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In a fitting conclusion to a chaotic year, this morning I managed to tip my breakfast coffee into the keyboard on my office computer. Latté went everywhere and I've only just finished clearing it up. I don't know whether the keyboard has survived or not; I'll leave it to dry out for a week or two in the airing cupboard before I think about reconnecting it, but I've been a computer geek for a very long time and I had plenty of spare USB keyboards lying around the house which I could swap it out for. So let's say hello again to my venerable old Microsoft Natural 4000 ergonomic keyboard, which appears to be going for ridiculous sums of money these days, at least as far as that web link is concerned. It isn't backlit and it's been so well-used that the surface of the space bar has been worn to a gloss finish, but it still works fine.
It's also free of the horrid "soft touch" finish that the Fnatic keyboard which I just trashed was covered with. That's one reason why I won't be particularly put out if it's permanently defunct. The stuff degrades into a sticky mess that attracts dust like nobody's business and the only way to clean it is to wipe it off with a rag that has been soaked in isopropyl alcohol (see also my Mk. 1 Ableton Push). The keys on this keyboard aren't Cherry keys and they require noticeably more pressure to operate, but as a result my typing has become slower and much less prone to typos.
And the surface of my desk is a lot cleaner.
We're in a bit of a cold snap today. It was foggy and still well below freezing when I got up and the temperature had dropped down to -5°C (which is 23°F) here last night. Right now (just after lunchtime) I think it's even foggier than it was when I opened the curtains.
Much to my surprise my phone had a yellow warning of snow and ice nearby on Friday waiting for me when I picked it up. Even without the weather to contend with, I wasn't planning on going anywhere at all for the next couple of days. I'm still isolating at home with COVID and I still don't feel like I've recovered, so I think the decision to bail on tonight's gig at the Town Hall was the right one. I might not be sleeping for fourteen hours a day any more, but I'm still considering taking a nap this afternoon. And somehow I very much doubt that I'll bother staying up tonight to see in 2026.
If I'm honest, I don't hold out much hope for the new year. The global situation continues to deteriorate and it becomes ever more obvious that the reason the world's ultra-rich got to be the way they are has nothing to do with philanthropy, empathy, or a wish to improve the lot of humanity as a whole. Or even that they're particularly intelligent. The secret of success, it turns out, is mummy and daddy's money and a spectacular amount of privilege. Oh, and a sociopathic need to assert their dominance, even as it makes them appear more and more pathetic.
Personally speaking, all I plan on doing is making more music in an attempt to make life better for people. And that's a valid goal, even when the total number of people who listen to it on a regular basis is barely in three figures, because I do this largely for my own amusement and as a means of healing myself as much as anyone else.
"Being in less pain" would be a nice resolution if I thought it was practical, though.
I've been away again; I drove over to my sister's place in Norfolk on Tuesday afternoon. It was a bit of a slog, as I found myself sitting at a standstill on the M5 several times. In the end, it took me just over five-and-a-half hours to get to her house, which included a stop in Huntingdon to fill the car up with petrol and a brief sojurn in Fakenham to set up the satnav so that it could take me directly to my destination where I planned to spend a few days staying with Annabelle, Ed, their daughter Zoë, and Pippin the very boisterous Labrador.
Christmas Eve was lovely; we sat around all day talking and drinking copious quantities of tea. Ed and I took Pippin out for a walk in the countryside around their place, and Pippin managed to flush out a roe deer, a wren, several extremely annoyed blackbirds, and lots and lots of woodpigeons as the sun set and darkness descended. While I was there the weather was wonderful. The nights were all clear and very cold, although as you'll see in a moment I didn't really get much opportunity for star gazing. And much to my annoyance, I'd forgotten to bring my binoculars with me.
We had salmon risotto for tea followed by home-made mince pies, and it was lovely to just sit and chat with them all—this was the first time I'd seen Annabelle for several years and we had lots of catching up to do. The plan was that I would stay with them all until the weekend, at which point I would head back home for a few days of decompressing before doing front of house sound for Function 246 at Chipping Sodbury Town Hall once again on New Year's Eve. But my plans had to be revised, because when I woke up on Christmas Day I felt like like I was having the worst case of indigestion I've ever had. Ed's risotto had had kale in it, and my first thought was that this was what was responsible (I've had one or two previous reactions to the stuff which ended up with me being violently sick, but the last time that happened was more than twenty years ago). As the day wore on, I began to realise that whatever was going on with me was quite a bit more serious than food poisoning. You've probably already figured it out: after my adventures in London the previous weekend, I'd managed (perhaps inevitably) to come down with a festive dose of COVID.
