incredibly cheesy (the book manages to avoid descending into schmaltz) but the central message of What My Bones Know is that true healing can only happen through the power of love, and I'm sad to say that that's something which continues to be in very short supply for me. The reparenting approach would be to tell myself that I deserve to be loved, but that rather skips over the problem of where that love is supposed to come from. So right now, I'm focusing on getting lots of rest because that's definitely something that is available to me.

But if you bump in to me socially over the next couple of weeks, please be kind; I'm doing the best that I can to cope, but I'm dealing with a lot of stuff right now.

After the weekend cold snap and snow, Tuesday night brought rain and a gradual thaw, with temperatures back above freezing on Wednesday. But there's a yellow weather warning in place here for tonight and an amber one just to the north of me as Storm Goretti is expected to bring what the Met Office are calling "multiple hazards" to most of the country until noon tomorrow. The warning was updated at lunchtime on Wednesday to include the prospect of heavy snow, so I'm really not that inclined to go outside at all for the next day or so.

Right now, it's just overcast and grey outside. That matches my mood perfectly.

Netbeans 28 was released back in November but I've only just installed it. To be fair, I've had a lot on my plate since then, but I must be feeling a little bit better if I'm back to doing nerdy stuff. At least I didn't end up skipping a release this time, as Netbeans 29 isn't expected to become available until some time after February 15th.

The installation was pretty much a repeat of last time but without the irritation of having to edit the registry to remove previous versions; this update just replaced the existing install (and noticed it was there, so it asked me if I wanted to import my existing plugins, which of course I did). And yes, I updated Notepad++ at the same time so that I could edit netbeans.conf properly. All good.

Depending on how you count things, Twelfth Night is either today or tomorrow, but I've decided that once I've finished updating the blog I'm going to take my decorations down and put everything back in the loft.

What with getting COVID and everything I didn't really get the Christmas that I'd hoped for, but I'm starting this year feeling more positive about my future than I have in a very long time. I think that this is down to what Plato meant about knowing your soul; over the last year I've learned an immense amount about who I am and how my childhood experiences, particularly multiple episodes of deep and prolonged trauma from which I couldn't escape, continue to affect me in ways that I was completely unaware of just twelve months ago. As I wrote in my review of Pierre's book, I used to think that I had unusual and possibly unique patterns of thought (I always knew that they were nothing like those of any of my friends, after all) but now I realise that they are the results of what happened to me and the way my brain is wired. It's not just that the way my mind works isn't even remotely original; my brain's behaviour is so common in people affected by c-PTSD and Autism that it's been described in clinical textbooks. The hoops my mind jumps through even have specific medical names. Most of those patterns of thought are counterproductive. Some of them do a lot of damage.

A big learning point happened for me this Christmas, and it came from reading Stephanie Foo's extraordinary book: it's the realisation that I can't heal myself on my own. I've been trying and failing to do that for more than thirty years, and it hasn't worked. Instead, I need the help of my family and my friends and I feel that at last I have the courage (or at least the confidence) to start asking for that help. I have a lot of work to do if I'm going to escape the feelings of self-loathing and inadequacy that have haunted me for my whole life, but I've finally realised in a meaningful way that I don't deserve the misery I've been wallowing in since I was a child. I don't want that any more. I want something better. I need something better.

I think I've finally recovered from getting sick at Christmas. Last night I stuffed my face with a plate full of pigs in blankets, roast potatoes, and a huge pile of boiled vegetables covered in gravy. It was the largest meal I've eaten in more than a week, and it seems to have done the trick: I had another decent night's sleep and today I feel much more like my old self.

I continue to be very pleased with myself for buying an electric blanket when I did, because the temperature in the back garden dropped down to -8°C (18°F) overnight on Saturday night and it did it again last night. According to my records that's the coldest it's been here since December 2022 when it dropped down to -11°C (12°F). But while the back lawn stayed covered in frost for the whole day on Sunday, that wasn't the case this morning. Instead, when I opened the curtains, things looked rather different outside:

My trail cam picked up next door's tuxedo cat picking its way through the snow at 03:00 last night, but those were the only tracks on the lawn this morning. I suspect everything else was trying to keep warm as best they could. Snow has become a rare occurrence here these days but provided that I don't have to go out in it, it's still a lovely sight. And I have absolutely no intention of going out in it today, thank you very much.

Well, 2026 already seems to be shaping up as one of those years so if you need me, I'll be hunkered down in my studio.

I have really been enjoying the electric blanket which I bought after Christmas and it's been put to plenty of use. Given that the solar panels on my roof are currently exporting more than 2 kW back to the grid, I haven't hesitated to use it, either.

Yesterday when I got up, I picked up my weights for the first time in nearly a month and did a gentle workout with them. After breakfast, I actually had enough energy left over to tackle the pile of ironing that has been sitting on the chair in the living room since I got back home. Getting that out of the way made me feel a lot better. Last night, my watch gave me the highest sleep score that it's recorded since the 10th of December and this morning I walked down to the Co-op and back without any problems at all. I think I might finally be recovering from the illness which has knocked me flat for the last ten days or so.

