That was a very long spring. Perhaps it’s because this week’s weather - cool, wet and windy, a lot of showers about, bouts of pleasant sunshine - mapped closely to the first week of September’s weather. And in fact nearly every week of the past three months has been cool, wet and windy with lots of showers, and bouts of pleasant sunshine. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced a spring with quite so much consistency. I put my jacket away and then got it back out again multiple times. Yet there is no doubt that the sun sets after 8pm now and there was even a test match - briefly- last weekend, so spring did happen.

But what did happen in spring? A lot and not much. Personally that is. Globally and domestically there was a lot going on, but for me the last few months have been one of pleasant routine, general health (ignoring the cold from the end of October that I nearly had to write a memoir about surviving) and mundanity.

I had the same customer all season, the same personal project for the evenings, the same gym routines, a lot of chicken breast salads. A lot of berries, cereal and yogurt. A lot of walking around the same lake, canal and seaside. Some good audio books. Pub Quiz. Walks with Vanessa and Nash - often to the bakery. Lots of good music.

I did go to Sydney. And for some hikes in the hills. And I saw friends and family. One night I saw the southern lights. It was very chill. I could probably have lived in that spring forever.

I clearly had a lot of time for reflection in spring 25 because my spring playlist reached 101 minutes and 26 songs. That’s two new songs a week on average that I considered worth engraving on my psyche to remember this time of my life by.

Songs that remind me of walking while wearing a jacket. Lunchtime exercise. Walking by the lake. Cooking BBQs. Driving around the suburbs. Writing XML by hand. Walking by the lake (again). Going off to get motor oil for my chainsaw. Walking by the lake (a third time). Walking by the lake (wow).

I have turned a whole pumpkin into a bulk meal for the last time in 2025. It was 29° today, and basically the equinox of my seasonal diet. After months straight of cereal and yoghurt for breakfast I cranked out a delicious mango and banana smoothie that tasted great. It also took a lot longer to consume, meaning I didn't get Nash out for her walk until 9:30. At that point the sun had been up long enough that all the flowers were open and there was a slope of different coloured petals under the nicest of blue skies and I thought to myself, fuck yeah. Look at those flowers.

One pelican encounter later I was back home making a hot coffee. Then one of my lunchtime meetings was cancelled, meaning I had 45 minutes to devour my first giant chicken salad of the season. This summer I've decided I will eat salads with high protein feta. Then that afternoon I had an ice coffee.

Dinner was a very hearty, pumpkin based pasta with terrible pumpkin muffins as an entree. It took me two hours to prep and cook, but I still made it to the beach right before the sun hit the horizon. The colours were mint. I wore only a shirt and shorts. I thought to myself again, fuck yeah.

The last time I walked the Onkeeta track was in spring 2016. It was sunny and hot and we took Nash on the loop who quickly took to the ponds and puddles. She ran out of energy before the end and I had to leave her with Ness and go to get the car and collect them.

Puddle is still there 9 years later. I think I saw a dog hair floating in it.

Today I walked the track again with Dad in a lot of drizzle and he made it all the way around without tiring or getting swampy. Then we went to Clarendon for lunch where I hadn't been since 2010 for the gap between a wedding and a reception. Then I drove dad back to his house past my old primary school.

Not a lot changes other than the people.

Towards the end of the first week of June I watched the pre-credits scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. We were about four hours away from landing in Adelaide when the precious artefact, sheathed in plywood, was rolled into an immense storehouse of similar crates while the camera panned out.

Today I made an ice coffee because the afternoon sun hitting my window was too warm to contemplate drinking a warm one. How quickly that winter went by since returning from Norway and resuming my daily routine. My 2025 winter routine was a lot of: sleep in clothes with multiple blankets, gentle stretching, double-layer pants and wear a puffy jacket under my actual jacket. Heated gloves. Occasionally put a beanie on over my headphones. Go for a walk, stare at the water. Eat berries and yogurt for breakfast. Work on various projects and initiatives. Coffee. Gym when possible. Lots of chicken because for some reason it was very cheap. Recover from a collapsed lung. Edit photos. Listen to music. Walk to the shops. Savour any sun patch.

There are actually only about thirty photos on my phone from June 7 to July 31st. And half of them are pool chemistry or Nash's GI tract related. It wasn't an exciting winter. It wasn't a bad one (the collapsed lung wasn't much of an inconvenience). I went to the office three times. It was just comfortable and a bit numb. I have no regrets.

It feels like since August started that the sun lingers longer and the coldest crisp is no longer in the air. I haven't double-pantsed for over a month. I haven't charged my glove batteries for weeks. Even though August was rainy and stormy at times, it feels like there was a lot of sunshine in there too.

So where does that leave Bradism Winter 2025? Only some tunes and journal entries to remember it by. Another season packaged up in a crate and being wheeled to its eternal resting place in the database.

It was a great weekend. The exact days that winter feels officially over, even though I'm sure there will be cold and rain again soon. Despite the many sights and sun, I didn't take any photos. So I'll recap it with words.

Friday night, date night with Vanessa, Lebanese food in North Adelaide. Mixed grill. Hot chips. A lot of salt and garlic. Very tasty.

Saturday morning I needed a haircut so after dropping Vanessa in town for an appointment I parked at my old barber and then walked back through Croydon to see how the flowers were going on my old walking streets. Okay actually I was going to see if one of my favourite jasmine vines was in bloom yet. There were some blossoms, but not enough warm breeze to carry the pollen to me. I got a coffee on Queen Street and then walked back for a haircut. In the mood for supporting more local businesses so I bought some sausages from a butcher and rolls from the baker - these would feature in lunch and dinner later in the day.

Around sunset we walked on the beach with bare feet before returning home for a BBQ. I slept with only one doona.

This morning the sun was shining and glimmering off puddles from overnight rain. We walked Nash to her new bakery and fed her a weekly treat of sausage roll before returning home under sun-showers.

After washing Nash, we drove north for a father's day lunch and a lot of sunshine coming through the windscreen.

Once back home, I walked around the lake as a huge moon rose into the lavender sky. Then I cooked another BBQ.

Yesterday felt like the first day of Spring, and today felt like the first day of summer.

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.

One cold morning as the winter solstice neared, I woke up with a collapsed lung. This didn't seem very fair as I'd already had my completely random, debilitating injury for 2025 back in January when my ankle stopped working for no reason.

Apparently it's common for spontaneous collapsed lungs to affect tall men. It does seem particularly egregious though - when I go to sleep buffered by at least four pillows - to wake up with new injuries.

I did go to hospital about my collapsed lung a couple of days after the solstice after spending a week thinking it was some kind of weird covid that only affected one lung and didn't show up on RATs. The doctor checked out my X-ray and suggested a conservative approach as opposed to admitting me to stick a needle into my chest cavity and suck out the excess air. The conservative approach was appealing to me too. So since then I've had a couple more X-rays to see if it is getting worse or better.

According to the latest X-ray it is getting better. Could this collapsed lung be a metaphor for winter? The day with the shortest amount of lung, and then slowly but surely it expands each day and eventually there's a summer of massive, never-ending lung? And then after New Year's the roulette wheel spins again to determine what my journal entries will be about in 2026?

No, probably not. If it's a metaphor for anything (it's not) it's a metaphor for the collapse of metaphors. It's dark. I'm cold. I'm growing old. I'm not running out of visual imagery, I'm running out of novel feelings to allude to with them.

But at least the solstice is done with. Soon it will be sprung.

It was not a good idea to watch the first episode of True Detective Season 4 on a dark, windy night right before bedtime. Not because the horror themes make me feel scared. Because the Alaska themes make me feel cold.