One of my resolutions at the start of 2024 was to take a month off from gaming. Towards the end of last year I had started to feel a little burned out and overwhelmed with choices, especially given the never-ending firehose of free games provided by services like the Epic Store and Amazon Gaming. I found I was only able to play anything for a short time before growing bored and logging out; perhaps a reset of sorts was required. I suppose it's been a long time coming.

I've been playing video games of one kind or another for more than forty years now. It started with visits to the arcade on Portsmouth's Southsea pier as a child, where – armed with stacks of 10p pieces from the change machine – my younger brother and I would spend hours feeding them into Out Run, Star Wars, Spy Hunter, Street Fighter, and many more towering cabinets whose names are lost to the fog of memory. As well as providing us some welcome additional pocket money to waste on those visits to the coast, my grandparents also eventually purchased an early home arcade system (possibly the Coleco Telstar Alpha) that allowed us to play such cutting edge games as Pong, and an early shooting game, on their black-and-white television.

By the early 1980s, computers were starting to become a part of schooling in Britain; most children of that era will have stories of the single school computer being wheeled from classroom to classroom on its trolley. Luckily for us, our father was a headmaster, and so the cream-coloured Acorn BBC Model B from his school spent its school holidays in our spare room, where we played a range of vaguely educational games like Granny's Garden (which is apparently still going strong).

It wasn't until 1985 that we finally had our own home computer, a ZX Spectrum 48K+, and discovered the twin wonders of 8-bit gaming and software piracy. It's probably not an exaggeration to say that I played on it every day. Over time, I came to find the technical aspects of the computer just as fascinating as the games, and I taught myself enough BASIC to write my own simple programs, including one (a simple maze game) that even had its own loading screen (leading friends to doubt I could possibly have achieved something so advanced).

As the 8-bit era gave way to 16-bit machines, videogames became less of a priority in my life, replaced in large part by a growing interest in music. My brother had a Sega MegaDrive, and I enjoyed playing Micro Machines and Sonic the Hedgehog, but I didn't really pick up gaming again until the late 90s, when I bought my first PC. Now with a much more powerful 32-bit processor, and the availability of dial-up internet in my own flat, I would spend hours playing Age of Empires 2 or Ultima Online, occasionally burning my dinner when I couldn't tear myself away from the real-time action.

Years later I would finally replace my ancient Windows PC with a new toy, the Apple iMac, which unfortunately also greatly limited my gaming selection. But it was also around that time that I discovered MMOs like World of Warcraft, and then later Elder Scrolls Online and EVE Online, all offering a Mac client as well as persistent online worlds with infinite possibilities for play. Eventually I took the time to set up the Mac's handy dual-boot feature, reinstalled Windows, and was able to expand my gaming horizons: Skyrim, Tomb Raider, Fallout 4, Bioshock Infinite and the Arkham series of Batman games were some of my favourites during that time. We also acquired a PS3 in 2012, and – despite the difficulty in claiming any TV time with three children in the house – I was able to play through classics like The Last of Us and Grand Theft Auto V.

And then came the pandemic, and a lot more time spent at home. So, in 2020, I finally retired my iMac and built my own gaming PC, curved monitor, fancy mouse and all. Since then, my Steam library (alongside the Epic Store, GOG Galaxy, and half-a-dozen other launchers) has grown exponentially, and the last three-and-a-half years has seen me playing more videogames than at any time since I was a teenager. Apex Legends, Rocket League, Destiny 2, Crusader Kings, Death Stranding, Red Dead Redemption 2, The Witcher 3, Microsoft Flight Simulator, Elden Ring, Baldur's Gate 3, Kingdom Come: Deliverance... the list is endless.

After this month off from gaming, I'll be picking up something else new: Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy from 2021 was one of Epic's freebies over Christmas, and everyone who has played it seems to have good things to say, so I'll be spending some time with that in February. And after that, who knows? I still have an original Spectrum sitting on my desk, together with an SD card loaded up with classic games from my childhood – perhaps I'll finally be able to finish Manic Miner, or reach the inverted levels of Chuckie Egg?

