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Chris's Blog Archive: November 2024

This is an archive page for Chris's blog and covers the month of November 2024. Please click on the link immediately below for the blog's most up-to-date entry.

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The older I get, the more I realise that the only sensible response to an increasingly irrational world is to try and make nice things for people. And so I make music. Lots of it.

You can stream or buy my latest album Mood Swings at Bandcamp, where you can also explore my extensive discography of older material.

Looking for social media? Here's my Facebook Artist Page and Instagram. You can also follow me on Mastodon.

UP AND DOWN

The weather here this month has been as variable as my emotional state. Last Saturday the temperature in the conservatory (which doesn't have any form of heating in it) was 4°C (39°F) but this morning it's a quite ridiculous 12°C (53°F) in there. It's December tomorrow.

I joined my buddy Paul for a couple of beers in the pub yesterday and we got to talking about the state of our health. Neither of us has been at our best for the last couple of months, and we were comparing notes. "What if it's long Covid that's making us feel like crap?" Paul mused, and I must admit that I hadn't considered that possibility before. But the more I think about it, the more sense it makes. There's not much I can do about it, but knowing what's making me feel like shit is a step forward, I reckon.

Given just how nasty a disease Covid still is (did you see the paper recently about the treatment of a snake bite victim who also had Covid which led to the discovery of similarities between the way that Covid damages the immune system to a potentially lethal degree and the way snake venom acts on the human body?) we should all still be social distancing and wearing masks, we really should.

Or just staying indoors, well away from everybody else. Oh, wait...

MEANWHILE, THIS SHIP ARRANGES ITS OWN ECLIPSES...

That's one of my favourite lines spoken by 'Doc' Ostrow (the late, great Warren Stevens) in the classic 1956 science fiction film Forbidden Planet.

But here in the 21st Century we actually have spaceships—two of them, to be exact—which will do just that in the near future by flying in formation together a constant 144 metres apart, maintaining their relative positions with an accuracy of less than a millimetre. This will let astronomers study the sun's corona in the same ways as ground-based observers are only able to do during a total solar eclipse. It's very clever stuff.

OPEN EARS

Yesterday I tweaked the setup of the Atmos system in my living room, rewiring the presence speakers so that the cables are hidden away and moving the left and right surrounds into positions that are closer to Dolby's recommendations. Then I ran the amp's calibration routine (the YPAO, or Yamaha Parametric room Acoustic Optimizer) to calculate the optimum sound field for the room for multiple positions, which means that I don't have to be quite as fussy about sitting in the sweet spot on the sofa to get the "proper" listening experience. And now that I have front and rear presence speakers, this included getting the amp to calculate speaker heights and angles, too. It was the first time that I've needed to do that.

I was expecting the imaging to tighten up a bit, but not to the extent that it has done. The difference is extraordinary and what I'm hearing now is much closer to the listening experience I had at Real World Studios back in the summer, with albums formatted in immersive audio finally sounding fully immersive. The presence speakers are now doing their job properly and adding an element of three-dimensionality to the sound that was previously absent. The Atmos mix of Yello's 2020 album Point sounded spectacular on my system before, but now I have to say that it's absolutely breathtaking. And the In-side mix of Peter Gabriel's latest album i/o is, quite simply, transcendent.

That was definitely an afternoon well spent. I have a feeling I'll be listening to a lot of Atmos and surround mixes this week, including the Atmos mix of the new album by The Cure, which is on its way to me right now...

PROG KARAOKE

...and one of the other albums I've since listened to (not as an Atmos immersive audio mix, but in 5.1 surround sound nevertheless) was Steven Wilson's 2013 mix of Hawkwind's Warrior On The Edge Of Time. Memory is a weird thing. The album was originally released in 1976 and I listened to it a lot back then. It's one of the seminal albums of my teenage years, not least because it features the bass playing of a certain Mr Ian Kilmister (who was fired from Hawkwind the day before the album came out but who went on to considerably greater glory after forming his own band). Even though it's probably been a decade since I last gave it a listen I was astonished to find myself singing along (or more accurately speaking along, in the case of the tracks such as "The Wizard Blew His Horn" which feature Michael Moorcock reciting his poetry) with every. Damn. Track. I still knew all the words.

