Status updates for November 2025

Saturday 1 November

Continuing to slowly get better. Not much else to report. A friend asked on the group chat for telly recommendations and I had a disturbing amount to recommend. Almost like I've been signed off work for a year and instructed to rest...

Nice bit of sunshine in the afternoon so I was able to sit with the buns and not risk a chill. Most of the big trees are pretty much bare now and the bugs are enjoying mulching the fruit we neglected to pick in time.

Sunday 2 November

Incrementally feeling better again. I won't horror you with the outputs though.

Chum Andy came over to chat with Fi about some art stuff and we had a nice catch up in the sunshine. Otherwise, Sunday innit.

Monday 3 November

Still got a thick head but felt able to do a few little things today, which then resulted in a little crash because I still have CFS, duh. But at least the kitchen is cleaner now.

I've been thinking about whether these daily updates would work as an email. I have a strong reticence to sending newsletters that aren't High Value Content because that's email and going into someone inbox is a big deal that shouldn't be taken for granted. But then I get emails that are basically short blog posts, and there is a decent amount of stuff down below this bit. And the vast majority of people don't use RSS, Mastodon or even Bluesky, the only bits of internet I'm mentally prepared to engage with.

Tuesday 4 November

Hey, guess what? My cold is marginally less worse than yesterday! Although my sinuses might tell you otherwise. Once this is posted I'll back over the steam bowl with a towel over my head.

Accidentally re-opened the rift between myself and Jez over whether Roy Lichtenstein was a genius artist (me) or an elitist copyist (Jez) before mutually realising we were too tired for this right now. Amusingly it came from a slag of Damien Hirst who, per Jez, "isn't even bothering to paint his own Ben Day dots".

If there's one thing everyone can agree on it's that Damien Hirst is shite, right?

Wednesday 5 November

My recovery might be at the stage where I can start doing small jobs again and I'm considering popping into work tomorrow.

My brain is definitely waking up as I've been thinking about mutual aid again and how it might work in my local community. The Peter Kropotkin In Our Time was particularly useful - if you've been following my Listening habits there's been a fair bit of Marx &co recently, and last year I did all 100+ episodes of Mike Duncan's Russian Revolution podcast, and while I find Marxist analysis interesting with plenty of value, I can't say I like the guy or his authoritarian mates. Kropotkin I do like, so far anyway.

Mutual aid isn't too weird a concept for me to be into. It's a foundation of the cooperative movement and underlies a lot of counterculture activity and activism. It's totally my cuppa, and if we're going to stand any chance against the forthcoming fascist insurgency we're going to need it.

No real capacity in my brain for coherent thoughts though, let alone deeds, but seeds are sprouting. Time to crack open Adam Greenfield's Lifehouse again...

Thursday 6 November

Didn't sleep too well - woke up pretty much on the hour for no good reason - so today was a bit of a write-off with a thick head all afternoon.

Weirdly warm, isn't it? I think the rabbits know something is off as they were acting more strange than usual today.

Had a good therapy session today. Feel like we covered a lot of good stuff.

Of all my photos I've made online jigsaws from, this one has been the most satisfying.

Friday 7 November

Made it into work today because there's a late shift at the bakery today so I could wait until the phlegm had cleared before heading in. Managed a good hour of photography and really enjoyed being there with everyone, but crashed horribly this evening with the good old post-exertion malaise. I mentioned to someone earlier how it's been perversely nice to have a bad cold because at least it's a proper illness that has recognisable symptoms and eventually passes. The cold has shoved the chronic fatigue on to the back seat this last couple of weeks, but it's back wth a vengeance. Yay...

The post-exertion thing is weird as it's totally unpredictable. I got home feeling pretty good, cautiously confident I could do some small jobs around the house. Fi came back around the same time, we cleaned out the rabbits together but as she updated me on her day I felt my brain shutting down. Watching Taskmaster, - usually a refreshing distraction - became a chore and putting this post together has been like wading through treacle.

It's not as bad as it's been, but it's still massively disabling.

Saturday 8 November

Recovery day so mostly sofa and jigsaws. Fi went clothes shopping and picked me up some fleecy things to replace my increasingly threadbare fleecy things, so I have a new wardrobe which I will doubtless be wearing every day now for the next couple of years.

After 15 days the cold appears to have mostly cleared up. I am ecstatic. Yay.

