Today is bright and sunny and right now the battery in the garage is charging from the 3.5 kW that panels on the roof are generating, which is rather handy. It's supposed to be a nice day for the rest of the day, but things will go downhill this evening as the first named storm of the winter season, Storm Austen blows in from the Atlantic. The Met Office announced a yellow warning for "strong winds causing disruption" running until 17:00 tomorrow evening for here, so I expect it'll get quite blustery later.

But at present there's little more than a light breeze outside. I need the calm today, I really do.

Over the past year and a half I've really noticed how unsettled I get when there's any sort of unexpected change to my routine or my plans for the day fall through. This is an extremely common Autistic trait and for some people, things not happening as expected can lead to some pretty severe meltdowns. I'm not affected as strongly as that, but nevertheless upsets can lead to me feeling, well, upset. It's only since I realised how neurodivergent I am that I've understood what's going on and I've been able to recognise what's causing the feelings of anxiety and insecurity I experience as a result.

And this is why I really didn't have a good day yesterday; when I went to get the car out of the garage and head off to get my annual flu shot and then do some shopping at the supermarket, it was as dead as a dodo. I haven't used the car for nearly three weeks, and its battery was flat. I had to ring up the surgery and rearrange my appointment, and I spent the rest of the day feeling all over the place: guilty and frustrated and disturbed, and not knowing how to deal with those feelings. Because how do you settle a mind that has decided that it's being threatened (if not outright being attacked) by some mysterious thing that it can't see or feel or hear? It's completely overwhelming.

I spent several hours just stewing about it, and yes, I know that this was ridiculous just as much as you do, but try telling that to my brain. I ended up changing the bedclothes and putting the electric blanket back on my bed together with the winter duvet, so that I could look forward to being warm and toasty that night. As a displacement activity it was a bold effort but it didn't seem to get the job done.

Even making a cup of tea didn't seem to help much, so I resorted to my tried and tested solution of working on music in my home studio and losing myself in hyperfocus for a few hours. That did the trick, and the piece of music I mentioned last time is now finished and mixed and sounding great. But I was pushing my machine's ability to run a large session in Ableton to the limit. I had to sit and wait for several minutes while everything loaded, and it's never been that slow before. I did have nearly twenty stereo tracks of guitars to mix, though...

I soaked in the bath reading a book for more than an hour last night. The bed was very cosy when I turned in afterwards and the big duvet did the trick: I had a fairly decent night and at one point my resting heart rate dropped down to 49 bpm, so I seem to have adequately managed the things that were stressing me.

I didn't really want to get out of bed this morning but when I finally did so, I felt rested and while I wouldn't push things by saying I feel refreshed today, at least I'm not feeling quite as frazzled as I did yesterday. I'm hoping that today will be a quiet day so that I can reset and regain my equilibrium. Somewhere on social media recently I read a question about dealing with life when you're neurodivergent: "Yes, you got through yesterday, but what did it cost you?" and oh boy, that resonated so much. Today is therefore going to be devoted to putting something back in my cognitive bank account because getting overdrawn is most unpleasant and I'm not going to do that again if I can help it. I have absolutely no plans for the rest of the day whatsoever and these days, I really appreciate how important it is for me to have days like that.

When I was a child, my father simply couldn't countenance the idea that I could get overwhelmed by things that he had no problem dealing with, so he decided that I must be faking it in order to get a day off. The Victorian work ethic his parents had instilled in him meant that there was no way I would be allowed to stay at home. Once I'd grown up (but still remained resolutely clueless) I would follow that same misguided work ethic and just plough through a bad day like yesterday, pretending that I was fine; is it any wonder I spent my whole working life feeling completely burned out? Nowadays I know that I need some downtime if I'm going to recover.

(Yes, that's a Simpsons reference; the song features Harry Shearer singing a duet with himself in the guise of both Montgomery Burns and his hapless assistant, Smithers, because he's a comedy superstar. It also has session legends Paul Jackson Jr. and Michael Thompson on guitar, and a certain Timothy B Schmit from Eagles on backing vocals...)