It's about time. I've been sleeping fourteen to sixteen hours a day and feeling like crap. That exercise might not seem like much to you, but the endorphins it released really made a difference for me.

The Christmas break is nearly over. It's been a time of contemplation and reflection and I've decided that I've got a lot of work to do this year when it comes to figuring out who I want to be in future and how I'm going to get there. If I'm feeling well enough next week, I intend making a start on doing that.

I already know that being a musician will continue to be at the core of who I am. I haven't made any new music for nearly a month and as the countdown to February Album Writing Month intensifies, I need to do something about that.

Writing fourteen songs in twenty-eight days is enough of a challenge as it is without going in to things out of practice and completely cold, so the comment about hiding in my studio I made just now isn't just rhetoric; I need to regain my focus on creative work because even if it wasn't my fault, I've really let things slide recently. Last night in Scott Lawlor's latest listening party, someone asked me if I'd started work on the next album from ICH, and I haven't. I really need to get that under way, too.

I picked up a couple of expansion packs for Superior Drummer during the Christmas sales and those always give me a burst of extra inspiration when I want to write songs in a more "traditional" format. But as last year drew to a close, I found myself particularly enjoying working on ambient music and I think that's what I'm going to focus on over the next few days. My Eventide H90 just got a firmware update that adds four new effect algorithms based on granular synthesis which I need to play with to find out how I can use them to shape my sound. And the Hologram Electronics Microcosm continues to mangle whatever I feed into it in pleasant and surprising ways—and I haven't even started on playing with its microlooper functions yet.

I love making music. The creative process lets me drop into hyperfocus for hours at a stretch, the sounds soothe me, the technology fascinates me and getting it all to do what I want it to do is intensely satisfying; and afterwards I get a real kick out of how hearing how professional-sounding the music I make has become these days. Why wouldn't I want to do this as much as I can physically manage?

Farewell, 2025. Don't let the door hit you on the way out. And hello, 2026. Nice to meet you. What sort of year are you going to be, I wonder? More of the same? Even worse? Or, perhaps—just perhaps—you might find it in your heart to be the year where things start to get better once again? Look at us all: we could really do with a year or two like that, and you know we could. How about it, huh?

I can't say that I have any expectations of the next twelve months at all, let alone any resolutions to make. Even though last year took some truly astonishing twists and turns both good and bad, by the end of it I barely knew who I was any more. 2026 for me is going to be a year of reconstruction and adjustment as I learn more about the authentic self which had been buried for the whole of my adult life as I pretended to be the average, neurotypical guy I thought I was. Now, I finally know that I wasn't kidding anyone other than myself in doing that; what a waste of energy it all was.

I don't think I'm being hyperbolic at all by saying that it felt like I came rather closer to dying on Christmas Day than I'm happy about. Collapsing on the sofa with a pulse of 37 bpm is not the sort of thing you want on your Christmas list, believe me. That has made me take a hard look at the sort of person that I want to be this year. I suspect you're going to see me flying my freak flag rather more openly, although I have no idea at all how that's going to manifest just yet. But if I had to sum up the core belief I want to drive my behaviour, I don't think I could put it any more succinctly than Kurt Vonnegut does in his novel God Bless You, Mr Rosewater when he writes, "Goddammit, you've got to be kind."

But we can get to all that later. For the time being, I have another column started on my blog archive page, and looking at the number of different banner graphics I've got stacked up these days (as I've just done) is intimidating. That is a lot of ink, right there. And I'm on my third scanner since I started drawing graphics for this site, way back in the last century.

As the banner at the top of this page promises, I don't intend to stop writing the blog just yet. And not dying would be good too, obviously.

On the last day of 2024 I'd had a busy and very late night, so my New Year's Day in 2025 was rather muted. This year I still feel very subdued, but the vibe is different.

Just as I'd predicted, by the time 2026 arrived I was fast asleep in bed. I did have a couple of glasses of wine yesterday afternoon and that was the first alcohol I've touched in a week, but I was still very much wiped out from COVID (I'd had a nap after lunch) and to be honest I really didn't feel like celebrating much. 2025 was such a weird and chaotic year and I suspect that 2026 is going to be just as crazy. So I took a couple of long-acting painkillers, fired up the electric blanket while I had a bath, and then toddled off to bed.

...where I was woken up by someone's rather excessive firework display at midnight. Was that really necessary?

I might not have been skiing for many years, and I can't really describe this as a skiing website any more given that the majority of its content is blog entries and pages about music and reading, but I still keep a fond eye on the skiing community.

So the news coming out of Crans-Montana today breaks my heart. I sincerely hope that the injured are able to heal quickly and that the death toll doesn't rise any higher.