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It's the last day of the month. December—and meteorological winter in the Northern Hemisphere—starts tomorrow. I was going to do a few month end related tasks today, but I can't focus. I'm tired and sore even after spending twelve hours in bed last night. I have no energy, no enthusiasm, and no motivation today. I just want to go back to sleep.
I feel old.
Old, and run down. This year has really taken it out of me in all sorts of unexpected ways, and the prospect of spending another Christmas on my own is already making me feel sad. I'm really not looking forward to the festive season because for me the overwhelming feelings it brings are of loneliness and isolation. And yes, I can already hear you saying to me, "You're going through another depressive episode, aren't you?" and you're absolutely right. In the past I'd probably already have scheduled a doctor's appointment to go back on the Mirtazipine by now, but I hate how dissociated and fuzzy that stuff makes me feel, and how much weight I put on when I take it. Worst of all, the way it dulls my thoughts takes away most of my creative edge. Being able to fall asleep at night just isn't worth the side-effects.
I suspect that the disruption to my domestic routines is at the root of how I feel right now: I'm unsettled and anxious and completely off my game. The work on the new bathroom should be completed by next weekend, so I'm going to wait and see how I feel after that before I decide whether I need to seek medical help or not. Right now, it sucks to be me.
But I've been in this state before. I'll get through it, just as I did last time, and the time before that. One thing that will still reliably make me feel better is to have a cup of tea, so I've just put the kettle on. And there's a cinnamon roll in the fridge that's left over from yesterday's trip to the Co-op...
November has drawn to a close here with blue skies and bright sunshine and thanks to the solar panels on the roof, I'm currently exporting more than 2kW back to the grid.
One month end task I did manage to complete this morning was to update my domestic energy use spreadsheet. While my electricity usage was slightly down on last November (and that can be accounted for by the fact that I was away at Real World for a few days) my gas usage this month worked out as being 83% of what it was last year. That was a surprise—it's amazing what not being able to take baths or showers will do to your energy consumption. It's not been a particularly mild month here, and I've not skimped on turning on the gas fire or the central heating when the house started to feel cold. As the bathroom fitters have been showing up at 08:00 for the last couple of weeks I've been getting up much earlier than I normally do. I'm up and about well before the timer is set to switch the central heating on, so I've been hitting the "advance" button on the controller each morning to warm the house up. If I'd stuck to my usual routine, I'd have used much less gas—probably less than three-quarters of the amount I used last November.
But while the weather has been cold, it's also been sunny and that has also had an effect on my energy bill: I exported a whopping 19% more electricity back to the grid this November than I did last year.
I'm a week and a half into the bathroom refit. Last night the fact that I was beginning to look like the wild man of the woods finally got to me so I got out the beard trimmer and my razor and somehow managed to tidy myself up over the tiny sink in the downstairs toilet (which is, quite frankly, so small that it's not much use for anything other than washing your hands). At least I have hot water in there; I'd probably have lost my mind by now otherwise. I felt much better afterwards and this morning I look and feel more like a rational member of society again.
I had another rough night, though. I'm in a lot of pain at the moment (from general creaky bones rather than the kidney or gall stones) and I woke up at least three times in the early hours of the morning. But I got a lie-in and didn't get out of bed until quarter to nine, which was a welcome change from rising at 07:00. That is so not my sort of thing any more.
Maybe it's the weather making me uncomfortable. It's been all over the place this week with bright sunshine one day and strong winds and rain the next. The overnight temperature has ranged from -5°C (23°F) to +8°C (46° F) and as I typed this paragraph the yellow warning of heavy rainfall which was supposed to last until midday has just been cancelled. It's just grey and dreich outside and it's definitely the sort of day where staying indoors is the most attractive option.
Ahh, the joys of being an independent musician: buying empty CD cases in packs of 50 so I can give away CD-Rs of this year's "Best Of" compilation to friends and family over the Christmas period...
I bought mine from here.
