Therapy For Me

W/C 21st July 2025 I will have to rely on others to make this statement definitive, but this may be my first Belinda Carlisle song choice as episode title...?! Dedicated to the right hand side of the bay window in the lounge, the one overlooking the harbour, and the hypnotic joy of idle observation. The song comes from the Real album, which was released in 1993 and is an absolute cracker - in fact...

W/C 14th July 2025 What seems to be happening at the moment is that I am missing one of my walking days, pretty much without fail, every week. The running is going fine, I am up to about 35 miles per week, and last week I ran my second half marathon distance. I am just about to set off for an eight miler, and I will probably do eleven or so tomorrow.  Thinking about it, it might be because I...

W/C 7th July 2025 There is quite a bit of excitement in the house about the new Superman movie. Jack has been looking forward to it for quite a while, and I must admit I have been a little drawn in by all the noise around it, and the fact it is dividing opinion so much. Clearly I am from the Christopher Reeve era when it comes to Superman. Another one of those magical movies that appeared at just...

W/C 30th June 2025 05:22 this time. After a similar experience a couple of days ago, it was slightly later this morning when I woke up with the missing piece. I suppose you could say that most weeks are full of hellos and goodbyes, but on reflection this week has been built around examples that are maybe a little heavier than the norm. And apologies for fans of the original, but at this time of th...

W/C 23rd June 2023 I forgot to mention how much I enjoyed the cricket. The first test against India from Headingley was an absolute delight, we were pretty much addicted for the whole five days, with the live coverage in the back room doing battle with the radio commentary upstairs. The whole joy is that for most of the fifteen (yes I did say fifteen) two hour sessions I had no idea who was actual...

W/C 16th June 2025 I have been trying to work out if I have ever seen the video for this song before, and having mulled it for longer than I possibly should, I have reached the conclusion that I probably haven’t. Nothing particularly surprising in that conclusion I suppose, and whilst it’s very much of its time (quirky and instantly forgettable) it also made me realise that I had no real clue what...

W/C 9th June 2025 Now you know I like a good sitcom, and you also know that I rate Not Going Out very highly and certainly worthy of special mention. Well the new series landed last night, and the BBC dropped all six episodes which resulted in us watching the first four. I am pleased to report that it is a strong as ever, but the reason I mention it is because the second episode called Doll is rea...

W/C 2nd June 2025 Sometimes the need to try and find a song title that encapsulates an element of my week, takes me to some very specific places. This song featured in a Rolling Stones documentary called 25x5, that I watched over and over, back in the late 80s. It was only a very small section of the programme, but it always stuck with me, and fortunately it was easy enough to locate the clip. So...

W/C 26th May 2025 I completed my final run for the month yesterday, and also the final run in my current pair of running shoes, and I mention it because it is a bit of a bitter-sweet moment. I become quite attached to my runners, and whilst I am looking forward to a new pair (the first few runs in new shoes are always great) it always feels like I am being less than respectful to my current squeez...

This Time is the first song I ever heard from an unknown Canadian rocker named Bryan Adams. I was introduced to it by a friend called Steve Nicholson, he lived at the end of my road and he too was an avid Sheffield United fan. I ended up going to away matches with him and his Dad, and I even had a Saturday job at their family business back in the day (they had an independent Insurance brokerage, j...

W/C 12th May 2025 I haven't been able to ascertain exactly which group of football fans adopted this song first. Wikipedia cites the example of Everton fans in 1956, which is only a year after the song was written - so that might be favourite. I was belting it out (along with 26,000 others) at Bramall Lane on Monday and having a whale of a time. Aura Farming: Depending on the context, “aura farmin...

W/C 5th May 2025 I see that Amazon very astutely managed to get Conclave on their roster of films included on Prime, just in time for the selection of the new pope. I can only assume that the nature of the timing, you could almost say it was divine, will push the viewing figures no end. I haven’t seen it yet, but I have read the book which I thoroughly enjoyed. Robert Harris is a fave amongst my f...

