I hit a nice milestone today. Since I had solar panels installed, they have now generated 15 MWh of free electricity. I fed that figure into Wolfram Alpha to see if I could get a handle on how much energy that is equivalent to. For a start, I noticed that it's the same amount of energy that you'd get from the total nuclear fission of two-thirds of a gram of uranium-235. More obscurely, it's 6.4 times the total magnetic field energy of all the magnets in the Large Hadron Collider. It translates to 5.4 x 10¹⁰ Joules and according to the EPA, that's saved around 64,307 metric tonnes of CO₂ emissions.

And that makes me happy, given the carbon footprint I used to have back in the late 90s when I was flying across the Atlantic once a fortnight. I'm glad those days are behind me, I really am. I know it's a drop in the ocean compared to the ludicrous energy demands of your typical data centre, but I feel like I'm doing my bit to combat climate change.

I spent a few hours today remixing and mastering tracks I've chosen for my next album release on Bandcamp. I've been doing this sort of thing for quite a while now, and today I noticed that my abilities to spot things in a mix have somehow levelled up again. As far as I'm concerned, this very much proves the point which I was making in my recent post here about putting the hours in if you want to get better at something.

Today, the thing that I spotted was a nasty resonance from the kick drum that I'd used on one track. As the song died away at the end, a booming noise stood out in a way that I'd never noticed before. And when I use the word "noticed" here, I mean that the sound I could hear sounded offensive enough for me to go straight back into the Ableton set, drop an eq on the drums, sweep through the drum submix with that eq soloed until I'd zeroed in on the offending frequency, notch it out, and then completely re-render the track. There was no way I was going to let something as ugly as that get past me. Yet just a couple of years ago, I would never have spotted it until it was too late. It's certainly not because I suddenly have higher-quality gear reproducing sound in my studio. I've had my MOTU 828 audio interface up and running in there since last April and I upgraded to a set of Focal monitors back in September 2022, and after using them for hundreds and hundreds of hours I'm very used to how they sound. Instead, I think what has changed is how my brain is processing the sound I'm hearing.

Noticing resonances in recordings is something that I've only been conscious of during this past year, and seeing professionals pointing out the same thing and notching out stray frequencies in a couple of the sessions at the Real World Masterclass that I went to back in July reinforced that learning nicely. I've been recording music for more than fifty years now. The fact that I'm still learning new things about how it's done is humbling, but it also replenishes my enthusiasm for the art of doing it right. Asking Suno to make a track for you is never, ever going to help you to learn something like that.

I just posted my review of the fiftieth book I've read so far this year. I set myself the goal of reading and reviewing sixty books every year, so with more than a quarter of the year still left to go I'm nicely ahead of my target.

I need to pick up my reading pace, though. The piles of unread books that are lying around the house at the moment are getting out of hand. If I gathered all the piles together into one, the resulting stack would easily be more than a metre high, and that doesn't include a collection of other books which I've squirrelled away on shelves to save for later.

At least since the new bathroom was installed earlier this year I've been able to read in the bath to my heart's content. I've been really enjoying doing so—all the more so knowing that I'm using free energy from the panels on the roof to heat my hot water. Thanks, Eddi!

It's that day again. All ye landlubbers can spend the day tryin' to talk like a pirate with varying degrees of proficiency. And that's all part of the fun.

Arrr!

This week I closed the business banking account that I've had since I started my own business more than a decade ago. I haven't really been using it since the pandemic, and if I'm honest about it I should have finished with it years ago.

And then today I got a letter explaining how I set about claiming my state pension, which will kick in at the beginning of the new year. I've been drawing my BT pension since I hit sixty, but I'm now moving towards being "properly" and fully retired.

