Tickly

The days are getting a little more relaxing at the moment which means it's time for a cold to sweep through my body, as my subconscious says "don't do that to me again." I thought I'd managed to stave this particular cold off. I caught it from Julian in the studio and it emerged for a couple of days at the start of last week, and then vanished. It's nothing massive. Just a tickly cough and a bit of a tight chest. As I go through life, I realise that my lungs are one of my weak spots. You know how we all have a part of the body which cracks under pressure? Some people get stomach problems. Some get bad backs. Others, like Nathan, get headaches. For me, it's always a tickly cough. Don't worry, I'm not the man on the cancer advert who coughs at the football match, I've just noticed that my illnesses usually manifest themselves in this way. I've even noticed that I sometimes start randomly coughing when I'm highly stressed. It's funny how the body works isn't it? I reckon quite a high percentage of illness is triggered by the brain.

There's not much else to say. I've been catching up on a lot of reality TV. There's an awful lot of it on at this time of year. I love it. I will happily watch X Factor, Strictly or Bake Off until the cows come home. I'll watch shows about potting, sewing, painting, drag... As long as there's a number of contestants who get whittled down on a weekly basis, I'm a happy man. I like the fact that I don't need to concentrate to watch them. They wash over me like a giant, sequin-covered wave.

The leaves are now dropping off the trees outside our house, which means, for the first time in eight months, we'll soon be able to see Alexandra Palace on the hill behind Queens Wood. The trees are so dense that, during the summer months, the only way you'd ever known the giant building was there, was by catching the odd glimpse of the red light which sits on the top of the television mast up there. In London we don't have that many clues that the seasons are changing. We rarely experience extreme weather. Back home in the Midlands it would regularly snow in winter, and get so foggy in the autumn that you couldn't see your hand in front of your own face. I miss those days!