I realised this after opening presents and eating a lovely Christmas dinner, because I pretty much collapsed and spent the late afternoon curled up in a ball on the sofa. There's a weird state that exists beyond simply feeling ill where you don't feel anything any more, and your body shuts down anything which it doesn't think is essential, like socialising, or talking, or even thinking. I couldn't think straight enough to realise that I was in serious trouble. Instead, I spent the next couple of hours completely dissociating. Eventually I got so uncomfortable on the sofa that I decided to try and get some sleep in the log cabin. I passed out almost as soon as my head hit the pillow but just before I did, I remember thinking that my resting heart rate felt weirdly, ridiculously low—but even though I knew this wasn't good at all, I was much too far gone to do anything about it.
I woke up at three in the morning. I was very grateful that the bed was fitted with an electric blanket, and in any other circumstances it would have been utter bliss but my hips ached, I felt sick, I was exhausted, and I didn't have any spoons left. I stumbled outside to have a wee (it was the small hours of the morning, so I didn't want to walk over to the house and have Pippin wake everyone up) and the temperature out there was just above freezing. That woke me up very quickly. I scurried back to the electric blanket as soon as I could, but getting back to sleep turned out to be impossible.
That was one of the most unpleasant and uncomfortable nights I've had for a very long time. But I got away with it. I'm not sure how; when my watch synced with the app on my phone the following morning, I was shocked to discover that at one point during the previous twelve hours my pulse had dropped to just 37 bpm. That's really not good. No wonder I felt like crap.
As I ate breakfast in Annabelle's kitchen on Boxing Day I realised that the indigestion had mostly disappeared. I still felt terrible and not at all festive, but at least I was back on my feet; Annabelle told me how relieved she and Ed were, as they'd been very concerned about the way I'd keeled over. "You weren't you," she said, and she was right. Even after some toast and a large mug of tea I wasn't up to doing anything very much beyond slobbing out on the sofa and watching a couple of episodes of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds on one of the streaming services—which was a perfect restorative for me, because I'm a massive nerd. Ed did some cooking, and Annabelle and Zoë headed off to a local pub with Pippin to watch some of their friends doing some mumming and morris dancing, which I would have really liked to see but obviously that wouldn't have been a very good idea. When they got back we had another lovely meal of leftover turkey with all the trimmings and this time I was able to enjoy myself a bit. We had a long discussion of things Autistic over mince pies and large mugs of tea, and it was lovely; just the sort of Christmas I'd hoped for (apart from the COVID, of course). I even felt like I was beginning to make sense of aspects of my life that have always confused and upset me. It turns out that a lot of them are very much part of the Autistic experience, not just me going mad.
But I knew Annabelle's son Ché and his partner were planning to visit them at the weekend, and she is immunocompromised—so having someone with COVID in the house was not a good idea at all. Much though I would have loved to have seen them both, I had no intention of giving them the virus, so that evening I loaded my stuff back into the car and drove home. I had a decent trip and found myself following the crescent Moon for most of the way as it slowly sank in the West. I was back here in the village by 00:30, so the return trip was a whole hour shorter. (This is why I much prefer to drive anywhere at night, folks; well, that and the fact that I saw rather more wildlife than you get to see during the day. Bunnies!)
The house had felt chilly when I first got home, but after I'd blipped the heating on for an hour while I had a bath, it was warm enough. Even though I was back in my own bed and utterly wiped out, I didn't manage to fall asleep until 03:00. I managed to get about seven hours sleep in, which wasn't terrible but it didn't feel like it had done me much good. Nevertheless, by the time I got up on Saturday I was feeling more like I'd come down with a bad dose of flu instead of feeling like I'd just been run over by a steamroller. Robin, the band's bass player, dropped off a sliced loaf, some milk, and some of his wife's home-made soup, bless him, so I didn't need to head out anywhere (and the soup was delicious). After breakfast I went into full creature comforts mode with the gas fire and the central heating both running, so the house was soon nice and toasty once again. Having said that, it wasn't long on Saturday afternoon before I'd retreated back under the duvet. I fell asleep almost immediately and slept for another couple of hours.
