Hello Blog.  I couldn’t think of a pertinent headline, being this is just me rambling and thinking I must post something ‘cos I haven’t in ages.  Actually, the whole headline malarkey is one I did not foresee when first putting my toe gingerly into the often-murky waters that surround Blog Land.  Of course, it’s moot that I need eye catching headlines in the first place, given the dearth of my readership but I’m ever a stickler for literary rules; ever a conformist.

I’m afflicted with a cold blog, that is still ongoing two weeks in, courtesy of a visit to the grandkiddiwinks but, in the manner of L’Oreal, they’re worth it. It has been quite a few months blog since we last touched base; since we last met up; since we last had a tete a tete (I’m filling up space until I can think where this something and nothing of a post is going.)   Oh yes. I’ll begin with my recent interaction with WordPress’s Happiness Engineers.

A couple of weeks ago blog you sent a notification stating, ‘Just a heads up – someone logged in (to you, blog) via email.’  I always login via Google so alarm bells began ringing – and all the more loudly because the husband had just suffered identity theft for the first time in years and years. The upshot of this scary episode, which brought with it (for me mostly) unpleasant feelings of vulnerability and abject fear – was that the husband had to spend ages changing his card details. An unforeseen consequence of which was that my annual blog domain payment was refused.  There are myriad knock-on effects from having your identity stolen.  Sometimes, I think we should just ditch the Digital Age.  Pretend it never happened.  Go back to carting paper money and heavy, jingly coins around, handing them over in ‘real’ shops, as opposed to handing our personal details straight into the hands of hackers gratis.

Actually, prior to Covid – or BC (before Covid) as I’m calling it, such was the paradigm shift that SARS-Cov-2 caused.  What was I doing back in 5 BC, I will occasionally think.  Is my birth date now 59 BC?   Anyway, prior to Covid I did pay for everything with cash. I went out of the house and bought stuff from shops. I carted a handbag around with a heavy purse full of loose change.  I withdrew money from a cashpoint and never once thought to pay for anything by card. Now I order most everything online. I swipe my card in shops. My purse is empty.  A permanent shift in behaviour caused entirely by a bug – and a field day for the online hackers.

Back to the blog notification. WordPress had sent me an email to say that payment for my domain had not gone through. I’d clicked on that email, which logged me into my blog, and I’d updated the card details.  So, wouldn’t you think, upon reading the notification ‘someone logged into your blog via email’ that I would have recognised that person as being MYSELF.  But no.  My head was full of identity theft.  So, I contacted the Happiness Engineers to be met with an AI in a box.  I’d always got a human before (the very few times I’ve ever chatted with WordPress.)  There was a picture of a sort of cute robot head in a corner of the box.  I rapidly (or so I thought) typed in my problem – that some nefarious person(s) had accessed my blog (which they do every day judging by the spam proliferation in my comments section.)   I had barely finished typing my last sentence when I received a HUGE instantaneous reply from the AI.  This was unnerving.  The advice was to change my password etc etc.  I then told my AI pal (for I’d already begun to anthropomorphise the robot head) that I’d checked online re: my problem and Google had advised looking at my activity log (which I didn’t know existed) as that would show nefarious activity.  I’d done that but everything had appeared blurred out on the log, except for a couple of names which I didn’t recognise, which made me even more certain that dodgy personages had infiltrated my hallowed blog.

Even more unnerving was that my little AI friend had begun typing whilst I was still in full flow, so was clearly not giving my riveting, if longwinded story the attention it deserved.  Thinking this was slightly rude on little Bot’s part (who now had a name) – as in, at least give me time to finish, you Bot you. I understand entirely that your neural networks will be thinking well, this is a load of old bollocks rubbish isn’t it?  But my blog’s security is at stake!  I then waited for little Bot’s fulsome and all-knowing reply.

To be fair, my second input to little Bot had been of a decidedly human and highly emotional nature, which clearly defeated little Bot and he (his assigned gender in my head, even if he was a bunch of programming languages) promptly gave up, so I asked if I could speak to a human please?’

I ended up getting 3 emails from 3 different lovely happiness engineers, one of which explained the blurry activity log, before I had to sheepishly tell them that it was in fact me, myself and I who’d accessed my blog via the email they’d sent me re the domain fee.  This revelation only occurred to me 3 emails in.  My final HE replied that that was very probably what had happened and that their AI bot does its best (I‘d thought, Ahh, little Bot, bless him) followed by a bot emoji.  In fact, the Happiness Engineers are all smiles and emojis (as befits their job) sprinkling their emails with the aforementioned, plus loads of friendly exclamation marks.

