september Archives - Neil Turner's Blog

Playlist of the month: Months

September 13, 2026 by Neil Turner

A screenshot of the months playlist on Spotify

So this month’s playlist is about, well, months. Basically there are a couple of good songs about September that I like, and I just went from there. It’s 10 songs, and not all months are represented, but it’s a theme, right?

As usual, you can listen along on Spotify.

Green Day – “Wake Me Up When September Ends”. This was the fourth single from Green Day’s seventh (and in my opinion best) studio album, American Idiot.
Earth, Wind and Fire – “September”. A classic disco track that seems to be in about every third Tiktok video that I’ve come across this month.
U2 – “October”. This is an older U2 single from 1981, and was the title track from their second album. Unlike most well-known U2 tracks, this is a piano track with limited vocals.
Wyclef Jean – “Gone Till November”. I’ve included the ‘pop’ version as this is the one I remember from watching MTV in the 1990s when this came out. A more downbeat song from Wyclef’s other contemporaneous singles like “It Doesn’t Matter” and “Perfect Gentleman”.
Neck Deep – “December”. Note some spicy language in this one. I first came across this in December 2019, when I was going through a bit of a rough time (some job insecurity, problems with this blog and a bad general election result) and this song was, as they say, a ‘mood’.
Foo Fighters – “February Stars”. Into the new year; I couldn’t find anything interesting for January so here’s an album track from the Foo Fighters second album. It’s another slower track, which seems to inadvertently be something of a theme with songs named after months.
Delain – “April Rain”. This is the fourth time Delain has popped up on one of these playlists of the month, which isn’t a coincidence. We’ve seen them live twice in their original line-up and they used to be one of my favourite bands. April Rain was the first of their singles that I encountered and remains one of my favourites of theirs; it’s the first single from their second album.
BT – “Flaming June”. A big change of genre here as this is some trance from American musician Brian Transeau, better known as BT. This was a collaboration with German producer Paul van Dyk, and was a big hit at the time – it used to be a regular on Dave Pearce’s Dance Anthems show on BBC Radio 1 on Sunday nights.
Take That – “Sweet July”. The newest song on this playlist, having come out in, you guessed it, this July as the second single from Take That’s tenth album. It’s a funky pop song.
Taylor Swift – “August”. With Taylor Swift having released 12 studio albums in her 20 year career, it’s not surprising that I would find one of her songs to fit a theme. This is from her 2020 downbeat album Folklore.

Sliding into September

September 1, 2026 by Neil Turner

We’re into the final third of the year. As I work at a university, September is a busy month as new students arrive to enrol and returning students come back after the long summer break, so campus is going to be busy again after a quiet few months. This month also sees my employer adopting a consistent hybrid working policy at long last, which means I’ll be working three days a week in the office from now on. Previously it was just two days a week in the office, but there were times when I would work an additional day in the office and so I’m not too fussed about the change.

I’m also off to visit one of the universities in Leeds this month for a meeting, as part of a collaborative project that I’m involved in across several northern universities. We normally meet online, so it’ll be the first time I’ve met some of these people in person, which is nice.

Schools

Our ten-year-old goes back to school this week, to start their final year at primary school. They’ve put on a growth spurt recently and so we’ve had to buy all new school uniform in recent weeks, even though they’ll only need it for a year.

In the coming weeks, we’ll be heading along to open evenings at the local secondary schools. Whilst all three of us are pretty sure which school will be their first choice, we’ll investigate the alternatives as well. The application has to be submitted by the end of next month, and then we find out the outcome in March next year.

Railcards and birthdays

My disabled person’s railcard is up for renewal this month; I’m hoping the renewal process is straightforward and I won’t have to provide evidence that my hearing hasn’t somehow magically improved. That being said, the fact that I have an epilepsy diagnosis and have been deemed medically unfit to drive are also valid eligibility criteria. I’ll be purchasing a three year railcard, as over three years it’s cheaper than a standard annual railcard. And as I can use it for commuting, it saves me quite a bit of money – especially with me being in the office more often now.

Christine has her birthday next week; as with last year, it’s not a round number, but we both have the day off work and so will probably go somewhere for a nice lunch.

