After another couple of days of Not Doing Much At All, I think I'm starting to feel a little better. I'm convinced that my diagnosis of having pushed myself too hard was correct and I needed a period of inaction to recharge my batteries. You've only got to browse a few of my recent blog entries here to see that I've very obviously let myself get very run down and recurring problems with sleeping are not helping matters.

Yesterday evening I sat on the sofa with a class of Côtes du Rhône and watched old episodes of Top Of The Pops on BBC Four whilst commenting on Mastodon with the #totp hashtag. TOTP was followed by more than an hour of classic funk material from luminaries ranging from James Brown, Funkadelic, George Clinton, and Stevie Wonder to the James Taylor Quartet and the Average White Band. Glorious stuff, all of it.

It felt like it had been much too long since I just sat and passively engaged with entertainment like this. I really enjoyed myself. And the wine was nice, too.

One of the most unsettling aspects of learning more and more about what it means to be Autistic is reading articles about things that I thought were specific if not unique parts of my personality and discovering that not only are they recognised symptoms of the condition, they're actually common enough for the behaviour to have been written up in text books and given a scientific name. This has happened to me multiple times over the last six months or so and believe me, it's not a comfortable feeling to see the innermost workings of your mind laid out on the page with precise, cold, clinical detachment. Particularly when it's being shown as an observation of the effects of a mental disorder. So much for free will, eh?

The latest example of this happened yesterday while I was browsing the useful and very helpful Hey ASD website, where I read about a thing I'd never heard of called Autistic limerence and oh boy, that article hit home hard. It describes the first few months of my life with Heather perfectly. It also explains why our breakup traumatised me so deeply. And I recognised that, even though I keep telling myself these days that I'm too messed up, old and tired to think about romance any more, those patterns of thought are still there (because it would seem that they're hard-wired) and they're still affecting how I interact with people.

To make matters worse, as I've observed elsewhere on this site, complex PTSD has left me with a hunger for the approval I never got as a child and this often comes across as a desperate neediness. Rather than bringing me closer to other people, this can overwhelm them and drive them away—which is why it's no surprise at all that I'm all too familiar with the pain of Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD) which the Hey ASD article also mentions.

Knowing that I'm experiencing these feelings because of how my cognitive development went astray when I was a kid is never going to provide much solace, but knowing that my brain is literally built to behave like this means that I can watch out for it happening and follow the advice that the author provides in that article in order to manage it. Focusing my monotropic tendencies on a special interest—music—instead of a person has shown itself to be a reliable way of diverting those obsessive inclinations into something productive and wholesome, and I reckon that's a plausible explanation of why the discography I've created over the past decade has become as ridiculously extensive as it has. And I've figured out that I should be particularly vigilant about behaving like this at the moment, because I've been struggling with intense feelings of loneliness over the past few months. As I said just now, if you've been reading the blog recently you've probably noticed just how miserable I've been feeling. Now I know that right now I'm particularly vulnerable and totally primed for another episode happening, and I'm trying very hard to just let go of the neediness. It's not easy; the PTSD is always going to be a part of who I am, and so is the autism. But even though limerence is a really cool word, I really don't want to have to go through that ever again.

I know that self-awareness is a good thing, but there are times when I just wish I was a little more ordinary...

This morning I signed up for the next Fix the Mix Challenge which is being run over at mastering.com from Tuesday to Thursday next week. There's a premium tier, but I am going to take part in the free version. It's not something that I've ever considered doing before, but I think my abilities have now reached the point where I will be able to get something useful out of it. It should be an interesting experience.

I'll keep you posted on how it goes.

I stayed in bed until ten this morning and quite frankly I could easily have remained there for the rest of the day; I was warm and comfy and nicely relaxed and it's been a while since I could say that. I'm still feeling very rough and run down after pushing myself too hard last week, but at least I know enough now about what causes this to not make things worse by trying to tough things out and power through the fatigue. Even so, today it feels like I might have to take drastic measures and have two large lattés to keep me going, but happily I am very well prepared for this: when I was at Cribbs last week I treated myself to a Bialetti Moka Express. I managed to find a custom one, no less, in the colours of the Italian flag.