Sunday 9 November

Grumpy day today, which is common the day after recovery day. It's like I'm recovered enough to function but not enough to not get frustrated with silly little things.

Not helped by my thinking more about how to distribute this little blog of mine. A few friends have said they like it but don't remember to check it, to which I reply, well, it's on the open web. You can add its feed to whatever you use to monitor websites and the like. And of course hardly anyone does that, because the web is a minority interest game and everyone's in walled gardens.

So I'm coming to the realisation that this is not my problem to solve. If people want to follow this blog they can figure out a way that works for them. I might write a little guide for the about page (probably a variant of About Feeds) but there's not much I can really do.

Well, other than offer a daily email option, which I plan to do soon.

Monday 10 November

Flu vaccine today, in anticipation of a particularly bad season. Since the British learned nothing from Covid it's probably best to be prepared for the worst. I'm not sure how much it costs as the pharmacist said I was probably immunocompromised given my history so didn't charge me, but I don't think it's much. £25?

Haven't have any notable side effects but to be honest they're probably no different to a standard day with chronic fatigue. LOL!

The pharmacy was a little chaotic, at least to my mostly agoraphobic senses. I always forget to bring earplugs etc and should really prep a leaving the house go-bag.

Tuesday 11 November

Felt like I had some spare energy today but didn't want to burn it just yet so decided to do some of that old work-from-home and started the massive but piecemeal-able task of organising the Loaf photography archive into something usable. I'm using Lightroom again, which is a delight (I know, Adobe sucks, but Lightroom Classic is just so good). Just like riding a bike.

After an hour the brain fog kicked in though and I'm struggling to do words. Fi asked me to email an article to her and I subject'ed it "Lady Walking Article", which is guess is descriptive.

Wednesday 12 November

One of the funnest things to do when you have long-term chronic fatigue is deciding which cause you want to assign to the debilitating effects. You'll never get it right - it's like trying to reverse engineer a really bland soup - but your sense of self requires you to make the effort. "What did I do that resulted in me feeling like this?" you ask yourself in an attempt to knit the actions of your past self to the present moment so you might at the minimum learn what to avoid next time.

And so yesterday I assumed it was my doing an hour of computer work that caused my evening malignancy. In hindsight, and following a night of sweating the bed, it was probably the side effects from the flu vaccination I'd had 24 hours previously. Or maybe it wasn't! Who knows! Not the doctors! And certainly not me.

Quiet day today in prep for a visit to work tomorrow. Don't want to cause any of those darned effects.

Thursday 13 November

Shite day today. Slept terribly, dicky tummy, anxiety brain... Didn't make it to work and only managed a few minutes of therapy before mutually deciding to try again another day. Low-level activities are OK but as soon as I try to level up it all shuts down. So mostly hanging with the rabbits and mooching on the internet. Ah well. Try again tomorrow.

Friday 14 November

Feeling better today, though the weather kept me indoors. Did not fancy going out on the mobility scooter in that wind!

Saturday 15 November

I guess you call a day like today a self-care day? Other than my therapy session (went well, I think - one of those hard-to-tell ones which were probably more useful than they seemed) and a call with the niece in New Zealand (finished her degree this week) I've mostly been resting and recuperating. Haven't even done much internetting, as you'll see below. In fact I'm not really sure what I did today. Normal service will probably resume.

Sunday 16 November

A friend came over to talk about my chronic fatigue today. He had some kind of post-viral crash a while ago which hasn't gotten better and wanted to talk to someone about it. Since I was in that position a couple of years ago and really could have done with having someone to talk to who wasn't a shrugging doctor, it was the least I could do.

It's also my specialist subject, the one things I think about all the bloody time, so I set the timer for 30 minutes and we dove in. Obviously everyone's experience of this condition is unique and management is a very personal thing, but I was able to give a few bits of advice I wish I'd had closer to the beginning, such as recognising physical symptoms that indicate you're on the cusp of a crash (in both our cases tinnitus and sinus pain) and then using breathing exercises to calm them down.

We also talked about the impossibility of knowing if you're doing the right or wrong thing, especially when it comes to brain fog which impairs your ability to make those decisions. And the importance of not getting angry or annoyed with yourself for being a useless shit-sack. Self-care and self-forgiveness are probably the most important things.

I hope he doesn't have my level of chronic fatigue and that whatever's ailing him clears up soon, but if he does, hopefully he can now mitigate the worst of it.