I'm still mulling over what "being retired" actually means. Not worrying about having to get a job is a big part of that, obviously. But for a start, I suppose I can't really describe myself as middle-aged any more. Last night it occurred to me that I'm now several years older than the "old hands" whom I used to work with at Bletchley Park back when I was in my twenties. Back then I still thought of myself as being young. Paradoxically I still find myself unable to consider myself as a grown-up, although at least now I have a justification for that because of how neurodivergent I've turned out to be. Closing down my business is an acknowledgement that my working days are finally over, and I can focus on doing things that make me truly happy instead (and that's something which I don't think I would ever say applied to any of the jobs I've had). These days that means making music, of course.

So I decided I'd celebrate by splurging the money that was left in my business account on a couple of items of music gear. The first is a Chroma Console from Hologram Electronics to go with the Microcosm that I bought back in September last year. Like the Microcosm, it's something that's been on my wish list since I first heard about it, and if I had a Microcosm, I needed to get its companion device, right? It's currently winging its way to me and should be delivered on Tuesday. The second new item of gear is a Line 6 HX Stomp which will be added to my bass rig for sessions and gigging so that I don't have to lug my outrageously big guitar pedal board with me each time I go out to play. I've been mulling over getting one for a while now, and when I noticed that they are on sale at 25% off at Thomann this month, it seemed like an opportune moment to take the plunge. It's compact enough that it'll fit in my satchel together with the wireless gear and my IEMs, and it even has a DI out function (using a quarter-inch jack only, sadly—no XLR) that will let me plug straight into a mixing desk. The more I lug gear about, the more I appreciate being able to leave things at home and get by without them.

After any period of intense creative work I always crash to some extent. I've been taking part in FAWM for long enough to recognise that this happens, so I prepare for it. This week, that consisted of plenty of self-care (such as having smashed avocado and smoked bacon on toast for breakfast on Monday and Tuesday, and I almost cried because it was so good). I've also been making sure that I wasn't forcing myself to be productive for the sake of things. After all, I'm retired; I don't have to feel guilty about not getting up to anything these days. On Tuesday morning I really felt like bailing on the idea of doing some gardening which I mentioned in my last blog and I came close to writing the day off completely, but after my morning coffee I decided that I'd make a start, and just see how much I could get done before I felt like calling it a day.

I really surprised myself with how much I got done. Four hours later, I'd mowed the back lawn and cleared roughly half of the out-of-control brambles and unwanted hawthorn saplings out of the biggest flower bed in the back garden. The green wheely bin was full to the brim (in fact, I needed to climb into it to compact the cuttings and clippings down to make more room) and the local robin was excitedly following me around, just out of arm's reach (but only just; he has no fear of me at all these days), looking for anything edible that I'd turned over. The garden still looks a mess, but it doesn't look like the insurmountable jungle that it did last week. Another couple of sessions like that and I should have the garden beaten into shape once again. That felt good.

But I'm not so resilient when I've been climbing up step ladders and waving a large set of hedge trimmers around as I used to be. Ever since Tuesday I've been stumbling slowly around the house like a zombie, and I even had to take some painkillers on Tuesday night because although I spent a good hour soaking in a hot bath, I was still very sore. I can still feel the after effects this morning.

I've just finished my half-hour of "morning sitting" and today the thirty minutes felt like less than half that. Yesterday (and it was actually the middle of the afternoon before I had time to do so, because I had other stuff to do which was a higher priority) I was so tired that I nearly dozed off. I caught myself just as my head slumped forwards. Not once, but twice. I've not done that before, and I've been following the practice for over a month now. This week I've been so tired, I've been sleeping unusually deeply. Last night 57% of my sleep was NREM sleep, which I'm pretty sure is a record for me; back when I was working in my last job, I would have been lucky to make 25% and I was only getting four or five hours' sleep each night. Not any more! My sleep quality score has been in the nineties all week and the last time I got a run of scores like this was way back in April. Thanks to these half-hour sessions, I think my body is beginning to learn how to relax again. And for the rest of this week I'm just going to give it as many opportunities as I can for it to do exactly that. Everything else will have to wait.

