I wasn't kidding when I said in my last blog post that I don't get out much these days. My most recent Google timeline update revealed that I drove a grand total of 18 miles in the preceding month. All of that was thanks to my fortnightly shopping trips to the local supermarket. Since I discovered how much I enjoy not needing to work full time any more, I have tended to stay at home and focus on doing things that I enjoy doing, rather than things I have to do to make money. Funnily enough, when I was working full time to finance my recording studio adventures, I was too worn out from work and had too little time left in each day to actually be creative. The days when my workplace cycled between Filton, Atlanta, and Tampa—sometimes every couple of weeks—are long gone, and I don't miss them at all. My carbon footprint back then was much, much larger than I'd be comfortable with nowadays. While I'm not always happy about the life of solitude I lead these days, I find it both comfortable and sustaining. Schedules are a thing of the past, and if I don't feel like going to bed when it's well past midnight, I don't. I can always have a lie-in in the morning (and that is my greatest luxury, I reckon; I'm no longer living by someone else's clock.)

Ironically, now that my financial position is such that I could splash out on a trip or two further afield if I wanted to, I no longer have any inclination at all to do so. After a couple of years of living in a Covid-infected world, I no longer really think about travelling to foreign parts. After being subjected to the misery of economy-class global air travel as much as I have, any romance that doing so once had has long since evaporated. The last few experiences I've had of air travel were horrible and if I never fly in another aircraft, I won't be sorry.

Maybe that'll change in a few years. I'd still like to cross Devil's Tower in Wyoming and the Grand Canyon off my list of places I've visited. I used to cherish dreams of going skiing in Banff and Lake Louise. But I won't be planning anything like that any time soon.

The blog's horizons have also contracted. In past years I'd be filling entries with reports of wild and wonderful things which I'd found online. Maybe the Internet experience, post-Trump, has soured for me but I don't feel much of an inclination to do that any more. I'm sure there are still fantastic things happening out there and some of them will end up in the blog from time to time but these days I read a lot of "content" and once I've finished sighing at the poor grammar and lack of understanding of what apostrophes are for, and checked on Snopes and other sites to make sure that the story hasn't been completely fabricated, I've lost any motivation for blogging about it.

So it goes.

Yesterday I uploaded another song to the Fifty/Ninety website, and this was displayed as my 54th song of the summer. It wasn't; one of the songs on my profile is duplicated, and another is only listed because I contributed ideas for a verse's lyrics (and the lyrics changed a lot when the song was recorded). But I've now written and recorded more than fifty solo efforts since July 4th, so I've "won" the challenge on my own terms.

I'll spend this afternoon in the studio to see if anything else springs to mind, but I'm not rushing things. On Wednesday I put together a drum track for a song at 130 bpm and once I'd done that, I spent more than half an hour playing along to it on the Fender Geddy Lee signature Jazz Bass I bought myself as a birthday present. That was fun, but it didn't lead me anywhere that sounded like a new song.

Yesterday, I slowed down the same drum track to 85 bpm and as soon as I picked up the Jazz Bass again, I knew what I was doing. The song just flowed, and when I'd finished, I was really pleased with the results. Songwriting is a weird thing. This year I've been listening to my "muse" more attentively than I've done in the past, and I think I've been creating better songs as a result of that. There have been far fewer of them, yes; but when I go back and listen to what I've written so far this summer I'm satisfied with almost all of them. There's still more than a week of the challenge left and I want to get at least 56 songs completed, which will better my tally for 2013, 2016, 2017, and 2018 and equal my performance in 2014. But the quality of what I've done this year is, I think, noticeably superior to pretty much all of my output for those years.

I just wish I could get more people to listen to it.

I don't seem to get out much these days. I went down to Bristol last night and realised as I drove down the M32 that it was the first time I'd been into town since June.

I was off to see Half Man Half Biscuit at SWX. I am ashamed to say that this was the first time I've managed to get to see them play live despite being a fan of their music for the best part of forty years (I still have a Betamax tape of their appearance on The Old Grey Whistle Test back in 1986...)

We got lots of old stuff like "F***in' 'ell it's Fred Titmus!" "The Trumpton Riots" (of course) and even "All I Want For Christmas Is A Dukla Prague Away Kit". We also got many of my favourites including "Renfield's Afoot", "The Light At The End Of The Tunnel (Is The Light Of An Oncoming Train)", "For What Is Chatteris...", "National Shite Day", and "We Built This Village (On A Trad. Arr. Tune)". The final encore was, needless to say, "Joy Division Oven Gloves".

The blog's title today was a comment by Nigel made part way through the set when a roadie brought out towels for each member of the band. Despite us being half-way through September it was a warm day, and inside the venue, conditions were even warmer. He was in affable mood. "I thought there was another band on after us when I saw the schedule," he said at one point. "It'd be a great name for a metal band: Strict Curfew 10 pm. And there'd be an umlaut over the 'U' of course, although that would really require it to be an 'O'." And now I want to form a metal band with that name, of course.

It was a lot of fun, but I must admit I get somewhat irked when younger members of the audience decide to stand right in front of me and then proceed to hold their phone up at my eye level to record two– or three–minute sections of the show on their phone, which of course had its screen set to its absolute maximum brightness. I found myself thinking of this article that appeared in the Guardian recently and wishing I could have struck the miscreant repeatedly about the head with a rolled-up newspaper containing the printed version. The behaviour of much of the crowd left a lot to be desired.

