The 2024 December sale, ended with the advent of January 2025 and now, close to the end of the month, all the mid-winter holidays truly are over. Making the January world grey, murky and colourless after the annual high season of illuminations and decorations.

Hitherto, the winter months – December and January – have been incredibly warm; eerily so. What litte snow has fallen, has quickly melted away, leaving a grey-brown world to trudge, where fog and rain make for the predominant precipitation, with some occasional downpours of sleet as a caricature of snow. The warming effects of human induced climate change seem to me to accelerate and take total prominence over the weather phenomenons that once was what I would expect this time of year: periods of snow and proper cold.

For me, this period in January without the real features of winter gets mentally tough and wearing, and with all that is currently going on in the world – with Russia still trying to ravage and devastate Ukraine after close to three years, a demented newly inaugurated president wreaking havoc on all conventions and relations there can be found while appointing unfit ignorants to important positions, Swedish politicians acting completely without visions, common sense and decency, and delusional tech billionaires openly curbing and controlling the lives of everybody else in favour of their profits, to mention some – it is all too easy to despair and get depressed.

One important thing to keep myself healthy, mentally alert and stimulated, is that I have begun work on a new composition for the “Yokai” project – a concert program primarily inspired by supernatural phenomenons of Japanese mythology and folklore. This new piece, titled “Anonymous Anomalies” and which is a fast swing duet for a male and a female vocalist concerning conceited, instrumental and exploitative love, is now under way, and will – of course – be published here upon completion.

I wish all of you visiting here some hope and some means to lighten up your January, and that you all can find those things that keep you from desparing when the times weigh you down.