As of right now, the total amount of energy I've generated from the solar panels on my roof stands at 14.95 megawatt-hours. It's sunny enough here for the roof to be putting out 3.5 kW, most of which is being used to charge the battery in the garage. I'm still exporting more electricity than I'm using even though the autumn equinox takes place at 01:23 on the 23rd, and my energy account is several hundred pounds in credit, even though I got a very nice refund from my energy supplier a couple of months ago.

I've not felt the need to use the central heating yet this autumn. The overnight temperature in the back garden hasn't dropped below 8°C (46°F) yet and last night the minimum was a very comfortable 13°C (55°F). I'm not going to skimp on keeping warm this winter, but ironically one of the things I do intend doing in a few months' time is getting a portable air-conditioning unit in readiness for next summer. I figure that buying one in the middle of winter will be easier and there'll be fewer problems with availability when nobody else is thinking about such things...

It's warm enough outside that I've got the door into the conservatory open. I can hear a magpie noisily chattering away in the back garden; I put some suet out for the birds yesterday afternoon and the local corvids, particularly the magpies, are enthusiastic consumers of the stuff. I don't mind them muscling in at all, but it does mean that my buddy the robin is no longer serenading me from the euonymus growing next to the garage's back door. He always spots me when I stand at the kitchen sink to do the washing up and comes to say hello, as he clearly recognises me as the person who puts all the food out. When I checked my trail cam recordings earlier (two cats, and one hedgehog having a long drink of water from one of the bowls I leave out on the lawn) the most recent recording was at 06:22 and the camera's microphone had picked him up singing his heart out in what appeared to be pitch darkness (sunrise this morning was at 06:48, and it was raining).

I'm looking forward to next month when the RSPB resumes selling bird seed and peanuts. They suspended sales in May in order to cut down the spread of a nasty disease called trichomonosis which has killed off large numbers of birds in the UK, particularly greenfinches. Putting out suet has changed the mix of birds I get in the garden, and I've noticed more great tits and blue tits visiting the bird table. The local house sparrows have adapted to the suet feeders, and as I've got squirrel-proof ones, the cages keep the starlings from just hoovering up everything. Now that it's autumn, they're already starting to gather in the big flocks that will eventually become murmurations; I looked out of my bedroom studio window last week and counted more than fifty of them lined up on the ridge tiles of the roof of the flats opposite. Recently I have found myself wondering whether there would be quite as many birds around here if I didn't put out all the food that I do. I suspect that there wouldn't be.

After the terrible state it was in last month it was nice to see that the village's cricket pitch was looking much better when I walked to the Co-op this morning.

Back in the green

It rained again last night, and it was trying to drizzle this morning, too. My back lawn might actually get a going over with the lawnmower tomorrow because it's started growing again; I certainly need to do a session of gardening or two to get things into shape before the winter.

The work on the station is coming on nicely, too. I'll post an update on that next month, but preparations to switch Little Bristol Lane back to two-way traffic are under way and the scaffolding for the passenger footbridge work was taken down on Friday.

The FAWM website is back in "comments only" mode now; the latest song writing challenge finished at lunchtime. I ended up writing nine songs in nine days; not quite double the target, but as they're all my typical full production, lots-of-tracks compositions, I think I did very nicely.

The site will go back into hibernation on September 25th but until then you can listen to what I came up with here.

I've been following a discussion on the FAWM forums this morning where people were comparing the songwriting process that they have; whether everything is made from scratch, or if people use loops, or presets, or what have you in order to achieve their creative vision. Lo and behold, somebody who is relatively new to the site shared with the rest of us that they have now gone all-in on using (shudder) AI, specifically a plagiarism machine that's called Suno.

But it was the way they justified doing so that really made me angry. In a reply to a comment on one of their songs, they said they didn't have the time, because "it would take me 5 hours or more to lay down the tracks, sing 243 takes to get it right, and then mix and master."

Well, yeah. That's kind of the point of doing it, isn't it?