Monday 17 November

Mostly pottering today, cleaning and I guess sort of getting ready for the winter, now the temperature has finally decided to drop closer to zero. Made sure the rabbit's little heater is switched on – their coats do most of the work but this keeps a section of their home just above zero, like it would be at the bottom of a burrow.

Thinking more about the chat I had with my friend yesterday about his possible chronic fatigue and how, in hindsight, it was a fairly positive experience for me. It's very easy to get depressed about CFS – it can feel like my life as I lived it is over never to return, and there's a significant amount of mourning to be done – but there are things to be optimistic about. My mental state has improved over the last year and I am managing things more steadily with fewer bad crashes. I'm still functionally disabled and can't do more than an hour or so of activity every couple of days, but I have help, I have advice and there's a glimmer of light at the end.

Explaining this to someone who's maybe at the stage I was a year ago also meant explaining it to myself, and I need that once in a while.

Tuesday 18 November

A friend popped over today for a chat and to use some of my shed tools to fix his bike. Was nice and relaxed and we kept it short, but afterwards I got "busy-brain" so we must have been talking about something interesting enough to cascade my neurones, Kessler-style. Jigsaws didn't help so I decided to go to bed for a bit and let my subconscious sort it out. Which it did! One mildly disconcerting dream later and I'm feeling OK, or at least functional again.

Wednesday 19 November

Rest day, not out of choice, but it is what it is and hopefully tomorrow will be better.

Fun with the rabbits, who decided not to eat their leafy greens last night or much of their hay during the day. This is usually an alarm for a digestive issue, but they seemed fine and were otherwise eating. Rabbits don't show when they're unwell because then they get picked off by predators, so you have to look for subtle signs, and none of those were showing. So we've just been monitoring all day. Still no interest in greens tonight, but they wolfed down the grassy pellets and took hay when offered. As is so often the case with rabbit behaviour, big ¯\*(ツ)*/¯

Thursday 20 November

A good day, but a busy one. Went into work to take some photos and talk about my gradual return and how that's going. It's going OK and they're happy with the progress.

And then this evening was my final session with my current therapist which went well. Apparently I've made great progress over the last 6 months and she's proud of me. So that's nice.

Buns are fine. Switched their hay and greens and they seem to be eating normally again.

Friday 21 November

Crash day today. Slept badly (tired but wired, as a friend put it) and then spent most of today in bed. But it was expected and it will pass, because it always passes. Just need to wait it out.

Saturday 22 November

Recovery continues with another gentle day. Nearly there.

My shed has been leaking, not from the roof but through the corner wall which is most exposed to the driving wind and rain. It's very annoying as I've been trying to sort it for the last year but haven't had the capacity to do anything properly. A fix I put in place in October failed last night and while it's not an urgent problem – the shed is ventilated so it dries out pretty quickly – it's frustrating that I can't just make it better.

The weather looks pretty good for the next few days and I don't have anything in my diary til Wednesday. Maybe I'll be able to burn a bit of battery and work on it without crashing too badly. Or maybe I should just leave it and focus on the self care.

(What'll likely happen is I'll burn myself out worrying about whether I should do it or not, and then feel shit for not doing anything. So let's maybe avoid that, hey?)

Sunday 23 November

A friend let me know that confirmation email for subscribing to this blog went into her spam folder. Which email service, I asked. Gmail. I was not overly surprised.

Spam filtering is hard to get right. I've been using Fastmail for about a decade now and every day there's a one or two pieces of unsolicited junk in the inbox for me to process, which is not bad given my email has been harvested off my various websites by nefarious actors for decades. I don't mind this as ultimately I'd rather they err on the side of caution that delete something potentially useful.

Realising I hadn't done it for a while I had a look in the spam folder to see if there were any false positives. Nope, nothing. All genuine spam. The filters are working well for me.

I can't speak for why Google can't do spam filtering properly. Maybe they feel that maintaining zero spam in the inbox is worth falsely flagging the occasional useful email. Maybe they just don't care about email from outside the Google ecosystem. Maybe they've given up on email like they've given up on search and not being shite.

Death by a thousand tiny enshittifications.

Monday 24 November

I appear to be doing a few days of recovery, which I have to keep reminding myself is OK because I am in recovery and will be for the next few years. But despite being a year into accepting this I still can't get over the feeling that I should be doing more than pottering, stretching and resting. Damn this productivity ethic I somehow got from somewhere.

