Jane Ayres

I'm so grateful to @NICMcharity @RecordsAsc for producing this memorial CD to celebrate gifted #composer Barry Seaman, who was tragically taken from us in 2020 by Covid & I remain determined that Barry's beautiful soul & #music will live on.💙 bit.ly/3hmxp9T

Well, in typical British fashion, I got the garden furniture out for the arrival of spring, and now it’s blown over and it’s snowing 👍

I am fully convinced that 2019 was the last normal year we will ever have. Not normal in the sense of perfect. Not normal in the sense of without problems. But normal in the sense that there was still a shared reality. A baseline. A world that, for all its flaws, still felt like it operated according to recognisable rules. That world is gone. Since 2020, something fundamental has shifted and most people feel it even if they cannot name it. A persistent low-level anxiety that never fully lifts. A sense that time is moving both too fast and strangely out of sequence. A feeling that nothing quite lands the way it used to that experiences, connections, even ordinary moments feel slightly hollow, slightly off, like a frequency that no longer quite tunes in. Everyone is exhausted. Everyone is overwhelmed. And yet nothing seems to slow down long enough to make sense of it. The anchors are gone. The institutions we were raised to trust have revealed themselves. The social fabric that held communities together was deliberately stressed and in many places snapped entirely. The relationships that did not survive the last five years left silences that have not been filled. And underneath all of it is something that does not get said enough. Grief. Grief for the world that existed before. For the innocence of not knowing what we now know. For the relationships that were lost not to death but to division. For the version of the future we thought we were building that has quietly been replaced with something none of us voted for. 2019 was the last year most people lived without the constant sense that the ground beneath them could shift without warning. But we are living in the aftermath of something enormous and we are being asked to pretend that we are not. You are allowed to grieve what was lost. And you are allowed to say that the world as it was is gone — because it is. Look around.

A rule that will lower your anxiety: Don’t replay conversations you can’t change, and don’t pre-live ones that haven’t happened. Focus on the next right action. Most stress comes from living everywhere except the present.

It’s almost warm today… as long as you keep moving.

6 ways to have a good weekend: 1. Drink coffee. 2. Avoid people. 3. Read books. Go for a walk. 4. Drink more coffee. 5. Keep avoiding people. 6. Read more books. Go for a walk.

“You're very quiet” Thanks for saying this in front of everyone, really helps.

Insane to me that the sales pitch for AI is, “It will put you permanently out of work and completely replace human artists, writers and musicians. All the fun things that once gave your life joy and meaning will now be done by machines. Get on board!”

#WritingCommunity #FYP

People who say their wedding day was the best day ever, have clearly never had two kit kats fall out of a vending machine. 😂

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Here’s your sign:

It’s March on Sunday. Can you believe that? February shouldn’t be classed as a real month, it just pops in for a quick cup of tea and a moan about the weather and then it’s back out the door again before you can even offer it a biscuit.

Keep reading books. It’s cheap. No adverts. Mentally nourishing. And there are millions to choose from.

Writing forces your brain to coordinate memory, reasoning, and meaning-making simultaneously. Every time you write, you rewire toward clearer thinking. Every time you let an LLM do it, you rewire toward consumption.

People won't revert to pre-internet behavior because modern infrastructure depends on digital connectivity. Jobs, banking, government services, and social connections all run through internet now. You can't opt out without becoming functionally handicapped in society. What will happen is verification systems and trusted sources becoming premium commodities. People already pay for quality journalism and ad-free content. As AI slop proliferates, curated human-verified information becomes luxury good. The internet splits into paid quality zone and free garbage zone. The 90s worked because everyone was equally offline. You can't go back selectively when your employer expects instant communication and your kids' school uses digital platforms. Individual rejection of internet is possible but marginalizes you economically and socially. The real shift is AI-to-AI communication becoming dominant. Humans increasingly interact with AI interfaces that summarize, filter, and present information. We're not reading raw internet anymore, we're getting curated digests from AI assistants. The question becomes who controls the curation and whether we notice when it starts lying systematically.

George Orwell on writing:

@DuncanLindsay Megan murdered by Maggie but Sam will get arrested and wrongly convicted until the truth comes out prob by Xmas...

So #Corrie fans, who do we reckon the murder victim will be? My team have their theories vm.tiktok.com/ZNRf9LyP4/

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