Its soggy out so far and that’s a fact. But staying in the dry is a bit of a bore. I went out for a brief stroll and maybe I will take another later on. I got annoyed having a very silly discussion with a very ill informed xenophobe on a forum yesterday , but I got a song out of it so that’s cool.
maybe I will start recording it this week? France seems to have had a lucky escape at the recent election….

Meanwhile I am working on other things at the moment as per usual. A bit more sunshine would help I think though.

A new scam call today and a disturbing one if say you were an overseas student or taken up uk residence. An AI woman’s voice telling me there is a problem with my British Residents Permit. There would be as I don’t have one nor would I ever need one .Apparently it’s a sort of visa fraud where you are told its expired and you have been fined. I hope people are not going to fall for it. Students are being targeted. Well as somebody born in London a very long time ago that’s held UK passports since the age of 20 that’s obviously a bit silly. I did try ringing the number but it was not recognised and it does not seem to be a Home Office one. I suspect that my phone number has been scraped from a hack on an Ecommerce site or similar though it could be a random dialler. It was certainly not from a gov.uk number.

Do we judge ourselves and set our own punishments? I think some of us do. We beat ourselves up over the world in our heads and and our inner desires and needs. Or is that just me perchance.

I was listening to an R4 prog on BBC sounds: “With the help of Rai, who has a schizophrenia diagnosis, we look at the way the Hearing Voices Network is changing the view psychiatry has of auditory hallucinations. And we explore how new talking therapies could help people deal with sinister voices and paranoia. ” Interesting as they discussed the crossover with psychosis in Depression and Bipolar trigger by trauma and for example childhood bullying.

Find it here:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0020xrm

Thinking about childhood and bullying, most of mine are I suspect doing quite well and blissfully unaware of the mayhem and destruction that they have caused.

Currently there are very high pollen levels which are affecting me a bit too. You can’t win really.

I played at the first performance of a friends pantomime. Robin Hood created by Jon Bickley who wrote the play and the songs. I am one of the musicians in the loose collective that is the Invisible Folk Club band that performed them for the show. I had said that getting opportunity’s to play gigs generally were getting very much rarer whenJon asked me how I was doing and suggested diversification generally. I said my problem was not lack of creative outlets but simply missing live performance.I mentioned the fact that so many of the gigs at pubs and so forth were just not there to be had anymore. It makes one feel a bit irrelevant.I enjoyed the show yesterday. Playing for a pantomime that was actually pretty funny was a good new experience.

It does seem that there are really only two sorts of retirees. I will use that term loosely but it sort of fits. There are the pipe and slippers people who seem perfectly happy and then the what now tribe. I am a what now, but of stock with a small trace of pipe and slippers in the DNA. Not wanting a Bilbo Baggins grand adventure but needing a bit more. Yes I am adapting but my metamorphosis is not yet complete. But even yesterday’s event is a step towards something different. My journey is slightly more problematic due to the depressive element as always there is a voice saying why bother. Sometimes it’s a loud voice and sometimes a whisper.
Knowing who I am is useful but not the superpower that I had hoped it would be.

So as I write this it’s a quiet day sorting stuff out. Plus a brief walk and a bit of musical maneuvering too.