Caffeinate me!

I was amused to discover that mine is just like the one you can see in this handy video demonstrating the best moka pot technique. I can thoroughly recommend James Hoffmann's YouTube channel, by the way. That moka pot technique he explains in the link was developed after a lot of entertaining and incredibly nerdy research. He's very definitely a kindred spirit and I was not even remotely surprised when I recommended the channel to Ruth recently to be told that she and Alex were already enthusiastic followers.

I've wanted a moka pot ever since I first tasted coffee made with one on skiing trips to the French Alps in the 1980s and 90s and yes, the HFO managed to set fire to the breakfast table with the chalet's giant moka pot more than once—but judging by the scores of octagonal scorch marks on the table, we were by no means the first guests to do so. Moka pot coffee is powerful stuff; not quite on a par with a decent espresso (you don't get the crema, for one thing, although the mouth feel is similar) but strengthwise it's not far off it, and provided that you don't scorch the coffee by letting the pot get too hot and start to sputter (yes, I have a diffuser plate for mine and yes, I've been practising with it), the taste is wonderful.

Bialetti recommend making—but then throwing away—three cups of coffee in a new pot in order to season it, or at least to get rid of anything nasty left over from the manufacturing process (there were a few tiny pieces of aluminium swarf in mine, which I rinsed out before I'd even started). I have done this, so my pot is now ready for use and I will be trying it out for the first time after lunch with steamed milk from my trusty Rancilio Silvia.

Edit: I did, and it was very definitely a success. Using an Aeropress filter paper between the coffee and the top section's filter is a genius idea. And it was a nice, strong and tasty brew; I'm buzzing right now, although that might be because although the packaging describes mine as a three-cup pot, it all went in my usual mug...

I thought the bedroom felt cooler when I went to bed yesterday, but when I checked the garden's maximum / minimum thermometer this morning I got a bit of a shock; it was just 2°C (36°F) out there last night so the next time I change the bedclothes I'll break out the winter duvet. I didn't see temperatures drop like this last year until October was nearly over, but the weather this autumn has been extremely odd all over the world. Hurricane season in the Atlantic is normally over by this time of the year but the first hurricane of the season only started to form a couple of days ago and it's done so in the Gulf of Mexico rather than in the Atlantic proper. Consensus seems to be that this is the result of this year's fantastically strong El Niño which is developing in the Pacific Ocean. It has been alarming climate scientists with the way that it has already broken multiple records for all the wrong reasons and the Daily Mirror and the Star (as well as several other publications) wasted no time going into hysterics about what that will—allegedly—mean for the UK's weather over the next six months or so. Tabloid journalists are overly fond of frothing at the mouth over the prospect of apocalyptic snowstorms each winter (the ones who work for the Daily Express in particular can always be relied upon to do so, with extravagant use of the CAPS LOCK key into the bargain), but this article from the Met Office calmly demolishes the hyperbole.

However, the fact that the UK Government recently decided to keep quiet about their latest briefing on the effects of climate collapse on food supplies, health, and the country's economy doesn't exactly instil much confidence in the likelihood that anyone's going to do anything about it. It's hard to feel any sort of optimism about things getting better when the news these days is so unremittingly bleak. Just how dire the present situation is was hammered home for me this week after I saw photographs of the Matterhorn in Switzerland showing that at the end of September it was completely and shockingly devoid of snow. Back when I started skiing, the idea of snow above the 3000 metre line ever melting was unheard of. It's a great pity that the newspapers never get as excited over real stories about the all-too-visible signs of impending disaster like this as they do about nostalgic fantasies of imaginary snowstorms.

I wonder why that might be? Answers on a postcard to the usual address...

I think I overdid it last week. I've spent the last few days feeling overwhelmed, and I realised yesterday that taking time to recharge my batteries needs to be a deliberate act rather than something that I assume is going to happen regardless, because these days my life very clearly doesn't work that way any more.

