The weather has been all over the place this week (I even heard a few rumbles of thunder a couple of days ago) and my mood and energy levels have been fluctuating wildly in sympathy. The last month was much busier than normal for me, and my introvert batteries are very depleted at the moment. That leaves me susceptible to any bug that's going around, and almost inevitably I have now come down with a cold. Worse, my left ear is blocked so not only am I unable to work on music, I'm even finding it unpleasant to just sit and listen to it. The same applies to firing up my home cinema system and watching a movie. And that sucks. At least I got all the tracks from my recent recording sessions mixed and mastered before I went partially deaf.

I'm still feeling very down. I spent most of yesterday in bed. I think I'm just going to chill out at home this weekend. And I'll probably do the same for the rest of the month, to be honest...

I've been banging on about the weakening state of the Sub-Polar Gyre, a.k.a. the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current (AMOC) on this blog for well over a decade at this point and each time I blog about it, it's because the news has gotten worse. As I've explained before, the AMOC has a profound stabilising effect on the planet's weather. Among other things, the AMOC is responsible for the Gulf Stream, which gives the UK its relatively benign climate (compare it with the sort of weather you get in Saint Augustin in Quebec, for example: at 51° 13'N it's a smidge further south than Bristol is at 51° 27'N but the winters there are much, much colder than the ones I get here—on average, they get more than half a metre of snow each January).

Cold salt water is denser than warm seawater, so in northern latitudes it sinks down into the depths of the Atlantic, where it flows south to be warmed in the tropics. Warm water rises to the surface, where ocean currents carry it back north again; it's this circulation of salt water which drives the Gulf Stream, cools the tropics, and keeps northern latitudes warmer than they would otherwise be. The problem is that climate change is making the seas at northern latitudes much warmer, so less salt water is sinking south. The rise in temperatures is also dumping a lot of fresh water (which is less dense than sea water) from Greenland's melting ice sheet into the North Atlantic. As a result, the AMOC has been declining in strength since the 1950s and is now around 15% weaker than it was back then. Scientists know that the AMOC has shut down before, back in the geological past, and concerns were first raised about it doing so again as long ago as 1961.

This week the release of the latest research shows that the collapse is much more likely to happen—and happen sooner—than was previously thought. We are probably much closer to the critical tipping point where it shuts down than anyone should feel comfortable about. It looks like it's already well under way to me, although you'll notice that the news media are being very cagey about suggesting that that might be the case.

Fossil fuel companies have played down how serious it will be if the AMOC does shut down. Of course they have; after all, their products have been chiefly responsible for the emissions that are causing it. Warnings about the consequences of not doing anything about it have gone unheeded so far (because the fossil fuel companies have a vested interest in preserving the status quo) and I doubt that anything is going to change until it's too late and the shutdown actually happens, because that's how capitalism works, kids. Capitalists get annoyed with science when it flags up things going wrong; so, rather than fixing things, the current administration in the United States has adopted a rather novel approach to inconvenient facts by cancelling research on the relevant subject and simply pretending that the problems don't exist; if nobody's watching what's going on, it can't be happening, right?

That's not how reality works, obviously—but that does not appear to be an issue for Mr Trump and his "post-truth" pals.

If the AMOC goes away completely, the planet's climate will change and that's not likely to be good for us. And I'm trying to be calm and not at all alarmist when I say that; unfortunately, discussions of the consequences in the scientific community tend to use rather more evocative words like catastrophic. A disruption of the planet's thermohaline circulation system could result in the release of billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide from the southern oceans, which would dramatically accelerate the rate of climate change. The results of a shutdown are also likely to include a marked cooling effect for winters in the UK with significantly more (and more powerful) winter storms—which I would argue we're already seeing—but also greater extremes of annual temperature with stronger summer heatwaves in southern Europe. Researchers also predict radical changes to rainfall around the globe but particularly in the Amazon rainforest and droughts taking hold in the African Sahel. In an area where geopolitics are already shaky, that's not going to turn out well.

Do you remember when the people in charge used to behave like grown-ups? I miss those days.

There was a quite violent hail storm here at the weekend, the hailstones blown by a strong Westerly and clattering noisily against the kitchen door. Last night, the temperature dropped down to -1°C (30°F) in the back garden. Today, the sun is shining intermittently—right now the roof is generating 4.3 kW—but it's not very warm outside at all. The forecast for the next few days is for heavy showers, with the temperature barely making it into the teens.

But spring is definitely in the air and as I made my coffee this morning I noticed a very fat wood pigeon sitting on the conservatory roof with a twig in its mouth. We made eye contact and it flew off and I didn't think anything more of it, but five minutes later it was back again, still carrying the same twig. So this time I stood still and waited to see what it did.

...which was to flap clumsily into the tall, but rather flimsy Euonymus growing by the garage's back door. And at that point, I noticed that its partner was already sitting in there, at just above head height. They are clearly in the process of building a nest.

