When I lived in the Middle East, the daylight hours were pretty much set in stone.

5:30-6:30am was usually when sunrise happened and 6pm – 7pm was when sunset happened. The sunset could be absolutely gorgeous and during the winter months, the weather was gorgeous.

Now I’m back in the U.K., I’m cherishing the longer days. I finished my show at 9:45pm and cycled home and could still see the sunlight.

The mountains and city of Cardiff became a silhouette in the darkness. Lights glistened across the river, and after a pretty horrendous month of persistent rain, we finally had a clear sunny day that had a hint of freshness about it.

I look forward to a summer with long days, hotter weather and long days of daylight.

Bat for Lashes is going it alone.

I’ve always admired her work. She’s done 5 albums and all over those records are songs that are brave, experimental and uncompromising.

Yet she has seemed to have had a bit of a rough ride as far as labels are concerned and the reason is clear.

Labels want financial success above anything else, so much so that they would rather thrust mediocrity that’s guaranteed to appeal to some superficial degree than anything that takes a risk and dances on the edge.

This was not the case before the 2000s, labels sought out talent and gave them time to nurture their sound and craft and have a few misfires along the way. Now if you want to do this kind of thing, it’s most likely that you are on your own.

Labels follow the data, then they have a committee of multiple producers and songwriters to manufacture the hits.

Popular does not mean better.

And when an artist follows integrity and gets things right, it hits on a level deeper and more resonant than anything a team of writers seeking out the average marketplace.

The good news is you don’t need permission any more to make your art, in the way you want to make it. If you are inspired to follow your own tuning fork, do it and don’t let any groupthink convince you to do otherwise.

Liverpool got into the Champions league.

They also got third place and after the season they’ve had, as a supporter I’m tremendously happy.

Injuries ran amok, most devastatingly at centre back, and the system of the team was completely disrupted and during March, it seemed to completely nullify out attack.

There were moments when I thought that European football wasn’t going to happen at all. The last five games saw Liverpool more like themselves, more stability, more creativity going forward and more last minute heroics (Allison’s extraordinary header).

Kudos to Nat Phillips and Rhys Williams, a young centre back pair that have earned a wealth of experience and have established themselves as premier league players.

At times, luck has run dry, one obstacle has come after another and things did not look good, but with resilience and the right attitude, the team fought back and it’s a job well done.

It’s good to have obstacles come in your way, they provide, new challenges, new experiences and lessons and I look forward to seeing how the team do next season.

Roll on the Euros.

Are you cog or are you a linchpin?

Are you compliant or a creator, a contributor, a spark?

Everywhere, humans create a web of systems that operate to achieve something, a coffee shop, a railway network or a film.

Each of these systems have personnel involved. There are the big names, the CEO, the director, the captain but then there is everyone else. Varied levels of skill sets, roles and responsibilities and without any of these people, the systems run the risk of a flaw, or a lesser quality of experience.

When systems run, things are as expected, it’s all okay but is potential wasted? How many people hate their job for example? How many do the bare minimum? How many of us watch the clock tick by? How many of us are weighed down by bureaucracy?

As we move from industrial to digital, there are opportunities for us to re-evaluate our relation with work to which passion can blossom, creative potential can be met and no matter how small a role someone plays in the way in which something operates, they can do work they are proud of.

The conflict that we are currently witnessing in Israel and Palestine is heartbreaking and tragic.

This is deeply complex, rooted in history and religious identity and I’ve done my level best to get my head around it.

One of the most informative things I listened to about the recent violence was Sarah Kendzior’s and Andrea Chalupa’s Gaslit Nation podcast. The main thing I learnt is that the US has a lot to answer for.

It’s rather astonishing to see leaders pander to war criminals just to save face with political allegiances, all in spite of moral principles.

You can’t seriously call for deescalation to the government you sold weapons to.

You can’t deflect and both sides the story when clearly one side is committing more atrocities than the other.

Netanyahu can claim he is avoiding civilian targets all he likes but why is it the case that such a large proportion of casualties involved children?

Human nature can stoop to horridly cruel and dark levels.

There are grey area to this I know, and the domino affect of this is worrying and this is the point that has to be stressed. Is it an impossible situation? Certainly feels like it.

I believe that many Israeli civilians want to co-exist with Palestinians where everyone can live their lives in peace and dignity.

And the atrocities of a few is no excuse for antisemitism.

So to take a stance is out yourself on the line, but ultimately, as divided as the media and internet wants us to be, we are all after the same thing and that’s for some peace.

I have to remind myself sometimes that technology advancing has played a huge role in changing the way we think, behave and perceive things.

Sometimes conversations steer towards that reminder and today, I remembered that humans aren’t naturally designed to play on the grid musically speaking.

By that, I mean rudimentary performing something at a precise tempo, say 127bpm for example.

But we have metronomes that allow us to train ourselves to do that and furthermore, we have music technology that can align and quantise everything with pinpoint accuracy.

There is something to be said for the amazing science behind this and the results it can create but there’s also a noticeable lack of the sincerity that’s created by unexpected fluctuations in tempo, or the adrenaline pumping a desire to play something casters. These are organic things as a result of being human in our performance.

Sometimes, I say to my students to learn to play with a click for accuracy but also learn to play with it so you can play without it.

It’s better to commit the time to translating the performance in a way that elicits human connection than concerning oneself with a precise tempo marking.

Every day there is an opportunity to learn something new, to obtain new information that changes us, transforms us and allows us to improve ourselves for the better.

Learning should not stop when we finish school or an education.

Learning should be lifelong and all of us should strive to keep learning new things each and every day.

What if we were to set ourselves a target of learning just one new thing a day, what would it be?

Right now, I am working in the world of recording and mixing and I have a myriad of things I should develop my knowledge on, one of which is how to EQ different instruments.

Alongside, our ability to learn something is also our willingness to share the things we learn with others and teach them too, and in doing so, we create possibilities to make everything better.

Mini lessons, small strides forward.

The ocean is made of drops, and these small things can create a world of difference.

There’s nothing quite as infuriating as watching an mp repeatedly refusing to answer a direct question.

They knew about the Indian Variant, they knew it was a risk and red listed Pakistan and Bangladesh but why not India, despite the higher infection rate let alone the variant being called after the country!?

Because of a political trip that had been organised. Either Boris Johnson was too invested in his self interest or didn’t want to offend Modi, or both, but as usual, here we are with the same situation where action is needed and the response is far too little, too late.

Quite rightly, some of the press and scientific community is pressing for an explanation, but I remain doubtful as to getting a response that has any substance, let alone acknowledgement of mistakes being made.

Instead, they’ll try and keep the focus on the vaccine success, despite the fact that this variant could have the potential to scupper things and cost lives.

I’m quite done with the guise that those in power are perceived to be doing a good job when they are clearly not. They refuse to learn from their mistakes and they refuse to admit to them and it’s all incredibly disingenuous and dishonourable.

The country has reopened significantly today. Let’s hope it can stay that way.

Is it me or has driving etiquette in the U.K. gotten worse?

Be it mobile phones, tailgating, rage and aggressive driving or making a stupid risk in traffic to gain essentially seconds, people seemed to have lost perspective.

This irrational short term thinking can lead to long term damage and it’s not worth it at all.

So what’s the solution?

Changing the culture with driving and the obvious answer appears to be cracking down on it with heavier fines and punishments.

But you need police to cover it and there’s not enough.

I’d rather see prudent decision making that encourages driving that is much more respectful and considered, much more than accidents that teach us a lesson that is already too late.