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Since my last post blog, Kindle-wise, I’ve read The Kingdoms (Natasha Pulley), The Silence Factory (Bridget Collins), The Betrayals (Bridget Collins), Enlightenment (Sarah Perry), The Way Past Winter (Kiran Millwood Hargrave), A Trick of the Dark (B R Collins – who is also Bridget Collins) and Tyme’s End (B R Collins) the latter two being YA novels.

I’d taken quite a break from reading due to the onset of a curious inability to read, specifically to read silently.  Maybe this was because I’d been reading too much and my brain had had enough, like your stomach rebels when you’ve stuffed your face.  I’d start out reading a sentence then stop mid-way and go back to the beginning to make sure of what I’d read (or remember what I’d read?) but carrying on again produced a feeling that my brain was getting ‘stuck’, sort of like trying to walk through sticky mud, or wade through treacle.  I’d find myself reading the same word, over and over again, like a programme  stuck in an endless loop.  It was unnerving (like my AI friend) and thoughts of degenerative old age crept in.  I partially solved it by reading out aloud which was no good as the stammer slowed me down.  So, I took a break from reading and it appears to have worked.

What I’ve mostly been doing though is playing my Roland FP-10 digital piano.  I sent my acoustic piano, that had been with me for over 50 years, to the tip.  This felt a wrench, and a heartless thing to do, but it had to go, it being too loud for a terraced house – I was always aware of disturbing the neighbours which didn’t make for relaxed playing, and it was in a pretty knackered state.  The weird thing is that, even though I enjoy playing the piano, I’d rarely played it as the years went hurtling by. I’d only had it tuned once in 38 years and took virtually no care of it at all.  So, some of the keys got stuck when I played.  It would make a weird vibration noise on particular chords, and it was sounding ‘tinny.’  The husband got some tip mates to come round and drag it out of the house on a tiny, battered trolley. They then upended the heavy upright and dragged it across the paved area at the front of our house, creating a trail of huge gouge marks in the process, which will never come out but, Hey, the husband said (when I roundly told him off for his pals’ shoddy removal skills) – it only cost a tenner.

The FP-10 is a revelation.  It’s a godsend. I wish I’d got one years ago, I will mumble to myself whilst tickling its fake ivories (its keys have ‘ivory touch’ which is splendiferous – none of your yukky plastic feel.)  But the best thing is the volume control.  The neighbour fears are gone.

I’ve also gone Ludovico Einaudi mad since being blessed with the FP-10.  I’d had Divenire and Nuvole Bianche (printed from the Net) hidden away in my old piano stool for years, having almost forgotten about them.  I rapidly bought the books The Einaudi Collection and Islands and I can’t impress upon you enough the value for money these bundles of sheet music represent.  Yes, the classicists bemoan Einaudi’s popularity – to my knowledge Einaudi has never self-publicised as being the next Mozart or Beethoven.  Yes, they berate those of us who play his simple, repetitive, ‘boring’ melodies, but to play his easy-going tunes is to enter a meditative state; is to remove yourself from the terrors of this world; is to get yourself back into playing the piano with the interest and enthusiasm you had before – to recapture some of your youthful self.  A key ingredient when playing Einaudi’s classical-light tunes is the ability to inject emotion into your playing, which is always about ‘touch.’  I don’t go in for the audible sighing and intakes of breath that Einaudi himself employs, but his music is uniquely emotional, and its relative simplicity can make any amateur pianist sound better than they are, which would explain his HUGE popularity.

My go to tutor for Einaudi pieces is Acuity1980 on YouTube.  His soulful, emotional interpretations of Einaudi are matchless, despite his paucity of views, as compared to other piano channels.  His renditions will make you think Einaudi is a genius.

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I’ve been watching the LGBTQ+ smorgasbord that is Dr Who, now improved by the addition of American actors via its new Disney link. Jinkx Monsoon was a highlight – blimey it’s that drag queen I used to watch on YouTube years ago, I’d thought. Jinkx has morphed into a spectacular all-dancing, all-singing, all-acting mainstream force since RuPaul’s Drag Race.  Her performance as Maestro out did every other performance in the episode – give her her own UK show, I shouted at the telly – heck, make her the next Dr Who!