After a couple of days of showers, the sunny weather returned this week (although I'm happy to say the heat has stayed away). Since I had the solar panels installed, they've generated more than 14.5 Megawatt-hours of electricity and with just over a week of August left to go, I have already exported 436kW/h back to the grid this month. I won't beat last month's record-breaking performance but that's still nearly four times as much electricity as I've used, which means that my power bill will be nicely negative once again.

But the village is really showing the signs of the drought. One of the rowan trees on the public patch of grass round the corner from me seems to have died, and the teams on the cricket pitch yesterday were having to cope with a wicket that wasn't just hard, but burnt to a crisp.

Cricket on the Village Brown

It's the Bank Holiday Weekend next weekend and the forecast is therefore (as is traditional for the UK) for rain. It's much needed, but... Can we not have too much all at once, please?

I'm currently reading Robert Fripp's entertainingly metaphysical examination of his craft, The Guitar Circle (Panegyric Press, 2022). I've been an admirer of Mr Fripp's phenomenal technique since I was a teenager but this is not the sort of book which gives practical advice on how to play any of his technically challenging compositions; it won't even explain how you should be holding your pick (indeed, that is one of the first things a beginner must learn in a Guitar Craft course, requiring one to focus on the physicality of doing so for an extended amount of time which may seem excessive to anyone not blessed—or cursed—with Autistic levels of attention but which turns out to be an essential aspect of being able to deliver a reliable and consistent performance). The book is philosophically dense and Mr Fripp does not hold back; when we met at Real World back in July I mentioned to Steve Ball (a long-time associate of Mr Fripp's and the person responsible for the Celtic knot artwork which graces the book) that I was reading it, his immediate, highly tongue-in-cheek reaction was a deadpan "Oh, I'm sorry." But what the book does do, and do extremely well, is to introduce the reader into a creative mindset by which, as the author tells us, "the impossible becomes accessible." I've been lapping it up.

I was intrigued by the fact that one of the exercises which the reader (in the shape of a budding Guitar Craft student) is invited to try is something called "Morning sitting" (it's described in its introductory form on page 126). As Mr Fripp puts it,

"Do nothing - as much as you can! "

before explaining what he is getting at as follows:

"1. Before we ask ourselves to do something,
we begin by asking ourselves to do nothing.
2. The exercise develops relaxation
and an engaged sense of personal presence;
3. Distinguishes what-we-are from who-we-are; for example,
our background noise and who is listening to it;
4. Strengthens volitional attention;
i.e. practises the Will (whatever we might understand by that). "

As Mr Fripp goes on to say, it's not meditation, as such. It involves sitting quietly for half an hour whilst attempting to train the attention to go where we want it to go, not where it decides it should go. I was sufficiently intrigued by this to attempt the practice for myself, and I have been doing so each morning since I read about it.

Just sitting still and doing nothing for half an hour? How hard can that be, eh?

Quite a bit, as it turns out. During my first attempt, the scale of the challenge revealed itself to me only gradually; although I've practised mindfulness for several years now, the extended amount of time for which the mind is asked here to stop what it's doing and sit quietly does not go down well with its inner voice(s) and thoughts kept bubbling up to the surface. The task one is set is to recognise that these thoughts are separate from you and can be ignored. Remarkably, this eventually seems to have sunk in; subsequent sessions were easier as I sat with my legs crossed and my hands clasped together and focused on my awareness of my body, starting with the toes of my left foot and then slowly moving it up my left leg, the left side of my body, down my left arm and up the right and so on it until it returned to its starting point. Doing so left me with a feeling of being centred and calm in a way that has been much needed lately.

I wish I could go on to say that it has helped me to sleep, but sadly that has yet to happen. I had an absolutely dreadful night last night and this morning I ache in all sorts of uncomfortable places. It feels like I'm moving from one phase of my life into another one at the moment, one in which I must be far more reliant on myself—because right now, I'm all I've got. I hope that what's waiting on the other side of this turmoil is a phase of stability and healing, because at last it feels like that might be possible. Indeed, it might even allow "the impossible to become accessible." But I have to let go of where I am at the moment first, and that's not exactly a prospect that fills me with happy thoughts. Worse, I've been letting myself down badly recently by not looking after myself (not least because the inner voice of my PTSD has always told me I don't deserve to be cared for) and I know that I really need to fix that. Yeah, I'm a mess. But the therapy has helped me to see that I don't need to stay a mess for the rest of my life, so I'll take each of these half-hours of calmness as an opportunity to lay down some solid foundations for what comes afterwards, whatever that turns out to be.