When I woke up again, I was sore and groggy. At this point I realised I wasn't going to be bouncing back to health anywhere near as quickly as I'd hoped. I was still very poorly; I'd been clobbered, and it didn't look like I was going to be getting better any time this week. That meant I needed to let the band know that I wouldn't be able to make their New Year's Eve gig. It's a drag, as I'd really enjoyed doing last year's NYE show at the Town Hall—but I didn't want to tell the band I would be fine and then have to bail at the very last moment and leave them in the lurch, and I certainly didn't want to turn the gig into a superspreader event. Fortunately they've managed to find someone who can stand in for me, which is a great relief. I just hope he's not quite as good at live sound as I am!
I spent Saturday evening listening to Internet radio stations playing ambient music quietly and reading one of the books I'd got for Christmas. Oh, and I commissioned the underfloor heating system in the bathroom for good measure, too. The tiled floor felt very toasty after I'd had a long soak in the bath. But I didn't stay up late and when I went back to bed on Saturday night, I ended up sleeping for fourteen hours.
Did I mention how hard this has hit me?
What day is it? Oh yeah, Tuesday.
I've been isolating at home since Saturday but I had to look on the calendar to check this because, as is traditional over the festive season, I have completely lost track of time. Getting COVID again has only made things worse but it has also meant that, unusually for me, I haven't consumed any alcohol at all since Christmas Day, and since Christmas Eve I've somehow lost more than three pounds in weight. Who on Earth manages to do that over Christmas, for goodness' sake?
It's been a weird week.
I feel better today than I did on Christmas Day but I'm still feeling very under the weather. This morning I masked up and ventured out to the Co-op for a few supplies, but by the time I'd walked home again I felt very wobbly. I think my agenda for the rest of this week isn't going to stretch beyond doing lots of reading and listening to ambient music. Right now, a US station which I've found that's called Culture Failure is playing a mix of tracks by Bola, Four Tet, and Boards of Canada and that's exactly the vibe I'm looking for this morning while I eat my croissant and drink a large latté flavoured with some chilli oil that my sister gave me...
One thing I managed to do at the weekend was order an electric blanket for my bed. I didn't expect such a thing to help the quality of my sleep and relieve my joint pain quite as much as the one at Annabelle's did, so getting one for myself was a no-brainer. It should be delivered this afternoon.
Other than that, I'm going to be leaning very heavily into a protracted chilling-out and recuperation session for the next few days.
Since I got back home I've hardly watched any television at all. When I have turned on the TV, I've ended up switching it off again in disgust a few minutes later because I couldn't find anything engaging to watch. UK television these days is mostly adverts, interspersed with programmes made as cheaply as possible, and it shows: the vast majority of them are utter garbage.
I've been really surprised by how much my stress levels have dropped now that I barely watch television any more. I shouldn't be; I discovered yesterday that, much to the TV companies' alarm, Gen-Z abandoned broadcast television a while ago and good for them.
I got back last night from a weekend in London. I'd been to see this year's Nine Lessons and Carols for Curious People show at Kings Place, presented by Joanna Neary, Robin Ince, and the rest of the lovely Cosmic Shambles team. There was plenty of science (2025 marks the centenary of quantum physics, for one thing) and some wonderful music, too. I've been going to these events for so long now that I spotted friends from previous shows in the audience, which was an unexpected delight. My pal Robert said he recognised me just from the back of my head, as he was sitting directly behind me. Since I started shaving my head back in the 90s I've often been told that the shape of my head is rather distinctive (and big) and I guess as a result of that I'm easy to spot (you can try it for yourself if you want). Even though the Victorian craze for phrenology has long been debunked and you can't tell anything about the brain from the shape of the skull that surrounds it, I still find myself wondering whether the shape of my head might be an Autistic trait—but that's a subject for an entirely different conversation...