As nesting locations go, it's precarious. During the weekend's gales the wind was being funnelled between the house and the garage and the shrub ends up flailing about violently. It's also a quick hop across from the garage roof for any of the neighbourhood's more adventurous cats. But in my experience, wood pigeons are absolutely the most stupid members of the bird kingdom. They're slow and dim-witted and I once saw one get run over by a car that was doing no more than two miles an hour because the pigeon hadn't figured out that that the car was moving faster than it was walking. It could have flown out of the way in a moment and the driver was obviously expecting it to do so, but it didn't, so under the bumper it went with a loud "clonk". I saw another one fly head-on into a van on the motorway and disappear in a cloud of feathers. And judging by the regularity with which little piles of grey feathers appear on my back lawn, they're equally crap at getting out of the way of the local cats and sparrowhawks.

I'll keep you apprised of this pair's progress here in the blog. But I'm warning you now: don't expect this to go well.

I got drawn in to a synthesizer-based mystery a couple of days ago and as any fule kno, those are the best sort. In this toot on Mastodon, user cazabon explained:

In the mid- to late-80s, I used to spend a lot of time in music / #instrument stores (not selling CDs, selling guitars and amps and drums and whatnot). Synthesizer tech was advancing rapidly at this point, with digital starting to overtake analog by leaps and bounds.

At some point, one of the stores got a new #keyboard model in. I can't swear to it, but I think it was either a #Roland or a #Korg. This one had a floppy drive built in, on the side of the #synth. And they had a demo on a floppy disk that was incredible at the time.

It wasn't an official #demo disk. It was a normal consumer floppy, presumably copied far and wide. Hand-Sharpied on it was the name / title "Amin Phone". It was a musical, bright and upbeat piece, rock / pop, maybe 30s long, and included digital samples of a person's voice.

The entire thing was a ridiculous #answering machine outgoing #message. I think there was even a sampled voice at the end taken from someone leaving a message, commenting on it being over-the-top or something.

Reader, my search-engine skills were frustratingly not up to the task. Surprisingly, nor was the collective memory of my synth-nerd friends. But I had faith in the Power of the Fedi and it was well-founded, because sure enough this morning I now know not only that the Amin in question is Amin Bhatia, but also that the demo was commissioned for the Roland S50, and best of all, that Amin's selling an album on Bandcamp which includes the full version of that very demo, which is called Answering Machine Song.

Sometimes, I love the Internet.

After a few days decompressing, this afternoon I'll be back in front of my DAW. I'll be there for the rest of this week, editing and mixing the recording session I engineered and produced at Keynsham last month. It's nice to focus on getting something done in the studio for somebody else for a change and that has also given me a helpful dose of motivation (which I've been struggling to find when I've been working on my own material lately, as you may have noticed).

In listening to the results of these recording sessions, I continue to be delighted with the performance of my Austrian Audio OC818 microphones. They weren't cheap. But they've been worth every penny.

Yes, it's been a while since I last updated the blog. I've had to focus what little energy I had on preserving my mental well-being, which I'd managed to get into an extremely precarious state. By the end of last month I was about as low as I've ever been, experiencing lots of very unpleasant suicidal ideation and wanting to do nothing more taxing than lie in bed all day and sleep. I was, not to put too fine a point on it, a mess. But much to my surprise, leaving Meta's platforms of Facebook and Instagram (which wasn't my decision, but that's a story for another time—probably shortly after the heat death of the Universe) was a turning point.

The greatest help, though, was being asked to get out and about working on other people's music projects. That's what I've been doing for the last three weeks, and it's been glorious. It's had a tremendously positive effect health-wise and it was also a much-needed shot in the arm for my ego. I'm still not out of the woods by any means, but I'm in a much better place than I was and I'm not ready to give up just yet.

The first request I got was from Function 246's singer Michaela, who asked me to run two more recording sessions for the kids at Razzamataz on the last two Saturdays at the end of March. I had great fun setting up my mobile gear, acting both as studio engineer and producer, and capturing them singing numbers from a wide selection of musicals. I've already mixed and mastered the session we recorded at Yate and I'll be working on the results of the Keynsham session next week.

Then over Easter I found myself staying in Melksham in Wiltshire and spending two days as a bona fide session bass player at NAM Studios (which is the studio where K T Tunstall recorded her debut album Eye To The Telescope).

Chris's "Geddy Lee" signature Fender Jazz bass in the control room at NAM Studios, Wiltshire, April 2026.

Jay, Robert Brian, Alan Pinder and Chris, NAM Studios 2026.

It took more than a day for the impostor syndrome to wear off, because I'm me, so of course it did. But when it did finally leave me I had a lot of fun. And very importantly, my client is very happy with what we did (with six tracks in the can!)

My mood has been noticeably better since I got back home. I just need to work on sustaining that, and building on it. It's not going to be easy, but I feel like the foundations I'm using this time are much more solid than they used to be.