W/C 28th April 2025 Between 13:00 and 13:40 today I witnessed a wonder of the modern world. In the Long Bar, which is situated in the East Stand at Headingley, an undisclosed but statistically significant number of cricket followers were fed a lunch of fish, chips and mushy peas, with bread and butter on the side. This was the scene that greeted me in the Members lounge, as this unnamed collective...

W/C 21st April 2025 As you are about to hear there isn't a real reason why I have picked this particular track to share with you as the episode title. There could have been, but as it turned out I ditched that idea because it was a bit too complicated. But I have stuck with it because I can't get past one aspect of the lyric, and as it happens it does resonate with (admittedly in a slightly labour...

W/C 14th April 2025 I am quietly chuckling to myself, because I never thought I would be able to feed a song title like this one into an episode of TFM. But in the context of the content for this week, and if you flip it around a bit, and imagine it from a certain perspective then it does make a lot of sense. Anyway it's a bit of a funny one this week, with the early week being the closing stages...

W/C 7th April 2025 As it turns out a Saltwater swimming pool does (in point of fact) still contain Chlorine. Not an opening sentence I thought I would ever use for a slice of TFM, but the experiences of the week have brought me here, and after all that is what this is all about. I have been informed by Goggle AI that 'a saltwater swimming pool utilises a salt chlorine generator to produce chl...

W/C 31st March 2025 26 minutes to go until this weeks TFM is due to be published and I have no idea what to do about the notes. Michael Sembello is pulsating out of the speakers on my desk, and if I flip tabs I can see the very MTV era video playing away in its non-widescreen format. We are due to be leaving the house for a family shopping trip to Meadowhall at quarter to, which is only adding to...

W/C 24th March 2025 One of the great things about recording TFM is that I get to rack my brains and come up with an episode title that is also a song. You know the rules, the song title (where possible) must be pertinent to some of the themes of the week's episode, and I try and make it a song I have some history with. Clearly this week was going to be fairly easy, I mean how many song titles are...

W/C 17th March 2025 I have heard this story three times now, and it floors me every time. This song was written as part of Radio 2's 21st century Folk project, where a group of songwriters were invited to write songs about other peoples lives. The song describes the day that Thea travelled to the North East to meet Delyth Raffell, and to hear about her daughter Ellen who passed away at the age of...

Welcome to fellow Marillion folk and all newcomers to this podcast... A few things to know, Therapy For Me has been running for just over five years and is a safe space for me to process what has been going on over the course of the last week. It is unscripted, recorded (mostly) in one take and published fresh everything Saturday morning around 9am GMT The episode titles are based around songs tha...

W/C 10th March 2025 I love this song, and I love this album. Bearing in mind what I am talking about this week I wanted something sublime and beautiful, and this is surely it. Should I be using something other than Marillion to describe a Marillion weekend? Absolutely I should, anything by the band themselves would be a little too 'on the nose' Anyway I hope you are well and have had a good week,...

W/C 3rd March 2025 Todays notes come courtesy of Wikipedia; Coles Corner  is the name given to the corner of  Fargate  and  Church Street  in  Sheffield , in sight of the  cathedral . It was the site of the old  Cole Brothers   department store until it moved to  Barker's Pool  in 1963. The corner is famous in Sheffield as a place to meet...

W/C 24th February 2025 I found myself watching the first Rambo film last night, partly because it was there and partly because I haven’t seen any of that particular franchise. Clearly they were films of their time, but it is interesting that the original - which was called First Blood and has since been rebranded as Rambo: First Blood - bore little resemblance to the genre it effectively spawned....

W/C 17th February 2025 It really has been a revelation listening to some CDs again, the only real downside is that I had forgotten the effort it takes to read the album titles up on the high shelf in the back room. You will understand what has got me to this point when you have listened to this weeks TFM, but in real terms it means I have given the following a spin; Symphonie Fantastique - Hector...

W/C 10th February 2024 As I have mentioned before, there are some weeks when it comes around to TFM time that I literally have nothing. Over time I have learnt not to panic, trust the process, and hey presto something appears right when I need it and away we go. The same is also true of writing the notes. So even though I finished this weeks TFM last night, I am still waiting for process to delive...