Joanna Neary was great. Her Bjork routine in particular always reduces me to a fit of helpless giggling. She compèred the first section of the show because, as Trent told us in as exasperated a tone as he could muster when he introduced her, Robin had somehow managed to double-book himself and was appearing at two separate shows on opposite sides of London that night, but when he did arrive he was on top form:
Afterwards I ended up chatting and drinking with Robin, Trent, Melinda and their friends until one in the morning and catching up with their news, much of it astonishing.
The night was, as it always is, one of the highlights of my year. I had an amazing time; hanging out with these people is more intellectually stimulating than drinking four double espressos and then plugging your brain into an electrical socket. And the subjects of conversation brought joy to my nerdy, Autistic heart as they covered everything from The Dark Crystal and Aardman Animation's contribution to the Star Wars Visions series to Brent (Commander Data) Spiner's penchant for performing show tunes, as well as taking in neurodivergent thinking, dogs, tea, curry, concussion, and (of course) music. Trent has been working hard on an epic documentary series about music recently (even though, as Melinda said to me, he's not a musician himself) and the trailer for the series, which was shown for the first time at Kings Place, looks amazing.
I didn't want to leave. So I missed the last train home; by the time I got to London Bridge, the entire station was locked up tight, and I didn't realise that ever happened. I had to find a different way home and that turned out to be quite an adventure, as the journey took in the sights of Greenwich, Deptford High Street, Lewisham, and Bromley, all of which were still remarkably busy at three o'clock on a Sunday morning; you don't get that round here, that's for sure. By the time I got off the N199 night bus at Orpington Station and walked the rest of the way to my brother's house, I'd covered more than twelve miles on foot since getting up (and since midnight I'd done 14,000 steps which is double my daily target). I was tired, but I was also absolutely buzzing; I didn't get to sleep until half-past five on Sunday morning.
But it was totally worth it.
Aside from the communal dining at Real World, the last time I sat down to eat breakfast with more than one other person was back in February 2023. On Sunday morning Dave and Cathy had a house full of people and we all had a full English breakfast together at their dining room table. It was lovely to just sit and listen to what everyone had been up to since I last saw them, too long ago.
And while we talked, Fergus the Cavapoo kept a wary eye on goings-on in the back garden and barked at anything which he felt we ought to know about (which was mainly squirrels). He rather likes sitting next to me and having his tummy scratched, but that might just have been because I was closest to the baking tray of sausages on the dining table.
There were plenty of birds in their garden, too. Lots of corvids, blue tits and great tits, as well as some more exotic fare: Parakeets have been flying freely around South London's suburbs since the 1970s, but seeing them perched in the branches of a tree outside the window never gets old.
Unlike last year, when I had absolutely no social life to speak of and therefore managed to write consecutive blog entries for Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and Boxing Day, the only occasion on which I've ever done so since I started writing the blog back in 2003, I'm going to give the blog a break for Christmas.
This year, I have other things to do. I also feel that I need to take some time to reflect on what's happened to me in the past twelve months. There's been a lot of stuff to deal with, after all.
I'll resume the blog before the end of the year but if you celebrate Christmas, I will wish you the very merriest of festive seasons and I hope that you have plenty of reasons to celebrate.
It was foggy here last night and the temperature outside was well below freezing. This morning is a typically dreich December day: a band of rain has moved in and it's dull and drizzling. Not only do I intend not leaving the house, I've nothing at all planned for the rest of the day, and that is intentional.
As you'll see below, I'm trying to get better at looking after myself, because I've not really been very effective at doing that so far this year. I realised at the weekend that I'm pretty much running on fumes right now.
I got incredibly stressed out doing front of house sound at the gig in Bristol city centre on Saturday night when the PA suddenly decided to mute itself and I couldn't get it to come back. I still have no idea what I did, but I eventually got everything back online with five minutes to spare and nobody else noticed what had happened. It took most of the first set before I'd managed to calm down.
But the band played an absolute blinder, the crowd were totally up for a good time (they danced to—and even cheered—the sound check!) and the client was absolutely delighted with how the evening went.
