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I can sometimes be an idiot. A real, full blown, fool of epic proportions. Usually about myself.

More accurately, my conscious mind can be an idiot, my sub-conscious is a lot better and just gets on with things without bothering to inform the rest of me.

Fucking hell is about all I can say really. I mean, I read 11 books, 5,030 pages, in August. This is not something I'm likely to repeat (come on future me, prove present me oh so very wrong) as I had a week off alone in the house and a bank holiday weekend shut away in my room. But, that's not terribly unusual, it's just that, recently, I've had good intentions but then Twitter.

This time, I managed to avoid the need to read every single tweet. It helps I had such good books though:

I went to the Nine Worlds LGBTQ+ Mini Talks session as it was really good last year (and introduced me to Hal Duncan who is amazing and wonderful!). This year though... Ho Boy.

Andy Burnham was asked if it would be great for Labour to have a woman leader and his response - "when the time is right" - has been noted as disappointing (shall we say?). On twitter, someone asked whether someone could come up with a better answer - they summarised the question and answer slightly differently so the attempt* below (by a white, queer, non-binary male who absolutely does not support Labour) bounced around in my head while considering the question "is Labour ready to have a female leader?":

According to The Guardian's report on Cameron's terrorism speech today (emphasis mine),

Dear Me,

You're 16, bet you didn't expect to find this in your pile of biurthday cards - oh, wait... you don't know what this is do you? Well, I'm you at 32 and your... well, me at 16. And yeah, you don't actually find this anywhere, never mind a pile of birthday cards - I think I'd remember a letter from the future. This is more about me now and nostalgia for you then.

I wrote this as I was reading a collection of similar letters to 16 year old selves, realised my 32nd birthday was coming up and thought, "hey, why not?"

As I start to write this, there are 15-20 minutes before polls open and DAB reception on my radio is sketchy.

I'll be heading out to vote before I go to work and I'll be spoiling my ballot again.

Last night fear of the Tories getting in again had me at maybe 20% willing to hold my nose and vote for Labour, but then this happened.

One of my (many) favourite authors is Ursula K Le Guin, and this month, BBC Radio 4 has been doing a little mini-season dedicated to her. It started with an amazing interview, Ursula Le Guin at 85 which at only 30 minutes left me begging for more. So I promptly went and re-read Earthsea.

You know, as you do.

I awaken once more from my slumber. I risk trying to put fingers to keyboard and type out a blog entry which doesn't make me cringe and retreat back into my shell amidst thoughts of @could do better@. The pure thoughts and ideas running around in my head struggling to coalesce into such mundane things as words.

So I try.

Oh... err... April... Oops... *waves*

I've struggled to write much recently sadly, but I'm going to force myself into it again no matter how crap I think it is. I've agreed to write something monthly for a local LGBT site (let's see how that goes shall we?) so I need to get into the groove.

So, I'm just going to do a quick update on my life: Gigs, books, theatre!

What, you want more than that? OK then...