Several times over the last few days I've ended up back in bed during the afternoon with a hoodie pulled down over my face, quietly dozing. In the past I would have classed this as a symptom of depression, but now I reckon it's because I let myself get overloaded. This is my brain shutting down until stuff is happening at a pace that it's happy coping with, and it obviously isn't happy at the moment.

The journal I write in longhand each day has been thin on affirmations or achievements recently. When I get out of bed each day I never feel like I've had enough sleep. I've been out for a couple of walks, but on reflection I think even doing that was pushing myself too much so today I'm just going to stay indoors, read, and listen to music. Anyway, it's dull and drizzling outside right now so it's not like exercising would offer much in the way of fun (well, that's my story and I'm sticking to it). Apart from anything else, my energy levels are at rock bottom and I know I have to look after myself rather more diligently than I have been doing lately.

According to the road closure sign that was originally positioned on the corner of Little Bristol Lane and Manor Lane, the one-way traffic scheme that's been in place there since last August was supposed to be lifted on Monday but when I walked down there at lunchtime to see just how things were going, I was disappointed to see that nothing has changed. A bit of digging on the Internet suggests that things are likely to stay as they are until next month at the earliest, and judging by the information I found on the One Network website, things aren't going to get properly back to normal until the week before Christmas. It's all rather frustrating. Negotiating my way around the diversion is very stressful because it involves cautiously edging around three blind corners and people around here are rather lax when it comes to speed limits or giving way. The sooner I don't have to do that any more, the better.

There are some signs that progress is being made, though. Over the last weekend, two new signal gantries were installed, one at either end of the station. As you can see, each one is a pretty substantial piece of engineering.

The old and new stations with a new signal gantry in place

The old station building (to the left of the tracks in that photo) is still covered in scaffolding and nothing appears to have been done in the way of repairs yet. I have no idea if it's just going to be left like that, or if it will be fixed up before the new station opens. It's a bit of an eyesore at the moment, as you can see.

On the other side of the railway line on Station Road, work is still going on, although it's hard to imagine that the scene below will be a bustling new station forecourt in just six months' time...

It gets worse before it gets better

I'm sure it'll all look great when it's finished, but as you can see it's a complete mess at the moment.

Since I started the "morning sitting" practice espoused by Robert Fripp, I've become much more aware of the amount of tension I'm carrying in my body. My shoulders hurt a lot these days, and much of the reason why they do so is because I spend all day with them scrunched up tightly. I just made myself relax them, and the difference in my posture is ridiculous. It's driven by stress and anxiety, I think. And that's ridiculous, because now that I'm retired and I spend most of my time these days at home, I have no reason to be this wound up. But then again, I now realise that autism doesn't need an excuse to drive me to distraction. Just getting out of bed is enough to set me off. I have to keep reminding myself to just breathe deeply and relax more.

As I was wandering around the shopping mall at Cribbs on Thursday I realised that I was getting overwhelmed, so I retreated back to the car dealership and sat quietly in one of their comfy chairs while I waited for the work to finish. But it's taken me several days for that feeling of sensory overload to wear off. I'd forgotten just how drained I can get when I've been out in the world for a whole day, and I've been wiped out ever since. I spent most of Friday just staring blankly off into space and dissociating. So of course my depression took full advantage, and I've been feeling very down and out-of-sorts. I think this morning is the first time I've started to feel more like my usual self again; I must be feeling a little better, as I've just changed the bedclothes and the washing machine is already on its second load of the morning.

But these days I'm no longer prepared to just sit and take it when I get like this, and I managed to build up my sense of self-worth by making some new music. These days, that's become my go-to method of fighting the tendency to retreat under the duvet when the black dog comes to stay, possibly because it requires me to use instinct and emotion rather than cognitive hard work. Call it Flow, or call it hyperfocus; whatever the case I'm working in a way that isn't particularly reliant on deliberate, conscious thought (at least, not when I really get into what I'm doing) so my brain doesn't have time to mope or dwell on the things that have historically made me tense up or miserable.

