Well I was not sorry to see the end of July. For winter, it's the worst month. June can be colder but there's still some novelty to it. July just feels like you should be asleep, in a sun patch on the rug whenever that happens (if Nash has left enough room). Or tucked away in bed when it's raining or windy. But even then my feet and fingers are like icicles, and the rest of my joints are clammy.

My employer must also feel the same about July, because they gave everyone today off to celebrate it. This was good timing for me, because the weather was perfect for a walk outside and I also saw bees pollinating some flowers earlier in the morning. So I met up with Dadism and we walked 14 kilometres through the hills and also passing by the Palo Alto garage in which I built bradism in back in 2005. Then we went to the pub. After spending a lot of July not sleeping and instead working, it was a much appreciated day to see lots of birds in some fresh air, walk up hills, and enjoy baked treats.

I walked from the bottom of West Lakes all the way to Pirate Life in Port Adelaide today. The was motivated by the fact it was warm enough to wear a t-shirt outside for the entire duration.

I knew of the north West Lakes area ("The Island") and I assumed it would have lots of nice houses like the south West Lakes does. And this turned out to be true. What I didn't appreciate until I walked it was that West Lakes is basically a big moat between Port Adelaide and the rich people by the coast.

Maybe not the most effective moat as I saw a few people canoeing across it.

After the walk, which took me just under an hour, I caught up with J for beers and half a chicken. It was a good side of the moat to be on. I did not walk home.

A warm, summer night in autumn 2025.

I do love me a seasonal playlist to remember a period of my life. And if some of the song lyrics/titles have a literal link to the specific season that I listened to them in - even better.

Lots has changed since my debut one in 2004. First, initially I had a lot more tunes to choose from in humanity's back catalogue. Second, I didn't make them every season, and third, the music listening experience was so different back before Spotify and endless mobile phone data. I feel like my standard for getting on the seasonal mixtape is a lot higher in 2025 than it was say in 2006. I also can't tell for sure if I look back fondly at every track that made a seasonal mixtape back in the day purely because it was on there. In the old days I would listen a lot to whole albums, playing them in my car where I couldn't change to another band on a whim. For the past few years I have had a staging process where anything I hear on an album or through the algorithm gets added to a "Liked from Radio" playlist (I forgot why I called it that back in 2016) and then usually when I'm feeling a tune on that list over a specific season it will get the call up to the seasonal.

Some tunes do hit my brain and go immediately to the seasonal as well.

By the time of Autumn 2025, I felt like making a mixtape for Autumn was tough. The main problem was that it was hot and sunny all the time. Summer lasted until April. Where was the weather I needed for enjoying some down tempo melodies, some darkness, the sound of rain on the roof?

The inverse of this problem was that I was scheduled to leave for Norway in early May, so whatever Autumn I was going to have had to be squeezed between summer finally ending and then.

Optimistically I named my playlist in Spotify Høst 25, which is Norwegian for "Autumn, 2025". And in March I added a couple of folky/dreamy tracks that gave me a feeling of what Autumn might actually vibe like. I also added a song called "Midnight Sun" from Jan Blomqvist's new album, for obvious reasons.

The reality of Autumn was a lot of moving house/selling house fun, ankle pain, and a month long cold. Plus some good tunes from Lawrence Hart, Brother Bird and Of A Revolution that had got me through some late night drives to the self storage or trips in the hire truck.

A 2m x 1m x 1m (approximately) solid chunk of an ending chapter of life.

By the time I took off for Oslo I had eight songs worth of Autumn and I thought I was either going to have to combine this with winter after I got back, or maybe release another seasonal EP (Summer 2022 was the first of those when I went arm first into the CBF).

A lot happened in Norway and I listened to a lot of music there but it certainly wasn't autumn.

On my last night in Lofoten, giddy with the heights of Reinebringen and the endless sunset and sleep deprivation I sought a playlist to soundtrack my drive back to Eggum and I started with Høst. Within about eight minutes I was listening to Midnight Sun while driving under a midnight sun and this was incredibly validating to me as a sign of my musical taste, sense of timing, and good fortune.

Because the drive was a lot longer than the short autumn soundtrack, after Gonna Be Me finished I switched to 2025's Liked From Radio and played it on shuffle.

There were a lot of good songs on that list and some I skipped. And the ones I didn't skip got instantly encoded with the vibrancy and energy of that drive along Lofoten's E10.

The sun still hadn't set when I arrived back in Eggum. Obviously. But autumn had ended. I was about to return to Adelaide for winter and a whole set of new releases and old life. But I wanted to do anything I could to hold on to that drive and that autumn where I pushed through pain and sickness to move house, sell a house, recover from injuries, work hard and then make it to glorious Norway for a life changing holiday.

So I added all the songs I'd just heard to the playlist in the order I'd heard them.

Autumn sunset colours in Adelaide, not Norway.

And now that winter is closer to ending than it is to starting, it's time to commemorate that decision and add Høst 25 to the list of seasons I've had the joy of experiencing with music.

Mother came over this morning for a Nash walk and cup of tea. On these walks she likes to point out plants and identify them and their current state of growth.

There was a photo I didn't take today. At one point on the walk, Nash and mother's focus was simultaneously invested in studying a plant just off the footpath. For different reasons.

Later in the day I bought a chainsaw - that's a coincidence.

Tomorrow I will be 41 which in some ways feels worse than turning 40 because at least 40 is like, oh well, you were in your thirties less than a year ago so it's not that bad. The rest of the ways it feels worse than turning 40 is due to 41 being a larger number than 40.

That said, I don't feel much different now than I did a year ago. Shaving takes more effort these days. Not because my beard is any thicker, but because more of the whiskers are white making them harder to target when I'm using the mirror.

I did fall into the AFL's floating-fixture marketing trap of watching football today because it was going to shape the ladder at the end of a season I didn't watch many games during. The Bulldogs were playing and the first thing I saw were goals by West and Croft, on the back of clearances by Liberatore. And some big Darcy was running around too. Had I time travelled? Was I twenty again!? I thought. No. No it was much worse than that...

I also watch a couple of episodes of the rebooted King of the Hill and all that sharded together was not good for my chronometer.