For some reason I didn't publish any New Year's Resolutions-style post at the start of 2023. I'm pretty sure I sat down to write one. Maybe it never made it out of my drafts? Or perhaps I didn't have any concrete goals – I definitely remember being in a bit of a slump last December – but since that's not the case going into 2024, here's a look back at last year and a handful of things I want to commit (or recommit, in most cases) to doing over the coming year.

2023 in retrospective

Despite it definitely having more of a post-pandemic, "things are back to normal" feel than 2021 and 22, last year doesn't seem to have contained all that much that stands out in my memory.

We took a couple of short breaks in Gloucestershire and the Lake District, and I saw some great live music, often in the company of one or another of my now fully-grown daughters – Metric, Iron Maiden, Boygenius and Bartees Strange were all well worth the strain on my knees of standing in a concert crowd for hours – but aside from those occasional highlights the year mostly rolled by uneventfully. I got back into watching Formula 1 after several years, so that provided some weekend entertainment, but gave up playing with a local symphony orchestra after concerts in March and June.

I also decided to give my various creative endeavours a bit of a boost, after deliberately avoiding them throughout 2022. I started writing again in January, redesigned and relaunched this blog shortly thereafter, and then in September started working on recording music as well as teaching myself Z80 assembly language while I develop a game on my ancient ZX Spectrum. In fact, my goals for 2024 are really just a continuation of a post-September regimen that I've been pretty happy with.

2024's resolutions

Starting in September, I set myself some daily and weekly goals, which I have mostly managed to meet, and since I think they're doing a reasonable job at keeping me on track I plan to carry on with them; so Resolution #1 is to stick to my daily and weekly writing, game design and music-making goals.

After a half-marathon in April, I stopped running entirely until mid-November as I was nursing some bad heel pain, but now I've restarted a routine of sorts I remember how much I enjoy getting outside to run. I also want to lose a little weight this year, so Resolution #2 is therefore to stick to a regular weekly exercise routine; for me that means daily cardio, a couple of runs every week and a longer session on the exercise bike.

And finally, something a little different to usual. Since replacing my creaking iMac with a decent spec gaming PC in mid-2020, I've been enjoying playing a much wider variety of games than I previously had access to, but recently I've been in a bit of a slump, not wanting to pick up anything apart from a couple of games of Rocket League at a time. I think what I need is a bit of a dopamine reset, so I've decided that this year Resolution #3 is no videogames in January. I'll be using the time that this frees up to make some improvements to this site as well as spending more time on the side projects mentioned above.

Happy New Year!

I'm still struggling to figure out exactly what sort of music I want to make.

The problem seems to be one part my eclectic taste in music – I listen to, and enjoy, everything from jazz to glitch to pop to hip-hop to heavy metal – and one part the muscle memory from learning to play guitar in the late 80s. My brain wants to experiment with genres, making music that sounds like Fever Ray meets The Postal Service by way of Swans; but whenever I pick up a guitar to start writing, my hands just automatically start to play distorted, chugging 4/4 metal riffs.

Other musicians say you should just write what comes naturally to you, that that's how to discover your sound, but when the first thing someone says about your demo track is, "it sounds a bit 90s" you can't help but think that perhaps you're wearing your influences on your sleeve just a little too obviously.

Perhaps if I bought a MIDI controller and started using that as my first port-of-call instead of the electric guitar when writing, it would lead me in a different direction? Or maybe I just need to embrace the distorted riff? Bands like Muse and Royal Blood are still wringing new life from it, I suppose.

When I set out to write something I could play on my ZX Spectrum, I was fairly confident in my abilities. Sure, it's been a while since I really did any programming, but over the years I've taught myself ASP, PHP, JavaScript, even bits of Perl and Python – I'm pretty sure I can understand something that is by its very nature far simpler. Plus didn't schoolboys used to write successful Spectrum games back in the day? How hard could it possibly be?