You might think that sitting in the corner sliding virtual faders up and down on a tablet wouldn't be particularly hard work, but when I got home in the small hours of Sunday morning I felt drained. I was completely wiped out for the whole of Sunday.
I'm still waiting for a few things to be finished off in the bathroom (which won't happen until the new year), but the skip that the fitters were using was collected from the drive yesterday afternoon, so last night I was able to put my car back in the garage for the first time since the end of last month and Matthew (who had very kindly let me park in front of his house) has got his drive to himself once again. I honestly hadn't realised just how much I was stressing out about this until it wasn't an issue any more. I really hate having to impose on anyone. I think it's because I was brought up to believe that I didn't have the right to ask for favours like that; that asking for help was weak; that I needed to be entirely self-sufficient. Even the most cursory examination of my life over the last twenty years or so will amply prove that that hasn't exactly worked out for me...
I've been blogging a lot about my mental health recently because I find that the practice of writing stuff down like this really helps me to put my thoughts into a more coherent state. You might think that this is an Autistic drive for oversharing, but I disagree. I think it's important to acknowledge mental health issues exist, rather than sweeping them under the carpet, because there are a lot of people out there who are having a hard time dealing with issues that might not be immediately obvious (even to their close family) who feel compelled to pretend that they're fine. They shouldn't have to hide what's happening like this but Western culture really, REALLY doesn't like the idea that people aren't all cut out to be perfectly well-balanced and productive members of society. The current government's ludicrous attitude towards neurodivergence is just the latest, pathetic example of how capitalism will try to deny that any sort of problem might exist.
Having said that, I've doubtlessly been overthinking things again, because I'm me and that's what I do. But I know I need to pay more attention to looking after myself next year. I'm not sure exactly what that will entail yet. I just know that I've not been doing a very good job of it for several years now because (as I just pointed out) I'm not used to thinking that I might actually deserve support, let alone feel comfortable asking for it, and I've been culturally indoctrinated into seeing the expression of any sort of need for help as weakness. It's pretty bloody obvious that this is a very stupid attitude to have, and I know how much of a toll it has taken on me over the years. I need to start letting people know when I'm struggling. And I've been struggling a lot this month. Even though my state of mind is much better than it was at the beginning of the year, I'm still pretty fragile and the past week in particular has been very challenging. I think that's why I crashed so hard after Saturday's gig and felt so tired on Sunday.
Despite that tiredness, I still found myself wide awake at 03:00 on Monday night, endlessly ruminating about things over which I have no control whatsoever. What is the point of doing that, eh? I know I need to stop it, but it's a very common (and incredibly strong) ADHD trait and I have absolutely no idea how I might go about that. At least now I know that it's an ADHD thing. I know I'm not going mad; that's just how my brain is wired.
Now I have a much better idea about what's going on in my head, I hope that I can explain to people what I need so that they can help me deal with (waves hand at everything) all of this. Because it needs dealing with. This morning, it feels like I'm getting there; after a long read in the bath last night, I applied large quantities of Ibuprofen gel to myself, went to bed, and slept for nine solid hours. It was the best night's sleep I've had in months.
Enough already. I am utterly sick of posts on social media that take a famous (and, usually, dead) celebrity and tell a protracted, schmaltzy, cliché-riddled story about a life lesson that they (allegedly) learned which the person sharing it obviously thinks is a useful way to signal that they're some sort of spiritually advanced human being. Instead, they just end up looking like a complete chump. Why? Because none of these posts was written by a human being. Instead it was vomited out by a large language model or LLM (which the media insists on calling generative artificial intelligence, even though LLMs are about as intelligent as Joseph Weizenbaum's original chatbot Eliza, i.e. not at all). The practice of spamming my socials with twee, made-up garbage has become endemic this week. I'd already encountered five of the damn things this morning before I'd finished my coffee; GPTZero assessed the text of the first to be 100% AI-slop and the rest as 99% AI.
Andrew O'Neill called out the practice this morning on the Book of Face after he'd just read yet another one of these posts. The example he gave was one that I'd managed to avoid reading, but it followed the pattern perfectly and his reaction resonated strongly with mine.
I can't stand it any more.