Dave the plasterer had finished covering up the Artex on the bathroom ceiling by lunchtime today, so (much to my surprise) this afternoon HFO headquarters has been blissfully quiet. I was expecting having the house full of tradespeople to be stressful, so I'd tried to prepare for it but oh boy, getting an unplanned afternoon to myself has been a welcome relief. The work has been going extremely well and I'm delighted with how it's all looking, but I hadn't realised just how drained I would end up feeling this week. How on Earth did I ever manage to socialise with colleagues for an entire working week? A therapeutic glass or two of Rioja is taking the edge off things right now but I don't think I'll be getting up to much for the rest of the day.
There's still at least another week of work to go (my contingency plans assume that it'll be the second week in December before everything's been completed, although it could all be over by a week today) but the bath and the underfloor heating have been installed, the storage area's been built, the electrics are in place, and the tiling is under way.
It's going to look so cool when it's all finished.
Valhalla DSP just released version 5.0.0 of their wonderful, free Super Massive reverb plugin, and I've already downloaded it and installed it on both the PC in the studio and on my music producer laptop.
This release adds yet another new reverberation algorithm called Sirius and it sounds absolutely amazing. I suspect I may set one of its new presets to be the A send in my default Ableton template (at present I use Super Massive's "C-Beams" preset for it, because who doesn't love a good Blade Runner reference, eh?) It's that good.
Toontrack also had some nice offers for Superior Drummer expansion packs this week and I took full advantage of those, too. I've mentioned Hugh Padgham on the blog before...
Hugh's signature Hitmaker SDX perfectly encapsulates his production approach. This week Toontrack were offering it at 45% off and as Hugh more or less defined the sound of music production back in the 1980s with Phil Collins's gated drums and the NonLin2 preset on AMS's legendary RMX16 reverb unit, I found that particular deal irresistible. I'm going to be all set for February Album Writing Month, that's for sure.
...to Rebecca and Steve, who got married yesterday!
Each morning the bathroom fitters arrive here shortly after 08:00 but strangely, becoming an early riser once again hasn't been as much of a struggle as I thought it was going to be. As the alarm goes off at 07:00 every morning at the moment, I've been going to bed much earlier than I usually do. I didn't expect this to affect the quality of sleep I felt like I was getting as much as it has. For the last couple of nights I've slept much better than normal and I don't feel as tired when I wake up.
Perhaps I should try not being as much of a night owl as I've become since I stopped working full time?
Ableton will release Live 12.3 this morning and I'm very much looking forward to downloading and installing it. It has some very interesting new features including automatic stem separation (which means that you can drop a recording into Live and it will split the bass, drums, vocals and whatnot out into separate tracks) and the ability to bounce entire submixes out to .wav files (which was long overdue, IMHO).
Live's sample browser now also includes integration with the online royalty-free sample library Splice, although because I'm me, I'd much rather make my own samples wherever possible so I'm unlikely to make much use of it. Or any use of it at all, in fact.
The audio panner has been spruced up with some intriguing new abilities. There's also a new pack, and several existing ones get updates. While this is only a point release, not a major revision, the stem separation feature feels like a big deal and I suspect I'll end up playing with it extensively in the next few weeks.
The bathroom refit continues. Ash and Jamie have decided that the creaky floor in the bathroom is flexing too much to support the underfloor heating system I'm having fitted, so they're going to take all the old floorboards out and replace them with some nice new plywood ones. Their attention to detail is commendable, but as a result it's rather noisy in here this morning and I'm finding it impossible to concentrate on anything at all right now. This is going to be a short blog.
Five days in, and I'm definitely at the "I'll be glad when this is all over" stage. With just a tiny sink in the downstairs toilet to wash myself with, I'm feeling somewhat crusty today. Goodness knows what sort of state I'll be in by the end of next week.
The blog's been on hiatus for the last week because much to my surprise I was made an offer I couldn't refuse—which led to me returning to one of my favourite places: Peter Gabriel's Real World Studios in Box, just east of Bath. I was there for another Producer Camp (and yes, that's me in the purple t-shirt in the photograph above the "How Does It Work?" heading on that page; I crop up in the video, too).