It actually rained here a few times over the last couple of days, and while the front garden is still a patch of dry scrubland, the back lawn now has patches which are genuinely green.

It's looking increasingly likely that this winter will, once again, see the UK swing from not having enough water to having far too much of it. The Met Office are already warning that this year's Super El Nino (which they are describing as "unprecedented" is likely to increase the chances of "wetter, stormier conditions for NW Europe, including the UK, in the coming autumn and early winter." It's been recognised for a long time that the warmer the planet gets, the more water the air is able to hold (and as this table clearly shows, between 20°C and 30°C the amount almost doubles) and that means much heavier rainfall, larger hailstones during more violent thunderstorms, more likely episodes of flash flooding, more landslides, and all sorts of other stuff which really isn't desirable at all.

The summer's heatwaves across Europe have killed at least 30,000 people so far. So why the fuck is Andy Burnham still prevaricating about taking action on climate change?

I've spent the last three days transcribing the chats which Helen and I had a couple of weeks ago. Each recording lasts between three-quarters of an hour to an hour and a quarter, and the completed transcriptions are each working out to be thirty to forty pages of A4 text, so that's a lot of work. It's been engaging and entertaining; there's a lot of laughing going on in the recordings and I find myself smiling a lot as I listen to them playing back. Not only is the work exactly the sort of thing that is guaranteed to send me into hyperfocus, I'm also spending most of the day listening to Helen's voice, which I have always found profoundly comforting ("You soppy sod!" was her response to this, of course). As a result of being so invested in the work I become so completely absorbed that everything else, including the passage of time, disappears. It's only when I finally notice that my butt has gone numb that I realise I really should have got up and moved around a bit more in the previous couple of hours...

But yesterday's recording in particular addressed some fairly intense subject matter. It stirred up strong feelings about my own childhood and these affected me strongly for the rest of the day.

Over the past few days I've also been having some deep and profound conversations with a couple of my American friends about relationships and loss, and the way our lives have changed over the years, and each of these stirred up memories of my own past which affected me much more than I was expecting them to. As a result, I had a very rough night last night, finding myself wide awake at 03:30 and unable to get back to sleep.

I might suffer from alexithymia most of the time but when the feelings do hit, they do so with incredible intensity and this week has really taken me on a roller coaster ride. Instead of repressing my emotions and pretending that I'm fine (which is what I've done for pretty much the whole of my adult life), ever since I started having therapy I've been allowing them to bubble to the surface so that I can recognise them for what they are and then work out what I should do about them. Last night was a typical example of that happening. I was swamped with feelings of loneliness and powerlessness (one of my friends is going through some challenging times at the moment, and I wish that I could do more to help her). Accepting my feelings, even when they're not comfortable ones, is a much healthier response and it's definitely been helping me but it's not just effortful work, it's exhausting. I feel drained this morning so I am going to put the transcribing work on hold for a day or two and go and do something much less emotionally demanding instead.

I spent an hour or so in the studio yesterday, but I can't seem to get any traction on my latest music project. I'm not going to push things; forcing myself to work on something when I'm "not feeling it" always end up with me making something that I'm not satisfied with.

The next Song Sprint will begin on the FAWM website on September 5th, so I hope the muse will have decided to show up by then.

The heatwave finally broke yesterday. I left all the upstairs windows open last night and this morning the display for the floor sensor in the bathroom was showing just 22°C (72°F) which is the lowest it's been in months. Perhaps unsurprisingly I slept like a log last night, spending 55% of it in NREM sleep, according to my watch.

And it feels like it, too. I had another very emotional therapy session on Friday but I came out of it feeling better about myself than I have done in years; decades, even. I've spent this weekend quietly thinking about the ramifications of what we worked through, because there was an awful lot to take on board. I haven't really done much else. It's been a long time since I allowed myself to sit peacefully without letting myself get worried or stressed about how "wrong" my life has been and instead I was encouraged to focus on the good stuff which happened to me in the past, and more importantly on the positive things which are happening to me in the present. And once my therapist got me thinking along those lines, I realised just how far I've come in the past year.