But it also serves as a commentary on the way the Internet is being run these days—and why "4" has rocketed to first place in the meme charts this week. The most amusing (and, depressingly, also the most plausible) explanation of the devastating clusterfuck that came to light earlier in the week is that the Indian company eMudhra, which acts as one of the Internet's Certificate Authorities (CAs are the net's security organizations; they enable traffic to be encrypted before it's sent from one computer to another, so that nobody else—allegedly—can eavesdrop on the interaction, and they're necessarily expected to have impeccable security protocols in place) used an LLM to select random numbers for their "secret" key used for encrypting things, and the LLM they used turned out to be a fan of Randall Munroe's very amusing comic XKCD. Specifically, this one which suggests that "four" is an acceptable random number to use when you're selecting a 384-bit number for a secret key which is expected to be roughly 10¹¹⁵ digits long. As Scott reveals in that link above, another of eMudhra's keys was 56 and a third was 115. In fact, of all of the keys that they had issued, none of them was higher than 237. That's... not very secure. The level of incompetence on show is astonishing. To absolutely nobody's surprise, it would appear today that eMudhra have subsequently decided to step away from the global Internet certification business. Or, perhaps "have been encouraged by other organizations staffed by smarter people" might be closer to the truth. I imagine their head office has been on the receiving end of some heated communications over the last couple of days.

Once again, I'm going to point out that using an LLM for ANYTHING AT ALL isn't just stupid; it isn't just environmental vandalism; it's also incredibly risky.

It also became public knowledge this week that one of the web's most common tools, the PHP Hypertext Processor (I just love the recursiveness of that acronym) contained several security vulnerabilities that were so severe that the recommended action was to take affected websites offline until a patch could be issued. And that meant a lot of websites; I was left feeling very grateful that I run a static website that doesn't use it at all. In a move that has resulted in them being widely branded as "assholes" on social media, the security company Chainguard blabbed, despite the announcement being embargoed so that patches could be put in place before the bad guys found out what was going on and could exploit things. Nice job, folks.

Oh, and then it turned out that the patches that were issued were still vulnerable.

Can we PLEASE find some grown-ups to run things? Because the folks that we've got in charge at the moment clearly haven't got a scooby.

It's properly autumnal out there today: thickly overcast and raining heavily and when I got up, the solar panels weren't putting anything out at all, it was so gloomy. By noon, they'd perked up a bit: they were generating nearly 300 Watts. I felt a strong urge to just stay tucked up in bed and hibernate this morning and my current gardening project, which involves clearing the main flower bed in the back, remains on hold. It'll probably do so for the rest of the week as well, judging by the weather forecast. There's a yellow warning for gales on Friday in place for most of the South West, although it doesn't quite reach as far north as here.

That's okay. I have a handful of different projects in progress at the moment and I can work on each of them without needing to leave the house. No surprise there, then; those are my favourite sort of task.

Yesterday I fired up the studio in order to install another free instrument plugin from Fracture Sounds, got sidetracked in Ableton, and ended up creating a new piece of music that ended up being just over five and a half minutes long. I've been thinking about the different compositional approaches I use when I'm writing music and I decided to focus on the emotional feel of the piece I wanted to achieve, which is something I've not really done as a first step before. Not surprisingly, it took me in a very different direction and I'm really pleased with what I've come up with so far. I'm inspired enough that I'll probably spend a few more hours on it this afternoon.

But I think I'll need the lights on in the studio, which faces north.

I'm still feeling under the weather. Not quite as bad as I did last week or the week before, but definitely well below par. It doesn't feel like I'm having another episode of depression, although there are definite similarities. More than anything else I just feel tired. There are so many things going on at the moment that leave me feeling angry and frustrated, and every time I accidentally switch on the television news I find out about something else to be angry about.

Certain political parties here in the UK have always had the hots for performative cruelty, particularly when it's aimed at the vulnerable and most disadvantaged members of society but the current selection, who not at all coincidentally have all been cropping up in cringeingly fawning interviews with Laura Kuenssberg on the BBC's news channel recently—don't appear to have any redeeming qualities whatsoever.

