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The back garden has been getting some much-needed rain over the last few days. I'm not doing no-mow May this year but I've only given the lawn one cut since the beginning of the month, because it's barely grown at all. Instead, I've been doing a bunch of stuff around the house. Chores yesterday included finally getting around to doing the stack of ironing that's been sitting on the armchair next to me for the past couple of weeks. Then I switched to musical maintenance, soldering broken leads and restringing the Warr for the first time since I bought it last year (and I polished the frets and oiled the fingerboard while I was at it; it looks rather spiffy as a result). There's a reason for all this work and it'll become clear in next month's blog. For now, all I'll say is that I think I'm all set for another adventure.
And it's about time; I'm overdue for a change of scene. The last time I stayed away from home overnight was before Christmas and I'm not gonna lie: for the last few weeks I've been really struggling with things. It's very hard to sleep when you're in constant pain and it doesn't take too many bad nights to leave me teetering on the brink of severe depression. We're pretty much at the end of May, and the whole month has been like this. So apart from anything else, I'm going to be packing some painkillers. And probably the Voltarol, too.
I hope this will shake me out of the funk that I find myself in at the moment, because it's not fun. I need a break. I need to find some joy.
I couldn't help laughing at the desperation of the SpaceX folk during yet another catastrophic Starship failure during the rocket's ninth test flight last night. After the booster exploded during its landing attempt and the upper stage spun out of control and then disintegrated, the fact that the bits were coming down just where the re-entry had been intended was cheerfully framed as a positive outcome (they literally said "so that's good" to the camera) rather than just being dictated by, y'know, the physics of ballistics.
After the eighth flight test, people were beginning to suggest that—far from being the game-changing advance in rocketry that Musk claims it to be—Starship is actually a badly designed boondoggle that's doomed to remain unfixable. Despite all of the wishful thinking at the project that's evidently going on, this latest debacle isn't going to make those awkward blog posts, YouTube videos mocking the company's inability to make a door that opens, and other conversations about shoddy design go away. Instead, a lot more people are beginning to join the dots.
In other news, registrations of new Tesla vehicles in in the EU, the UK, and the broader European Free Trade Association (EFTA) bloc of Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland in the past twelve months fell by 49%. So sales of Musk's cars have dropped to half of what they were a year ago across pretty much the entirety of Western Europe. Ahh, delicious schadenfreude.
It's the Spring Bank Holiday weekend this weekend (and so it rained here last night, as is traditional on such occasions). The enabling work on Little Bristol Lane has been paused for a few days to give the engineers some time off, and when I wandered back from The Plough after a few pints with Matthew yesterday evening we discovered that the road is open to traffic once again—although there's still plenty of work to do, so I'm sure it'll be closed again next week. Work really seems to have accelerated over the past fortnight and they're not hanging about. I said in an earlier blog that I would post some more photos of the work that's going on and here they are, starting with a shot showing how much progress has been made on what's going to become the car park for the new station:
And as promised, here's a shot of the overgrown arches on Station Road that would have been used to store coal for the steam engines of the day. I really hope that these are preserved for posterity and made a feature of the site. I'm assuming that they will be, as the Council's map of the general arrangement of the finished site that's available online has them marked as "coal chute arches."
And take a look at this rather magnificent JCB:
You can see in this shot just how much higher the digger is than the camera's point of view. There's a significant difference between the height of the site of the station and the road which leads to it. Things aren't going to stay that way, though. According to the latest letter I got from Network Rail, "Starting on Monday 19th May are works to partially construct the new station forecourt. To enable this area to be used as a construction compound for the new platforms and footbridge, we will be reducing the ground level. You may notice an increase in the number and frequency of lorries being used to remove the existing ground that is elevated above the adjacent carriageway."
Further along Station Road, here's what the old goods yard looks like at the moment. A couple of months ago, this was all hidden by trees. Behind the Portakabin you can see the station's old water tower (which would have been used to top up the boilers of those old steam engines). The new station and the footbridge connecting the two platforms will be built immediately to its left, as you can see in this rather wonky CGI rendering of the new building (can someone who knows what they're doing fix the normals on the lift doors, please?)
On Little Bristol Lane, lots of electrical work has been carried out and some very shiny new streetlamps were installed this week. The old ones still need to be removed, but work to disconnect them is going well.
On our way home yesterday, Matthew and I noticed that one of the new streetlamps also doubles as a belisha beacon, so now we know where the pedestrian crossing for the station will be.
And when I took these photos a couple of days ago, a stretch of Little Bristol Lane was being resurfaced—and resurfaced in the good, old-fashioned way that should last a darn sight longer than more modern resurfacing techniques result in...
Work hasn't completely stopped this weekend. The focus has shifted to the railway tracks themselves, as they are being lifted, slewed to one side, set back down, and then tamped into place again (I suspect it's going to be quite noisy out there tonight). The tracks are being moved to make sure there's enough room to build the new platforms and the pedestrian footbridge.
I'm very excited to see all of this engineering finally happening. It's only taken thirty years for it to become reality...
After spending most of Saturday writing and recording songs, I didn't know if I had any creative juice left in the tank so I decided to find out. I spent yesterday making another track—the seventh—for my next album and it turned out rather nicely, even if I say so myself. I guess I did, then.
And when I updated my "songwriting tally" spreadsheet after rendering the track, I was surprised to discover that I'd reached a significant milestone in my recording journey. That was the 1,500th piece of music which I'd recorded. One and a half thousand tracks. Whoa.
I don't have a secret method that has enabled me to do this. I won't be making any "I wrote 1,500 songs and you can too: here's how" videos on YouTube. I just sat down and did the work. That's all you have to do. The work needs to come first. By all means post about your stuff on social media, but the trick is to do all that after you've done the work, not beforehand. I follow a lot of musicians on various social media platforms, and there are always one or two who post a lot about the projects they're starting but oddly, they never seem to finish anything. Don't be like them.
Just do the work.
The back garden camera picked up a hedgehog visiting the hedgehog house last night!
This makes me very happy.
The page from my Filofax from Friday, May 19th 1995 was pretty thin on the details, but it was thirty years ago today that I moved in to this house.
On that Friday, Dad and I wandered down to the Railway Tavern and I had the first of many pints there (and I had a couple more there on Friday night, as Mik and Graham were doing an acoustic set in the back room and I went along to listen—no sound engineer was required). By the Friday evening back in 1995, Dad and I had managed to get the house in some semblance of order and we drove over to nearby Huntingford Mill, which back then was a fancy restaurant (as far as I can remember, I had a very nice steak). Judging by the entry at the bottom of that Filofax page, after Dad went home on the Saturday and I'd followed him in Mum's Mini over to Norfolk to pick up the Vauxhall Cavalier SRi I was driving at the time, I probably spent Sunday playing a Star Wars game on the Gateway Pentium PC I'd recently bought myself. Because back then I was a messed-up, stressed-out, profoundly depressed thirty-something with zero self-confidence who didn't know what he wanted to do with his life and was playing the whole thing by ear until he figured a few things out.
Three decades later, I still can't say I've got everything figured out. The depression has never gone away, although these days I'm managing to keep on top of things without medication, which is a big achievement by itself. Looking back, I should have been much more assertive than I was. I made more than one silly life choice over the years. And as Dame Helen Mirren so shrewdly observed about her own younger self, I should have told people to fuck off a lot more than I did. But it's amazing what a master's degree and a professional career that took me all over the world will do for your self-confidence. I would never have expected to become the person I am today when I turned the keys in the lock on this house's front door all those years ago, but this house has had a lot to do with that process of transformation. Just the fact that I had my own place down here, away from Milton Keynes, meant my stress levels dropped through the floor. I wasn't sorry to leave the place. I needed out.
It's not just me who has changed. The house has, too. Those years of living in Milton Keynes had taught me some painful lessons about home security so one of the first things I did when I moved in here was have a burglar alarm fitted. It has never gone off in anger. All the same, I've made sure I improve the system every few years, because this keeps my anxieties under control. And it's kind of important, because the back bedroom, which was my art room, is now a full-on, high-tech computerised recording studio. I added a conservatory at the back (which faces north) to give myself a dedicated space for making art. The garage door, which barely survived being used as a goal by my neighbour's kids for more than fifteen years, has been replaced by a fancy remote control one and I've been pleasantly surprised by how much I've appreciated that! The ugly and overbearing Leylandii hedge along the back boundary of the garden has been cut down, and almost all of my neighbours have had theirs taken out too; I've been amazed by how much more light there is in the back garden these days. The house's exterior woodwork has been replaced with low maintenance uPVC and I had the drive and patio relaid to be low maintenance, too. And these days I can roll the wheely bins into the back garden without having to lift them over the back step. All the windows have been replaced with much more energy-efficient ones; the same applies to the central heating system (and the water pressure I get in the bathroom as a result is a vast improvement on the disappointing dribble I used to get out of the shower). And then there's the solar energy system, and the storage battery, which have turned my utility bills negative for half the year...
In another thirty years' time I'll be ninety four. I have to admit that I will be very surprised if I'm still around then. But if I find myself still living here when 2055 comes aorund, I won't have anything to complain about.
I had another shot at the Immersive Composition Society's 20-song game over the weekend. I'd had a couple of rough nights at the end of last week and I wasn't exactly firing on all cylinders after a late night at the Railway Tavern on Friday night, but after a nice strong coffee on Saturday morning (maybe Miss Silvia has been reading my blog, as she's returned to working properly at the moment and I seem to have got my grind properly dialled in) I set to in the studio for another twelve hour writing and recording session. My neighbours are building a new cabin in their back garden, so I had to battle construction noise for most of the day, but once again I surprised myself by how many ideas I could come up with for a song seemingly at a moment's notice. Before trying the 20-song game the most I'd ever managed to do in one day was write and record four songs and I'd only been happy with one of them.
In the end, I only managed ten hours' work before calling it quits. I got another twelve songs under my belt, which is two less than last time. But I was working a lot more efficiently, and I managed to avoid a lot of the productivity traps that I had unsuspectingly blundered in to last time. I was a lot more disciplined about getting sidetracked, and took fewer breaks for snacks. And importantly, the quality of what I came up with was much more consistent than it had been in the first round I played—or at least that's my assessment of what I came up with.
Yesterday Carley and Burr and I got together on Zoom to listen to what we'd all came up with (and I got plenty of useful tips about the craft, as well as adding a number of items to my gear wish list). We enjoyed ourselves enough to agree to have another go in a couple of months, so I think the weekend was a success for all of us. I'm already plotting—sorry, planning—my approach for the next game.
The last time I had to replace my coffee machine was way back in 2010, when the Gaggia I'd been using for the previous three and a half years gave up the ghost. When I saw the state of its aluminium boiler after I'd disassembled it (in a vain attempt to resuscitate it) I was so horrified by what I discovered inside that I vowed that I'd only ever drink coffee from a machine with a brass boiler from then on. After reading reviews in the consumer magazine Which and bringing myself up to speed in coffee-making forums online, I bought myself a Rancilio Silvia. And for the past fifteen years I've been happily using it every day, so I have very definitely had my money's worth out of it. But even though I have looked after it fastidiously—it gets cleaned and descaled regularly (with professional-grade products that I bought from Germany, I might add)—it's been showing its age recently. I know just how it feels.
Some of the problems I'm having with it are minor cosmetic ones that don't really affect my enjoyment of caffeinated beverages. For example, the housing for the flow head originally looked like it was metal, but it's actually white plastic covered with metallic foil, and this has been flaking off in chunks for a few years now. I keep finding bits of it lying on the kitchen counter (but thankfully not in my coffee).
But recently, I just can't get a nice espresso out of it, even after I finally got round to doing a deep dive on the settings of the Rocky grinder I bought at the same time and learned exactly how to grind my coffee beans for the best results. When I pull a shot the group head spits and spurts (yes, I've replaced the seal on it), draws much too fast, and most of what little crema (the tasty, dense, brown foam that rises to the top of a cup of espresso) I get on the resulting shot fades away after ten seconds or so. I expect the crema to be getting on for a centimetre thick; I'm lucky if I get a couple of millimetres. The coffee's not undrinkable by any means. It tastes all right but there's definitely something amiss. Enough is enough; I decided this week that it's way past time that Miss Silvia got an upgrade, because life is too short to drink disappointing coffee.
Not only do I know a lot more about setting up and cleaning my coffee grinder now than I did when I first stared using it. I know quite a bit more about the process of coffee making, too. For one thing, I know how important water pressure is in getting consistent results. I've seen how useful the pressure gauge on my Uniterra Nomad is in ensuring that I get a lovely crema on shots I pull with it. The crema I get with the Silvia is disappointing by comparison, even when I use exactly the same coffee. Look, I'm going to be a massive nerd about anything like this; more than once I seriously considered buying an aftermarket group head for my machine that would let me monitor pressure as I pulled a shot on it, because the Silvia is known to have a tendency to overcook things (and I'm pretty sure that's what's going on). I've also read up a lot more about the aftermarket modifications that people have made to their machines, and adding PID controllers to control pressure and flow automatically will obviously make a huge difference to the results that people get. And, finally, I've learned that if you want really great results when you're steaming milk for your latté, you really need a dual-boiler machine instead of one that has a single boiler. Oh, and if it pre-infuses the coffee for a few seconds before the shot is pulled, that's going to make for a more consistent extraction, so I was looking for a machine that does that as well.
So rather than pulling my machine to bits and fitting such extras myself (disassembling it didn't work out so well for my Gaggia, after all) I started looking for a machine that has dual, brass boilers, and which has pressure gauges, PID controllers, and other bells and whistles already fitted. What I needed had to include a pre-infusion routine, and it had to approach the built-like-a-tank engineering and reliability of the Silvia that I've been using for the past decade and a half. That turned out to be a big ask. A lot of the mid-level machines I looked at came in for savage criticism in forums because of their build quality or the size of the steam boiler, and I ended up rejecting machines from a couple of brands entirely based on their online reputation. You get what you pay for, of course, and at the high end of the market there are a lot of machines that fitted the bill perfectly. More than a few of them looked like they belonged in an art gallery rather than on a kitchen counter and they were priced accordingly, too. It'd be nice to have something like that in the kitchen and I have the funds to buy one, but I just couldn't bring myself to justify spending thousands of pounds on a device for making milky drinks. I ended up slashing the budget I'd allowed myself for a replacement to make sure I didn't go crazy. After reading even more consumer reviews (and in doing so I learned quickly to spot those which had been spawned by AI rather than a human being, but that's a topic for a different blog post) and trawling discussions on Reddit and elsewhere, it became pretty obvious what I needed to replace the Rancilio Silvia with: the Rancilio Silvia Pro X. Yes, it costs more than twice the price of my old machine. No, I haven't pulled the trigger on buying one yet, because it's still a lot of money. But as I said just now, life is too short to drink disappointing coffee.
There's another month and a half left before the enabling works for the village's new railway station are completed and Little Bristol Lane (which I use to get from my house to the main road through the village) is still closed, which means to get anywhere I have to thread the car through roads with lots of vehicles parked on the street, which can be rather stressful if a lot of people are coming the other way. The road closed at the beginning of February and won't open again until July, and I've been very reluctant to go anywhere by car as a result, although I did drive down to Thornbury yesterday to do some shopping and survey the charity shops for interesting books (and I picked up a decent haul for the princely sum of six pounds!) But progress on preparing the station's surroundings is most definitely being made; I took this photograph a month ago and work has moved on a lot since then; last week I noticed that BT have installed new telegraph poles on the south side of the road (you can see them running along the north side of the road in the photo below) although the wires haven't been moved yet. I'll post a more up to date picture of how things are looking on the blog in the next few days.
What's going on here is that the road is being moved a metre or so to the left and a number of lay-bys are being added so people will be able to set down and pick up passengers—because even though this is a rail project, it has to accommodate the use of cars. There'll also be a roundabout where Little Bristol Lane meets Manor Lane, so that people can turn their cars round and head back to the main road without needing to make a three-point turn and screw up local traffic any more than is absolutely necessary. However, the main reason for moving the road is so that there will be enough room to build a new platform on the northbound side of the railway. The station will be built roughly where that black and red crane is in the photograph above; that's the old station and the water tower for refilling steam engines behind it. It's all going to look very different when everything's finished.
A lot of work is happening at the side of the railway tracks all through the village to improve drainage and prevent flooding. One look at how much tarmac and how little grass there is in that photograph should have you thinking that surface water run-off is going to be a problem when it rains; it does for me, anyway. On the north side of the tracks, work on the new car park is well under way. Diggers and earth-moving equipment moved in to the field opposite the low bridge on Little Bristol Lane a couple of weeks ago and they have been hard at work levelling the area.
Further along Station Road, the old goods yard (which, quite frankly, was a bit of a mess) has been cleared out and is now the main hub for the project. A stack of Portacabins has appeared, complete with closed circuit television surveillance and there is much coming and going of people in orange PPE and Hi-Vis tabards. Sadly, all of the trees which used to line Station Road have been cut down and acoustic fencing has been set up in their place; the road needs to be widened by several feet to allow two-way traffic to the new car park. A lot of undergrowth has been removed from the side of the tracks as well, and I bet they had to cart away several tons of brambles, because they were covered in them. As a result, you can see the arches of the access road up to the railway line once again; they were easily visible when I first moved here thirty years ago but they have been overgrown for years. They are quite a striking feature and from the architecture I think they must date back to Brunel's day (the original station opened in 1844) but after decades of neglect they're in an horrendous state of repair and I don't know if they're going to survive the construction of the new station. I really hope that there are plans to preserve them. I'll post a photo of them on the blog too, if I get the opportunity to take a picture (and remember to do so).
I am happy to report that when companies behave badly enough that their customers start deserting them in droves, they do occasionally notice. According to Futurism magazine, Soundcloud announced yesterday that they have switched to an opt-in policy for artists allowing their content to be used for training generative AI models instead of the opt-out policy they've had in place for the last year, effectively switching from assuming that people are okay with such things to the rather more realistic assumption, borne out by the reaction of the Soundcloud user community over the past week, that people are most emphatically not okay with them (somehow I bet that making that change wasn't an idea that occurred to Soundcloud spontaneously). The company's CEO, Eliah Seton, conceded that the language they'd quietly added to their terms and conditions back in 2024 which assumed that their customers were okay with allowing the work that they uploaded to the site to be used for for AI training was "too broad" (which presumably means that it wasn't opaque enough to stop people noticing just what it was that Soundcloud was asking them to agree to let them do). This was followed by the usual PR guff about the company being on the side of the creators, thanking the community for holding them accountable, yada yada yada—which long experience has taught me can always and without fail be translated to "we're really sorry we got caught."
When I read that Futurism article, I must admit my response was very brief, and very simple:
"Too fuckin' late, mate."
I will be following the news at the end of the fiscal year very closely to see if Mr Seton keeps his job after Soundcloud's financial results are published. Somehow, I very much doubt that he will.
There are at least three different hedgehogs making regular visits to the garden at the moment. The infra-red camera I use to record their activities shows up different markings on the spines on their backs which makes it relatively easy to tell them apart (size is also a bit of a giveaway, as one is almost twice the size of the others!) But I would like them to stick around more, so the garden has a new addition:
This hedgehog house was bought, ready assembled, from the RSPB's shop. The trail cam hasn't recorded any visitors to it yet, but it's not been in place for long. I've put plenty of dry leaves from the garden inside for bedding (there were plenty available given the spell of ridiculously dry weather we've been having for the past three months) and we'll see if any residents move in.
I'm going to be having another go at the 20-song Game this weekend after having a lot of fun last month (when I didn't manage to write twenty songs in twelve hours, but did successfully write and record fourteen).
But I've been in the studio every day for the past week and I think I'm making progress on the new album which finally—FINALLY—seems to have decided what it wants to be.
This one's been hard work. I've thrown a lot of stuff into the PC's "castoffs" folder over the past month. Some people might not agree with me but I do stress out about whether or not my music is any good; if even I can't be bothered to listen to it afterwards, I'm going to take it as a sign that it should never see the light of day and that was very much the case with stuff I was making last month. But the material I've created recently has reassured me that what I do isn't entirely pointless. I'm enthused again.
Even more of my musician friends told me this week that they have dumped their Soundcloud accounts as a result of the company's updated terms and conditions requiring the user to consent to having their work used to train AI that I've been blogging about. I'm beginning to think that the company's current debacle may end up being a NaNoWriMo moment for them (and look how well that turned out).
I'll be keeping tabs on this one for a while longer, I suspect.
The consensus seems to be that the failed Soviet-era space probe Kosmos-482 ended up falling into the Indian Ocean on Saturday morning, although as the article I've linked above says, we'll probably never know for certain exactly where it came down.
Unless, like other parts of the same mission, it gets discovered years later lying on some New Zealand farmland, that is. There's more than one reason why one of my favourite bands wrote a song back in the 70s called Space Junk.
But the final images of the Venera lander in orbit taken late last week are fascinating, as they indicate that the parachute which was intended to slow it down during the final stage of its descent to the surface of Venus had most likely deployed while the vehicle was still in orbit around Earth. In space, parachutes are useless—but you knew that already, right?
I suspect that rather a lot of sphincter tightening must have been going on at Soundcloud headquarters yesterday because the clause in their terms and conditions that I mentioned in yesterday's blog has gone viral in the worst way possible for them. I posted about the issue on Mastodon and it has received nearly a hundred boosts right now, less than a day since I wrote it. Many of the replies it got were from other people who, like me, had just deleted their accounts.
After music and technology websites (and even The Hollywood Reporter) picked up on the story, the company hastily went into damage limitation mode. They issued a statement denying that they had any plans to use their users' music to train generative AI models, because of course they did. Forgive me for being sceptical, but when a company tells me they have no intention of doing a thing that their terms and conditions explicitly require the user to consent to letting them do, I'm simply not going to believe them.
I plan on remaining an ex-user.
ESA say that their radar failed to detect Russia's Kosmos-482 spacecraft on its predicted latest pass over Germany today and they have therefore concluded that it's down, but I have no information as yet about where it might have landed.
The spacecraft was the descent stage of a Soviet mission to Venus that was launched back in March 1972 but which remained in low Earth orbit after its booster failed to put it into a Venus transfer orbit. The Venera lander was designed to survive a descent through Venus's dense and highly acidic atmosphere and touch down on the planet's surface intact. It weighed nearly half a metric tonne, so it's not the sort of thing you'd want crashing through the roof of your house.
It's a lovely sunny day this morning. The roof was putting out a hefty 3 kW before 10 am, so I'm doing the laundry. I considered doing some gardening later today, but I had a poor night last night so I'm going to skip it until later in the week.
The pattern of "have a good night, then a bad one" continues. On Thursday night my watch recorded the highest-ever percentage of NREM sleep I've had so far at 62% and I got a sleep score of 100. Last night I was down to 44% and a score of 82. That's still much better than I ever managed while I was in full time employment but believe me, I don't feel very rested this morning. I've been taking regular naps over the past few days, because by late afternoon the morning coffee has worn off and I've completely run out of steam.
If only there was some analogue of solar panels I could use on myself. Or is that what coffee's for?
If, like me, you have an account at the music hosting service Soundcloud, you should be aware that their current terms of use (which you can read here) now include this little gem (and typifying SC's usual inattention to the finer details, all those random capital letters are in the original text, at least at the time I posted this):
"In the absence of a separate agreement that states otherwise, You explicitly agree that your Content may be used to inform, train, develop or serve as input to artificial intelligence or machine intelligence technologies or services as part of and for providing the services."
There is no indication of just how one might go about obtaining such a separate agreement, and there's no way I'd want the AI shitweasels to scrape anything of mine, even the early, embarrassing stuff which was pretty much all that was left on my account, which I've been running since way back in 2011—I stopped posting new stuff there years ago because of the site's persistent and endemic spam and scam problems.
So I've deleted my account. Permanently. Everything of mine there should be gone forever, although there is—of course—no guarantee whatsoever that a company will honour a request for it to delete a user's data when they leave, even when it's required by law to do so.
And I've removed every single embedded link to their site from this website that I could find. It's taken me most of the afternoon. Sure, it's inconvenient. It's cut off a way of getting my music into the ears of listeners that's allegedly popular, although experiments like this one I've conducted over the years suggest that most interactions that take place there are initiated by bots. But there is absolutely no way I want anything to do with bastards who think plagiarising "content" (and there's a red flag term for any company to use, if ever there was one) is acceptable practice. It looks like quite a few people agree with me too. I posted about this on Mastodon earlier and my phone's notification alert has been going off every few minutes for the past four hours...
Yesterday I decided to spoil myself. I drove in to Bristol, parked at Cabot Circus, and went shopping. Of course I ended up buying books in Foyles and Waterstones, but I also stocked up on some brightly-coloured pairs of socks (because life's too short to clomp around in sad, old, worn-out covers for your feet). After returning my spoils to the car it was time for calzone and caramel cheesecake at Zizzi's, after which I got to catch up with a former colleague of mine whom I'd not seen for ten years and watch an actual round of Mornington Crescent being played, live on stage, by professionals!
The BBC were recording two episodes of the long-running panel game I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue at the Bristol Beacon. Jack Dee was in the chair, of course, trying to impose order on the teams: Rachel Parris and Henning Wehn vs. Miles Jupp and Ade Edmondson. Colin Sell was seated at the piano, and The Lovely Samantha kept score for the first episode with Sven doing the honours for the second. The jokes, songs, references to Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia, and letters from Mrs Trellis came thick and fast, and there was much groaning.
It was worth the price of admission just to hear Ade Edmondson (on his first ever appearance on the show) singing and yodelling his way through "The Lonely Goat Herd" to the tune of Coldplay's "Fix You" but the highlight for me had to be when he and Miles Jupp performed Gilbert and Sullivan's "A Policeman's Lot Is Not A Happy One" on Swanee whistle and kazoo. Rachel Parris was a hoot, too (and she does a spot-on Kate Bush impersonation).
Producer Jon Naismith told us that the first episode will be broadcast on Radio 4 on August 4th, and added "Don't be surprised to hear yourselves laughing at entirely different things..." (ahh, the magic of radio!) You should tune in; it was great fun.
As a result of wandering around Bristol for most of the day I absolutely smashed my step count target. But I drank far, far too much coffee and ended up paying the inevitable price last night. I was still wide awake and buzzing at half-past three this morning, which earned me a woeful sleep score of 70 from my watch.
Now if you'll excuse me, I think I need to go and take some painkillers.
Yesterday I recorded a piece of music that I was happy with when I put my headphones on and listened back to it afterwards. That was the first time in a couple of weeks that I'd not immediately hated something I'd just finished making. Making the decision to abandon the project I'd been working on seems to have been the right thing to do.
I'm past the point of trying to second-guess my creative process. If something works, I'm going to go with it. If it doesn't, I won't waste any more time trying to force it into being something it doesn't want to be.
I'm kinda at that point with life in general, too.
Yesterday's session in the studio gave me the opportunity to give the new pedalboard a proper test drive, and it came through with flying colours. It also turns out that I appreciate being able to stomp on one of my stompboxes and not have it slide across the carpet a lot more than I expected I would.
The new rig has also prompted me to add a new section to my music page on this website so I can nerd out about effects pedals and you probably saw that coming before I did.
I feel like doing some more music stuff today, too. I like that feeling.
Yesterday I decided to abandon all the work I'd done for one of the two albums I've been working on, and start again from scratch, taking a different approach. I've never done that before, but the way things were going was making me unhappy and I finally realised I had to call a halt.
I'd set myself the task of recording an album where I treated each track as a live performance. I wanted to see what sort of music I could make in real time without allowing myself to make any edits or overdubs. This was the most ambitious thing I've attempted at any point in the last thirty years as far as making music is concerned. As a way of ironing out the last technical wrinkles in my current studio setup, it was a great idea. Creatively, it ended up being a disaster.
I ended up with seven tracks between three and seven minutes in length and while they had a lot of promise, I was getting increasingly frustrated at my inability to get to the end of a piece without doing something that made me wince when I played back the recording afterwards. Sure, I could have fixed those things; but that would have gone against the creative purpose of the album in the first place. I'd wanted to challenge myself, and push my abilities as far as I could. I finally concluded yesterday that I'd pushed myself too far and I should stop, and try something else instead. So that's what I did.
That's more than half an hour's worth of my music that will never see the light of day. Because it doesn't deserve to. Onwards and upwards!
Perhaps it was as a result of taking that decision or perhaps it was thanks to the pizza and two glasses of Malbec I had for supper last night, but I had an okay night's sleep last night—not good, because I don't get good nights any more, but I can live with okay ones—and I didn't get out of bed until ten o'clock this morning. I really needed that.
It seems like my subconscious will always find something for it to stress out about, and flailing away at music I didn't like was what it had glommed on to this week.
Hey, remember yesterday when I was enthusing here in the blog about my new pedalboard build I was about to start working on and I said "It's a bit larger than I need, but that means I've got plenty of room to expand..."?
More fool me; I've pretty much filled the thing up already. Take a look at this bad boy:
You might be surprised to learn that when I powered everything up for the first time and fed a guitar signal through it, it worked perfectly. You might be surprised; but I was astonished.
Everything you can see on the board apart from the Blackstar remote footswitch is being powered by a single Harley Benton PSU that's held in place on the underside of the board by bungee cords, so it runs off a single, 13-amp plug (the Blackstar remote gets its power from the amp it's connected to) and most of the cables are tucked away out of sight underneath. I'm really chuffed with how the rig has turned out and how stress-free it was to set it up. And there are far fewer cables lying about under the desk for me to catch my feet on now, which is a bonus.
Some of the patch cables are a bit unwieldy, though. I've got some shorter ones with low-profile, angled jack plugs on order and those should be arriving next week, but even with how it's set up right now, I'm satisfied that I've got a practical, mobile setup. Huzzah!
The UK is experiencing a spell of very warm weather this week. Again. Yesterday was the warmest day of the year so far and today's forecast is for it to get even hotter. It really shouldn't be this warm at the beginning of May but it has meant that the village's colony of swifts (apus apus) turned up yesterday for their summer stay. I love hearing their calls. For me, the sound will always remind me of teenage summer holidays I spent in Holt in Norfolk, where big flocks of them would chase down the streets in the evenings at rooftop level.
But a survey in Kent last year suggests that there's been an 89% decline in the county's insect population over the last 20 years and if those figures hold true for the rest of the country there will be a lot less food on the wing for the swifts to catch this summer. The Kent Wildlife Trust, who conducted the survey together with the Buglife conservation charity, have described these figures as "terribly alarming" and they ain't kidding.
And as another front garden in the neighbourhood is paved over to make room for yet more cars, those little insect refuges are getting fewer and further between...
No, not a comment on my health; as it's the first of the month I've been updating my energy usage spreadsheet, and this April it looks like I did rather well. I used significantly less gas during the month than I've done in any of the previous years I've got records for. But it's my electricity usage that really brought a smile to my face: I exported twice as many kilowatt-hours of electricity back to the grid as I used.
My net monthly energy consumption should be well into negative figures by the end of this month, but I treated myself this morning by heating up my breakfast croissant and pain au chocolat in the oven, because they just don't taste the same when you don't.