Today is the first day of meteorological autumn. The summer's dry spell seems to be over for the moment, and the village got quite a bit of rain at the weekend. As we were heading over to Sunday's gig, my buddy Paul (who is the band's guitarist) asked me, "why does the air smell so nice when it rains?" and because I'm me, I was able to answer him with a single word: petrichor.

Actually, if I'd wanted to be scientifically accurate I'd have added a second word: geosmin, or (if you want to be really hip and get down with the chemistry kids) C₁₂H₂₂O. It's one of a family of aromatic oils called terpenoids and this particular substance is created in nature by a number of soil microbes but particularly a family called Streptomyces. A few years ago it was discovered that they do so in order to attract a species of invertebrates called springtails so that they will feed on them and distribute their spores.

Most humans love the smell and can detect it in concentrations as low as a few parts per trillion. As that first link notes, this is probably because finding sources of water by smell likely conferred a big evolutionary advantage (because you don't die of thirst). All the same, you wouldn't want it in your drinking water because it makes it taste of dirt and so most water treatment plants use carbon filtration in order to remove it.

Science, eh? All that, just from us smelling the air after a storm.

After a busy weekend (by my standards, anyway) I appear to be completely knackered. It was after ten before I managed to drag myself out of bed this morning and I'm really looking forward to my breakfast coffee (as I type this, I'm just waiting for the machine to heat up but as soon as I hear the noise it makes when it's ready, believe me when I say that the blog will immediately have to concede priority—ah, there it goes. I'll be right back.)

Even without painkillers (I'm going without them for a week, to see if I still can) I fell asleep unusually quickly last night. In fact I went out like a light. I still woke up at half-past five this morning for some reason, but after lying awake for for a half hour or so I managed to fall asleep again. And when I woke up again at 07:30 and told myself "I'll just close my eyes for another five minutes" I nodded off again for another good three-quarters of an hour.

Twice.

My watch therefore awarded me a very generous score of 97 this morning which should indicate a relaxed and restorative night. It doesn't feel like that's what I got at all. I'm still sore, although not as bad as I felt yesterday and I can still move about; the pain's not affecting my mobility very much, thank goodness. I think the tiredness is actually more of a neurodivergent thing than a physical thing. Spending a couple of evenings over the weekend in rooms that were full of people pushed me well outside what I've come to think of as my comfort zone, even if I was able to wear earplugs and focus on the job I was doing, of making the band sound as good as I possibly can. I need a few days to recharge after days like that because the older I get, the more I find them to be overwhelming. And I know that there's also an emotional side to how I'm feeling at the moment. After the highs of July's stay at Real World, a week hanging out with Helen last month, and celebrating my birthday, I've spent most of the last couple of weeks here at home on my own, decompressing.

Much as I love having company, I've realised that too much of it isn't good for me. After a while I stop being able to handle the additional stimulation and the TILT indicator in my brain will light up until I can spend some time on my own. The good news is that these days I know it's about to happen before it does so, and I can do something about it to limit how severely I shut down. The bad news is that needing to do so puts a lot of stress on a relationship and I think it's one of the main reasons why I've lived on my own for the past twenty years. Although I love all the abilities that my weirdly wired brain gives me, there are times when leading a rather more cosily "normal" home life sounds like it would be really nice. The sad thing is that I no longer think I'll ever have much chance of finding out what that would be like.