31 October 2026
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Sing Around Songs – 31 October 2026

It’s been a few weeks since I made it to one of the local sing around sessions but I got down there today with my resonator guitar. I had to leave early but I managed to contribute two songs.

I started with Wayfarin’ Stranger, which I’ve done several times on various instruments. On 21 November I’m gigging with the Charnwood Training Band and have an opportunity to do a solo song in the middle. Early on, we’ll be playing a medley called the Southern Folk Rhapsody, which is a beautiful orchestration of several traditional gospel tunes from the “Deep South” of the USA and starts with this tune so I thought it would work to do a version with the lyrics later on. It worked well and suits my voice although I might need to play with a plectrum to get the sound projection from the guitar (which is the kind of thing I wanted to find out by playing it today).

For that tune, I dropped the top and bottom strings of the guitar down to D, since I was playing in D minor. However, I was due to help someone else out with another tune later on that would take all my jazz chords so, during the break I reverted to standard EADGBE tuning. In turn, that meant that rather than the other pieces I’d been considering, I made a snap decision to break out my version of 20th Century Boy by T-Rex. What makes it “my” version is that I’ve added a couple of additional chords to the chorus – I think the original just plays A B A B but I’ve tweaked it to A B C D, giving a little more musical interest without disrupting the raucous rock character too much.

I also got to support a version of the jazz tune All of Me in the key of Ab and including an improvised guitar solo. Jazz guitar is not my forte but being back in standard tuning at least allowed me to make a decent go of it.

30 October 2026
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Rumbledethumps

For tonight’s dinner, I had some mashed swede and cooked cabbage to use up so I did a search online for ideas and came across rumbledethumps. It is a Scottish dish with a fantastic name and I didn’t closely follow the recipe on that link but, as is my wont with cooking, used it as a starting point for some improvisation. The swede and cabbage get combined with mashed potato and then baked with cheese on top. It turned out very tasty, which wasn’t overly surprising. It is along the lines of things like ‘bubble and squeak’ (mashed potato and leftover greens, often bound with some egg) and most things work well covered in melted cheese.

I cooked both the rumbledethumps and sausages in the air fryer (separate drawers). I think the silicon liners I used slowed down the cooking but the made the cleaning up much quicker, not least because half the rumbledethumps is still in that liner but now sitting in the fridge.

29 October 2026
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Moneyball

We recently borrowed some DVDs from a friend and the first one we watched, this evening, was Moneyball (2011). It is about a baseball team that struggles because it doesn’t have the budget to keep up with its competitors until the General Manager hires an unlikely geek who (if I understood it correctly) revealed that being statistically above average is better than producing a few one off performances that make the selectors think you are a hero.

I think I’d appreciate it more if I cared much about baseball or competitive sports in general. If I had a good grasp of the subject, I wonder if I’d see it as an accurate depiction of a significant historical change or so much more Hollywood slop? As it was though, I was glad to have seen it (being a film I’ve heard of and statistics being something I am interested in) but I think this is one I will politely return without watching again.

28 October 2026
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Free for Patriots?

Issue 001 of Reform UK’s free “newspaper” dropped unbidden through my door earlier this week. Apparently it is free for patriots but I’m fairly certain that neither I, nor many of the other recipients, qualify under their definition of the term but there is no obvious way to return this rag that I didn’t want and would not be willing to pay for. Let’s count that as as issue #1.

The front page has three main stories, all of which are “dog whistle” politics. The small ones promise that, if elected to power, Reform UK will stop the boats (what might be called the details on p.3 fail to mention that the number of small boat crossings has already begun to fall significantly) and a hagiography of the late Ann Widdecombe. They don’t use such a long word but they are very clearly casting her as a saint and martyr. The big picture shows Nigel Farage with what I assume is his dog and he is even wearing a dog whistle. I’m not sure if that is carelessness or contempt. The big words promise a fix for “Broken Britain” and that if a Reform Government doesn’t deliver in 100 days, the ministers responsible would be sacked. No word is given about whether that would apply to himself, presumably cast in the role of Prime Minister and thus ultimately responsible for his cabinet.

I won’t work through the whole release although there are problematic things on every page. For example, it seems a bit odd on the centre pages to make a big point of how 14 years of failed Conservative government and yet several of the people flanking Mr Farage were prominent members of that failed government. I suspect the indication of horns behind a couple of their heads is probably another example of lack of attention in their media department. Finally, I note on the back page that although I got this paper for “free”, I’d have to use a stamped addressed envelope to mail in to become a member. I guess they are clever enough not to open up a FREEPOST address which would probably get lots of unwanted items.

Nothing seems to let a good fact get in the way of a partisan opinion. Meanwhile, since there’s too much ink on this unwanted “newspaper” to make it good for fire starting, I’m going to see if I can get it in the recycling bin before they come round to collect it today.

27 October 2026
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Let’s Just Build It

I continue to be impressed with how quickly AI tools can help develop useful systems. Today I had several documents in Markdown format to read which were made challenging because they featured tables with significant amounts of information. I’ve often been using a command line program called glow but that was truncating the information. Since I’m going through a phase where I’m having to interact a lot with AI I asked it to suggest some options. I knew some of the results it came up with (which included glow) but I didn’t really want to install another program, so I asked a further question, about whether there was a website I could load a Markdown file into and have it render in a flexible table. The answer was yes but not all were entirely clear about my requirement for local processing. Some of the data I’m working with is potentially sensitive so I don’t want it being hoovered up elsewhere.

