Hi!

I have to confess my mojo has been at a pretty low ebb for the last couple of months. There’s no obvious reason why, but I haven’t written a word in any of my current book projects, and while I did manage to edit and publish the new Vadi course, that was about it for creative juices flowing.

I’m inclined to associate this with the very annoying cholesterol results I got back from a routine health check at the end of March, which lead me to drop alcohol altogether for a month. Clearly my habit of drinking a couple of glasses of wine while cooking dinner, and another couple with dinner, most nights of the week, for years, was channelling too much Fiore (he was Italian, after all) for my English constitution to tolerate. Just a few weeks off had the even more annoying result of significantly improving my cholesterol levels. So other than one birthday party at the beginning of May, where I found out that my ability to metabolise ethanol was utterly ruined by a month’s abstinence, and one afternoon where I split a bottle of Chardonnay with a friend, I’ve not been drinking at all.

According to my tracking devices (an Oura ring, and a Garmin smart watch, both of which I use when running tests but not in normal life), my sleep was improved (with average heart rate at 50 or lower all night, and lowest at 43-45, for 7.5 hours of actual sleep). And so I should be full of beans and leaping about the place. But my knees hurt, my back hurts, and I haven’t had the tiniest scrap of creative vision.

So on Monday night I had a glass of wine with dinner. According to the devices, that did lead to worse sleep. But the next day I was burbling about brimming with creative vigour, and have cracked the biggest issue I am currently facing professionally (more about that later).