As it turns out, assembly language – commands (or "opcodes" to give them their proper title) that are only one step removed from the actual instructions executed by the computer's chip – is both extremely simple and ridiculously hard. Almost everything you do is concerned with moving values around in memory, storing references to particular parts of that memory, and juggling those values and references in between a few 'registers' until you've moved the value you want into the place it belongs. There are no shortcuts, no libraries or include files; if you want some graphics to appear on the screen, you need to update the corresponding section of memory with the bitmap values that represent the thing you want to draw – and then update some other piece of memory with a value that represents the foreground and background colours for that part of the screen. Want to make it move? Just keep track of where it is, redraw it every frame ... and don't forget to undraw it from its previous location before moving it somewhere else – oh, and do that for every single moving thing on the screen.

Once you understand the basic underlying concepts it does become a little bit easier – pushing and popping things off the stack, and how to think about loops in a different way were some early stumbling blocks – and you can look at a game like Jetpac and understand what might probably be going on under the hood. But looking at something more complex, like the 3D environments of Head over Heels, and at how many lines of code it's taken me to just print a countdown from 10 to 1, and it's easy to be more than a little daunted by the task of making an entire game on your own.

Still, if 15-year-olds in the 80s could do it, without even the benefit of the internet, I'm sure I can fumble through with the help of YouTube tutorials and PDF guides.

Recently I've been making a concerted (pun not intended) effort to get back into making music – and a few recent purchases have helped.

I've always owned an instrument or two; I learned to play the violin at the age of seven, and then subsequently switched to guitar as a teenager. I played in a band in my early twenties, but since then life and other interests have largely taken over, and my musical output had dwindled to occasionally picking up the acoustic to play a few chords.

However, last month I decided to see whether I could actually accomplish anything with my PC, a cheap microphone, and an even cheaper guitar; since then I've learned a fair bit more about what making music is like nowadays.

Software was the first thing I needed. There are dozens of options for which DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) to use, ranging from expensive professional options like Ableton Live through to simpler free tools like Audacity; after looking at a few I ended up going with Reaper, which has a generous trial period and only costs $60 for personal use. It does pretty much everything you need, and seems to be very popular with the hobbyist musician.

The next thing I discovered is that you really need a decent audio interface if you're going to record yourself accurately. I tried installing ASIO4ALL, but even with those drivers I was experiencing far too much latency, so I bought a Focusrite Scarlett Solo, which lets me plug in either a mic or an instrument to use as an input device. Their 2i2 model is more popular due to its dual input option (so you can record both your instrument and vocals at the same time), but since I didn't really need to do that right now I decided to save myself the extra fifty quid.

And then there are the instruments. DAWs work with either analogue inputs (plug your guitar directly into the audio interface and simulate amps and effects) or MIDI, where you can use a keyboard (or drum pad) together with virtual instruments and effects to recreate virtually any instrument you desire. I could do with both, but since Reaper comes with a virtual keyboard to play when recording MIDI, I decided to pick up a new electric guitar first, and perhaps add a MIDI controller later on. Christmas is coming up soon, right?

So with those basic fundamentals of a home studio all set up and ready to go, I've been recording bits and pieces while I learn what all of the various plugins I've downloaded actually do. I should probably pick a cover song to record in full, but my musical taste these days is so broad I'm having trouble picking a genre to explore...

Two pieces of John Waters-related media showed up in my feeds this week – a lengthy New Yorker interview ostensibly to mark the unveiling of his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and a brief Criterion puff piece from a few years ago wherein the director picks out some of his favourite DVDs (at least, those which are available in the Criterion collection) – and it got me thinking about my own 25-year fascination with the filmmaker.

As a young wannabe filmmaker in my early twenties, I would read as many books and magazines about film as I could, and Waters' Pink Flamingos (1972) would often crop up in discussions about low- or no-budget filmmaking (alongside those other low-budget poster-children, Clerks (1994) and 1992's El Mariachi). I dutifully obtained a copy (almost certainly on VHS at that time) to watch and learn from. I'm not sure whether the ramshackle production, dreadful script, terrible acting (Waters blames poor sound equipment early in his career for this, causing him to instruct his actors to simply "Scream!") or blatant courting of outrage that is the film's most famous moment (despite happening almost post-credits) impressed me least, but it was his attitude towards creativity – the conviction that he should just make things that he and his friends enjoyed – that stayed with me.

