Not enough hours in the day for filling up all the hours in the day

It's a flipping full-time job this sober lark innit? I'm finding more and more that I'm coming to the end of each day thinking, I should have done... I haven't done... I still want to.

All good stuff I guess. Boredom's the enemy here. So, what with my almost constant low-level housework going on, taking medication, going out to a garden centre today (at Mrs CD's behest - she loves her gardening and we both want to get a Lemon Verbena plant. I love the tea, which seems to have vanished off the shelf of late, if anyone knows why I'd love to know - a bad 'bena harvest, a run on lemony herbs or a revolution in the Verbena growing outposts of Mexico; I miss it.)

Of course a fair amount of all this busyosity is no-good-time-wasting bobbins by most standards. I, despite being a man, am fantastic at multi-tasking. I say I'm fantastic at it, but what that really means is I do lots of things at the same time which means that the thing I set out to do takes four times as long. So, I pop onto the computer to write this blog, or send an email or find something out and while there check Facebook and Myspace and decide to try and write some music and read the Guardian comment page and I MUST, simply MUST have the radio on while I do this and bless my soul but it's three hours later.

Still, I'm 10,000 times less a prevaricator than I was, when a huge chuck of at least four hours of each day was red inked in and underlined as 'Sitting in the pub.' And, along with all the time-wasting feats I make little steps forward - I'm meeting someone early next week about writing for his website; unpaid but good for the CV and hopefully enjoyable. I've sent a couple of emails and made some steps towards cancelling an account I no longer need - and, a message for British Telecom here: the way you hide details of how to cancel accounts both on your automated phone system and your website no doubt makes commercial sense in that people will, as I certainly would have done two months ago, give up, but it's snidey, cheap and tawdry and makes me hate your company.

Today's been OK. Up early, breakfast, coffee, garden centre, nice lunch cooked by me, cleaning up, computering, including writing a piece of music for to submit to a library music site and even doing something for a no-doubt foolish, quite possibly pretentious and awful arty project.

I will bore you with the details. I write and record (on extremely cheap software) electronic music, abstract but quite tuneful, retro-futurist popadelica things which I enjoy and which have even had minor public outings. Well, I thought I'd like to do something with words, random words, which is why I spent a good chunk of the afternoon picking out every third book on my bookshelves, going to page 33, skipping three words and writing down the next three. I then emailed a load of people asking if they'd be willing to read out said snippets into a microphone for me to digitally mash, loop, reverse and generally mess about with before crunching them into some sort of, err, sound.

Then I cooked a very nice pasta dinner and now I'm shattered.

It's all very inconsequential but I'm enjoying myself in a self-contained and level-headed sort of way.

It struck me very powerfully the other day as I was walking to the pub to see C. I don't want to drink. I'm not saying that's it, I'm cured, Drunk in Cardiff will now become an even more tedious litany of the pedestrian and prosaic without even a light panic attack to leaven the mix. Neither am I saying, although I'm noticing every day how much more at home I am with moderation, well, I can have a drink now and be sensible about it. That's the last thing I want right now - I'm scared of drinking and happy to be not drinking. I'm lucky that so far the tests and triggers have been relatively few and far between and they've only been little bumps in the road - tougher tests are as inevitable as an England batting collapse but really, so far, so good.

I wanted to get a little counter for the blog to tick away the days since I last had a drink. I couldn't find one (any clues gratefully accepted) but as I had my last drink on May 31, I think that makes 41 days sober, so tomorrow it'll be six weeks without a drink.

Champagne corks ahoy!

If you spent it, thank you for your time.

Cardiff Drunk.