It's like they've realised that they don't have to devote any energy to pretending to be caring or compassionate human beings any more. I wonder whose political success gave them that idea?

I enjoyed taking part in this week's Fix the Mix Challenge and after spending a couple of afternoons trying out the techniques that Kevin presented in his tutorials, I can already hear a significant improvement in the quality of my own mixes. Which was a bit inconvenient as it meant that I've had to go back and rework the six tracks that I've recorded so far for my next album (this one will be full of instrumental prog tracks, and I really went overboard on the production this time).

I have to admit that during the parts of this week's sessions that were plugging mastering.com's premium mentoring program (which costs several thousand pounds) I went off and made myself a cup of tea. They were still working hard at upselling when I came back, ten minutes later. Don't get me wrong; I'm sure that a certain type of person will get a lot out of a membership, but it's not for me because I know I'd spend far too much time getting annoyed at the amateurish training design. I've got more than forty years' experience and a master's degree in structuring training interventions and I very quickly realised that their teaching skills weren't anywhere near the same level as their Grammy-winning mixing prowess. The theme of the event was about building a solid foundation for a mix; ironically, putting together an effective training programme needs to take exactly the same approach, starting with making sure that everybody understands the basic concepts involved and building more complex ideas on top of them.

In one session, the chat was full of newbie questions about important concepts like "What's a transient?" or "what are LUFS?" and "What does 0 VU mean?" and these all went unanswered. We watched Kevin make things happen in his copy of ProTools without any explanation of what he was doing (such as the way he was affecting the volume of multiple audio clips at the same time) or whether he was doing it with a keyboard command, a mouse, or an external control surface (and people were asking which it was in the chat, too) let alone talk us through what he was listening for, what his intent was, or the thought process behind it. So when Caleb earnestly assured the 500 or so members of the audience, "If you're a beginner, this is for you" I'm afraid I burst out laughing at how ludicrously inaccurate that comment was. The beginners were quite clearly lost and on the first day even I was struggling to see what was going on because the streaming platform they were using was downscaling Kevin's very fancy widescreen display to the point that it was illegible. Sessionwire clearly wasn't fit for purpose (I got the impression that this was the first large-scale field trial that they'd conducted, and you most emphatically do not do things like that with an audience of existing and potential future customers, ever) and the next day they'd reverted to using Zoom.

Where the course really fell down was in translating the concepts that were the "Foundation" of their approach into specific actions that we could try out in our own DAWs. What am I watching being done? How can I do the same thing in Ableton, which has a very different user experience? And does what I'm doing make things sound better, or worse? Analysis, synthesis, and evaluation: Benjamin Bloom identified these three cognitive behaviours as being essential in making learning stick. It took me a whole afternoon of experimenting with what I thought the techniques I'd seen being used were on my own recordings before I sort of figured out how they worked and what was going on. My real learning came as I got things wrong and then worked things through step by step until I spotted where I'd gone astray (and mistakes are an incredibly important part of learning, too).

I'd also made a point of not going off and buying any of the premium plugins which Kevin was using so that I could match his moves exactly, but instead made myself rely on the resources which I already have to hand. I remember as a newbie being disappointed to discover that just copying equipment setups that you see the pros using in YouTube videos is not the sure-fire trick to getting the sound you're looking for that it looks like it should be. I eventually realised that adopting that approach actually prevents you from learning the essentials of what you're trying to do. It's far more important to understand how you're affecting the material you're working with. Figuring out which pieces of the gear you already have can do the same thing (or at least get you reasonably close) usually ends up saving you money, too.

I'd quickly decided that I wasn't going to submit a mix for the song that was used for the demonstrations, partly because I could tell that there were other people taking part with better skill sets and much more sophisticated ears than mine, partly because I know that I would have gone down the rabbit hole for days obsessing about minute details on my version and the deadline was less than two days away, but mostly because—lovely though SEIDS's song undoubtedly was—it was in a genre that I know next to nothing about, so I wouldn't have been able to pull out those features which are most important. But I did import the stems into Ableton and had a lot of fun playing around with my own mix.