I've watched more of his work over the years. Cry-Baby (1990) was an early favourite, as was Pecker (1998) and the original version of his musical Hairspray (1988). His earlier, non-Hollywood studio movies (Mondo Trasho, Multiple Maniacs, Female Trouble, Desperate Living, and Polyester) are harder to find, although many are now available to watch in full for free on YouTube or other video platforms. I even made a pilgrimage to the Senator Theatre in Waters' hometown of Baltimore when I visited there in the late 90s. The cinema was where Waters would premiere all of his films; most were filmed entirely on location in and around the city.

In conversation, despite being labelled "The Pope of Filth" by some because of his work, Waters is always unfailingly pleasant and polite, unfazed by any outrage or disgust he may be the source of, and happy that at least some people enjoy the things he enjoys making – in short, a healthy attitude to have towards creativity, without worrying about meeting any arbitrary audience needs. If they laugh, fine; if they puke, also fine. He's apparently starting work on a new film shortly, to be based on his recent novel Liarmouth. The book's heroine is named Marsha Sprinkle, which reassures me that he hasn't lost his unique sense of (bad) taste.

(On a related note, I also highly recommend the documentary about Waters' frequent star/muse and friend, I Am Divine, which I think is still available on Amazon Prime).

Last week, motivational writer and bookshop owner Ryan Holiday (he of the Daily Stoic and a bunch of other newsletters; if you're constantly being reminded that you should have read Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, you're probably subscribed to one of them) published a post on his blog titled These 38 Reading Rules Changed My Life. I read it, and – while I wouldn't claim it changed my life – several of the points he made definitely chimed with my own observations after forty-odd years as an avid reader.

Physical books only

This rule gets my unadulterated thumbs up. Ryan was making more of a comparison with audiobooks (another format of which I have never seen the attraction) but I would also put e-readers, Kindles and the like, in here too. Sure, raving about the smell of old books is now just a cliché, but I find immense value in having the ability to flip back and forth while reading, or to physically see your progress through a book and how much farther you have to go.

Hard disagree on his preference for hardbacks, though – too much air travel has forever soured me on carting about something that heavy. Paperbacks all the way.

Classics are classics for a reason

One hundred percent, yes! Sure, they are often intimidatingly long (The Count of Monte Cristo, anything by Dostoevsky), painfully slow-moving at times (Thomas Hardy, Proust), and written in a style that is at times hard (Homer, Milton) or near-impossible (Ulysses) to read comfortably ... but if anything is worth the effort, it is reading the acknowledged classics of literature. I used to try to split my time by reading one classic, one modern, and one old favourite in turn; I no longer follow that rule, but each time I pick up a 'classic' it almost always ends up being one of the best things I've read that year.

Don’t be a book snob

This rule is not so much something I agree with, but more something I need to work on myself. I've always said life was too short and there are too many great books out there to bother reading cheap airport thrillers by people like Lee Child; but then I read one of his books, and ... it wasn't half bad. Most bestsellers are that way for a reason, as Ryan says. (But, as Ralph Waldo Emerson advised when he wrote, "Never read a book that is not a year old," I think it's unlikely I'll start buying novels simply because they are at the top of the weekly charts.)

Ruin the ending

Okay, I don't actually do this, but what I will always do as soon as I finish a book is head straight to Wikipedia or Google to see how the plot and themes have been interpreted by others, and look up reader reviews on Goodreads to see if the things that stood out to me stood out to anyone else too. If a book has a preface or foreword I don't tend to read it beforehand (to avoid spoilers), but I'll always go back and read it after I've finished; I find that the more you understand about the context of a book's creation, the deeper meaning the author's choices seem to contain.