That was a completely unexpected delight. Musical memory is a weird and incredibly powerful thing.

ONE MORE MELTDOWN

But memory can also trip you up when you're not looking, and slam you to the ground without mercy. I was trying to find a photo on my computer on Tuesday and in doing so I stumbled across a favourite photograph of my ex that I hadn't seen for years. Thirty seconds later, I was in the absolute pit of despair. All the hurt came flooding back and it felt like someone was ripping my heart out of my chest.

I'm not kidding; I got brutally mugged by my own memory. I haven't felt so low in a very long time. I've lost track of the number of times I've been told that time heals all wounds and that scars eventually fade, but that's just bullshit. Thirty years ago I had my heart thoroughly and completely broken. It still is, and I've come to the sorry conclusion that it always will be.

Today I'm feeling a little better, but I'm still wondering whether or not to go back on antidepressants, because after the last couple of days I'm a mess. Thank goodness for the fact that I can literally surround myself with music these days; I don't think I'd still be here if it wasn't for the moments of joy that it's still capable of bringing me.

MATTERS OF CONCERN

This morning the sky is blue, the sun is shining, and the solar panels on the roof are currently exporting 3 kW. But that wasn't the case yesterday as Storm Bert roared through the village. It rained here all weekend and in the middle of Sunday afternoon I had to put a light on in the living room just so I could see the book I was reading. In the small hours of Sunday morning the wind was so noisy it woke me up. Some gusts were so strong that my house was making occasional and rather alarming creaking noises. A few trees have been brought down round the corner in Manor Lane and last night the main road through here was flooded where it crosses the Little Avon River at the bottom of the village. When the construction of a new housing estate started down there a few years ago I thought it was a crazy idea to build on an area that floods so often, but the local developers clearly thought a quick profit was worth the risk (it wouldn't be them who end up bearing the cost of insuring the properties, after all). Even though the council upgraded the culvert which takes the river under the main road before work on the estate began, it has already proved to be insufficient in protecting those houses from inundation and things are only going to get worse in the long run. Never buy a property close to a river, folks.

Yesterday evening my neighbour knocked on my door to let me know that the door on the control box that's on the side of the house for my solar panel installation had blown open. I'm glad to say that this was the worst inconvenience that I experienced personally; I got off very lightly, and happily so did most of the rest of the village.

Not very far away from here in Yate, 100 houses were flooded over the weekend. And not much further away over the border in Wales, Sion Street in the town of Pontypridd found itself under water for the second time in four years after more than 150mm of rain fell on the area in less than 24 hours. Across the country several people have died in incidents which appear to have been related to the flooding.

Spain last month; Wales this. Who will be next? Because make no mistake: thanks to climate change, somewhere else will be next for the very simple reason that the warmer the atmosphere gets, the more water vapour it can hold, and that means that the amount of rainfall which anywhere gets will increase. As we're already discovering, the places where we live are already unable to cope with that.

And what are the world's governments doing about it? Nothing other than greenwashing bullshit.

MORE REMIXING

I am continuing to tweak tracks that I recorded earlier in the year so that my "Best of 2024" album sounds as good as it can. As I mentioned earlier this month, I've never really gone back and polished a composition once I'd mastered it before, and the realisation that I'm allowed to do this has been surprisingly liberating.

As a result I've rather gone all in on the practice. I've taken drums off tracks, I've rewritten lyrics and then re-recorded the vocals, and I've been replacing any instrumental takes that I considered to be less than perfect with more accomplished versions (which is much easier to do once I've gotten to know a song through repeated listens, and that discovery was a surprise!)

You wouldn't believe how satisfying it is to do this.

NOT RESTING

Yeah, as if I'd be capable of staying away from my recording gear for even a couple of days. Nope. Not gonna happen.

Yesterday I started to assemble the compilation album that I send to my friends and family every year and rather than just choosing which songs were going to end up on it, things escalated rather a lot, because of course they did.