Because it's the process of doing that that turns you from a clueless newbie into a seasoned, skilled craftsperson. I could play you songs of mine from 2009 or so when I first started taking part in FAWM and then play you one of my recent pieces, and it would be blindingly obvious which one was which because nearly twenty years of focussed practice and plain old-fashioned hard work has resulted in what, personally speaking, I consider to be a vast improvement in my musical abilities. I'm a better musician today than I ever dreamed I could be back then.

This is why (in my not-so-humble opinion) the fundamental aim of FAWM is what it is: to get people used to the songwriting process by doing it as much as they can for a whole month, so it becomes a habit instead of waiting for the muse to grant you inspiration (and spoiler alert: she seldom shows up—the trick is to just write the song anyway). The more you write, the more experience of writing you will build up. If you're writing for an audience, you learn what sort of thing is likely to resonate with them and really fly, and what sort of thing will just wither and die instead (and it's not easy to learn that one of your favourites is a miss instead of the hit you thought it would be, believe me). You just have to keep plugging away. That's how you become a better songwriter, or musician, or pretty much anything else, in fact. So I can absolutely guarantee that if any person keeps offloading the work they need to do to a machine, they're going to be no better at doing it in five years' time than they are right now. In fact, judging by the rash of papers being published these days, it's highly likely that their abilities will actually have declined (and if you read any of the links there, and don't immediately conclude that you shouldn't touch intelligent agents with a ten-foot pole, it may already be too late for you).

I know I keep banging on about it, but if you want to become good at something, you're going to have to do the work. There aren't any short cuts. And anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to scam you.

Another forum discussion kicked off this week when somebody asked the question "Do you play better when you don't practice?" and at first I just muttered the obvious answer:

No. That's not how it works.

But once I'd stopped rolling my eyes and facepalming, I started thinking about the attitude that's lurking behind that question. I'm not trying to have a go at the person who asked the question in the first place here, because it's very likely that they've not even realised what their subconscious motivation might be in asking it. Yes, it might be that every now and again you seem to get slightly better at something without consciously working at it, just because you're older and wiser than you were the last time you had a go, but that's no substitute for sustained, reflective practice. I analyse and reflect on my musical work obsessively, because I want to get it sounding as good as I possibly can. And I know from experience that the bass riff that sounds like it's impossible to play isn't—provided that you're prepared to sit down with it, pull it apart, and just practice it. Over and over again. Been there, done that. It works. But a lot of people like to put the results of doing this down to magic things like "luck" or "talent" and while each of these things is useful, they're not essential to doing good work (fame and fortune are, as always, a different matter altogether).

Thinking that luck or talent are the deciding factors in achieving mastery is appealing, because it absolves the person who is comparing themself to a more successful artist of any guilt they might otherwise feel about not having practised enough. It can also hide the painfully stark realisation that they could be a lot better at the thing that they're doing right now than they actually are if they'd only put the hours in and done the work back in the past. I think that this is exactly the same thinking that is driving people to use AI tools to turn out slop, because it allows them to think that they're working at the same level. But the results they're getting are not the same, they really aren't. And—for the time being, at least—most listeners can still tell that they're not.

When I sat down to do my regular session of morning sitting earlier, I quickly realised that I was really on edge. I hadn't had a particularly good night; less than a third of it was spent in deep, NREM sleep, as far as my watch could make out. Perhaps it was the fact that the coffee I'd had for breakfast was freshly ground, but I wouldn't have thought it would affect me that strongly.

It took a while, but I eventually managed to calm myself down. I've been working on exercises to improve the fine motor control in my hands, and after sticking at it for more than a fortnight now (what was I saying about doing the work?) I'm starting to see a slight improvement in the movement of my left hand, which is noticeably smoother than it was. Not by a lot yet, but the exercises do seem to be having a positive effect. By the time I'd finished them today, I felt a little more settled.

Emotionally, though, I'm all over the place today. The counselling that I've been going through over the past few months is helping me to deal with the emotions that I've kept bottled up for my whole life, but the feelings of anger, and hurt, and humiliation that keep bubbling to the surface at the moment keep threatening to overwhelm me, and today in particular I've found it very hard to achieve any sort of stable equilibrium. It's all part of the healing process, I know, but some days I wish I could hit the pause button and just have a rest from it all. I'm just too tired. Really tired.