If a book is good, recommend it and pass it along to other people

I don't tend to lend a lot of my books, but I'll always recommend the best ones wherever I can, whether that's via social media like Goodreads, or in more private groups like work channels or Discords. And nothing makes me happier than seeing my daughter enjoy books I've recommended to her (as a teenager I read everything that Judy Blume wrote; it paid off some twenty years later), and in turn seeing her recommending and passing along her own favourites to others.

On a whim I recently bought myself a new toy. The Zenit EM is a 35mm SLR, manufactured in the Soviet Union (back when there was such a thing) for the 1980 Moscow Olympics. And, after almost 20 years using a smartphone, it's been a bit of a steep learning curve.

Zenit was originally a cheaper copy of the fancier Leica brand, and they've manufactured a wide range of different cameras (including this awesome Photosniper model) at their factory outside Moscow since the early 1950s. This model, the EM, features a built-in light meter (that seems to still work fairly accurately), several shutter speeds, automatic and manual aperture setting, and a timer.

After watching this excellent YouTube how-to several times, I managed to successfully load a roll of film (which has gotten really expensive now everyone has gone digital) into the camera, and get to grips with the "take light reading, adjust shutter speed, set appropriate aperture" process. However, now that I've finally gotten the test roll back from the printers, it appears that manually focusing is something I need to work a little harder at. Landscapes are easy enough, but anything up-close requires you to really hit the perfect spot on the focus ring if you want the results to be at all acceptable. I also discovered that the exposure counter doesn't really work on mine, so either I need to carry a notebook or have a good memory for how many shots are remaining on the roll.

To be honest, I'm not sure how often I'm going to use it, what with the high cost of both film stock and development nowadays. Perhaps next time I'm going somewhere with plenty of long-distance landscapes to capture I'll pack it (although it is kind of heavy); in the meantime, playing with the Zenit has made me appreciate my Pixel 6's 50MP/4K pocket-sized camera even more.

This is almost certainly pretty common knowledge, but it took me a little while to find the right combination of tools so I thought I'd share them here too.

One of the projects I'm slowly chipping away at in my spare time is a game for the ZX Spectrum, my first ever computer. Eventually I plan to write it in Z80 assembler, but until I can make all of those esoteric commands stick in my brain I first decided to create the basic game in, um, BASIC (since I can remember a fair amount already and the manual is extremely easy to understand).

However, I really don't want to type it in using my actual Spectrum (an original 48K+ model); hunting for the right combination of keys to output every command would take forever. So, I started looking for a method that would let me write BASIC on my PC using a comfortable, familiar IDE, and then load it up on my Spectrum for testing.

Text To Basic

After trying a few options (which were mostly written in C and assumed you know how to compile them yourself), I came across Remy Sharp's NextBASIC encoder, also available on the command line via NPM. Now, I don't know much about how the BASIC on the Spectrum Next differs from the original, but I'm going to assume that as long as I don't try to do anything too fancy the encoder should be able to cope. (Sidenote: it's weird to find a solution from someone I primarily know of as a JavaScript developer in the web sphere. Small world.)

So, now I can write BASIC in VS Code (Remy also created a VS Code plugin that does a bunch of cool formatting and syntax highlighting for BASIC), convert it from a text file into a .tap file using the command line, test it locally in Fuse, then copy it onto an SD card and load it onto my Spectrum via the DivMMC card reader (which is also how I load all my games).

Now I just need to get around to turning my idea into an actual game.

One of the things that I did shortly after relocating my office into the new garden studio was to rearrange my bookshelves.

Previously, the short set of shelves that sat behind me was home to a random selection of books – mostly mine but also some of my wife's – that served as nothing more than an overflow for the other bookshelves around the house. Nothing ever ended up there intentionally; I think I had read most of what was on the shelves, but not everything, and if one book was removed something else soon took its place.

But now that the shelves were to occupy my studio office, a place that was ostensibly mine and mine alone, I decided that I would rearrange them in order to gather together the works of my favourite authors.

