Day 224

Today has been a much better day, partly because I did radio, which always cheers me up (maybe because I have to be cheerful for my listeners, and definitely because I love playing new music – and some old loud stuff). Although the show did start disastrously because my playout system wouldn’t work. Turns out it was because there’d been a Windows update and that had made the machine default back to an audio output which didn’t exist. I did manage to cobble together the first 20 minutes of the show using other music players until I’d solved the problem. Breathe, breathe!

I also think I’d inadvertently dehydrated myself. And that’s weird and stupid, because I am usually very conscious of the need to hydrate, and very conscientious about hydrating myself. And this has to do with what I was talking to Colonel L on our weekly Zoom earlier – that once again time seems to passing more quickly than I can fathom or cope with. I haven’t done any stretches for two days now either, and I seem to be chasing stuff rather than actually being in charge of my time. It’s all very odd. And there is a novel in all that, about time speeding up but none of us noticing because the clocks don’t seem to have changed speed – but we’re in a closed system, so how would we notice anyway?

One thing that crossed my mind earlier this week is a very First World problem concerning the climate crisis we have created. The office now, and I’m writing this at just coming up to 20:00 UK time, is 30C. Our bedroom, on the other hand, has a nice through-draught, and so is probably at least 5C cooler. And that’s where my vinyl is right now. The plan has been to move it into this office, but now I’m worried it will melt and degrade and warp (at least during the now hotter summers) if I do move it. I told you it’s a First World problem. And part of me wants to move it so I can play it more frequently (well, at all, actually), and I can’t do that in the bedroom. And I possibly want to put together a back-up studio up in the bedroom as well (don’t tell M; she’s already forbidden it once).

The builders are back, and we’re now hopefully looking at the final stretch of being able to get the house as we need it (although the anti-materialistic part of me says we didn’t need to change it in the first place, but just get rid of more stuff, especially if we are going to move to Agios Nikolaos).

I must be feeling better.

AGGIE’S ART OF HAPPINESS – CHAPTER 177