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.