Guy Gavriel Kay

I first read GGK as a teenager when I picked up a copy of Tigana from the public library, and since then I have read everything else he has written (his latest, All The Seas Of The World, comes out in paperback this April). It's almost all low-fantasy, set in fictionalised equivalents of places and times during which our own world was going through change, and tends to follow a mixture of characters both high- and low-born as they influence or are swept up by the events of their time. His early works – Tigana, A Song for Arbonne, The Lions of Al-Rassan, and The Sarantine Mosaic – are my favourites, although I suspect that's largely due to the age at which I read them. The more recent books and characters just don't seem to stick in the mind as much, although they're still an enjoyable read.

Alan Moore

Almost certainly the greatest comic book writer of all time, I came to Moore through the graphic novel collections of his work – first the seminal Watchmen, and then later other lauded works such as Batman: The Killing Joke, From Hell and V for Vendetta. Over the years I've slowly built up a collection of his less well-known work as well, my favourite of which is the limited series Top 10, as well as the novels Voice of the Fire and the 600,000 word epic Jerusalem (which is quite possibly my favourite book, although I have only managed to get through it once). And I still haven't gotten around to reading The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen or Swamp Thing, so there's plenty more Moore left for me to discover.

Peter Bagge

Another comic book writer, and I have my brother to thank for introducing me to Peter Bagge's work – specifically his series Hate – as a teenager. I empathised with his Gen-X slacker anti-hero, Buddy Bradley, and as I grew older and re-read the stories I found more to admire in Bagge's stories and art. In later years I've filled in my collection with some of his other books; they're of variable quality, admittedly, but there's always something about them to like and the art style is definitely unique. For a long time, "Buddy Bradley" was my chosen name across mostly now defunct web forums and message boards.

Ernest Hemingway

It's obviously something of a cliché that men who fancy themselves as writers will idolise Hemingway, but there really is something about his writing that sets it apart from just about any other writer. It's not all perfect, of course (To Have And Have Not in particular is awful) but when he was at his best – The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls – it just seems so effortless. (He also wrote so few actual full-length novels that they don't take up much space on the shelf, which leaves room for...)

F Scott Fitzgerald

Of course everyone has read The Great Gatsby, but I tend to think Fitzgerald's other works, especially Tender Is the Night, are far more interesting. His prose style is eminently readable; it's a shame we didn't get to see what he might have been capable of had his life not gone off the rails.

Arthur Ransome

I've loved the Swallows and Amazons series by Arthur Ransome ever since I was a child. Somehow the adventurous fantasies of 1930s public schoolchildren landed perfectly for me 50+ years later, and even now I will re-read one or two of the books every year for some comfortable nostalgia. My favourite is probably We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea, and of the others the only ones I don't particularly care for are the more fantastical Peter Duck and Missee Lee. And I'll always watch the 1974 film whenever it appears in the television listings.

Robert A Heinlein

I used to have a far more impressive collection of Heinlein books, mostly paperbacks from the 60s and 70s, but sadly they were lost in a garage flood several years ago. Since then I've been re-buying them when I can, although with fewer opportunities to visit charity shops it's been slow going. Despite his somewhat problematic views on some topics I've always loved his competent and inventive protagonists with their whip-smart dialogue; my all-time favourite has always been The Number of the Beast, but I also really enjoyed most of his so-called "juvenile" books of the late 40s and early 50s.

Joe Abercrombie

The most recent discovery on this list, I don't really remember how or when I came across Joe Abercrombie's work, but since picking up his first book, The Blade Itself, I've made sure to grab everything else he has since released – he's one of the few authors whose work I own in hardback because I just couldn't wait for the paperback release. A self-described writer of "grimdark" fantasy, his books are packed with morally ambiguous characters whose motives are sometimes not entirely clear, but you can't help rooting for them anyway.

Charles Bukowski

Speaking of morally ambiguous characters, I've enjoyed Charles Bukowski's writing for a long time, both his novels and short stories but also his poetry. The books are written in a spare, straightforward style that perfectly matches the base urges that seem to propel his alter-ego stand-in, Henry Chinaski, from dead-end job to dead-end job and from woman to woman.

