On The Turntable pt1

 July 2026

Music that has featured on my hi-fi this month. 

Doublespeak - Doublespeak, vinyl LP ( An album of cover versions by synth pop buddies, Vince Clarke (Depeche Mode,Yazoo,Erasure), Neil Arthur (Blancmange), and Benge.)

Propaganda - A Secret Wish,  vinyl LP ( German electronic band from the 1980s, known as "The Poison ABBA").

Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark - Souvenir, CD ( A collection of all of the singles by the electronic pioneers).

Scritti Politti - Cupid And Psyche 85, vinyl LP ( A new expanded reissue of the classic 1985 blue eyed soul and lovers rock tinged release).

Propaganda- Wishful Thinking, vinyl LP ( A remix album of the aforementioned album).

The Damned - Machine Gun Etiquette,  vinyl LP (The best punk album ever).

CMAT - Euro Country, CD (Country inspired music from this wonderful Irish singer/ songwriter. My favourite album of 2025).

Echo And The Bunnymen - Ocean Rain, vinyl LP (The classic fourth album from 1984 by the psychedelic influenced scousers).

As well as music on the hi-fi, there was a wonderful event broadcast on BBC 4. The Prog At The Proms concert. The BBC Concert Orchestra with guest singers performing orchestrated versions of prog rock songs. It was wonderful. Both well known prog classics and lesser known pieces were performed. With a cast of guest vocalists, Guy Garvey, Jane Weaver, Gruff Rhys, The Staves, Peter Hammill, Vanessa Haynes, and the recorded voice of Greg Lake. And putting on a wonderful performance on the drums, for two of three Emerson,Lake And Palmer numbers, we had Carl Palmer himself. It's often said rock drumming is a young man's game. Well not on this showing. At age 76, he was brilliant. Presenting duties fell to BBC 6 Music's Stuart Maconie, who did a great job.

The set list was as follows

First Half

• Fanfare for the Common Man (Aaron Copland, arr. Emerson, Lake & Palmer) – Performed by the BBC Concert Orchestra with Carl Palmer on drums.
• Living in the Past (Jethro Tull) – Featured vocals by Gruff Rhys.
• Out-Bloody-Rageous (Part 1) (Soft Machine) – Instrumental arrangement.
• I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe) (Genesis) – Featured vocals by Guy Garvey.
• Northern Lights (Renaissance) – Featured vocals by Jane Weaver.
• Nights in White Satin (The Moody Blues) – Featured vocals by Jane Weaver.
• Refugees (Van der Graaf Generator) – Performed by original frontman Peter Hammill.
• And You and I (Yes) – Featured vocals by The Staves.
• Tubular Bells (Part One - Excerpt) (Mike Oldfield) – Orchestral version featuring a spoken-word master of ceremonies. 

Second Half

• Karn Evil 9: First Impression (Part 2) (Emerson, Lake & Palmer) – Played by the orchestra with the original, archived vocals of the late Greg Lake.
• Sylvia (Focus) – Orchestral rock crossover.
• Komfo (Osibisa) – Highlife-infused prog instrumental.
• Peaches en Regalia (Frank Zappa) – Full symphonic arrangement.
• King Crimson Medley (21st Century Schizoid Man / I Talk to the Wind / Court of the Crimson King) – Featured vocals by Guy Garvey.
• Entangled (Genesis) – Orchestral delivery of the A Trick of the Tail classic. Vocals by Guy Garvey and Jane Weaver.
• On Reflection (Gentle Giant) – Celebrated for its intricate vocal and instrumental polyphony.
• Maker of Islands (Incredible String Band) – Featured vocals by Gruff Rhys.
• The Great Gig in the Sky (Pink Floyd) – Improvised operatic rock vocals performed by Vanessa Haynes.
• Crime of the Century (Supertramp) – Grand symphonic arrangement.
• Pictures at an Exhibition: The Great Gate of Kyiv (Modest Mussorgsky, arr. Emerson, Lake & Palmer) – The grand finale featuring Carl Palmer returning on drums. 
• The BBC Concert Orchestra were conducted by Robert Ames.
• And the answer to the question that all true prog rock fans will ask?  Yes. There was a Mellotron.

