This was originally an email newsletter. If you want this sort of thing in your inbox from time to time, subscribe here As you will know from resubscribing to this fledgling envelope of raw, unfiltered brain matter, I have abandoned Tiny Letter. What I hadn’t realised is that Tiny Letter is now owned by MailChimp and employs the use of tracking pixels in its mailshots. This is probably fine and #notAllTrackingPixels etc.

Wednesday last week would have been my dad’s 69th birthday. We lost him on the 13th October to all sorts of complications due to lung cancer. Today is father’s day in the UK, and social media is resplendent with tributes to amazing dads. It warms my cockles. It also makes me sad for those out there, and I know a few, for whom father’s day can be very painful. Those whose fathers weren’t amazing.

A Day in the Life Do you remember much of secondary school science? Bits and bobs, right? Do you remember the experiment with waves, and what happens when two wave crests combine? In this case it’s know as ‘constructive interference’. The wave crests add together to create a crest the size of the two heights combined. Conversely, when a crest encounters a trough, they add together also, but the trough is now negative, so they essentially subtract.

AD(H)D and Me I don’t think it’s a secret that I suffer from depression and anxiety. I do my best not to perpetuate the stigma of mental illness, so I talk about it a lot, I imagine often to the detriment of my friends’ attention span. I’ve always felt though that the anxiety and depression were symptomatic of something else. There was something ethereal and undefined that orbited my identity, prodding at my mood from time to time and gently knocking me into an eccentric orbit of my own.

I started this post almost two weeks ago when Claire and I were on holiday in Italy. I was having a bit of a ropey early morning, where anxiety had kept me awake, so I dragged myself out of bed and tried to think about what was going on and whether I could exorcise it with a wee bit of writing. My dad was very ill, and his prognosis not good.