Blepha-what?

I'm currently on a train bound for Cambridge. The automated woman's voice has just said "welcome to this.... service... to Cambridge." The curiously unrealistic pause before "service" makes it sound like she's putting the word in sarcastic inverted commas. Like she's only calling it a service because she's been forced to!

I have blepharitis. For the uninitiated, blepharitis is a rather painful infection of the eyelid. The whole thing has gone all puffy and I look well dodgy. Like someone who's been in a fight.

I walked up to King's Cross station this morning from Covent Garden where I've unsuccessfully been trying to get my iPhone fixed. Central London was full of horrible-looking, ageing skin heads. Many were carrying union jacks and some were walking bulldogs, which were also wrapped in flags. Plainly there's some sort of right wing march or protest going on. They were behaving really aggressively, shouting at each other in the street in broad Essex accents with no sense of decorum or how other people might be intimidated by them. I find it profoundly depressing that my country's flag has been misappropriated in this manner. I feel ashamed enough to be British at the moment without this added joy.

I officially hit the wall yesterday morning. That's a silly phrase isn't it?! I didn't physically hit anything and there was nothing official about my waking up so knackered that the alarm clock actually made me scream! It took me thirty seconds to realise where I was, and what on earth was going on! I A lot has been written about sleep cycles. Recent research suggests that we have two of them per night, so it's actually easier to function on just one, than it is if you're woken up mid-way through the second, which is plainly what happened to me yesterday.

Still, the weather was so beautiful as I walked along Parkland Walk to Julian's that a lot of my woes instantly evaporated. The sun was low in the sky, so low that it often blinded me. Great columns of trees were lit up so brightly that they glowed lime green. It seems that very few of the leaves on the London trees are in any hurry to turn brown. I wonder if they've already turned in Scotland?

We finished the guitars in the studio and I'm really pleased with how the songs are shaping up. I feel we're consistently recording to a very high standard, and this makes me very happy, blepharitis or no blepharitis!!