The Tour of Britain came through the village yesterday and—true to form—ITV4 cut to a commercial break just as the breakaway pack got here. There was a brief glimpse of the peloton looking back up the road with The Plough in the background when coverage returned, but that was all we got, because by that point the race leaders had already slogged most of the way up the hill to Wotton-Under-Edge.

I was at the foot of Charfield Hill, camera at the ready. As the tour came through in the opposite direction from last time, they were going faster than nine years ago. Much faster, in fact; they must have been doing well over the speed limit.

I got a few decent photographs. Wout van Aert (above) was still leading the general classification when the stage finished at Gloucester. He went on to win the overall tour; it's the second time he's done so. But the stage was won by Norway's Rasmus Tiller (Uno-X Pro), who was looking very comfortable in the peloton as everyone came through.

The hot weather must have been quite a challenge, but the pace that the peloton sustained through Uley up Crawley Hill to Nympsfield was astonishing. Just experiencing those conditions on foot left me with a lot of respect for every rider taking part.

I decided yesterday afternoon that, regardless of the heat, I was going to stream on Twitch for an hour or so. That turned out to be a rather rash decision. Even though my streaming setup only uses LED lights rather than the old-style incandescent type, the temperature in my home studio after I'd been going for forty-five minutes had hit 31.3°C (that's 88.3°F).

Today it's still very hot outside, and tomorrow is forecast to be hotter still. The Met Office have issued a yellow warning of thunderstorms from 2pm tomorrow, but I'm right on the southern edge of the affected area here. Right now I've got the windows open in an attempt to get some fresh air circulating through the house, but everything smells of smoke because someone, somewhere nearby is burning what smells like domestic rubbish (which would be illegal).

Oh, the joys of autumn...

The Tour of Britain comes through Charfield tomorrow afternoon. The race gets live coverage on ITV4, and I'm rather hoping that this year they don't cut away to a commercial break just as the leaders reached the edge of the village, which is what happened the last time the tour came through here, nine years ago.

I've blogged about the meteorological event known as an omega block before, but yesterday I was watching the Met Office's Alex Burkill presenting the latest ten-day trend video on YouTube to see how much longer the current very warm weather would continue, and discovered that there's one over eastern Europe right now and that's what's caused the lack of change in our weather for the last few days.

And it has been very warm this week. When I'm working in my bedroom studio it hasn't been taking long for the temperature in there to climb above 30°C (86°F). Outside, it's been sunny and muggy and last night it was still 25°C (77°F) outside at 9 pm. This morning, there's a lot more cloud about but it's still uncomfortably warm. I've had the curtains at the front of the house drawn for the last couple of days to try and keep the heat out, but after several days of this the house is much warmer than is comfortable for me.

I'll be back working on music later, which will warm the studio up again and I'll be keeping an eye on the temperature in there before deciding whether or not to do anything on Twitch this evening.

I took a couple of days off from making music this week. Instead, I spent my time hanging out with my friend Helen, who was visiting the area. We had a couple of very nice meals prepared by someone else, chatted about old times, and drank rather a lot of coffee. I had a lovely time.

But for the last few days I've been back at it; I've sorted out the problems I'd given myself by putting the wrong gauge strings on my Ibanez RG770 and throwing the fine balance of its Floyd Rose tremelo system completely out of whack, and I was anxious to play in its new set of strings so they could settle down and I could clamp them in place. It's easier with the Parker Fly and the Squier Strat, which also have fresh strings but don't have locking nuts; there has been much playing of guitars in HFO headquarters this week.

I also contributed some lyrics to a song and was very kindly added as a collaborator there, so my current tally on my profile page on the Fifty/Ninety site stands at 46 songs, although one of those is a duplicate entry, and I'm not counting it. That means I'm 90% of the way to the site's target of writing fifty songs in the ninety days between July 4th and October 1st. I'm working much more slowly than I did last year. By September 7th in 2022 I'd uploaded eighty-one tracks! But I really think that in taking things at a much more stately pace I have managed to ensure that the quality of the music I've been making has been noticeably and consistently higher. I've been doing good work, even if I say so myself. And with plenty of buffer built up, it's been much easier to just shut things down and walk away for a day or two if I feel like I've run out of steam, creatively speaking.

For one track that I recorded this week I decided that rather than walking away, I'd post it just as it was, even though I'd planned to add another half-dozen tracks of guitar and synth to it. Ironically, if you judge a track's popularity by how many comments people make on it, this track has ended up being the most popular thing I've done for a couple of weeks! I love the mystery of the process by which music connects with people. It's completely unpredictable, although I have noticed that a funny title can often draw people in for a listen. I think that'll be one of the items I list when I do my traditional "things I've learned from Fifty/Ninety this year" blog post next month.

But no, at the moment I'm not planning on writing another book-length version this year...

Yes, it's the first Friday of the month once again, which would be an exceptionally good day to wander over to Bandcamp and pick up a copy of my e-book (in pdf and epub formats) about how I went nuts and wrote and recorded more than 100 pieces of music last summer for Fifty/Ninety. And you get 20 of those songs in the album included with the book as well.

Just click here.

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