The FAWM song sprint has just over a day left to run. I think I'm going to write something this afternoon, which will take me to nine songs, but I think that will be it for me this month. I'm not going to force myself to make something if I don't feel like I have anything in the tank. And sad to say, I've been feeling that I wasn't far from reaching that state for the last couple of days. I've inspired myself by taking the unusual step of finding a loop in Kontakt and using that as a jumping-off point rather than my usual process which involves programming drums in Superior Drummer 3. It's enabled me to get results that sound radically different to my usual stuff, which is good—but I've never been the sort of musician who feels entirely comfortable with using loops, even when they're loops of me playing one of my own instruments.

Yesterday I found myself thinking that I was glad the challenge was to come up with five songs in nine days rather than back in the good old days when we all attempted to write fifty songs in ninety days. I'm pretty sure I couldn't have managed that this summer. The site's already pretty quiet, apart from the regular influx of Indian spammers creating accounts to boost their (obviously extremely gullible) clients' SEO rankings. I've left 80 comments on other people's work so far and I've set myself a goal of leaving 100 comments by the time submissions stop at 13:00 BST tomorrow afternoon.

But I've done some good work this week, at least as far as my internal standards are concerned. I've been entertaining myself trying to write stuff that's funny, and people seem to have got what I was getting at and comments show that they've appreciated the humour in the lyrics. The site will be open until the 25th, after which everything goes back into hibernation until the main FAWM challenge starts again next February. By then I hope my reservoir of creative juices will be topped up nicely.

Yesterday afternoon I uploaded a song called Hidden Consciousness to the FAWM website, and that makes five tracks I've written and recorded since the challenge started on Saturday. So with almost half the challenge still to run, I've already hit the target. It feels like I've got plenty left in the tank as well, so I will be heading back to my bedroom studio later today to work on song number six.

For track number five I decided that I was going to use some of the many instruments which I've collected over the years which run in Native Instruments' venerable old sampling engine, Kontakt. I have the full version of Kontakt, not just the free player that has rather restricted functionality, and I've bought some very useful premium packs for it over the years such as the Pripyat Pianos from Strix Instruments, which you can hear on my latest recording. I've also gathered lots of free instruments, because there's a thriving community of people making sounds for it and most of them do so just for the fun of doing so.

Okay, when I typed "lots" just then, that doesn't really convey just how enthusiastically I've embraced collecting quirky, free instruments from providers scattered around the globe; I happened to notice how many sounds I'd got available yesterday, and it was rather more than I thought I had: the browser had found 25,873 individual .nki files.

I should be able to find something else in there to inspire me, right?

Making music is helping to take my mind off other things at the moment. I've noticed a general improvement in my mood over the past week or so and having people say nice things about the work I'm doing always lifts my spirits. Some of the comments I've received this week have made me very happy.

I think that for next month's Bandcamp Friday I'm going to release an album of my favourite songs from this summer's song sprints. I won't dump everything out there; not all of the stuff I've produced since June is worthy of a release, but the song I recorded yesterday deserves to remain available after the FAWM website goes back into hibernation before the end of the month, and so do many of its fellows—at least as far as I'm concerned, anyway.

Listening back to my recent work on headphones last night, I noticed that a few tracks could benefit from remixing as well as some very minor touching up. Most of them took less than four hours to make from start to finish, after all; the focus is on getting the songs finished, but not necessarily radio-ready (although because I'm me, I do try to get them as close to that state as I can in a single session). But I should have plenty of time to do the necessary polishing before the end of the month. And it's long past time that the album in the page header here got a refresh, too. It's been there since April. For someone as prolific as I usually am, that feels like an eternity...

