It's been five days since I came down with COVID and I now have a full beard (I couldn't be bothered shaving and I kinda just went with it). On Thursday night I barely slept at all and on Friday morning I had to bail out of my therapy session because I was running on fumes, and after half an hour I'd even run out of those as well. I spent most of the rest of the day back under the duvet in bed, although I couldn't settle, and I didn't manage to fall asleep.

So as of yesterday afternoon, the central heating system is back on its timer for the winter. I caved in a good couple of weeks earlier in the month than I've managed in recent years (and this is the earliest I've done so since 2014) but I've been sitting around the house shivering and I'm too old for that sort of bullshit. I'm going to look after myself.

Yesterday evening I joined in the #TOTP watch party on Mastodon for a while, sat in on Stick Men's Bandcamp listening party (see below), and then soaked in the bath for an hour and by the time I was done, I could barely keep my eyes open.

But that meant I went out like a light almost as soon as my head hit the pillow. I don't remember anything after that until I woke up at around 09:50 this morning. Today, I'm still sniffly and I'm definitely not back to firing on all cylinders just yet, but I feel much better than I did yesterday. I even managed to go for a walk this morning.

As the web continues to be filled up with AI slop, it's a joy to watch something as genuinely creative as the new video from Stick Men which is filmed entirely practically on a table top in an animation studio in Pittsburgh that is run by This Is Red, featuring physical puppets of band members Tony Levin, Pat Mastelotto, and Markus Reuter. Take a gander:

Isn't that splendid?

Their new album Let's THRAK Again is out now, and jolly good it is, too.

When I first moved here in the nineties, the local school would put on a splendid bonfire night display and sold hot dogs and cups of mulled wine to spectators, which went down very nicely on a cold November's evening. But the insurance premiums rose so much for the event that the bonfire on the playing field was eventually abandoned. Even after that, the costs and red tape the school had to deal with continued to increase, so the decision was made to stop running the event altogether. I was rather sad about it at the time. I like mulled wine, particularly when somebody else has made it for me and all I have to do is drink it. These days, the nearest alternative (which is a ticketed event) takes place up in Wotton and this year's display takes place on Saturday. I've never been to it.

Public awareness of the effects that fireworks have on pets, wildlife and zoo animals (and, indeed, on people with PTSD) has grown rapidly in recent years and recent calls to limit their use (and the amount of noise they make) make it likely that stricter controls will be brought in after this year's festivities.

To be honest, I wouldn't be particularly sorry to see the tradition die out altogether. Fireworks are a significant cause of air pollution and this is known to cause problems for people with respiratory illnesses as well as making it easier for dense fog to form (and I really noticed that happening back when I lived in Milton Keynes, which would put on enormous displays every year that left the place shrouded in thick fog for the rest of the night). Then there's the depressing number of people (particularly children) who end up being treated for life-changing injuries every November 5th. It's really not worth it. I can always make my own mulled wine.

I'm still being clobbered by COVID after catching it at the pub last Friday. It's progressed to the "stinking head cold" stage of things now, and it's been making my life thoroughly miserable. I was still awake at two o'clock this morning so I made myself a milky drink and sat on the sofa eating a packet of Haribo. That seems to have done the trick, because I'd fallen asleep within half an hour of going back to bed and I didn't get up today until after noon—that's how wiped out I am.

I've lost a load of weight, though.

Despite being laid low with the 'rona, I enjoyed listening to David Bottrill chatting with Caleb and Rob on this week's Fix The Mix challenge, although I would have liked to hear less about working with Tool and a lot more about how David helped Peter Gabriel to set up Real World Studios, although I admit I'm obviously more than a little biased when it comes to that place. I have even managed to submit my mix of Sleep Club's song When I Close My Eyes for the competition to win a copy of Ozone 12 Advanced. I finished working on it yesterday evening without falling down the hyperfocus rabbit hole too much.

It's an odd track; there are no overheads for the drums (which are from Superior Drummer 3, apparently) and no hi-hats, either. The song kinda falls apart at the 2:15 mark, when the lead guitar which has provided the bones of the arrangement up until that point suddenly drops out. Even though it leaves a wall of fuzz guitar still going, this creates a big hole in the mix and nothing else steps in to fill it.

But this is a mix challenge, not a producer challenge, so I just had to grit my teeth and leave things as they were. It's the final day of the challenge today, and I'll be tuning in again although I don't expect to win anything. I just hope they manage to get a better sound balance between Rob's SM7B and the music playback (if only there was some sort of technology that would allow you to duck the volume level of the music while the presenter is talking...)

I managed to get infected with Covid at Friday's gig. By three o'clock yesterday afternoon I was coughing and sneezing as well as running a temperature so I retreated under the duvet. And I pretty much stayed there until this afternoon; I've just got up and made myself a mug of tea, but I guess I'm going to be feeling like this for another few days. I really don't feel up to doing very much today, which is a drag because I should be getting on with preparing the garden for winter. That will have to wait.