These stories have a number of distinctive tells. The first one that I look for is incredibly common: the article will suddenly pause to make three single-sentence statements which read as if they're bullet points written by a kid who didn't actually read the assignment properly. You're probably already thinking of a post which you've read in the last couple of days that does exactly that. And yes, I'm aware of the irony in warning you about articles that make three simple points in a post when I'm in the process of doing exactly that here.
The second tell that you'll encounter every time is that the text always reads like the worst sort of hyperbolic press release. Rather like the former Conservative education secretary Michael Gove, LLMs believe that everyone can be above average; everything reads like amped up and overly dramatic advertising copy; nothing will ever be described as being a minor setback when instead it can be framed as a devastating blow and AI will always couch the most trivial of insights as if it was sharing the secret of life with you.
Thirdly, AI is weirdly fond of specific phrases which crop up, over and over again; with apologies to Marks and Spencers (which may be where it was scraped from in the first place) AI is really enthusiastic about starting paragraphs with "This isn't just..." Oh, and LLMs love to begin these stories by telling you the exact date on which they think that all of the events which they have just hallucinated (which is the current media euphemism for "making shit up") took place. Those events never happened, of course. But people are much more likely to believe bullshit when it's laden with peculiarly specific details from unattributed sources rather than the vaguely plausible recollections of named witnesses that an authentic article would have to rely on. So that's what the algorithm pukes up for us. And go on, admit it: you've already read a story like that today too, haven't you? Once you start to see these patterns, you won't be able to unsee them.
There's another post doing the rounds on social media at the moment that tells me that the way most nine-year-olds are calling out bullshit these days is by saying, "That's so AI" and quite frankly that fills me with hope for the future.
If you think that the reason Marco Rubio desperately wants to stop the use of the Microsoft font Calibri by US government departments is because it's "too woke," you might want to think again.
The bathroom is almost finished. There are minor issues with a bunch of things (the wood supplied for the windowsill wasn't big enough and a new piece is on order to be delivered after Christmas; the button for the "small flush" option on the toilet doesn't work at all; and the funky, Bluetooth-enabled mirror is chipped, so it needs replacing) but the bathroom is back in use, and it looks amazing. The outstanding problems won't be fixed until the New Year, but that's okay. Once they have all been sorted out, I will of course post a photo of the final results here on the blog but even in its unfinished state, the new bathroom is a huge improvement on the old one.
Since yesterday, I've got the house to myself once again and peace and quiet reign once more. As I'd suspected, I was getting really stressed out by all the noise and disruption and now that it's all gone away, I've stopped feeling so overwhelmed. And after a shave, a once-over with the hair trimmers, and a nice long bath with a good book last night I don't look quite as frazzled as I did. I feel so much better than I was feeling a week ago.
iZotope's very useful Insight 2 analysis and metering plug-in is available as a free download right now and if you haven't already got it installed in your DAW, you should get it immediately.
It'll do useful stuff like tell you how loud your tracks are in LUFS so you can make sure you're not overcooking things, show you if there are any phase issues for people listening in mono, see the stereo field to identify potential balance problems, display a spectrogram of what's going on so that you can check for stray frequencies, and it can provide a loudness history so you can keep levels under control for the duration of the song.
Highly recommended. And once again: right now, it's free!
I spent an hour last night soaking in the bath, just as I'd planned. It was bliss. As I'd hoped, the steel bath retains the temperature of the water nicely, and I can confirm that it's a great shape for lying back in, particularly if you've got a book to read. My first impression was that it's quite a few centimetres longer than the old bath, because I seemed to be able to stretch my legs out more than I'm used to. As a result, I felt very comfortable.
As a soak test, I think it was a success. Nothing untoward appears to have happened—there don't appear to have been any leaks, and the water all drained away perfectly afterwards, which is a bonus.
Afterwards, I felt properly clean for the first time in weeks. I enjoyed the experience so much that I'm going to be extremely self-indulgent and have another bath today. And I really can't wait until the rest of the fixtures and fittings are in place with the towel rail hooked up to the central heating system. The final cherry on top will be the day when I can enable the room's underfloor heating (which is embedded in a support matrix that needs to be left to set for a couple of weeks). I've already installed the app for controlling it on my mobile phone...