July

 

Well I'm all for posiblogging and I try not to dwell on negative things, but I can't deny that July has been a very difficult month for me and my Wife. 

There was another heatwave, and this one seemed to go on and on. It really took a toll on my Wife, who's health problems is exacerbated by these extreme conditions. We really need to look at ways of establishing the bedroom as a cool room in the future. 

On top of this, after her mouth cancer scare, last month, now my Wife has had to go through a bowel cancer scare, after her routine bowel cancer screening came back with an inconsistent result. Thankfully she was all clear following a colonoscopy. It was a worry because bowel cancer is rife in her maternal family.  So that's a bullet dodged on this occasion. 

The use of hoists to get my Wife around the house is going OK, with it being much safer. But it is hard work for me. For most of my time as a carer, I've been doing the work of two people. With the introduction of the hoists, it's gone up to three. Just getting her from her chair in the lounge, and into bed takes 45 minutes. It used to take 15. But the danger has gone, so that's a big positive. 

My Wife has also developed a small pressure sore, which is making sitting in her chair uncomfortable, so has been staying in bed for a lot longer. It has destroyed our routine and means I'm spending more time looking after her.

As a result, my own routine has been shot to pieces, and there have been no opportunities to dress. So this lack of feminine expression has fed into a growing feeling of gender dysphoria, as I have to try and deny my femme needs.

My sense of dysphoria wasn't helped by a big problem with this blog suddenly having issues with the images that I have placed in the posts, over the last 18 months.  They suddenly became pixelated. And I'm afraid it triggered a neurodiverse melt down, which was very difficult to deal with. Now it's receding into the past, I feel stupid about letting it happen, but being autistic means that I can't control when things will overwhelm me. I can usually see the warning signs and take action to minimise my reactions, but this one blindsided me. So I had a difficult few days. I have discussed this elsewhere on the blog so I won't dwell on it here. The blog is being fixed, slowly but surely. I am slowly but surely re-centreing myself. All will be well. 

I took a short social media break to help in calming myself down, and it has helped. I'm returning renewed and stronger for it.

I have a new mobile phone. It's a Samsung Galaxy  S25fe which has replaced my S23 Ultra. Part of the problem with my blog images, was the massive photo file sizes created by the 200mp camera on the old phone. The files created by new phone with it's 50mp camera, should be much more manageable.  The phone needed replacing because it's going to be unsupported after next spring. At least this one has 7 years of support. Much better than the 3.5 years my old one had. 

So let's forget this horrible month and look  forwards. Hopefully I will get to try out the new camera next month, with some more dressing sessions.  I'm going to try and get my fitness campaign back on track after a bit of disruption in the last couple of weeks.  

So I'm sorry this hasn't been a very positive posting, but life is like that sometimes. And I don't try to dwell on that, but I'm not scared to acknowledge it either. 

But I do feel positive about the future, as difficult as it might be. I feel stronger and I am more determined than ever,  to make the most of things. 

Hey, that last statement was almost posiblogging! Here's hoping for of that next month 

Dee

💋💋💋

The Devil In Disguise

 

 

Earlier this week, I had a massive problem with my blog. Most of the images across multiple posts became low resolution to the point of looking pixelated. I was heartbroken and incredibly upset and angry. Upset enough for it to cause me to have a massive neurodiverse melt down. Tantrums, panic attacks,stimming, and tics were all there along with more than a few tears. It was the whole works. Possibly worse than I had ever experienced before. But why?

It's just a blog. Yes it was something to be upset and a little angry about. It was a pain in the backside trying to sort it out. But it wasn't the end of the world. Most things like this can be sorted out eventually. Get a grip. Pull yourself together. 

I have friends who are going through things much harder than some pixelated images on a web page. Illness, bereavements and such. Proper hardship.This really was a storm in a teacup.