Bathroom renovation

Following our new kitchen in 2022, the next big renovation project on our house is our upstairs bathroom. Work probably won’t start this month, but we have had the majority of the new bathroom furniture delivered. Indeed, there is currently a brand new bath sat in its packaging in our living room, and we had to move half a tonne of tiles into the house last week. I’ll post more when work starts; most likely in November but we’ll see.

Unblogged September

September 30, 2025 by Neil Turner

A depiction of the Cheshire cat on the roof of Trinity Leeds

Considering that I still haven’t written about everything we did in July and August (there’s one more blog post to follow on Thursday), then surely there’s lots more to come from what we did in September. Right?

Well, we did do quite a few things this month, but not all of them merited blogging about on their own. Diamond Geezer normally writes a summary of unblogged things each month (here’s his from August) and whilst I won’t be writing a day-by-day summary, here are some of the things we did:

Trips to Manchester

I went to Manchester twice this month. The first was for a birthday meal for Christine, and also a shopping trip. We naturally went to Afflecks, which is an indoor market focussed on alternative lifestyles and has many small businesses selling clothes, jewellery and music. It’s in an old department store which closed in the 1970s after being taken over by Debenhams (who already had a larger store nearby). It’s operated in its current format since 1982, and is a very quirky place.

My second trip was for work, attending a training session about international qualifications delivered by UK ENIC. That was held at the University of Manchester.

Trip to Leeds

We also had a shopping trip to Leeds, which also doubled up as a second birthday meal for Christine, this time with my parents. This was at Bibi’s Italianissimo, which is a huge art deco restaurant near the station. Bibi’s has been in Leeds for years and retains a reasonably good reputation for food and hospitality – especially for families.

We also went into the Corn Exchange, which is similar in some respects to Afflecks in Manchester as it’s also home to many smaller shops – a couple of which are also in Afflecks. Architecturally, the Corn Exchange is far more interesting, being as it is circular with a huge glass domed roof over the central atrium inside. It’s unsurprisingly Grade I listed.

Back to school

Our nine-year-old is back at school, and started year five – their penultimate year at primary school. Next year, we’ll need to start looking at secondary schools.

Getting cold

This time of year is when we see how long we can hold out before turning the heating on. Which turned out to be Tuesday 16th September, after a run of cold days. It warmed up again afterwards, and so the thermostat didn’t come on until it turned cold again last weekend. Normally, the heating stays on until early May.

Speaking of heating, I’ve had major issues with my Nest thermostat recently with it refusing to work with either the Google Home app or Home Assistant. Ultimately, I had to completely remove it from both, and then re-add it, to get it working again. Which is a faff because the Nest integration in Home Assistant is one of the most difficult to set up, and it’s actually gotten worse since last time as you now have to create a Pub/Sub topic too. I’m pleased that it’s working again, but you can tell Google are phasing out their Nest thermostats in Europe. It will certainly get replaced with a different system, as and when we’re ready to replace our gas boiler with a heat pump.

Septembaargh

September 1, 2025 by Neil Turner

Good grief, is it September already?

Work-wise, September isn’t quite as busy as August for me, but still very busy – it’s when the majority of our new university students start their courses. Christine’s birthday is also this month, although it’s not a round number this year. Still, we both have the day off work. Meanwhile, our nine-year-old goes back to school after the long summer break.

25 years ago

This September marks 25 years since I started my A-levels at college. My secondary school didn’t have a sixth form, so instead most of us went to our local college. Indeed, the college was much more local than my secondary school, so I no longer needed a lift to school or to get a bus home.

That summer, I’d been bought my first MP3 player, when such things were still very new – it was a Samsung Yepp YPE-64, which we picked up at the Eurotunnel terminal in Folkestone. The ’64’ referred to the 64 megabytes (yes, megabytes) of flash storage on board, although there was a slot to insert a SmartMedia card to add up to 128 MB additional storage. Data transfer was via a IEEE 1284 Parallel cable – no USB. Still, it was smaller than a MiniDisc player, which at the time was the smallest type of portable music player available, and I remember some classmates marvelling at how small it was.

Other anniversaries

In terms of other anniversaries, it’s 23 years since I started university, and also 23 years since I switched to Movable Type. Incidentally, TypePad, which was essentially a paid-for hosted version of Movable Type, announced it was closing for good last week. Those who are still using it have until later this month to export their data and move elsewhere. It’s a bit of a sad end to that chapter of blogging, but I guess most people just use WordPress now.

It’s also ten years ago since we bought our first car.