I wasn't at all surprised to get a response to yesterday's idle speculation about the role of Quakers in the Temperance movement. Living in south Birmingham, and particularly so close to Bournville, one comes across Quakers in the same way residents of East Grinstead must come across Scientologists, only ours aren't creepy and evil. I've always liked Quakers, both personally and spiritually, and count a few as good friends. After one sent me a couple of links about the Temperance question I asked:

Does Quaker = Temperance, or is it that some Quakers do Temperance, but not all? And what sort of proportion is it?

To which the answer was "yes". It seems there are as many variations of Quakerism as there are Quakers. But one of the key tenets appears to be for abstinence and moderation, so many when the Temperance movement gained momentum many found it a cause worth supporting. Which is how the likes of the Cadbury family built their chocolate empires, promoting hot cocoa as an alternative to booze. These days the Friends Temperance Union has evolved into Quaker Action on Alcohol and Drugs.

I still find it curious that there was no mention of this in the In Our Time episode. Maybe they too got tied up in the minutia of it all and decided to skip it.

Tuesday 25 November

Next week I'll be running a short composting workshop for an RSPB site so I spent a bit of time today getting my notes in order. I was a bit wary of taking on this job, given my condition, but I'll have help and Fi says talking compost makes me happy and that's as good a reason as any. I'll be keeping the subsequent few days clear for a crash though.

Way back when I had my NHS chronic fatigue assessment the doctor mentioned they used to offer tai chi sessions before a round of cuts nixed that, and it's stuck with me as a way I could do exercise without exerting too much. I'm not going to make a class anytime soon so I went to the YouTube. As expected, there's a lot of wellness bullshit in the search results but I found this wholesome looking video where Ian from Wokingham borough council stands in an empty echoey hall and going through the basic moves. It looks perfect. To quote the comments, "no music, no plants, no leotards."

I've only made it five minutes through so far though. A chum who has also found himself on enforced rest will be popping over next week for a catch up. Maybe I can convince him to try it with me.

Wednesday 26 November

Had a dentist appointment today, my first in 6 years it turned out. He took one look and pronounced my teeth perfect. It was almost embarrassing how little he had to do. And I have to say, with my body not being at its best these days, it's nice to have something that works.

Since I was on the high street I popped into work with the camera to take some photos. Didn't stay for long, obviously, but spent a bit of time in the cookery school, looking for nice compositions.

Thursday 27 November

This afternoon was mostly spent setting up the Loaf online shop for December. I've been able to hand over all of my pre-CFS office duties except this one as it's far to complicated to document, especially as it only happens once a year. So one of the gang came over with the numbers and I slowly worked through the horrifying hodgepodge of Wordpress workflows.

The issue I ran into with an online shop for a bakery was all the standard e-commerce packages assume you have a warehouse full of non-perishable items. The Amazon model, basically. They don't adapt well to pre-ordering fresh bread with a one day shelf life. So you either go bespoke or you get in there and hack, both of which mean the system gets fragile over time.

Apparently we've had a guy in to talk about re-doing the website next year and he recommends Shopify. I remain sceptical, but he seems on the level and, crucially, it's not my problem any more!

(This is also why there's bugger all links to click today. Brain too pooped to surf. Crash probably incoming...)

Friday 28 November

Mostly a rest day today, although I did find myself re-wiring the lights outside the shed this afternoon. A quirk of my condition is as I get tired I can get what I'm assuming is an adrenaline boost, which translates as a determination to do a thing even if I maybe shouldn't. I'm better at managing this than I was but even so I didn't feel great after and this evening has been one of thick heads and sore limbs.

Still, the lighting in the rabbit run is now somewhat less unsatisfactory, and the rabbits got an extra long session on the lawn, so that's something.

Saturday 29 November

A much needed rest day. Tired and grumpy and just waiting it out. It will pass. It always passes.

Sunday 30 November

Woke up grumpy and decided today needed to be a bit different. We'd already planned to do a compost drop-off at the allotment but decided to also have a bonfire, since this is the month when bonfires are allowed on Birmingham allotments. A rotten shed needed to be disposed of, after all.

As has been written many times before, fire is a primal thing. Some of my favourite memories involved sitting around a fire with good friends. Watching a fire is something all humans benefit from.

So we sat and watched a fire. For five hours.

It's good to be outside.