Now being neurodiverse with autism as one of my conditions, does mean that in these situations, it is difficult to get a grip, or pull myself together. I'm not fully in control of myself in these circumstances. So something that is a pain in the proverbial, which should only trigger some frustration and annoyance, can sometimes produce an emotional overreaction. But this was on a different scale. 

For a couple of days, I was in freefall. I was just about able to fulfill my caring duties for my Wife, but everything else seemed to be unravelling. I was making knee jerk decisions to try and sort out the problem. I was obsessed with sorting out the problem and each setback triggered a neurodiverse response. 

Eventually I stopped spinning and managed to get calmed down enough to think more clearly. I made a decision to step back from social media for a week or two. And I placed the blog out of the public eye. And then I experimented with different ways of resizing and uploading the images to a test post  that only I was going to see. And this more analytical and measured approach paid off, and I found a way forwards. Yes it was a pain. Yes it was tiring and tedious. But I was calmer and able to put the actual malfunction into a more normal perspective. 

The blog is slowly and surely being fixed. I found a solution. Everything is OK.  I have fixed all of this years content, and I'm slowly working through the older posts. 

So now I'm in a calmer frame of mind, and the neurospices have slowly ebbed away, I have been in a position to try and make sense of my massive overreaction to a mere bump in the road.

It's been a difficult year, especially in recent weeks. My Wife has been unwell and is now having to deal with her second cancer scare within a month. The hot weather is making her poorly.  As a result looking after her has been tiring. Much tougher than usual.  So I am less resilient than normal. A little more vulnerable. But even so, having a complete mental breakdown over a blog?

And then hit it me. The realisation of what this really was? Why I was behaving like this. Yes it was autism. Yes it was being worried. Being tired. Being stressed. But the straw that almost (but not quite) broke the camel's back, was a devil in disguise. A devil I have been visited by on many an occasion throughout my life.

Dysphoria.  Gender Dysphoria. Not being able to be the femme person I am. And it was triggered by the issues with my blog, because that is a major part of my femme persona. My feminine portrayal of myself to the world. At a time when finding time to put on the wig and make up and pull on a frock is limited, being able to be my true self on my blog, or my Flickr page,or on social media, is my way of existing as Deeanna. So a sudden perceived attack on my feminine existence triggered an unrecognised but very strong sense of dysphoria.  And the dysphoria triggered the neurodiverse melt down. 

So now I know that this is what happened, I can recognise the signs in the future. And take steps to protect myself. And to try not to ignore my femme needs, just because things are busy, or stressful or difficult. 

Being able to express my femininity is one of the most calming and soothing ways of suppressing my autism and ADHD. I'm rarely agitated or manic or stressed when I'm dressed as Deeanna. In fact I'm never affected by my neurodiversity when I'm dressed as Deeanna  apart from the dyslexia and dyspraxia. 

Life is full of bumps in the road. It's also full of major hazards like potholes and the occasional IED. I need to recognise the difference between things which don't really matter too much. Recognise what are the bumps, and try and stay calm for the small stuff and find a way to cope with the big scary stuff. And find ways to alleviate and banish the dysphoria devil.

Dee 

💋💋💋

Back In The Saddle

 

Well after a very difficult week, and a lot of stress, heartbreak, head scratching and fixing, my little blog is back online again. 

Apparently, Google have updated Blogger with a new way of storing the images we upload.  It started when they took the editing tools from the task bar at the top of the post writing and editing page, and hid it behind three dots instead. At this time they changed the photo uploading and display. 

For the past 3 years, I have been using a Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra smart phone to take my crossdressing photos. It's a powerful piece of kit. The rear camera has an array of lenses and a sensor of up to 200 mega pixels available to use and the front (selfie) camera has 12mp. For comparison, my DSLR camera, the Canon Eos 7D, has an 18mp sensor. So the image file sizes the S23 Ultra can produce are massive.

