Cold out there. Perfect in here.

I’m in The Carpenters Arms, my favourite pub in London. From a lofty position at the top of the charts, it just launched itself into the stratosphere with the introduction of a new small plates menu which includes a pint of delicious, sweet, fresh prawns with garlic mayo for £3.00. Unreal. Sitting with that and my usual Orval beer, I am the (paper hat) king of all I survey.

I haven’t posted since I took my family on a month-long odyssey through Japan in the summer. It was absolutely magic, and a brilliant time of exploration of the soul, finding peace and gratitude around the death of my mum in January 2018. Peace in acceptance of her passing, and gratitude for all the time I got to spend with her and the fact that she died with nothing left unsaid between us.

It’s been an interesting time since then. Before going away, I had concluded I wanted to completely pack in all web development and focus on music. I just couldn’t understand why I was finding it impossible to settle into that decision. On my return from Japan, I started work on two web projects I had agreed to a long time before, and found myself enjoying them immensely. Suddenly it dawned on me that I somehow need a bit of web development work in my life to keep things balanced. The perfectionist part doesn’t get much satisfaction from music (as music is definitely not a game of perfect) but does get it from writing code. 100% perfection is possible. I take a lot of pride in hand-crafting my code, finding great solutions for the little problems that each project presents, and I missed that. Ultimately, the enjoyment of those projects made me realise once and for all that I don’t need to choose between music and code – they are both part of me now, and I need them both around.

All that said, I have just agreed to go on tour with Imogen Heap for a chunk of this year, and have just finished doing some additional production work for an incredible trad band called Flook, so the music side is coming to the fore once again. I am excited about spending two months in the USA in late spring / early summer – playing great music, catching up with friends, adventures and new connections. We’re in each city for longer than usual, which should be a big plus.