What I failed to mention in my last post was that Saturday night involved a lot of throwing up, and a brief spell asleep in a bar. Fortunately I've recovered now. Feeling like a zombie on a Sunday morning? Only a nice breakfast at The Reliance on North Street could sort me out, you have to try it.

I seem to have lost the enthusiasm to write in my blog these days. It's most definitely a cyclical thing, and seemingly quite common amongst the casual bloggers elsewhere in cyberinterwebnetspaceland. It's a shame, but I'm being honest.

That said, I did some writing here.

The events of yesterday evening teamed with a complete (to)day of doing absolutely nothing guided my thoughts to taking stock of where I am now and how it compares with the past. It feels like I've spent much of the afternoon thinking about it, and I try and post some conclusions here. None of this might make sense, but you never know.

Things are just great at the moment - never better, really. I hadn't really thought about it until now, but inside I'm really comfortable with myself and where I am now. A big change from the end of 2001 and the start of 2002 when I was a bit depressed, but as early as the start of this year I still wasn't sure of myself inside. Pinning down what has changed between then and now isn't easy, but I think it has a lot to do with self-confidence.

I have more confidence to be myself - the actual me, as opposed to the me I portray. I don't think there's a difference between the two anymore. I think my priorities have changed, that I'm more thoughtful about things and that I've more enthusiasm for everything. If all that's true then the way I approach things, the decisions that I make and the way I behave generally must be very different to before.

For the last two years, and for the vast majority of my life since I left university in July 2000, I've been single. That has definitely had a influence: negative and disruptive to start with, but ultimately very positive. Over time I adopted a way of approaching the initial negativity (the detail of which I won't bore you with) which meant that instead of looking for others to like me, I just had to like myself. It may sound easy but I don't consider it so and, as I said earlier, back then I didn't.

It got worse before it got better, but today I realised the journey I'd been on and that I can give myself a little pat on the back for staying on track.

I've written in the past months about my attempts to get fit - getting a bike, going to the gym and trying to eat properly. My goal was to be able to cycle to work, and now that I'm cycling to work pretty much every day it's fair to say I've met that goal now.

Time to set a new goal, then. I am going to run a race.

I've registered to run in the Leeds Abbey Dash, a 10K (6-and-a-bit miles) road race being held at the end of November. It's something to train for, and I've set myself a modest target of finishing in an hour. I've no idea how I'll perform in such a race, so it'll be useful to set a benchmark time to aim to beat in future races. If all goes well, I'd like to run more than just this particular race.

Wish me luck!

You might think I've gone a little bit quiet, with so few posts of late. I'm not dead. I'm currently developing something new, something a little different. I'm hoping to unleash it on you this month, but it's a little too early to say at the moment.