Up until now, Blogger has happily created decent small versions of the image for the blog, and stored the full size file for viewing if the viewer clicks on the image. It still does store and allow the full size image to be viewed in all of it's glory.  But with massive files, it can no longer handle them on the blog posts, and it compresses them until they are pixelated and horrible to view.

I uploaded a post on Sunday morning, and noticed the awful image quality on the post. And then my heart sank, as I realised that every image created on the S23 Ultra, on every post on the blog, was affected. Suddenly my blog, looked awful and ugly to me.

I tried to find a solution to the problem by looking through online posts and Google AI. They confirmed it was a file size issue. Google AI gave me several potential solutions to try. But none of them worked. We concluded that it was an unsolvable issue. 

By now I was having a neurodiverse melt down, and I was suffering mentally. I'll write more about that on a future post. It may seem like an overreaction, but to someone with autism, like myself,  it's something that happens when things get challenging. My blog is very important to me, as it keeps me in touch with the true me, who only gets to appear in physical form, about 15% of the time. The other 85% of the time is a charade I am forced to maintain for the benefit of others in my life. So having my blog disfigured was triggering. 

I looked for alternatives. I follow a few WordPress blogs. They look great. But when I signed up to it, and began creating a blog site, I was pretty quickly out of my depth. It's so much more complicated than Blogger. And I don't find Blogger exactly easy. Another alternative that friends and also Google AI suggested, was Substack. I tried it, and set up a Substack page and imported my blog posts from Blogger. It was ok at first. But then I was bombarded with posts from other users, asking me to follow them. And I found out that anyone ftom outside of Substack, viewing my Substack blog, would be getting constant messages to join or sign up and subscribe and receive emails and updates directly to their inbox, from my blog. And I was also getting messages from Substack about how to monetise my blog. I can see it's a good place for artists, writers and creatives,  who want to engage with a community of like minded people or run a creative business. But I don't want to exist within a community like that.  I want my blog to be out there for everyone. So I deleted my page and account after 24 hours.

So that left me with a choice. Blogger or nowt. I have really enjoyed blogging and I feel a connection with some of the other bloggers I follow. Also I know that my audience extends beyond the blogging world  because quite a few friends follow my blog, without being bloggers themselves. And apparently I'm massive in Vietnam, Singapore and Brazil (waves to the bots👋).

So I decided to try and find a way forward.  I took my blog out of public view,  and set up a Test Post and experimented with different ways of resizing my photos and then posted them to the blog and viewed them. Some solutions worked OK. Others didn't. But all of them were better than what I had. Eventually I found a good solution. ImageResizer.com. Here I could resize my photos to 1200mp, which apparently is the ideal size for Blogger. It worked. Not as well as the old Blogger image interface worked, but good enough for me.

So then began the task of deleting all of the corrupted images,  creating resized versions and posting these back into the old blog posts. 

So far I've repaired all of the posts from 2026. At this time, I reopened this blog to the public view. I will slowly work through 2025  until the whole blog is fixed. 

Another thing I have done is bought a new phone. My Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra was the problem with it's huge files. Resizing smaller files to 1200mp will result in sharper images on the blog posts. My S23 Ultra was going to need replacing anyway next year, as it was only supported by Samsung for 4 years. My new phone is a Samsung Galaxy S25 Fe. The good news is that this year, Samsung extended the support that they now provide to 7 years  starting with the Galaxy S26 models. So that's 2032. But they also committed to supporting last year's model, the S25, to the same date. So I bought one of last year's phones to save a lot of money. 

The Samsung Galaxy S25fe has a 50mp rear camera, as opposed to a 200mp camera on the S23 Ultra, so it's still a decent performer, but not as good as the latter camera. But it's fine for what I want to use it for. The S23 Ultra was overkill in that department. It's intended for photography enthusiasts. And I have my trusty DSLR for that. So this new phone and it's camera should be perfect for my femme photographic needs.

So I'm back in the bloggy world again, with my original Blog intact and hopefully able to continue for a few years yet.

Thank you for your patience. 

Dee

💋💋💋