I'm sticking with Robert Fripp's practice of morning sitting which I started last month. I've been fascinated by how variable the experience is. On some days I float gently through the half-hour with a Zen-like calm so that it feels like I've been still for less than five minutes but on others, like this morning, I struggle to find any equilibrium at all. I sit there with my nerves jangling, I can't still the inner voices, and when I perform Mr Fripp's "body scan" I realise how jittery I am. The difference in the ease with which I can make small deliberate movements with the fingers of my left and right hands is scary. The right is relatively smooth and I feel like I'm in charge; the left hand seems to have a lot of glitches in it, particularly when I'm moving the second, third and fourth fingers. My fine motor control is abysmal and they spasm and jerk violently in a way that completely overwhelms the movements that I intended to make. This is nothing new; I've had a persistent tremor in that hand for more than thirty years now. It's only since I realised that I'm Autistic that I have figured out that it's probably one of the many symptoms of the condition, or at least the result of the non-standard way in which my brain is wired. Well, that, or the PTSD. No wonder I've always struggled with playing fast licks on the guitar.

I've mentioned before that stimulants seem to have the opposite effect on me compared to normal people. Perhaps I should have waited for my breakfast coffee to kick in before I sat down this morning. I had a rough night last night, and I'm really feeling the effects of not getting enough sleep today. I'm still laying off the painkillers and toughing out the aches and pains, and last night was a bit of an ordeal. But I've been feeling unsettled for the whole month so far. The world is in such a mess at the moment that it's difficult to pin down any one thing as the root cause.

I think I'm going to stay away from the news media entirely today. The antics of the far-right are doing nothing for my peace of mind. I keep telling myself that the grown-ups will be along soon to sort everything out, but each time someone promising arrives on the scene, they soon show themselves up as being just as hopeless as their predecessors. Yes, I'm looking right at you, Prime Minister.

The FAWM song sprint has been running for less than two days as I write this but I've already got two songs posted on my profile page there. I'm quite pleased with how they turned out, although neither of them ended up anywhere close to my intentions when I fired up Ableton and created a new set. That's part of the fun of songwriting for me. I have lost count of the number of times that a song has suddenly and very decisively set off in a completely different direction to the one I had planned. Quite a few of my fellow fawmers have been talking about songs having minds of their own in our Slack channel, and I totally get what they mean.

I'm going to spend the rest of the day working on song number three. But first, I need to update some more of my plugins, which helpfully told me yesterday that new versions were available to download.

The FAWM website will let people post their contributions to this month's Song Sprint from 1 pm BST this afternoon, and as soon as I've posted this blog entry I'll be heading into my home studio to see what I can come up with. Yesterday I made sure that all my gear was running smoothly but although I updated Kontakt 8 to its latest version, I managed to resist the temptation to install Audacity 4 (and my goodness, that's a terrible web page).

August was a quiet month for me, creatively speaking. I've spent most of the last six weeks working on other things—not that I'm complaining about that at all; I was doing stuff for other people, and I'm very grateful to have been asked to do so. But as I noted last month, as of late it feels like my muse has been neglecting me. I'm hoping that if I just assume she's going to show up later today, that's exactly what she'll do.

But even if she doesn't, I'll just carry on and do the work regardless. Because it turns out that this is actually the trick to getting creative work done (and not just when a deadline is involved, either). It's the reason why I've ended up recording more than 1500 pieces of music since I first signed up for February Album Writing Month back in 2009. You have to do the work.

I seem to have had a really good night's sleep again. My fitness app tells me my resting heart rate dropped to 48 bpm and I slept all the way through the night. As a result, my "sleep score" this morning was a very satisfactory 98.

I think there are a number of reasons why I managed to do this besides keeping the bedroom windows closed, which I mentioned below. The most obvious one is that I've not been drinking alcohol this week. Normally I'd have opened a bottle of wine on a Friday evening and slobbed out in front of the TV but yesterday I'd switched to a glass of cranberry juice and read books. Another recent change to my lifestyle is giving up my Friday night pizza (yes, I know, it's really sad and I'm grateful for your sympathy). Last night I had a much healthier stir fry instead, heavy on the vegetables (bamboo shoots and water chestnuts) with a few pieces of chicken. I'm still avoiding taking painkillers as well; that's more of a challenge, as after half an hour of practising bass yesterday, I'm pretty sore this morning.