Last time I went to producer camp, it really didn't pan out the way I'd hoped it would. As a result of that experience, I'd decided that I ought to wait for at least a year before starting to think about having another crack at it. The fact that I'm still working through a boatload of intensely personal stuff at the moment meant that when I told myself "another year" what I was thinking was more along the lines of "not in the foreseeable future." So when my fellow Real World alumnus Alan (with whom I've been working on music—remotely—for most of the last six months) suggested that I really ought to join him there so that we could work on our current project together in the same room rather than over the Internet, as we usually do, I was extremely reluctant to agree. My initial reaction was that I simply wasn't in the right frame of mind to take part, so I politely declined his invitation. And up until last week, that was the end of it. But then Alan brought out the big guns in the shape of Real World's chief organiser, technical consultant and resident genius, Tim Oliver who phoned me up to have a chat about finding a way for me to join everyone without me having another breakdown. This was, after all, a chance to make music with some of my favourite musicians in what I consider to be the finest recording studio on the planet and I really didn't stand much chance of resisting that, did I?
And so on Thursday afternoon I found myself parking the car in the Real World car park for the third time this year. I'm so glad that Alan and Tim talked me into it. This time, the experience surpassed all my expectations and I had an absolute blast. I mean, c'mon here: that's me in the photo below, recording bass in the Wood Room at Real World on Saturday morning with Rob Brian on drums and David Rhodes on guitar, taken by Alan as we developed his song while he was sitting at the room's magnificent Bosendorfer grand piano.
Yes, really. How did that happen to a home studio duffer like me?
Above all else it was lovely to catch up again with the friends that I've made there. My fellow alumnus GG was his usual irrepressible self and any doubts I had about attending evaporated in seconds. As soon as she saw me, Katie May rushed over to give me a hug. Lisa, Maisy, Ben, Xav, Clare, Jerome and the rest of the Real World team were incredibly welcoming (as they always are) and they made me feel at home straight away.
I made plenty of new friends this weekend, too. When the final sessions of the day concluded after dinner, we decamped to the dining room, where enthusiastic and convoluted conversations stretched out into the wee small hours of the morning. These people are my tribe; I was usually one of the last to toddle off to bed. The way I figure it, I'll have plenty of opportunities to catch up on sleep next month but the chance to talk with people who not only know what I'm on about but can add even more layers of nuance and wisdom to the subject doesn't come along very often, so I was going to take as much advantage of it as I could. I tried hard not to take so much advantage of the bottles of whisky and bourbon which mysteriously appeared on the dining table each night, but what I did consume was very tasty and it ensured that when my head did finally hit the pillow, I was out like a light and slept very soundly indeed. That was a welcome difference to my first visit to Box last year when I was so hyped up and wired that I don't think I managed more than three hours' sleep over the entire weekend.
Another thing which made a welcome difference this time around was just knowing that I don't experience the world the same way that everyone else does. An Autistic brain like mine interprets reality in a rather different way to everyone else's and as this video shows very well, people like me struggle with certain things that just don't present the slightest challenge to neurotypical, allistic people. As a result, I struggled to hear conversations during dinner as I fought to make out everyone's speech against the background tumult of scraping chairs and clattering cutlery. That room is LOUD! And my boundaries were pushed hard, of course they were. But this time I was expecting it; it's part of the deal when you're working in an intensely creative environment with some of the most powerfully motivated and artistic people you are ever going to find. Now, though, I know what sort of things are going to present a challenge and although I struggled as the only monotropic guy in a room full of polytropic adepts, when they happened I could (and did) manage them—and my subsequent reactions to them—in a positive and productive way.
The producers and artists arrived on Friday morning and I was able to catch up with Jantine, Jim Barr, John Baggott, Steve Evans and Chris Hughes who had all looked after me so kindly last time. And I was so glad I had an explanation to give them about what was going on with me last time around. I made some new friends too, particularly Rob Brian. Alan and I sort of stole David Rhodes for most of Friday afternoon as well as an hour on Saturday and Sunday morning and he was understanding and supportive and inspiring despite never having done one of these events before. I know exactly how much of a shock to the system it is to take part as a client; I'm sure it's not at all easy when you're a producer or an artist, either.
This time around, I felt positive and productive. I composed the bass line on the track we worked on and then laid it down myself (I'd taken my Fender Jazz with me) in one take in the Big Room on Saturday morning. Once I'd got that down, I completely stopped stressing about whether what I was doing was good enough and started to really enjoy things. As well as playing the bass part again with David and Rob in the Wood Room later that morning while they tracked their parts (and that was the high point of all of my visits to Real World so far for me), I also recorded several guitar parts to back up what David had played for us, programmed some synths and drums, and even dropped in a few bits of sound design working at my table in the box with Ableton. This was a far cry from what happened last time. This time, I felt like I was genuinely able to contribute something of value instead of just being tolerated and then dismissed. I felt involved. It was glorious.
The weather on Friday was less so—in fact, it was atrocious. It rained heavily all day and I found myself humming "It's only water..." as I ran through the rain from the Mill to the house for lunch. And the photograph below shows the sight that first made me laugh and then got me singing "I took the old track..." as I walked down Mill Lane to the studio for breakfast on Saturday:
The playback sessions each evening as people shared the progress they'd made during the day were an absolute delight. Tim commented how funny and upbeat each song was and how unusual it was for there not to be a single dirge or gloom-pop song to be heard. Instead, there was plenty of laughter from everyone listening and the music played included some genuinely jaw-dropping surprises. One of them had Jeff, one of this camp's first-timers, literally punching both his fists in the air with joy.
I can't begin to convey what a beautiful experience the whole event was. I am so grateful to have been a part of it and truly thankful that Alan and Tim managed to talk me out of turning down the chance to take part. As I said at the final playback session on Sunday, I had the time of my life.
And the jam session at the Queens Head on Sunday night was EPIC!
Work on the new bathroom started yesterday. This morning I had to stumble down to the downstairs toilet to carry out my ablutions and I won't be able to take a shower or have a bath for the next two weeks. I'm really not looking forwards to that, but I have absolutely no social engagements whatsoever until the middle of next month (hooray!), so I should be okay. The apartment where I stayed in Box last weekend had a heated towel rail in the bathroom like the one I'm getting, and after stepping out of the shower there and being able to grab a nice warm, fluffy towel to dry myself off, I can't wait to be able to do this at home.
I was glad I'd set my alarm clock nice and early yesterday because the skip lorry turned up just before 08:00 and Ash and Jamie turned up a few minutes later to begin work fitting my new bathroom. By lunchtime, the room was unrecognisable. It had been dismantled down to the stubs on the wall and all the old fittings had been consigned to the skip on the drive (and in daylight they looked in a very sorry state!) Pulling everything apart revealed some ominous damp patches on the floor where the sealant around the bath had evidently been leaking, but that will all get replaced and everything will be robust and waterproof once again.
Perhaps it was the fact that the temperature here dropped to -6° C (23° F) on Wednesday night, but after talking to Ash and Jamie on Thursday afternoon I've decided that the new bathroom is going to have electric underfloor heating as well as the heated towel rail that the original design Barrie put together already included. Today, the plan is for the electrician to put in in all the wiring to make that (and the new lights in the ceiling) happen. Building regulations have changed significantly from how things were when I was young and the switches for everything now have to be installed on the wall outside the room rather than using a pull cord or two inside the bathroom itself. Some of the basic plumbing has been done, too: at present the pipes for the original radiator in the bathroom have been moved to their new position and capped off, but thankfully the rest of the central heating system is unaffected. As I've been running the heating quite a lot during this week's cold snap, I'm very grateful for that. It was well below freezing outside again last night, with the temperature falling to -5° C (25° F).
I did not welcome the alarm clock going off again this morning at 07:00 because I stayed up very late last night (I'm afraid this seems to be becoming a bit of a habit for me this week). I was hosting another listening party on Bandcamp for ICH's third album, Alchemy of Differences. This party was timed to appeal to our audience in America and it didn't get started until 20:00 Eastern Standard Time, which is 01:00 GMT. Despite this, our audience was well in to double figures with some new faces popping up in the chat as well as old friends.
It went well. Henry and Ingrid both joined me for the duration and we sold some music. People said nice things about what we've made and I came in for some praise for my mixing and production. Once again I was asked how I could possibly mix a single track that was 53 minutes long and have it stay coherent, and my answer was the same as last time: Autistic hyperfocus!
The album is 76 minutes long, so it was nearly 03:00 before I got to sleep last night. I was up and about at 07:00 today, so I think I'll probably be paying for that by teatime. But it's Friday (hooray!) and after another busy day here today I'm very much looking forward to not doing very much at all for the next couple of days.
There'll be a fair amount of disruption here starting next week. My old, worn-out bathroom is being ripped out and I'm having a new one fitted. It's well past time it happened; my old acrylic bath has cracked, and it leaks if I take a bath in it. The water never made it to the floor, which is why I didn't immediately notice the problem (and that's a good thing as far as I'm concerned) but as I mentioned last month, when I took the bath's side panel off to see what was going on, I found out that the sheet of MDF that the bath rests on had rotted away in the middle and it had broken in two.
Yikes. No wonder the bath flexes if I stand in it to take a shower.
So there will be building work going on upstairs for a fortnight or so. Jake tells me that he'll take everything in the bathroom out down to the bare wooden joists if necessary, so it's going to be quite a project. Fortunately for me I have a downstairs toilet with a small sink, so I'll still have access to limited, basic sanitation facilities. But it's unlikely that I'll feel like getting anything done in the studio while all the work is happening, so I'm going to take the opportunity to have a holiday at home and focus on catching up on my reading. I have a pile of books a foot high sitting next to my armchair waiting for me to read and they aren't going to read themselves.
I do a lot of reading, although as I normally do so in the bath (where I will happily soak while reading a book until the water goes cold) the number of books I've read over the past five or six months has tailed off considerably. Despite this, I've already passed my target of reading sixty books by the end of the year.
Mademoiselle Caroline and Julie Dachez's graphic novel Invisible Differences is the latest book I've read, and as you'll see from the review I wrote on my books page, I really enjoyed it.
I can't wait to resume my bath time reading habit, though.
I'm having a terrible time getting to sleep at the moment. Last night was particularly bad because I'd done an hour or so of gardening in the afternoon. Although we haven't had a frost yet this autumn, the leaves on the Boston ivy have all fallen off and the drive was covered in them. Sweeping them up wasn't particularly strenuous but afterwards I was in a lot of pain. When I went to bed, I just couldn't get comfortable enough to drift off and I was still awake at 3 am this morning.
Six months without being able to soak in the bathtub for an hour or so every night have really shown me how important baths are to my physical and mental wellbeing. Before this, I honestly wouldn't have thought that going without a bath and taking showers instead was going to make that much difference to my comfort levels. Maybe it's an Autism thing; the sensation of lying in a hot bath full of bubbles has always been a source of comfort for me, leaving me feeling relaxed and refreshed afterwards. It's how I have always de-stressed.
So I'm really looking forward to trying out my new bathroom.
After going to bed at around eleven o'clock last night and managing to fall asleep relatively easily (for me, anyway), I woke up at about 1:30 in the morning with indigestion and what felt like a panic attack. And that was it for the next four hours: no sleep, a racing heartbeat and a racing mind, and a stomach that was clearly not happy about something. This morning I feel shattered, but my digestion seems to have returned to normal. I'm pretty sure the culprit was what I'd eaten for dinner last night: some Tesco Paprika and Red Pepper Pork Hot Dogs. The only other things I ate were some boiled potatoes which I carefully scrubbed beforehand and a salad with a vinaigrette dressing that I'd made myself. Now that I've gone back and checked the label on the pack I can see that the hot dogs were full of acidity regulators like calcium lactate and sodium bicarbonate, stabilisers such as tetrapotassium diphosphate and disodium diphosphate, and an appetising-sounding preservative called sodium metabisulphite, which has the dubious distinction of being named allergen of the year last year. It's listed in bold type in the ingredients list which identifies it as being problematic, and after looking it up online I discovered that side effects include chest tightness, a fast heartbeat and an upset stomach, so I think I'm safe in assuming that that's what had got me. I'll be avoiding anything containing it in the future, that's for sure. Evidence-based practice, that's what it's all about, kids.
To make things worse, once I was awake my mind switched to its default setting of "demented hamster wheel" once again. Overwhelming thoughts of self-loathing, inadequacy, and loneliness don't make for a relaxing night's sleep and when they start, I find it very difficult to stop them. Eventually in desperation I grabbed my headphones, switched on my mp3 player and listened to some music for an hour in an attempt to drown out my thoughts. Once I'd done that, I'd calmed down a little and eventually I managed to drift back off to sleep.
There are times when I wish I had a normal mind that knows when it's bedtime and switches itself off. Mine doesn't do that unless I've knocked it out with something like Mirtazipine, but the side effects of that medication stop me being me and turn me into a numb, spaced-out zombie. Much though I'd like to wake each morning feeling rested and refreshed, I love having the abilities I do, and the hyperfocus side of Autism is something that gives me a noticeable edge when I'm mixing and mastering, as you'll see below. Most of the time, I can accept the trade-off. Just not at four o'clock in the morning.
The fragile state of my mental health over the last five years or so has meant that I've spent most of that time at home, isolated and alone. It has not been easy, even without things like COVID making life even more complicated. As you may have seen in earlier blog entries, I discovered a few months ago that I'm not the person I've been pretending to be for the last sixty-five years at all. I'm actually someone else; someone who experiences and navigates their way through the world in a way that is completely different to most of the people I know. In fact, it's even more complicated than that: as a result of my unusual neurological wiring, you and I probably live on very different planets. That discovery also led me to realise that the habit of pretending otherwise was almost certainly at the root of my struggles with depression, so I've started to drop the mask I've always worn.
Casting that mask aside has not been easy. I still experience an almost overwhelming urge to just hide away at home when anyone suggests that I would enjoy attending an event somewhere or other. At home, I don't need to mask at all because there's nobody I need to wear it for. But over the last couple of months or so I've been pushing myself hard to get past that and go out and simply enjoy myself. As if that was a thing that I could actually do; convincing myself that it really was possible has been surprisingly difficult.
I realised recently that I need to get out there and explore what my life might be like without having to carry all the emotional baggage of the last six and a half decades with me, everywhere I go. As a result, I've driven nearly a thousand miles in my car over the past fortnight. In my last job, I would have covered that in a week, but since I retired I've barely driven that distance in an entire year.
Going back out into the world and opening myself up to new experiences has meant tearing down the walls which I've built up around myself over the last thirty years. Quite frankly, it's been scary making myself vulnerable like that. But in letting go of my expectations of what I want to get out of anything and being assertive about my personal needs and boundaries (rather than—as I'd always done in the past, as my mother always did—not wanting to upset anyone and just going with the flow even though it made me uncomfortable) somehow I have ended up getting more out of each experience than I could ever have hoped for. And wonder of wonders, I have been enjoying myself. Chatting to Helen yesterday I told her that I'd realised that since I stopped caring about what other people think about what I do or how I'm perceived, they somehow seem to respond much more positively to me.
On Wednesday I took my mobile recording setup out for its first excursion since the beginning of last year. I recorded a fourteen-piece children's choir at the Longwell Green Community Centreand the kids were awesome. I really enjoyed the challenge of recording a large (and loud!) choir for the first time, but I had all of the gear that I needed, I knew what I was doing, and I am at the point in my audio engineering journey where I knew how to make sure that the things that needed to happen happened. More or less, anyway.
Yesterday I stitched all the recordings I'd made into a draft of the final product, and it sounded really good—at least as far as I was concerned, anyway. I spent most of Saturday afternoon in a blissful state of hyperfocus working in Ableton and I completely lost track of the passing time. The results sound very promising, at least to my ears. But we'll see what the client thinks...
On Friday I attended a rather special event at the Tring Book Festival where Robin Ince was reading poetry from his latest book, Ice Cream For A Broken Tooth accompanied by King Crimson vocalist and guitar hero Jakko Jakszyk, who talked about his memoir, Who's The Boy With The Lovely Hair? They were both clearly enjoying themselves.
It was an entertaining and unexpectedly moving evening. Jakko created some fantastic soundscapes on his PRS guitar and a Line 6 Helix stomp box which he used to great effect as Robin recited some of his poems. Jakko read several passages from his book. Robin talked about feelings of guilt, abandonment, and the personal growth that has resulted from his recent diagnosis of ADHD. You won't be the slightest bit surprised to learn that there was an awful lot of stuff which I related to very strongly.
And we ended up in the pub round the corner afterwards, because that's how my life works these days. Jakko talked about his band 64 Spoons (I saw them back in the 1970s, and he confirmed that I wasn't imagining my memory of them all swapping instruments during their set, a stunt that completely floored me at the time) and how as a teenager he met the legendary guitarist Allan Holdsworth, who was kind and supportive to an aspiring guitarist whom he'd only just met. He told an outrageous story about Lemmy, too. Robin told me that he planned to work with Dr Camilla Pang and Professor Gina Rippon again; I got a lot out of the YouTube video of the session on Autism which they did at Latitude in the summer, so I was delighted to hear that. We talked about how important it is to focus on being creative when your mental health is damaged; we shared our experiences of insomnia and the resulting dread (perhaps—very occasionally—it becomes a celebration) of hearing the dawn chorus as it starts up; and about all sorts of other ideas and experiences and concepts that are part and parcel of being neurodivergent.
These guys are very much part of my tribe and it was a delight and a rare treat to be able to hang out with them. This week promises to be every bit as interesting, but more on that later...
Most unusually for here, my Internet connection has been intermittent all day. Fortunately I haven't needed it for the stuff I've been up to so far, but I hope things don't continue in this vein for much longer. I need my Internet!
I got an email this week from BT Openreach and was pleasantly surprised when I got to the paragraph that read, "Great news, our engineers are upgrading the broadband network to this property and Full Fibre will be available to order soon." The download speed which they suggest that I'll get once I'm up and running with Fibre To The Premises (FTTP) tops out at 1.6 GBps. At the moment I have Fibre To The Cabinet (FTTC) and I get download speeds around 70 MBps and I can't really complain at that, as it allows me to watch streaming movies in 4K with Dolby Atmos immersive audio (at least, it does when I have a working Internet connection).
It's all rather overwhelming, considering I had a US Robotics dial-up modem to get me online when I first moved here. I was still using one when I started this blog back in 2003, although my connection had become a little faster (remember the US Robotics Sportster, anyone?) Downloading anything off the Internet back then was still a challenge, though. It was something that you only did as a last resort. And if the connection dropped before the download had completed, the only solution was simply to start again from the beginning. I don't miss those days at all.
Yesterday I scheduled another listening party on Bandcamp for the ambient album I recently made with Ingrid and Henry (hence the name of our group: ICH) which you can see at the top of the page. This party is timed for the convenience of listeners in the US, but wherever you are, you'll be most welcome to join us.
It'll start at 8 pm Eastern Time on Thursday 20th November (that's 1 am Greenwich Mean Time on Friday 21st November for people in the UK) so I am going to be up late!
The blog went quiet for the tail end of October because, for the first time since COVID, I have actually been away somewhere that wasn't Real World Studios and stayed there for more than one night. I spent a lovely few days in Otley with Helen and then drove on to York to see Ruth and her partner Alex. They all looked after me very well indeed. When I weighed myself this morning I was amazed to see that I'd only put on a couple of pounds, because I've definitely been living the high life with some very memorable meals out. There was plenty of red wine on hand and more than one Negroni was involved. Much tea and coffee was consumed, too. But in the process I got plenty of steps in, so when I weighed myself this morning I was relieved to discover that I'd only put on a couple of pounds.
I'd not been to Otley before. I felt instantly at home with the place (the red kite that flew over the car as I drove down from the top of the Chevin into town definitely helped that mood) and I said to Helen how nice it was to hear northern voices again. I've lived down South for a long time, but I still miss the accents.
It was lovely to spend an extended amount of time with one of my dearest friends. I'm the eldest of my siblings, and I had a tough time of it; Helen is the big sister I never had but always wished for, and it's always a delight to see her. Quite frankly, I adore her. We tend to end up having some very deep conversations about life, the Universe, and everything and this week was no exception; it felt very therapeutic and goodness knows, I need as much of that as I can get right now. We're both charity shop junkies so Monday afternoon was spent visiting a collection of those in town and drinking copious amounts of tea.
Helen is in the process of writing a book about her brother Phil, and she has been organising and scanning a collection of his photographs that date back to the 1970s and 1980s when he was the drummer in Motörhead. In the 80s Helen ran the Motörheadbangers fan club and I submitted lots and lots of cartoons and graphics for every newsletter. She's been using GIMP to edit all her brother's photos, and so while she acts as my personal therapist and confidant, I'm her graphics, imaging, and general IT consultant. I was astonished when she opened one folder of pictures on her Mac that was labelled "fans" and said to me, "There you are..." And she was right; there I was. I'd never seen the photo before and it brought all the memories flooding back. Happy days!
That photo was taken by Helen's dad at the "Heavy Metal Holocaust" show at Port Vale Football Ground, Stoke-on-Trent on August 1st 1981. Motörhead topped the bill supported by Ozzy Osbourne's Blizzard of Ozz, Frank Marino and Mahogany Rush, Triumph, Riot, and Vardis. That's Helen's mate Stan photobombing the two of us.
That was more than forty-four years ago. Where does the time go?
On Thursday I drove on from Otley to York to see Ruth and her partner Alex. It was the first time I'd visited their house, and I got stressed out when the satellite navigation system on my car refused to recognise the existence of their ten-year-old building or its postcode. In the end I found them without any trouble at all and there was even a parking space opposite their front door waiting for me!
Two thousand years ago, York was a Roman settlement that went by the name of Eboracum (it's the setting of what is for me the most famous—certainly the most compelling—true life ghost story ever told) but it continued to be a seat of power for the north east long after the Romans had left; the Minster which dominates any view of the city leaves you in no doubt whatsoever of that fact. York is steeped in history. And Ruth's brother Rob did his degree there.
Because it was half term, the place was absolutely heaving but Ruth had organised a fun set of things to do while I was there, which included a couple of very nice meals in the centre of the city, a visit to a shop selling specialist gins (of course), a walk around the battlements at the top of the city walls, multiple bookshops (of course) and tracking down a most impressive number of cat and ghost sculptures!
The plague doctor was part of Unconventional Design's Ghosts In The Gardens installation. They looked rather impressive at night, when they added a spooky flavour to the Echoes of Yorkshire Son et Lumiere installation which Ruth had booked us tickets for.
Sadly I had to bid Ruth and Alex goodbye on Friday and drive back home but I set off nice and early and I was back here by half-past one. I was very glad I wasn't travelling in the opposite direction because the M5 was nose to tail northbound from where I joined it from the M42 right back to the Stroud junction and I noticed several times that traffic going the other way was at a complete standstill.
Since I got home I've gradually been unwinding, although last night was Hallowe'en and I was visited by at least forty trick-or-treaters. One child was dressed in an absolutely note-perfect Bela Lugosi outfit but he couldn't have been more than ten years old, so kudos to his parents! I'm so unused to socialising for more than a couple of hours at a time these days—even with my closest friends—and judging by the fact that my resting heart rate each night was in the high 70s instead of its usual 60 bpm I must have found it quite challenging (well, it was either that, or the very tasty late-night espresso martinis). But these days I'm finally aware of the needs imposed on me by my Autism and Helen and Ruth and Alex all know about what I've gone through this summer. I was deeply touched by how considerate they all were, making sure that I could (for example) sit in the corner with my back against the wall when we went for a drink or a meal. And I was surprised by how effective just managing things like that proved to be in making me feel comfortable and relaxed (although the company I was keeping had a lot to do with that, too).
I'm not planning on doing very much this weekend at all. I've always needed to recharge after periods of intense socialising, even when I've been hanging out with people I love. Given who I am, I don't think that will ever change. But while this week has in some respects been just as intense as my stays at Real World, it hasn't left me feeling overwhelmed like those did, and so far I haven't noticed any hint of an incipient manic episode like the one that my first stay at the studio ended up triggering (and thank goodness for that). It's going to take me some time to get used to the solitude again, of course. It feels strange rattling around in this house by myself with nobody to talk to. In the past, I would probably be feeling very sad right now that all the fun I had this week has ended. But these days I know how to look after myself somewhat better than I used to, and I'm trying very hard to live in the moment rather than dwelling on the past. I also know that my friends will be happy to have me come to stay with them again, because they told me so.
And quite frankly, that's the best medicine I can think of.