The positive side to all this is that even though I have a big bowl of sweets left over from Halloween sitting on the dining room table, I've barely touched them and my appetite, which is normally pretty good, has disappeared completely. When I weighed myself this morning, I'd lost two pounds. And also, I guess my time-expired lateral flow tests still work, so that's another win.

I will still be logging in to this week's Fix The Mix challenge, though, because (a) it's free, (b) all I need to do for it is sit in a chair in my studio and take notes, and (c) their special guest this time around is David Bottrill who produced, mixed, and engineered some of my favourite albums, so I'm not going to miss out on that.

I've already installed the freebie I got for signing up: a copy of iZotope's Ozone 12 Elements one-stop-shop mastering plugin, although after trying it out, I think I'll be sticking with my copy of Ozone 11 Advanced, thanks. The fact that 12 is heavily reliant on AI is enough of a turn-off on its own (what's it just done? Why did it decide to do that? Who knows...) but honestly I don't like the sound of what it does to tracks that I feed into it, either. They sound overly bright and fizzy, like someone's dropped an exciter on them without thinking about what it's going to do to the sound beyond "make it exciting."

I sound grumpy and ungrateful about this and honestly, I don't mean to be—I'm just feeling down and very under the weather today. And I reckon that's completely understandable.

You can definitely tell it's November here today. It's grey and overcast outside and the solar panels on the roof are putting out just over 600 watts, which is enough to run everything I'm using in the house at the moment and charge the storage battery, even if that's only happening very slowly. But I've got another hour of free electricity lined up this afternoon so it'll be used running another load of laundry while I noodle away on something in the studio.

There was a Met Office warning last night for "moderate fog" around here, and it was certainly cold and misty out there, but no more than that. Although the Clean Air Act was first introduced in 1956 which was well before I was born, pollution was still exacerbating fog well into the 1970s and I can remember nights when I lived in Stafford that were so foggy that if you stood at the base of a street light, all you could see of the top was a vague glow. Those pea-soupers are, thankfully, long gone and last night was nothing like as bad, but the video that my trail camera recorded of the local hedgehogs on the back lawn looked very trippy, all the same.

It feels like the year is beginning to wind down. There's a sense of things preparing for winter, both inside and out. Last week the leaves on my Amaryllis plants started to go brown, so I'll go round and cut them off this week; the Boston Ivy on the house has already turned a vivid red and I suspect last night will have encouraged most of its leaves to drop. I also need to finish off clearing the main bed in the back garden, so that's on the agenda for the coming week as well. The buddleia need cutting back, the cherry tree needs pruning, and it never stops, does it?

Yesterday afternoon I made the largest batch of curry I think I've ever cooked. I have a stainless steel stock pot that's marked with a quantity scale on the inside and when I'd added all the ingredients, it was full to the eight-litre line. There are now a dozen generous portions of pork Madras sitting in my freezer, which should keep me going for the next few months. I use pork belly and loin steaks for this recipe and this time I decided that rather than browning it in the pan, I'd cook it in the oven first instead. When I added it to the onions (which had been slowly caramelising on the hob for about 45 minutes—forget about all that "let the onions caramelise for about five minutes" stuff you see in cookery books; that's just bullshit. Caramelising takes time, folks) I also poured in a generous amount of the fat from the baking tray and the difference this made was astonishing. The meat was juicy and tender and the flavour of the end result was far richer and much more complex. I may have put on a couple of pounds this morning, but it was worth it.

Yesterday's session resulted in one casualty: somehow I managed to snap my favourite garlic press (which I've had for about forty years) in two. I had to consign it to the bin. Luckily I had a backup press available so I switched to using that.

It's been a while since I did a big cooking session like this and I had completely forgotten just how satisfying the process is. Eating the food I'd made is always enjoyable, but the work involved in preparing the ingredients and choosing the spices to use was as well. The anticipation of that first taste to make sure that nothing was missing, the endorphin rush from all the chillies (and the fact I'd used two whole bulbs of garlic certainly helped matters along nicely) and the sight of all those portions filling up the freezer all contributed to a real sense that I'd spent the afternoon doing something worthwhile.

It's the day after Halloween, and I'm facing a rare problem. If you find yourself thinking while you're having your elevenses that your pot of tea or mug of coffee would pair nicely with a few sweets or a bag of Haribo, I've got you covered. Probably for the rest of this week, if not for the entire month.

The number of trick or treaters who were doing the rounds this year was about a third of the amount I've seen in recent years. Maybe it was the weather; aside from the warning of fog, when it got dark it turned quite cold, dropping to just 2°C (36°F) but I think I only answered the door to about half a dozen groups of kids in total. They were all incredibly polite and none of them took more than a single sweet each. As I result of this restraint, it turned out that I'd significantly over-provisioned on the treat front.

Aside from one group of teenagers, most of my visitors were so small that they couldn't reach the doorbell. One kid was wearing a black witch's hat that was taller than she was and was so shy her mum had to ask for her. Adorable!