This year I will be experiencing Christmas for the first time with the knowledge that I am Autistic. I can already tell that it's going to be a very different festive season for me.
Yesterday afternoon I got the Christmas decorations out of the loft. I have strung up a set of lights across the shelves in the living room as I always do, and they look very nice this morning. The Santa Claus tea light holder has claimed his rightful place on the mantelpiece once again and the multilingual Christmas greetings embroidery which my late Aunt Mary gave me decades ago is back on the shelf behind the sofa.
But when I got to the point of assembling the seven-foot artificial tree which normally sits at one end of the living room, I realised that not only did I not have anywhere to put it this year without spending an hour or two moving my furniture and loudspeakers around to make room for it first (which would really screw up my audio system's carefully calibrated Dolby Atmos sound field), I really couldn't face the faff of spending an hour putting it all together and another one covering it with my collection of lights and decorations. I've become very aware of the need to look after my mental health this year, and my gut was telling me that it was too much of an ask for me at the moment. I wasn't expecting that, but I knew I needed to pay attention to what I was feeling, so the tree stayed in its box and I've returned it to the loft. Maybe I'll change my mind when the work on the bathroom has finished and all the disruption that's going on at the moment is over. Although I feel like I'm coping okay right now, I think I'm still rather more stressed out than usual this month.
I'm not enough of a humbug to simply ignore the idea of Christmas decorations altogether, though. When I was in the depths of depression many years ago, I made the mistake of doing exactly that and as a result I had the most miserable Christmas I have ever had. I learned my lesson and I'm never going to do that again. So I've already ordered a smaller tree as an interim solution, and that one will come ready lit (a few years ago I would have rejected such laziness as not being in the spirit of Christmas at all, but times change and so, apparently, do I).
The wardens at Pensthorpe, just outside Fakenham in Norfolk, have discovered an unexpected beaver living on their nature reserve. It was filmed by a trail cam after they spotted signs of beaver activity there, and it's the first beaver to be recorded in the wild in Norfolk for approximately 400 years.
However, beavers have been breeding a few miles up the road at Sculthorpe for a while now. Even if the Sculthorpe beavers are all accounted for, my immediate reaction is that someone else read about them and released their pet into the wild close by, so that it could join them.
Lisa at Real World tells me that they've seen beavers on the river which flows through the grounds of the studio. My pal Mik has even spotted beavers on the Little Avon River, just downstream of the village where I live, so you might have some living a lot closer to you than you thought...
It now looks like the bathroom will be topped out on Tuesday next week. The windowsill, toilet, and sink should go in on Monday with some final tidying up to do on Tuesday (when the skip on the front drive will be taken away) but I'm already delighted with how it's all looking and the new steel bath is built like a frickin' tank.
The guys putting everything together have been taking great care to make sure that absolutely every aspect of things is done exactly right, and oh boy, you can spot their attention to detail when you stand in there right now. Taking an extra day to get everything finished is not going to be an inconvenience for me, because the work is already at the stage where I'm able to take a bath again. In fact I've been encouraged to use the tub, even though the bathroom isn't finished yet. I'm going to be doing a literal soak test and I will be doing so tonight for the first time since the middle of September. To say that I'm really looking forward to that is putting it mildly.
I've had a blast seeing the design go from Barrie's original computer graphics to tangible reality and I can already tell that aside from being an absolutely epic place to luxuriate in, it's going to make a really interesting live room/reverb chamber. With big ceramic tiles on the floor as well as the walls, the room really rings out, just as I'd hoped it would.
My social media feed has been full of pictures of a passed-out raccoon for the last couple of days. After falling through the ceiling of a a supermarket in Ashland, VA the furry miscreant went on a rampage through the shop's selection of booze before passing out in the toilet. The ranger who rescued the comatose critter explained that "He needed to lie down for a little bit" and let's face it, we've all been there.
I mentioned last month that after effectively being retired for six years I was struggling with returning to the routine of getting up at 07:00 (because Ash and Jamie have been arriving at 08:00 every weekday to work on the bathroom) but yesterday evening I had a couple of glasses of Malbec and they completely wiped me out. I hadn't realised just how tired I was. I was going to attend a friend's listening party on Bandcamp last night but instead I emulated that raccoon in the story above and fell asleep. I only woke up again at half-past eleven, at which point I anointed my back with Ibuprofen gel and then toddled off to bed.
