This is a little overdue, and indeed is being written on the move, so to speak. All will soon become clear.

There have been a lot of health triggered disruptions to this site over the years, and those of us who write for it move towards and even into our senior years, those disruptions almost inevitably tend to increase in number. Recent developments on this score have even taken one of our writers out of the review pool, at least for the immediate future, and my own review schedule has been undermined by an initial diagnosis that gave me some cause for concern and involved a series of blood tests and MRI scans that ultimately gave me the all-clear, albeit with the requirement for half-yearly tests to monitor the condition. This, as you can imagine, has been a bit distracting, and has been further eating into my still limited free time and preventing me from making a significant dent on the pile of review discs I have waiting.

All this was settled about a week and a half ago, and it's then that it finally hit home that I was booked to fly to Japan ten days from then, a trip that had been rescheduled from its springtime norm after my partner was taken seriously ill just and hospitalised just days before we were due to depart. Those ten days have since passed and I'm now sitting in a hotel room in Ōsaka recovering what may or may not be the results of food poisoning, or at the very least a bad reaction to something that I ate or drank. Although the worst has definitely passed, I am still a little delicate, and the joys of jet lag are now starting to mess with my ability to stay awake during the day and sleep soundly at night. And despite being technically autumn, it's currently hotter in Ōsaka than at any time in the summer back in the UK. I definitely prefer it to UK autumn and winter cold, but still…

I'm away for the whole month, and oviously this will impact my ability to write and post reviews during October, particularly as I won't even clap eyes on any of the discs sent after my departure until I return to home base. I do have my laptop with me and have ripped a small selection of discs and made notes on the technical specs, but I'm fully aware that I've done this very same thing on previous trips and ended up just being too busy to sit down and watch and write about the titles in question. I am also shooting and editing video each day which is eating up a good deal of my down time, and one review I had two-thirds complete has been the victim of that dreaded cloud file synchronisation issue that I've suffered before, and the second half of what I had written has disappeared into the ether. Cue snarling face emoji, if there is such a thing. While I'm here to unwind and to help my partner with what for her is a particularly important trip to her homeland, this does frustrate me just a little, as I was already behind on my reviews and do feel like I'm letting down those good people from our favourite labels who send us discs, so apologies must go out to Indicator, