As you can see from the banner, this month marks the twenty-third anniversary of me deciding that I'd like to try my hand at blogging for a few months so I could keep Rob and Ruth up to date with what I was doing and share anything interesting I'd found on the Internet. I had no idea back then that I'd still be doing that all these years later. But here we are. Rob and Ruth are both grown up, living with partners, and having interesting adventures of their own. I still code every page by hand using Netbeans, and I know a darn sight more about CSS these days than I did back then when I thought that using a table in HTML was the height of high-tech web savvy.

The blog has gotten way more introspective over the years. In the early days I was more interested in writing about daft social phenomena like flash mobs than I was in examining my thoughts and feelings. But as I got older, I became much more open about the poor state of my mental health, and I've shared more than one phase of severe depression on these pages. I didn't really have a choice about it, because at one point things got so bad that I was forced to take a protracted leave of absence from the blog which lasted for seven weeks, and believe me, that was no fun at all. It's only in the last year that I've begun to figure out what's been the root cause of all of my difficulties all along, and last month was the first time that I've written in detail here about my experiences. The feedback I've received about that piece showed me that other people valued what I'd written considerably more than I expected them to. It was the right thing to do.

I guess the blog has always been a means of self-actualisation for me. To my knowledge, it doesn't have a particularly large readership (even if I do get occasional spam emails asking me if I'd ever consider carrying sponsored posts here and I would rather gouge my own eyes out than do that) but it lets the world know I still exist, and that has to be enough. I often think about friends I'm no longer in contact with, and I find myself wondering if any of them have ever stumbled across these pages and discovered what happened to that weird bloke they used to know, back in the day. It would be nice to hear from them.

After ten years of blogging I started posting links to the music I'd made public on Bandcamp and has it really been that long since I started doing that? My musical activities have remained a constant here ever since, and those humble beginnings have taken me further than I ever dreamed possible. These days I am comfortable identifying myself as a musician and a composer, and it's incredibly satisfying to be able to do that.

And so the blog continues. I've given up trying to figure out what lies in the future for me (or indeed for anyone else) because my life gets more and more crazily unpredictable with each passing year but whatever happens, you're likely to find me blathering on about it here. Don't forget that there's an RSS feed you can subscribe to which will let you know whenever the blog gets updated with a one-sentence summary.

Yesterday afternoon, after spending a happy couple of hours in my home studio working on a new piece of music, chatting with my brother in New York on WhatsApp, and having a meeting on Zoom with a muso pal to plan what our next collaboration sessions should focus on, I shut all of the gear down and came downstairs to chill out for a while.

But without consciously thinking about it, I suddenly realised that I had decided to tidy the living room up a bit. So more sorting, filing, binning and shredding ensued and a couple of hours later, several piles of books and Blu-Rays which had been living either on the floor or on the coffee table in the living room had been cleared away to the shelves where they should have been kept in the first place. There's another big pile of cardboard in the kitchen, waiting to be recycled. And the dining room table is completely free of clutter, which is extraordinary and lovely and incredibly satisfying.

This is the second time in a week that I've found myself tidying up. The first time I had a course of therapy back in 2015 it had the same result but it's still most unusual behaviour for me. I'm not sure how long this feeling will continue to win out over my ADHD but I think it's a good sign, as is the fact that once again last night my watch gave me a sleep score of 100.

This "feeliing okay" lark is weird. I'm not used to it at all. But I'd like it to continue, please.

After the blog had been running for twenty years I found myself writing about how my Internet presence had gone from a 14,400 baud dial-up modem to an always on, Fibre To The Cabinet (FTTC) connection that was giving me speeds of 70 Mbps down and 18 up. Since then, I've upgraded to Fibre To The Premises (FTTP) and the speeds I'm getting these days are ridiculous. I ran a speed test this week and quite honestly the results I get now are more than I could ever manage to max out: 870 Mbps down and 109 up. Latency is 17 ms, which is nuts.

I noticed as I wrote today's post that back in June 2023 I'd blogged about getting an Aeron chair and I can report that it's still going strong and still as comfortable as ever. I'm sitting in it right now, in fact. And the Mirra 2 in my studio is even more comfortable!

And no, Herman Miller didn't pay me to post that.

Seriously, though—the amount of advertising on UK television these days is sickening. Worse, most of the channels synchronise their ad breaks, so you can't escape by switching to a different station. And dear God, if I ever meet the person responsible for those credit card adverts that are "sponsoring" showings of Star Trek and Stargate SG1 on weekdays at the moment, I swear I will not be held responsible for my actions. They are disturbing the balance of my mind.