This morning I didn't get up until 10:00.
The sun will set here at 16:00 for the next week. That's the earliest it does so all year, and if I could hibernate I strongly suspect that I'd be doing exactly that for the rest of the month. Even without booze.
The announcer on Radio 3 this morning reminded me that it will be Christmas Day three weeks today. For the last decade I've spent the big day (and most of the rest of the festive season) on my own, eating too much and feeling sorry for myself. But I'm not going to do that this year. This time last year, I had absolutely no idea that my sense of who I am or my approach to life was going to get the radical shake-up that it's been given over the last twelve months. I'm literally not the same person I was back then, and because I've changed so much, I think my festivities are going to have to change accordingly as well. For one thing, I'm going to be out in the world rather more than I've become used to in recent years. This December I have multiple events to attend and lots of people to see. My social calendar in January is already looking a lot busier, too. That's not usual for me at all.
But this will be the first Christmas I've experienced since I discovered how neurodivergent I am. I'm hoping that my new-found self-awareness will help me to focus on simply enjoying the festivities rather than spending most of them wondering why they were making me feel anxious and stressed out (which I'm sorry to say they have done for many years). I want things to be different this year, and I do not intend to spend the next few weeks shut away at home like a hermit, not seeing anyone. Doing that had become a habit (because that was how I'd learned to protect myself). It wasn't doing me any good, and it has to stop.
It's unlikely to be plain sailing, I know. I'm still learning where my limits and boundaries are these days. But this year I will be watching myself carefully to make sure I'm managing my stress levels, checking that I don't get overwhelmed, and practising some self care if things get too much. If I can manage all that, it should make this a Christmas worth celebrating.
Before you get to Christmas, though, there's another Bandcamp Friday for you to enjoy. I don't have a new album for you this month (I've been working on music, but it's mostly been for other people's songs) but should you wish to support my work by buying an album or two of mine you can find an extensive discography on the Bandcamp site.
There are still some albums there which are marked as name your price, and that includes free.
And even if you don't buy anything of mine, please remember: never, EVER give any of your money to Spotify. Seriously. Because they're dodgy, skeevy, fascist assholes who don't pay artists for their work.
At present it looks like work on the new bathroom will be finished on Monday. Today Ash, Jamie, and James are at work finishing off the tiling and installing lights in the alcoves at the end of the bath. It's really beginning to take shape now; I've got a much better idea of how it's all going to look when everything's done. It's looking good!
Not gonna lie; yesterday I was very tired and run down and I ended up feeling rather sorry for myself. You can see exactly how low I was if you read yesterday's blog and by early evening I really didn't feel like staying up any longer, so I gave up and went to bed...
...where I spent the next couple of hours turning the events of my life over and over in my mind and completely failing to get to sleep. That has become a habit for me every night recently, so that didn't come as a surprise. But then something new and unexpected occurred to me, and it's something which casts my mental health, particularly my struggle with chronic depression, in a different light.
I'm still thinking about it this morning. It feels like I may finally have achieved a form of closure on a particularly painful part of my past. I've felt like this before, though—and each time it happened I would realise after a month or so that I was just kidding myself and that nothing had actually changed, so I'm not going to jinx things by discussing what happened yesterday here. I need to process what I discovered and give it a chance to either sink in and do its work, or fade back into the general tumult that passes for my inner thoughts. But today, I don't feel as down as I did yesterday. I hope that feeling continues to stick around.
I still feel as exhausted this morning as I usually do. But for the second half of last night I slept like a log, and that never happens.
Tired or not, I got some work done in the studio yesterday afternoon and even did some work on graphics for the blog. That's more than I've managed to do in quite a while. I hope this means that I'm beginning to get my creative mojo back. It was largely absent for the second half of last month. The bathroom refit is still under way here, so I'm unlikely to get much done this week, though. Today the ceiling is being painted and more of the tiles are being fitted.
I'll be very glad when it's all finished and I'll have the house to myself once again. And I can't wait to have a bath.