But when I stood on the scales this morning and discovering that I'd continued my streak of losing weight rather than putting some of it back on again, it was a very nice surprise. Am I feeling the benefits of all this? Well, not so much.

The FAWM website is open for business again and beginning on Saturday, I will be attempting to write five brand new songs in nine days for the latest Song Sprint. As this one starts on 9/5 (at least, it does if you live in the United States) we're calling this one the Dolly Sprint as a small tribute; the site has been bedecked with butterflies and purple. And as far as advice for all budding songwriters goes, I can't think of anything better than that from Dolly herself: "Find who you are. And do it on purpose."

It's Bandcamp Friday again tomorrow. I'd toyed with the idea of putting together a new release for it, because it's been quite a while since I updated my discography there, but this week I just haven't had enough spoons available. Next week will be a good opportunity to write some new material for one or other of the projects I'm working on at the moment. They're progressing slowly, but they are progressing.

But for now I'll have to wait until the next Bandcamp Friday. Which is next month, I believe.

The physics world is buzzing this week after UCSB (the University of California in Santa Barbara) reported an intriguing interaction in their LUX-ZEPLIN detector which suggests that they may have detected a WIMP for the first time. The Large Underground Xenon - ZonEd Proportional scintillation in LIquid Noble gases experiment (LZ for short) is basically a giant bucket containing seven metric tonnes of incredibly pure liquid xenon, lined with photoelectric detectors which pick up the light emitted when something with a lot of energy enters the detector, hits a xenon atom, and interacts with it, releasing a photon. LZ has been been finely tuned to detect interactions with theoretical objects called Weakly Interacting Massive Particles or WIMPS, which are one of the prime candidates for explaining dark matter, an invisible something which makes up roughly 27% of everything in the Universe that has never been directly observed before (that's why it's dark). The stuff that we can see, which you and I are made of, makes up just 5% of the total mass/energy in the Universe. It's called baryonic matter because its principal constituents are baryons like protons and neutrons, which are both made up of subatomic particles called quarks. Things like electrons and neutrinos, which aren't made of quarks, are called leptons; they are much lighter but they're still observable to current science. (Yes, physics is complicated.)

Galaxies spin, and they spin so fast that if they were only made with regular matter, they'd fly apart. The gravity from something that has a lot of mass but which is invisible must be holding them together. There are also accumulations of matter of some sort out there which are so massive that their gravity bends light from things like galaxies that are behind them. Again, we can't actually see what it is that does this; it doesn't interact with light and is therefore invisible. That's dark matter.

Up until the closing years of the last century, cosmologists thought that gravity would be slowing down the expansion of the Universe which resulted from the Big Bang, but they were rather surprised to discover from observations of distant galaxies that the opposite was true; the expansion is actually accelerating. Dark energy is the best theory available at the moment that explains this. It's just as mysterious as dark matter, and it's thought to make up the remaining 62% of everything there is. Cosmology is weird.

Dark matter and dark energy explain the way that the Universe behaves in a way that can't be accounted for if the baryonic matter we can see is all there is. A single detection isn't going to change physics overnight, of course; more data is required before what just happened is accepted as evidence that WIMPs are real (right now, the result has a statistical significance of 2.6 sigma, meaning that there's about a 0.5% chance that it's just a fluke of background noise. Remember when the discovery of the Higgs Boson was announced, back in the day; science requires a 5 sigma result for something like this to be accepted as fact). But it's certainly a very interesting announcement.

When I woke up on Wednesday morning I was rather surprised to discover that it was after eight o'clock. I'd slept right through the night, and according to my watch my resting heart rate dropped down to 47 bpm in the small hours of the morning. I was really out for the count. Last night my pulse dropped to 51 bpm, and I didn't feel quite as groggy when I woke up, but I was still very grateful for my breakfast coffee.

