A new rhythm, heatwave, hope and a hint of Madopar

Winding down from a very very hot day (Wednesday) at the Appleton Estate (no rum jokes please) - my small but comfortable home office in reality. My laptop tells me it's 29 degrees centigrade. Living in Manchester we are accustomed to more rain than anything else (blame the Pennines) but as I always say, nobody is forcing us to live here and if we don't like it, we can always move on. Of course the complainers deep down love our mucky rainy city and personally I've lived in and around Manchester all my life, and 33 years in the same house.

Thanks today to my wife Lynne for buying me a new fan (no, not a fan of the bands!), one that blows nice cold air, keeps me sane-ish 🙃

We were looking through our ticket records for SOS Festival last night and were reminded of all the different European countries you come from to see our lil ol' gig... Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England obviously. There may be more but anyhow, looking forward to catching up with so many friends - especially in my senior management role of coffee drinker.

Joking apart I'm finding at long last that I'm settling in to life off the road now. I won't pretend it's been easy because it absolutely has not. I'm sure I've been very difficult to live with during this past year or so, but I think I've found a new rhythm and it's starting to work. I'm also just starting to get back into tackling fitness issues and that should help across the board I hope. At my latest Parkinson's consultation the doc tweaked my meds and it's worked especially well in tackling the restless legs problem. Not resolved 100% but improved a lot. Just one simple extra Madopar 12.5mg tablet at 5pm daily and that was it. It's helped me so far, so I hope it will similarly help others subject to their own advice as always.

I'm enjoying writing too and it's not just this newsletter/blog, I have a longer-term project which I'm excited about and will share when I think the time is right. Such a tease! 🤗

A musical highpoint this week was son Luke's solo acoustic show at the Irwell Works Brewery, in Ramsbottom. Luke's developed the solo work alongside everything else (Absolva, Blaze Bayley, previously Iced Earth and Fury UK) and it's worked great. For me ths was his most enjoyable solo gig so far. Intimate audience made up of friends/fans plus strangers to whom he was previously unknown. One of the those lovely shows that at first you can't help but wonder if it's going to be ok and by the third song on the setlist the audience participation and reaction settles you down immediately and you know everything is going to be alright.

You can catch Luke streaming live online frequently via his Twitch account, with play-throughs on bass, acoustic and lead guitar, plus competitions, requests and interviews in his Muso to Muso series. The next one is tomorrow 7pm (29th June - interview with Gabrielle George of Pryma). Simply search 'Luke Appleton' on twitch.com

Meanwhile, let's take a look at the latest analytics as promised, for the past 30 days...

Average open rates are 61% - strong (the percentage of people that receive the newsletter and actually get to open it).

We have 82 members - so that's 82 of you that have actually subscribed. It's not setting the world on fire but that was never the objective.

Unique visitors are 227. So people are reading but not always subscribing. Much bigger sites than mine are continually asking for subscribers so I'm not too shy about asking here the same. So, just a special request from me to you, please subscribe, it's free, no catches. See form below...

Thanks everyone. And last but not least... a recent extremely sad event has reminded me of the strength of our rock and metal community. Watching out for each other against adversity, isolation, depression, addiction. Please, never be alone, there's always someone who will help - ALWAYS x