I've written myself a page of the affirmations which my therapist and I came up with. This morning I printed it out, framed it, and hung it on the wall next to my bed. I'll make sure that I read at least one of them out loud each morning when I get up. It might seem like an insignificant thing to do for most people, but it didn't feel like that to me. Each of the things I typed out is evidence-based, too—because apparently that's what it takes for my weird mind to pay attention to them. I'm going to sit with that realisation for the rest of the day, because I think I need to let it sink in.

This month seems to have become a bit of a turning point. Despite all the bad stuff that's going on in the world, I feel like my circumstances have changed for the better. Or more accurately, the way in which I make my way through the world has changed somehow. I've let go of a lot of memories and feelings and I hadn't realised just how buried I'd become under counterproductive, negative thoughts. I guess when your therapist points out the damage that you're doing to yourself, it does rather sink in. It seems like I've finally managed to start living in the present moment instead of dwelling in the past, and I feel so much lighter as a result.

I hope I can preserve that feeling. But for the moment I'm just going to savour the pause in my mental turmoil for as long as it lasts, and simply breathe.

I had a nice birthday on Tuesday. I'd been encouraged by several of my friends (and my therapist) not to stay at home all day, so after I'd had breakfast I headed into Bristol to do some shopping. I loaded up on books and also scored a couple of really cool Godzilla t-shirts from Forbidden Planet; some things never change, no matter how old I get. Bristol was surprisingly quiet (the university is closed for the summer, and that makes a significant change to the number of people in town) but by lunchtime I'd had enough. I'd already surpassed my daily step count and the temperature had really started to climb, so I headed back to the car and drove home.

I nattered with friends on WhatsApp for the rest of the day and called in at the Plough for a pint of IPA in the afternoon. It was so nice that I stayed for another one while chatting to Steve Nute before picking up something for tea at the Co-op and walking home. I had a bottle of fizz waiting in the fridge, and I spent more time chatting online while I worked my way through it before eventually going to bed feeling happy and rather pleasantly drunk. That's not something I do very often these days and being woken up at quarter to eight the next morning by the sound of chainsaws and the smell of two-stroke wafting through the windows as my neighbours had the tree in their front garden chopped down did little to alleviate my (mild) hangover...

I've given my home page its annual refresh, too. I've polished up the writing (which will always be a continuous process, after all) and added one or two photos that you might not have seen before.

I hadn't realised how close to totality things were going to get here during yesterday's solar eclipse, but at quarter past seven in the evening the light went really weird and the shadows in the back garden revealed just how much of the sun had been occluded:

Crescent shadows

My social media feed went bananas, of course. The weather was perfect for viewing across much of Spain and the Mediterranean, and the photos of totality were wonderful.

It got noticeably cooler, too. That was particularly welcome as the temperature in the back garden had peaked at 35°C (95°F) earlier. Yes, we're in yet another heatwave at the moment; today, the Met Office has just issued an amber warning for extreme heat here until midnight tonight.

Well, not that lazy, really; I'd shaved, showered, and walked to the Co-op and back to get a fresh loaf of bread and some milk by 09:30 this morning. But I'm going to just chill out at home for the rest of today after one of the nicest weeks I've spent in a very long time. Helen and I spent most of it sketching out the structure of her book, going out for nice meals, and just spending time together as two old friends, hanging out and nattering away non stop. We hadn't seen each other since January and we had plenty of catching up to do.

Since Helen headed back north on Friday morning I've been transcribing the book chats we recorded. I found a rather nifty piece of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) called Buzz which runs locally, so it avoids most of the awful implications of using modern LLM-based tools because (a) I'm running it from power off my roof and (b) no data centres are involved, as all my data stays on my machine but sadly, it relies on OpenAI's Whisper model. There don't seem to be any alternatives out there that don't use something similar. It's astonishingly fast and pretty good at what it does, although I'm only running it with the "tiny" model of Whisper so it didn't understand quite a few of the more unusual words Helen and I used and it misheard "The cause of death was Hep C" as "The cause of death was Pepsi" so that was corrected very hastily before any lawyers got involved. And it's so sweet listening back to the two of us chatting. I hadn't realised how often we finish each other's sentences!