If you're a fan of Metric, it's a little surprising to come across them playing in such a relatively intimate venue as London's Roundhouse. The multiple Juno award winners and three-time Polaris Album of the Year nominees (Canada's equivalent of the Mercury Music Prize) seem like they should be selling out stadiums, or at least filling venues like the O2. Who knows, perhaps back home in Canada they are – but here in Europe, on their current Doomscroller tour, the stops are decidedly on the smaller side.

Openers (and Columbia labelmates) Lo Moon were competent but bland, frontman Matt Lowell's Thom Yorke-esque falsetto a highlight as they rattled through half-a-dozen songs you'd be hard-pressed to recall the next day; Loveless, their first single, the only real standout.

Metric's latest album, 2022's Formentera, is something of a return to form after the disappointing Pagans in Vegas (2015) and the forgettable Art of Doubt (2018), and they have wisely packed their set with tracks taken from both the new album and their breakthrough, Fantasies (2009), while sprinkling in a handful of older songs for the hardcore fans that were present (including one audience member throwing rather incongruous devil's horns throughout). The crowd was equally diverse, with young and old represented fairly evenly – surprising for a band now entering their third decade, although with plenty of American accents in evidence perhaps it was an opportunity for expats to catch up with an old favourite.

After kicking off with the ten-and-a-half minute epic dance-rock of Doomscroller, the band ploughed through another half-a-dozen songs without pause. The rhythm section – bass player Josh Winstead and drummer Joules Scott-Key – has always been the heart of Metric's sound and were as tight as ever (even if the drum riser was in darkness for much of the set), while guitarist James Shaw swapped frequently between synths and guitar, although his occasional over-extended guitar solos felt unnecessary, indulgent and quite frankly underwhelming.

But it was charismatic singer Emily Haines that most of the crowd were focused on. The 49-year-old, who celebrated her birthday just last week, bounded around the stage like a woman half her age, blowing kisses to the multitude of camera phones as she bounced, shimmied and glittered through the band's best-loved tracks. Her breathy, slightly helium-infused voice hasn't lost any of its power after twenty years, and the showmanship of Haines and the rest of the band deserved a larger canvas than the Roundhouse's small stage could provide.

The problem Metric have always had is that, despite getting decidedly dancier over the years, their music is hard to dance to – they often pick a tempo that is just a little too slow for a crowd to really bounce along to, and so even on anthemic tunes like Help I'm Alive, Gimme Sympathy, Black Sheep, and set closer Breathing Underwater, the atmosphere felt somehow muted, the pent-up energy of the crowd denied the outlet of a full-on mosh pit. Still, you can't have everything.

Last summer, as the likelihood that working from home was going to be part of our New Normal for the foreseeable future, I invested in a garden studio. Up until that point I had been working in what was effectively our house's extended porch, meaning my day was full of distractions and interruptions as other people came and went or deliveries arrived. A dedicated workspace, albeit at the end of the garden, would bring some welcome privacy and a chance to regain some focus.

Having my own space also meant that I had somewhere private to give meditation another go. I tried it before, years ago, and found it an effective way to start the day with a clear head and a relaxed sense of self, but living in a busy household made it difficult to find the time or space to sit quietly for several minutes every morning. And, since one of the benefits my company now offers is a free subscription to Headspace for all employees, it seemed like a good time to start again.

I find meditation to be similar to exercising or writing: you never really want to do it, but you always feel better after you have. I've made it part of my morning routine now, for fifteen or so minutes before starting work, and I can tell that it's beneficial by how annoyed I get at myself if I don't manage to fit it in for some reason that day. Headspace programs do a good job at avoiding the more hand-wavey, "healing crystals and ley lines" type of nonsense that some meditation advocates sometimes push–their guided meditation recordings are simple and pleasant to listen to (without sending you to sleep).

Sometimes I even catch myself doing the meditating-finger-touch thing.