For a start, thanks to the goodie bag I got during my sojourn at Real World Studios back in July I now have a much more up-to-date set of plug-ins in my mastering chain, so the songs I've included that were written before then felt like they ought to be remixed and remastered. And after a pleasant and detailed listening session on my B&W speakers in the living room's 7.1.4 system I decided that some tracks needed to be rebalanced, so I went back and did that, too. And in doing so I decided that the vocals on one song really ought to have been recorded an octave higher than they originally were, and as I now have a new cheap but ridiculously good MXL 990 large diaphragm condenser microphone which could make them sound brighter and cut through the mix more, I ought to do that too, and then I decided that I didn't like the drum track on the same song so I changed the Superior Drummer kit I'd used on it to a new, custom programmed one I recently put together and edited the performance MIDI and oh, where did Friday go?

I also needed to update the default template I use in Ableton because Valhalla DSP just released version 4.0 of their extraordinarily good (and entirely free) reverb plugin Supermassive. The Black Friday sales have started too, and the nice people at Soundtoys emailed me with an upgrade offer that I simply couldn't refuse, so I'll be spending this weekend using all these now tools at my disposal to add a further layer of polish to some of the other songs I've selected for the compilation.

Because (just in case you hadn't realised it already) doing this sort of thing is my idea of having fun. And quite frankly we could all do with a bit more fun in our lives at the moment.

WARMING UP

I guess it was fairly predictable that after I said that I'd managed to get a half-decent night's sleep on Wednesday night that I'd be back to struggling on Thursday night, and that's exactly what happened. Last night I fared slightly better, possibly because I was full of pizza and a couple of glasses of red wine (and as an aside, the local Co-op's limited edition oven ready Hog Roast Pizza—topped with roast pork, stuffing, and apple sauce—is currently my favourite pizza ever.)

The overnight temperature on Thursday night was still a very frosty -3°C but last night, although things had dropped to -1°C by midnight in the back garden, the persistent region of high pressure which has been responsible for the low temperatures finally got pushed out of the way by a very wet and windy area of low pressure, which has been named Storm Bert. A warm front has moved in from the Atlantic and as a result, it's a balmy 11°C (52°F) outside right now. That's a good 3 degrees up on where things were at breakfast time, and the house feels much warmer than it did at this point on Friday morning. The marked change in the weather means that I won't be needing to run the heating quite as hard as I've been doing during the recent cold snap (although yesterday I was able to run a 2kW fan heater off the solar panels and still have enough juice left over to export another kilowatt back to the grid). The winds forecast for later mean that more green electricity will be available, so this storm is good news, in a way.

I'm trying to stay as green as I can. Octopus tell me I'm still in the top 2% of greenest consumers in the area.

GIVE IT A REST

Last night the outside temperature dropped down to -4°C (29°F) again. I retired to bed with a book and a hot water bottle and much to my surprise, I ended up having a fairly restful night; I think I was simply so exhausted that I couldn't stay awake any longer. Today I'm feeling slightly better than I was yesterday, and I've already got all the things done that I needed to do today including sorting out the house insurance for another year and putting some of my poo in the post for my biennial cancer screening test, courtesy of the NHS. Ahh, the joys of getting old.

Maybe it's my depression making me write off the skills that I already have, but I decided yesterday that I'm not satisfied with the sort of music I'm making and that I should take a complete break from creative work for a few weeks and give my muse a chance to recharge. Even though I find the process of making music incredibly sustaining, there comes a point when you have to step away from things for a while in order to gain a better perspective of what it is you're achieving. To borrow a concept from my professional background, if you look at what I've been doing in my bedroom studio for most of the past four years in terms of David Kolb's learning cycle, all I've been doing is oscillating between the active experimentation and concrete experience phases and completely neglecting the reflective observation and abstract conceptualisation phases of the process. So I'm going to focus on those for a while instead. That will involve listening to other musicians' work a lot more, analysing what's going on and thinking about what it is about particular pieces that appeals to me as much as it does. The good news is that I have a house that is absolutely stuffed full of recordings by other artists, so that won't be difficult to do. The conceptualisation part might be more of a challenge. I need to spend some time thinking about what sort of music I want to make next and which aspects of what I do I specifically need to work at improving in order to be able to actualise it.

I feel like my own work is missing some indefinable quality that other people's music seems to have. Again, this might be my depression telling me that I suck and that there's no point in aspiring to improve myself, but I have to ignore that particular inner voice because that way leads down a very dark path indeed, and I'm not going to go there. Instead, I've decided that I need to work harder at being a better musician. One creative area where I still consider my skills to be particularly weak is in lyric writing. Over the past decade and a half I've written nearly one-and-a-half thousand songs but I'm still terrible at following writing's golden rule of "show, don't tell" and it's really beginning to bug me. And by that, I don't just mean that I'm finding my work disappointing or even mildly irritating, I mean that I find myself thinking that I should never inflict another set of my lyrics on the world ever again. That needs to change and I'm not sure exactly how I'm going to manage it, but I'm sure I'll find something that will help. I think I've already managed to assimilate the advice in this lesson from the BBC, but as it's aimed at 11- to 14-year-olds that's not exactly something I ought to be proud of...

I need to sharpen up my soloing, too; in my opinion I think I'm starting to sound samey and predictable and I hate that. So once I've had a break, I think I'm going to have to knuckle down and do some serious practising for a while. Listening to a lot of other artists should also help me to break out of the rut I'm in, or think I'm in.

At least when it comes to my production chops, I'm happy with where I am these days. If I listen to something I recorded fifteen years ago back to back with anything off my recent albums, the difference in clarity and quality is quite astonishing. Having an obsessive level of interest in the ins and outs of the process has undoubtedly been an asset here. I might not have the facilities to master in anything other than stereo just yet, but I remember telling my friends even a couple of years ago that I had no plans to ever upgrade my living room system to full Dolby Atmos immersive audio, and look what happened there. "Yet" is a small but very powerful word...

Music is not a contest, it's a journey. It's a path which I've been following for more than half a century, and I love where it's taken me. I can't imagine what my life would have been like without it and I hope that it's a journey which will continue for years to come, so I need to cultivate and nurture my ability to continue making it.

CHILLY

After yesterday's snow, the skies cleared and last night the temperature in the back garden dropped to its lowest so far this winter, -4°C (29°F). I was not at all surprised to discover this morning that my trail camera hadn't picked up a single thing overnight. But today the sun is shining and the roof is currently generating more than 3.5 kW. I'll take that.

I had a very rough night last night. I'm finding sleep difficult at the moment and after tossing and turning for hours I got up at 04:30 and put the central heating back on. I think I may have finally dozed off for a while at around 07:30 but that's not been enough to help matters. This morning all my daily giant mug of coffee has been able to do for me is to give me a thumping headache.

I'm not really up to doing very much today.

GIVE US A RING

I read an interesting paper yesterday which suggests that Earth may once have had rings like Saturn has (Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune have them too, but they're not as prominent). Analysis of several asteroid impact craters on Earth dating from the Ordovician period around 466 million years ago show a curious alignment once their positions have been adjusted to take into account the continental drift that has happened since then. They're all within 30° of the equator. One possible explanation for this is that a passing asteroid came inside the Earth's Roche Limit (that's very close; it's less than 20,000 km) and tidal forces broke it into lots of pieces, forming a ring system around the planet. The impact craters were formed as larger pieces subsequently fell to Earth and it's been suggested that these impacts were responsible for triggering the late-Ordovician ice age. By examining fragments which have been recovered, it's been known since 2007 that an l-chondrite asteroid was the culprit.

And in case you're wondering what that means, the letter "l" signifies that the object was low in iron and a chondrule is a spherical blob of once-melted rock that is found in large numbers inside such asteroids. L-chondrite asteroids are the second most common constituent of the asteroid belt.

IFL science...

ERMAGERD! SNER!

When I went to bed last night the temperature in the back garden was 10°C (50°F). When I got up this morning it was barely above freezing outside and I've just spent a restful few minutes doing nothing more taxing than sitting here staring out of the window and watching the snow falling. It's still snowing at lunchtime and right now the outside temperature has only just reached 1°C (34°F). The snow might not be sticking on the street but my neighbours' lawns have all gone white, my conservatory roof is covered, and so are my solar panels (but despite this, the house is currently generating more power than it's consuming!)

Snow in November

It's been a while since the village got any snow this early in the winter. In fact as far as I can tell from a quick trawl of the site archive, the last time there was enough of it about in November for me to judge it worth mentioning here in the blog was way back in 2005. Last month I found myself pondering the possibility that winter this year might be a little less mild than those we've had in recent years and today's weather is making me think I could be right.

The UK really isn't prepared for proper winter conditions and it never has been, even back in the days when heavy snow events happened much more frequently. I know I've said this before but when I used to work over in Norway I was profoundly impressed by how severe weather didn't make the slightest bit of difference to people's daily routines (and I'm not talking about conditions that sprinkle an inch or two of snow overnight, but that dump several feet of the stuff everywhere). Here, people are reacting as if a snow apocalypse is happening with dozens of schools shut down, railway travel disrupted, and many roads being closed completely because despite the weather forecast yesterday warning that snowfall was expected, the gritting lorries didn't get out to treat higher-level roads in time. Why not?

The heating's on. I'm staying indoors.

NEW ALBUM!

So here's album number thirty-nine from me. It's called Altruism's For The Poor.

I'm not gonna lie: this album was a tough one to make. As you might have noticed I have been struggling a lot over the past couple of months and my decision to use the international maritime flag that signals "I require assistance" for the cover ended up being a no-brainer. A few of the songs on this album were written during the summer's 50-90 songwriting challenge and people left comments at the time telling me they thought the lyrics were on the "grim" side but I'm sure you've noticed that the world hasn't exactly improved since then. Add my health problems to the equation and you'll understand that I've not exactly been feeling particularly optimistic of late so thematically this isn't what you'd call a fun album. But I'm not apologising for that fact; that's where we are today. And strong emotions make me raise my game in terms of my musicality and my approach to production and that's very definitely the case from start to finish here. I couldn't leave things alone, and I kept listening to the mix and then redoing things to make it better to an obsessive degree. Mission accomplished though, I think; in my opinion I did some really strong work on this one.

Altruism's For The Poor

I always have a run-time target of between fifty-five and sixty minutes for my full-length releases, and I was bang on the money with this one. There are thirteen tracks and the album lasts just under an hour. And because I'm me, it's not all in 4/4; there are tracks in 6/8 and 7/8 as well.

I've scheduled listening parties for next week for this album (on Wednesday 27th) and also for its predecessor Mood Swings (on Tuesday 26th) so I hope you'll join me in the chat as I talk you through how each of these albums was made. And thanks to everyone who has already RSVPd to those parties!

Meanwhile it's on to the next musical project!

FAVOURITES

They Might Be Giants rolled in to Bristol on Saturday night with an eight-piece band to play a sold-out show at the O2 Academy. The gig was originally supposed to have happened at the SWX nightclub a year ago but had been rescheduled because Flansy was involved in a serious road traffic accident (the Uber in which he was a passenger was hit by a drunk driver), but Saturday night turned out to be well worth the wait—not that I had any doubt that this would be the case whatsoever. The tour features the band playing every track off their breakthrough album Flood and to my delight they also played Shoehorn With Teeth, Last Wave (a song which was written to synchronise to the Aerosmith / Run DMC video for Walk This Way) and best of all, the band came back for an unexpected extra encore after they played Istanbul for a rendition of Where Your Eyes Don't Go (which was often described by Sir Terry Pratchett as "the scariest song ever written.") "This was a special night for us," Flansy told us. Aww. It was for me, too.

The Johns were in fine form. To introduce the song Hot Cha from Flood (which contains the lines "Second time he went away / Left the bathtub running over") Flansy told a story—which he said he'd never told the rest of the band before—about staying at the Columbia Hotel back in the 90s and getting distracted for twenty-five minutes while leaving the ancient bath running, not realising it didn't have an overflow like modern bathtubs do and subsequently flooding his whole suite (and quite possibly the entire floor below)! During the first set they played the short song Sapphire Bullets of Pure Love from Flood but to make things more interesting, they did so backwards; at the end of the interval the video recording of that performance was played back but reversed so that we could all hear how closely they'd managed to achieve real-life backwards masking and they had absolutely crushed it. And if this sounds implausibly bizarre, have a watch (and listen) of them doing it during their recent Australian tour.

Brilliant.

On Wednesday night I was at the SVA Goods Shed in Stroud to see an evening of poetry featuring Robin Ince with Clare Ferguson-Walker introduced and compèred by the wonderful Jonny Fluffypunk (this was the first time that I managed to meet Jonny in real life after sitting in on many of his performances on Zoom as part of the lockdown livestreams organised by our mutual friend Wobbie Wobbit, hooray!) It was a really nice, good-natured evening and there were sofas and beanbags for those members of the audience who got there early (which included, me, needless to say). I got to have another nice chat with Robin afterwards (there was much talk of prog rock) and I bounced a long-cherished idea for a musical project off him to which he responded very positively, so I need to start working on making that happen. Hooray again!

The venue had a quite extraordinary object-based immersive audio system that to my surprise was not based on Dolby Atmos but was from a German company called D&B Audiotechnik. Many thanks to Alex Watts for kindly letting me indulge my inner front-of-house nerd and walking me through the setup, which had forty separate channels all around the hall (there were five just across the front!) and drawing back the curtain at the side of the stage to show me the insanely powerful processor which was driving everything. Alex had spotted my Real World hoodie and mentioned that he'd spent the past week installing a D&B system in The Big Room there; last year's WOMAD Festival featured one of their systems and Peter and his team clearly liked what they heard. I can't wait to hear the system for myself at next year's producer camp!

I like Stroud as an entertainment location; there are some nice venues, it's easy to get there, and the car parking in the car park at the railway station is free if you get there after 5pm. I really ought to go to gigs there more often.

TROUBLED NIGHT

As enjoyable as those gigs were, I've been paying the price for staying up late too often lately and I'm having a distinctly rough time at the moment. I know I drone on too much about being ill here and I should stop doing that, but last night I was still awake at 03:30 and that really isn't doing me any good at all. I've been checking my blood pressure and it seems pretty stable, but on a couple of occasions recently I've felt dizzy when I've moved my head quickly, so I think I might have picked up a bug and it's been hanging around for a fortnight now.

I've no plans at all for venturing out over the next couple of weeks and I hope this means that I can start to recover my equilibrium in both a literal and a metaphorical sense.

Because the state I'm in at the moment is not pleasant.

THIRTY-EIGHT DOWN...

I never expected to have recorded a body of work as a musician which would take you several days to listen to, but that's how things have turned out. Over the past fifteen years or so I've written and recorded more than 1420 songs and since I set up my Bandcamp account just over eleven years ago, I've released a fair amount of them there. I did a quick count just now and there are thirty-eight full length albums of mine on the site. For the purposes of that count I took "full length" to mean releases which contain more than half an hour of music, but there are plenty of EPs and singles in my discography as well.

And they'll soon be joined by album number thirty-nine. Yes, I've finally got it to the point where I'm happy with it, and it'll be released later this week. As usual I will provide all the details right here on the blog.

WINTER HAS LANDED

It was -1°C (30°F) outside last night and today I have switched the timer on my central heating system back on. It'll come on for half an hour, three times a day, to stop the house chilling down too much. Once we hit the tail end of December I normally boost things with a full hour in the morning and evening until March. Since I had the double glazing replaced in 2017 that's usually been enough to keep me warm, although I'm not averse to putting the gas fire on for a bit, too. But this is the earliest date that I've switched the heating back to automatic since 2019; is this a sign that I'm getting old and need to keep warm more than I used to, or is it an indication that we might be getting a "proper" winter this year? I don't know, but the UK weather forecast for this weekend is mentioning the possibility of snow falling on higher ground, and as far as I can recall the last time that happened as early as November was also five years ago.

Happily today has been a day of blue skies and sunshine and I just put a load of washing through the machine without drawing any power off the grid at all; my panels have been putting out around 3 kW. The panels on the roof also seem to act as an extra layer of insulation in keeping the house warm, because it wasn't particularly cold inside when I got up this morning. In the living room right now it's a very comfortable 17°C (63°F).

So I think the house is as set for winter as it could be. I hope!

UNDER THE WEATHER

I wish I could say the same for my own health, but this isn't the case. This morning I was wide awake at 4 am. It took me a good ninety minutes before I was able to get back to sleep. I've had two unpleasant stomach upsets in the past fortnight and my sleep hygiene has been all over the place. Even if I discount the aftereffects of the latest bout, I feel off, somehow. Getting old is kind of a drag.

I've been avoiding watching the television news channels and I've also been much less active on social media because quite frankly who needs to be subjected to the dystopian hellscape which they've both largely become lately? Instead I have been working on the new album. Last night I gave the whole thing a listen and there were a couple of things which annoyed me enough that I will be spending the rest of today fixing them. The niggles are now at the stage that I doubt anybody else would even hear them, but they have been bugging me, so I'm going to re-record the offending items. Again.

This isn't like me; the level of pickiness I've been exhibiting in the process of making this particular album is way off the charts. But the results sound—in my humble opinion—really good. If I can rein in my tendency to keep tweaking things forever, it should be released in time for Bandcamp Friday next month. Stay tuned...

WHEN THINGS FALL APART

...you make art. That's all I've got right now. And it'll have to be enough, for the time being.

GLOOMY

There's an enormous region of high pressure sitting over Europe at the moment. It's so big that it extends from the West of Ireland to the Balkans. With the air mass not going anywhere, the weather here for the last few days has been calm but very gloomy. Yesterday the overcast was so heavy that my solar panels didn't generate a single watt, and I had to rely on the Grid for power all day (that's the first time that this has happened since the panels were commissioned back in February).

With the long days of summer over for another year I was no longer a net exporter of energy last month. I fully expected this to be the case, although it still makes me a little sad: my net energy usage last month was 421 kWh compared to the -211 kWh I managed in July. However, back in October 2023, before I switched to solar power (and had my old central heating boiler replaced for a newer, much more efficient model) my net energy usage was 707 kWh. Even accounting for differences in the weather from one year to the next, that's a whopping difference. And yes, I've already updated the spreadsheet which I blogged about last month, because of course I have.

At least the high pressure means it's not been raining here and that's given the fields a chance to dry out a bit. Sadly this is not the case down in Spain, where it's still raining and they're still counting the cost of the catastrophic flash floods that hit the area around Valencia last week. As I watched the King of Spain getting pelted with mud on the news yesterday I found myself wondering if that ought to be a wake-up call for oligarchs the world over who have been holding back efforts to mitigate climate change; if the people have become angry enough over the lack of action to do that to their King, what might they do to a corporate CEO sleazebag?

TAKING MY TIME

Yesterday I finished another track for the next album. This one will be the title track, but most unusually for me it is not the song that I originally wrote for the purpose. The first version, which I'd written in 5/4 time, had begun to annoy me. It was angry (which is fine) and it was about a specific individual (which I am also fine with) but the arrangement and lyrics just sounded too clever for their own good. So I junked it and started from scratch by writing the lyrics first for a melody in 4/4. Much to my relief, the creative spark caught hold almost immediately and I've ended up with what is (in my humble opinion) a much better track. I found it difficult not to draw the conclusion that if a song is intended to have a message, you should keep the arrangement nice and simple so that it doesn't get in the way.

The attitude of "write something and move on" has been rather drilled into me since I first took part in NaNoWriMo some eighteen years ago (where does the time go?) It became ingrained in my process after I started doing the 50-90 and February Album Writing Month songwriting challenges which have taken up much of my time over the past fifteen years. Back in February this year I started to push back against that mindset and allowed myself to go back and edit the tracks I wasn't happy with after I'd posted them. By the time 50-90 finished last month, I'd decided that don't be afraid to rewrite was the second most important creative learning point of the summer for me. I'm still seeing the benefits of that, I think. And after listening to what I've recorded for the album so far on headphones last night, there are a couple of other changes that I'll be making to existing material this afternoon. I want this album to be as good as I can make it and I'm no longer averse to going back and improving things if I can see a way to do just that.

TARGET REACHED

Since I ceased my patronage of Amazon and closed my Goodreads account, I've been buying books elsewhere and focusing on writing reviews of them for this website instead. Every year I set myself the goal of reading and reviewing sixty books. Last year my final tally was 76 books. Yesterday I reached my target and wrote the sixtieth book review for this year.

Looking at the list of titles I've reviewed this year I'm struck by how much less fiction I've been reading compared with my normal literary habits. Fiction titles make up less than 30% of the whole, and I suspect that if I hadn't set myself the task or reading all of Martha Wells's excellent Murderbot books and then rereading all of the books in the Dune sequence that were written by Frank Herbert this year, the percentage would have been less than half that.

I'm also struck by how many of the books I acquired came from charity shops, particularly from the British Lions shop in Thornbury which has become a regular haunt of mine. When I caught up with my fellow bibliomaniac Robin last week, he was travelling with an even more impressive than usual collection of book-filled carrier bags in addition to his rucksack which is usually so heavy it's wise not to attempt to lift it one-handed. We both know the delight which comes from finding unanticipated treasures hidden among the shelves; we are both, I suspect, rather addicted to the rush of excitement that each fresh discovery gives us. When I was a small child, books were a means of escape from a life that was far less pleasant than it ought to have been. Sixty years on, that continues to be the case.

NINTH TO ELEVENTH

It's November the first, so the eleventh month of the year is under way once again. And yes, I know what you're thinking at this point. "I know that the name 'November' comes from the Latin for nine, Novem. The Latin for seven is Septem; the Latin for eight is Octō; and the Latin for ten is Decem. That means that the names of the eight to twelfth months of the year which we use differ by two from what they should be. So why is that, Chris?"

I'm glad you asked. It's all because of the Romans.

If your experience of Roman culture consists mainly of watching Ridley Scott's epic Gladiator, you've probably got the impression of the Roman Empire as a paragon of military organization and efficiency. In many respects it was, but I've always found it amazing that they ever managed to organize anything at all, because to start with they didn't think it was necessary to come up with a fixed length of time for each year. In the early days of their civilization, the Roman year had ten months that began in March. Each month had either 30 or 31 days, and when they got to the tenth month (December) the calendar just... Stopped. Winter just kinda happened until everyone decided that it was March again based on the phases of the Moon; the Ides of March (now set as March 15th) would be declared on the date of the full Moon. With three exceptions, we still use month names based on this calendar. Martius (March) was named after the god Mars; Aprilis (April) got its name from the Latin verb aperire which means "to open" (in the context of buds and seeds); Maius was named after the Greek goddess Maia; Junius after Juno, the Roman goddess of marriage and childbirth. I guess someone ran out of inspiration at that point because the remaining months—Quintilis, Sextilis, September, October, November, and December—translate as "fifth month," "sixth month," "seventh month," and so on.

Things began to change when Numa Pompilius, the second king of Rome, split winter into another two months and set year and month lengths so that they more closely aligned with solar and lunar cycles (he also introduced the festival of Terminalia, which marked the "official" end of the year on February 23rd). There's a school of thought which asserts that the first day of the year was changed to January 1st in 153 BC so that Roman Consuls could take office two months early in an effort to quell an uprising in Hispania which occurred during the Lusitanian War but from what I've been able to determine this has yet to be accepted as the official explanation. The Julian Calendar introduced by Julius Caesar in 46 BC introduced the cycle of three years with 365 days followed by a leap year with 366 days that was much more closely aligned with the solar year. This had the effect of removing the leap month of Mercedonius (or Intercalaris) which is one of the three exceptions I mentioned earlier; the other two happened when the existing months of Quintilis and Sextilis were subsequently renamed. Quintilis became Julius (July) in honour of Julius Caesar (it was the month of his birth) and in 8 BC Sextilis became Augustus (August), named after the founder of the Roman Empire, Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus (who, confusingly, was born in September).

The Julian calendar continued to be used for the next sixteen centuries by most of the western world until discrepancies between the calendar and the actual solar year had accumulated to such a degree that they were becoming a problem (this happened because the assumption that Caesar had made that a year was exactly 365.25 days long was incorrect and as a result the celebration of Easter was drifting further and further away on the calendar from the March equinox from which it was calculated). Most Catholic countries adopted Pope Gregory's new calendar immediately on its establishment by papal decree on October 4th, 1582 but being a largely Protestant country, England resisted following suit for more than 160 years. We didn't switch over until 1751, by which time the Julian and Gregorian calendars were out of sync by eleven days. You've probably heard about the riots that ensued when the switch was made as a result of people thinking that the adjustment in the calendar had actually taken the missing time off the duration of their lives. I'd like to think we'd be more sensible about such things these days but given the sort of television programmes and quality of news coverage that people are subjected to, I'm rather doubtful that this would be the case.

TREATED

It was a busy night here last night with plenty of visits from costumed neighbourhood kids in search of sweets. But I've still got half a bowl of chocolate left (they cleaned me out of packets of Haribo with no effort whatsoever). I guess I'll just have to eat them myself, then.

One side-effect of the huge increase in the number of people walking about in the street last night was the disappearance of the regular visitors to my back garden. My trail cam didn't trigger once.