Maybe I'm being picky, but teaching people not just how to do things, but helping them to understand why they're being shown how to do them in a particular way was central to my professional career for decades and when people start asking for a lot of money for supposedly teaching something of value, then I'm not going to let them off lightly when the pedagogical approach that I'm seeing doesn't appear to measure up (and it didn't). Nobody is entitled to a free pass there, regardless of the awards they've won in their community of practice; I have standards. I get that this was a free event, but I had to work much harder than I expected to turn what was presented into a workable method that I could apply to my own mixes. I eventually came out of this week ahead, though. My skill set has been given a noticeable upgrade, my tracks sound punchier and they have a better balance, and I didn't need to spend any money doing it. I'm happy with that.

Yesterday was the thirtieth anniversary of my divorce being finalised. For a few days beforehand I was wondering how I'd deal with that. This blog has featured more than one meltdown from me over the years, because the separation wasn't my decision and on top of losing someone I loved deeply, I was betrayed by my best man, a close friend whom I'd known for more than a decade who turned out to be an asshole. I now realise that being neurodivergent made it particularly difficult for me to cope with such profoundly life-changing events. I wasn't just deeply hurt, I was thoroughly traumatised. It changed me in many ways that I thought were permanent. Realising that I had no control at all over what had been the most important aspects of my life made me bitter and angry; I closed down; I became profoundly and deeply depressed; what little self-esteem I'd had disappeared completely, and I found myself unable and unwilling to trust anyone or see the good in anything.

But yesterday, when the day eventually arrived, I was very surprised to discover that apparently I'm—finally—over it. I know a lot more about how my mind works these days, and understanding that it can behave in compulsive ways that are predictable and common enough to get written up in medical textbooks turns out to have removed a lot of their power over me; they're not part of who I am, they're wiring faults. So when I woke up yesterday morning and the rumination tried to kick off once again, I just told myself "Nope, not doing that today" and got up and treated myself to avocado and grilled bacon on toast for breakfast instead. It tasted good.

I had a good session of therapy in the morning. I worked on more music in the afternoon. And then I went to the pub with my mates. I had a very good day.

Hooray for self-awareness, right? Therapy works, folks.

I woke up at one point during the night thinking the bedroom felt a bit cold and when I checked this morning I saw why; the temperature dropped to just 1°C (34°F) in the back garden. There were no hedgehogs to be seen in the trail camera's recordings today, just a selection of the neighbourhood's cats wandering through the garden on their way to important meetings elsewhere.

While there are plenty of berries on the trees at the moment, the local sparrows, blue tits, robins, dunnocks, and starlings are going to need all the support they can get over the coming winter. With the nights starting to get properly cold, whatever I can provide is going to be an important source of energy for them. The RSPB lifted their moratorium on selling bird seed this week (it was imposed over the summer to try and stop the spread of a parasitic disease which has been responsible for a significant decline in the populations of multiple species of the UK's wild birds over the past few years) and I've already ordered fresh supplies for my feeders and the bird table.

Ever since I deleted my Goodreads account (because it became an Amazon affiliate, and Amazon are evil) I decided to set myself the challenge of reading at least sixty books each year and writing a review of each one of them right here, on my own website. Why spend time and effort making things for somebody else when I can do it for myself? This morning, I uploaded my fifty-ninth review of 2026, which is of David Lynch and Kristine McKenna's lovely Room To Dream so with two-and-a-half months left in the year, I'm already one review away from achieving my goal.

Mind you, in 2023 I read and reviewed 76 books. In 2024 (my most prolific year to date) I managed 80 and in 2025 I read and reviewed another 70 books, so I intend to read at least another ten books before the year is out. And given the stacks of unread books I have lying about the house at the moment, I'm not going to have any difficulty sourcing additional reading material. The hard part will be deciding which of them I'm going to tackle next.