I don't have a lot planned for next week. Although it's my birthday on Tuesday (I will be 66, and how did that happen?) most of the usual suspects I would usually end up in the pub with are away and I suspect that I'll end up celebrating the day on my own. The weather is supposed to turn hotter once again with temperatures here forecast to be in the low thirties by Thursday, so I will probably be hiding away indoors but I might end up going out for a drive just so that I can sit somewhere that has decent air conditioning!

...seems to be returning. I've been playing bass regularly for the last couple of days and today I feel like I need to get back into the studio making music once again. It's taken me a while to feel like this after writing eleven tracks in nine days for last month's song sprint, but that might simply be because the back bedroom has been too warm to stay in for long during the recent hot weather.

Listening to music is a beautiful thing, but making music of your own is so much better.

Chatting with Helen and Roz this week reminded me just how sustaining it has been for me to have a decent home recording setup available to use whenever I need it. Since I completely refitted the back bedroom it has been not just a place of refuge but also a portal to creative fulfilment which has kept me going whenever I've been feeling down. There's also a sensuous side to playing the guitar or bass which I hadn't realised existed at all until my therapist pointed it out to me this week. I very much enjoy the sensation of playing guitar in a way which I don't get when I play the piano, for example. Make of that what you will.

I was an inveterate synthesiser nerd before I hit my teens. I've always been particularly obsessed with the strange timbral effect on the human voice that could be produced by feeding it into something called a Vocoder, particularly models made by EMS and Roland (and, later, by Sennheiser). Today I have several emulations of the technology in my home recording studio and I've made extensive use of them. But as an avid listener I can remember sitting spellbound as the BBC Radiophonics Workshop's production of Ray Bradbury's There Will Come Soft Rains was first broadcast on BBC Radio Four back in 1977. In my opinion it remains one of the classic works of electronic sound design and its unique atmospherics owe much to the expert application of the vocoder to the cast's performances by the director and producer Malcolm Clarke. I was obsessed with the production as soon as I heard a preview of it and made sure that I could record it off air on my trusty Decca cassette recorder at the appointed time. I ended up listening to that recording over and over again over the years, often several times in a row. In fact, I'm pretty sure that I still have that cassette kicking around somewhere. But these days everything like that is on the internet and I don't have to go digging through storage crates in order to find it, because here it is, in gorgeous quality, on YouTube:

It's radio, but with pictures.

Bradbury was riffing on an earlier poem with the same name written during the closing stages of the First World War by Sara Teasdale who, like Bradbury, muses on what would happen to the rest of the world if mankind suddenly disappeared. Teasdale gives no explanation for the absence of humanity, even though her poem was written at the height of the Spanish Flu epidemic which killed millions; in contrast, Bradbury's vision is bleakly explicit.

I mention it today, because today is the day on which the events of the Bradbury poem take place. Despite its apocalyptic nature, this is the sort of thing that tickles my neurodivergent brain in a pleasing manner. I hope it does the same thing to yours.

Helen is visiting this week. We had a nice meal yesterday at The White Horse at Buckover, which we seem to end up at every summer. I'm helping her put together her book about her brother Phil and we've been having fun reminiscing about our rock and roll adventures back in the 80s.

And talking of the imminent arrival of soft rains: we were interrupted this afternoon by—wonder of wonders—a heavy shower of rain. It was nice to smell the petrichor; it's been a while!

After a good therapy session yesterday I decided that as it was pretty much a perfect summer's day outside, I should go for a walk. So I picked up a camera (of course) and headed off around my usual circuit of the village on Devil's Lane. There hasn't been any rain here for weeks, and we're in a severe drought. The creek which runs through a culvert at the end of my road has pretty much dried up, and this photograph which I took up in Churchend shows what most of the countryside around here looks like at the moment.

It's all looking a bit brown and crispy around here.

There are signals in the forecast for the tail end of next week that we might finally get some showers, although there is still no sign of any serious amounts of rain. This weekend is expected to remain dry and sunny, with temperatures much closer to their seasonal norms than they were last month. And I'm very grateful for that, even though I found myself wide awake at half-past two this morning.