So on Friday afternoon I played guitar for a couple of hours. Yesterday I spent most of the day playing more guitar, adding a bass line, and then overdubbing even more guitars. It was satisfying, and a lot of fun. And I ended up finishing a new track for my next album which I'm really pleased with, so that's a definite win.

But I'm still finding myself getting distracted. I'm sure I'm getting worse as I get older, but I'm also convinced that it's ADHD that's the reason for it. Just while I was putting this blog post together I went down three completely unrelated rabbit holes and I was just about to head upstairs to get something out of the loft that I just remembered I wanted to sort out before I realised that I hadn't actually finished writing this post—a task I started more than an hour ago.

It's frustrating being like this. But at least these days I'm aware that this is how my mind works and I can keep an eye on my tendencies to go off on a tangent and (like I just did) haul myself back to the task in hand. At the same time I find myself wondering how I ever managed to get anything done at all when I was younger.

Here in the south-west, it's remained unseasonably warm since autumn began. The Met Office reported that last month was the joint fourth warmest September on record, but there are a few signs that this is all about to change. The temperature in the back garden dropped to 6°C (43°F) again last night and this morning when I opened the curtains it was slightly misty outside, which means that the dew point of the very humid air we're in right now was high enough for fog to form. Judging by last night's trail camera recordings, the fog got quite thick just before dawn; it looked very weird in infra-red.

By quarter past ten, the sun had come out. It's supposed to be a lovely day today and my solar panels are generating enough power at the moment for me to run the washing machine and this computer and still have some electricity left over to export to the grid.

The forecast for this week is for temperatures to slowly fall to around the seasonal average (and perhaps even slightly below it the week after) but in the living room right now the house is a comfortable 20°C (68°F) so I'm not thinking of switching the central heating back on just yet.

The year has reached the 75% point. It feels simultaneously like the past nine months have flown by and dragged on interminably, but I guess that's just a side-effect of getting old. And I'm really feeling the passing years at the moment; as I mentioned in last month's blog I'm still in a bit of a funk. My mood is fine one minute and in the depths of despair the next and the fact that I've not had a therapy session for three weeks now is not helping matters. My therapist has had to cancel tomorrow's session as well, so when we do catch up, it'll be a month since we had our last chat. I'm getting by, though—and she'll be pleased to hear that I've not been shut away at home like a hermit. Not all the time, anyway. The blog update is late today because I've been out and about in the real world doing essential (hence unavoidable) things like getting the car serviced and MOT'd for another year. And after getting it new discs and brake pads, two new tyres and a full wheel alignment, it ended up costing me an arm and a leg. So much so that I ended up down at the Plough this evening with the usual suspects, drowning my sorrows. Three pints definitely helped.

Nevertheless, I've been attempting to get my self-actualisation fix by working intermittently on my next album. Yes, despite releasing Sprinting earlier this week (and don't forget it's Bandcamp Friday tomorrow, just sayin') I've already got several tracks in the pipeline for the next. I'm making good progress, but lately I've mostly found myself getting sidetracked with refining the preset tones that I'm getting on my bass guitars from the HX Stomp that I bought last month which I'm programming myself from scratch. I'm gradually figuring out how it works in both a DI and a stompbox context and I'm very impressed with the results. It's a fun little beastie, and I think it's going to come in very useful on sessions.

I was very sad to hear this evening that Conrad "Cronos" Lant of the band Venom has died at the age of 63. No cause of death has been announced. The best tribute to the man I can think of is in Andrew O'Neill's History of Heavy Metal where you will discover that Cronos basically invented most of the main genres of metal in the space of a glorious couple of minutes in an interview back in the early 80s.

Yes, the early albums sound like the band were recorded at the other end of a sewer; yes, Venom weren't the most gifted of musicians. But their significance was the way in which they lit a fire under so many other bands by making them think, "We could do that." And a lot of those bands went on to do exactly that and in the process become bigger and better than Venom ever managed to be.

Sometimes it's not what you achieve yourself that counts; sometimes, it's what you inspire in others that turns out to be your legacy.