I had a decent night's sleep last night. Maybe it was because I've been reading about David Lynch a lot over the past few days, but I had some of the strangest dreams I can remember having for a very long time. They were rich in metaphor, and most of them seemed to involve being reunited with things (for example, some favourite sweaters which I used to wear decades ago) that I used to treasure but which have since been lost. I felt myself returning to the good parts of my past, rather than the traumatic ones which more often than not are what dominate my dreams, and have done for most of my life. I do not have a happy soul at all and finding out that pleasant parts of my subconscious have somehow managed to survive was really quite shocking, but in a good way.

I woke up enveloped by memories of happiness and feelings of comfort which brought an unexpected moment of joy to me this morning, although I've no idea why those emotions chose to reveal themselves to me last night.

And who knows what it all means? Answers on a postcard...

When I went to bed on Saturday night I was not expecting to have the worst night I've had for months, but that's what happened. My watch awarded me a dismal score of 59 and I couldn't really argue with that. My heart was racing all night and I felt really ill. The symptoms felt familiar, too: it wasn't the first time I'd felt like that, and when I got up on Sunday morning and checked the ingredients of the oven chips I'd eaten for dinner, I recognised one of the less appetizing-sounding substances listed on the packet: disodium diphosphate. I mentioned this particular food additive the last time I became ill like this, and the fact that it has cropped up again leads me to believe—based on the evidence at hand—that it was what was responsible for me feeling so bad. Read that first link, and you'll be asking why anyone would want to eat something that contains it, given its side-effects. You'll probably be wondering why manufacturers are allowed to add nasty stuff like that to food, too; and you're not the only one doing so, believe me. I really need to start checking the ingredients lists of food I buy more carefully.

I feel better this morning. On Sunday night I fell asleep remarkably quickly and for the next hundred minutes I was in solid NREM sleep. You probably know how fixated I am on tracking the quality of my sleep by now (seeing the decline of multiple relatives with Alzheimer's disease and knowing that not getting sufficient NREM sleep every night is one of the biggest factors in exacerbating the progress of the disease is going to make you extremely motivated in improving the quality of sleep you get, particularly if your autism gloms on to it as a thing you can compile data on and track from day to day) but I think that was a record for me.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that I'm bright-eyed and bushy-tailed this morning, but I was out of bed before 09:00 and after my habitual giant mug of coffee I feel more like my old self.

Internet nerds have been fascinated by the results of multiple drone strikes on Russia's Yandex data centres over the weekend (Yandex are the Russian equivalent of Google). Why? Because the amount of global web traffic spawned by Yandex fell off a cliff as a result. A staggering 99.6% of traffic from those centres comes from automated sources, according to Cloudflare. The majority of this traffic will consist of Yandex's data crawlers busily indexing other sites on the web, because that's how a search engine provides its results.

But—and this is what the nerds are focusing on—not all of it. They've been suggesting that the fact that, over the weekend, the amount of posts on social media supporting far-right organizations, particularly Germany's AfD, mysteriously plummeted was not at all a coincidence. Another thing that data centres are useful for running is automated posting programs, or "bots". Most people aren't aware that a lot (if not most) of the posts that they see on social media don't come from human beings at all. Instead, millions of them originate in literal troll factories. Prime Minister Andy Burnham confirmed at the weekend that Russia interfered in the 2016 Brexit vote and a social media campaign by a foreign power is a particluarly cheap (and, up until now at least, low-risk) form of warfare that most people don't realise is happening at all. After all, as a way of destabilizing the EU, Brexit was the lowest of low-hanging fruits to pick. The nerds will probvably bet that Russia's efforts at manipulating public discourse over here did not conclude once the UK's decision to leave the EU had been made. Such a nerd might go on to observe that some of the loudest pro-Brexit campaigners over here still appear to have strong ties to Russia. Evidence to support this arrived in the shape of the results of the strikes on Yandex on Reform UK's engagement levels over the weekend. And the Ukrainian President didn't hesitate at all to join the dots about what was going on.

Those same Internet nerds have not been slow to point out that all of this bot traffic going offline might be somewhat inconvenient for Donald Trump, given that the American midterm elections are only a few weeks away...

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 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.