That led me to asking if it could build me such a web page to run locally and, about three minutes later, I had just such a solution. As a sanity check, I asked a different AI tool to assess the page for security and it came up with a number of small refinements, such as verifying the content delivery networks that provide some of the JavaScript tools involved. All told though, it was about 15-20 minutes and I had a web page that not only does an excellent job of rendering Markdown in the browser (including large tables) but bonus features I didn’t ask for. I can drop a file onto the page and, if I drop a second one, it creates a new tab within the page allowing a batch of files to be assessed.

Back in the old days (in other words just a few months ago), that kind of task would have been a non-starter. I’d have needed hours to research, code, test and develop. The security audit wouldn’t even have been covered as I’d have put far too much time in just to get to the starting line. As it is, I’ve got a tool that has already saved time from what it would have cost to try and browse the files with glow and I’m sure is going to be used again and again. AI coding support hasn’t reached the point where I can just put my feet up and let it do all the work but it is often able to speed things up in a way that, not too long ago, would have seemed entirely like science fiction!

26 October 2026
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Red Hot Chili Peppers

Not the band but my latest polytunnel harvest:

I’m delighted how well I’ve done with Cayenne Peppers this year. Last year I managed a small handful of chili peppers but, as you can see from the photo, this year I’ve got enough to blow your socks off! The plants also have a few green peppers and even some flowers so I might get more but, even if it turns frosty this week and the plants drop dead, I’ve still had my best pepper harvest ever.

Half of them have been set to fermenting in a 3% brine solution (with a bit of garlic and carrot), which will end up being blended into hot sauce. The rest will be dried. I’ll probably do the red skins separately from the inner membranes and seeds so I can create one or more blends for colour and heat.

I’ll also try saving some of the seeds to germinate next year. The trick seems to be getting them going in a heated environment. Last year I hardly had any germination, fewer plants that made it to planting out and a very low final yield. With the germination knowledge, I feel empowered to try another batch next year, because I think the effort may be worth it.

25 October 2026
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Early to Rise…

I like the autumn clock change, where I get the illusion of feeling awake earlier in the morning. The downside is the other end of the day. It’s only about 9:30pm and I definitely feel ready for bed. Mind you, playing at church in the morning, cooking and eating a roast dinner and then heading out for that gig with The Panamas may also account for it. I’ve certainly not spent the day doing nothing! Here’s a shot of my bass from one of the short intermissions in our music making:

24 October 2026
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An unsuitable hat?

Tomorrow evening I’m gigging at The Kilo Wine Bar in Quorn again as part of The Panamas duo (5pm – around 7 or 7:30pm). I’m not sure that is the kind of headwear that is going to be suitable as the high winds look set to continue but at least the forecast isn’t set to be quite as wet as today. I’m also certain that we’ll be inside and not out the lovely courtyard we enjoyed for the previous couple of outings there although chances are that it won’t be quite as lovely as being safely inside tomorrow evening!

Also, don’t forget the extra hour in bed tomorrow morning (or the chance to get up an hour earlier). With so many time-telling devices automatically updating nowadays, making a public service announcement seems less essential that it did in the past but I expect there will be one or two churches up and down the land where people turn up and wonder why the doors are still locked!

23 October 2026
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New Ways of Reading

The main Bible app I’ve had on my phone for sometime now is YouVersion. It does give access to many translations and it is free but it has some annoying quirks. I don’t like the way it keeps nagging for reviews and, although for a while I enjoyed the gamified element of seeing how long I could keep a reading streak going, it lost its attraction after it turned out to be easy to lose a long run for no apparent reason. More recently, I’ve found it painful trying to pick reading plans (poor previews and search tools) and a week or so ago, the plans seemed to switch to “doomscroll mode” where commentary and whichever bits of passages they want to included flow down in one long page. I want to keep my orientation in the Bible, not just run my eyes over several screens of text.

I’ve looked around for alternatives and have settled, for now at least, on a hybrid approach. I’m still using YouVersion to put the Bible at my fingertips but I’m now using another app, called Learn of Christ, to track my reading. It has far fewer translations available but it lets me record the chapter or chapters that I’ve read. I can also follow up my reading of the plain text with the notes and cross-references it provides, should I want help pondering a bit further. Most importantly though, it lets me get on with my reading discipline like a grown up rather than treating me like a child who needs to be spoon fed with whatever someone else has decided they want to put on the spoon.

22 October 2026
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Patches Ahoy!

Some of my brain time over the past 24 hours has been taken up responding to the recent news of two major vulnerabilities with the PHP language that many web servers run on, including ones I am responsible for. In the situations where I’ve got sufficient control, I know that I’m covered because the companies hosting the websites have quickly patched the language code but I wouldn’t be surprised if these kind of days become more common, with AI tools accelerating the rate at which obscure bugs can be found (and, fortunately, often fixed too).

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