What's made the difference to the quality of the sleep I'm getting seems to be keeping my bedroom windows closed. I'm pretty sure that what was waking me up was my neighbours setting off for work, although the fact that during the summer it gets light here by five in the morning certainly didn't help matters. Now that it's autumn, it doesn't get light until six. The weather's cooled down too, so it's not been necessary to keep the windows open and last night I didn't even have the bedroom fan running.

I've also noticed the benefits of not taking any painkillers since the weekend. I hadn't been taking them every day, but they were beginning to be a habit, and that's really not good for you. I've still got aches and pains, but they're manageable. It's all part of the joys of getting old, I guess. Given the alternative, I'm fine with that.

Today is the first day of meteorological autumn. The summer's dry spell seems to be over for the moment, and the village got quite a bit of rain at the weekend. As we were heading over to Sunday's gig, my buddy Paul (who is the band's guitarist) asked me, "why does the air smell so nice when it rains?" and because I'm me, I was able to answer him with a single word: petrichor.

Actually, if I'd wanted to be scientifically accurate I'd have added a second word: geosmin, or (if you want to be really hip and get down with the chemistry kids) C₁₂H₂₂O. It's one of a family of aromatic oils called terpenoids and this particular substance is created in nature by a number of soil microbes but particularly a family called Streptomyces. A few years ago it was discovered that they do so in order to attract a species of invertebrates called springtails so that they will feed on them and distribute their spores.

Most humans love the smell and can detect it in concentrations as low as a few parts per trillion. As that first link notes, this is probably because finding sources of water by smell likely conferred a big evolutionary advantage (because you don't die of thirst). All the same, you wouldn't want it in your drinking water because it makes it taste of dirt and so most water treatment plants use carbon filtration in order to remove it.

Science, eh? All that, just from us smelling the air after a storm.

After a busy weekend (by my standards, anyway) I appear to be completely knackered. It was after ten before I managed to drag myself out of bed this morning and I'm really looking forward to my breakfast coffee (as I type this, I'm just waiting for the machine to heat up but as soon as I hear the noise it makes when it's ready, believe me when I say that the blog will immediately have to concede priority—ah, there it goes. I'll be right back.)

Even without painkillers (I'm going without them for a week, to see if I still can) I fell asleep unusually quickly last night. In fact I went out like a light. I still woke up at half-past five this morning for some reason, but after lying awake for for a half hour or so I managed to fall asleep again. And when I woke up again at 07:30 and told myself "I'll just close my eyes for another five minutes" I nodded off again for another good three-quarters of an hour.

Twice.

My watch therefore awarded me a very generous score of 97 this morning which should indicate a relaxed and restorative night. It doesn't feel like that's what I got at all. I'm still sore, although not as bad as I felt yesterday and I can still move about; the pain's not affecting my mobility very much, thank goodness. I think the tiredness is actually more of a neurodivergent thing than a physical thing. Spending a couple of evenings over the weekend in rooms that were full of people pushed me well outside what I've come to think of as my comfort zone, even if I was able to wear earplugs and focus on the job I was doing, of making the band sound as good as I possibly can. I need a few days to recharge after days like that because the older I get, the more I find them to be overwhelming. And I know that there's also an emotional side to how I'm feeling at the moment. After the highs of July's stay at Real World, a week hanging out with Helen last month, and celebrating my birthday, I've spent most of the last couple of weeks here at home on my own, decompressing.

Much as I love having company, I've realised that too much of it isn't good for me. After a while I stop being able to handle the additional stimulation and the TILT indicator in my brain will light up until I can spend some time on my own. The good news is that these days I know it's about to happen before it does so, and I can do something about it to limit how severely I shut down. The bad news is that needing to do so puts a lot of stress on a relationship and I think it's one of the main reasons why I've lived on my own for the past twenty years. Although I love all the abilities that my weirdly wired brain gives me, there are times when leading a rather more cosily "normal" home life sounds like it would be really nice. The sad thing is that I no longer think I'll ever have much chance of finding out what that would be like.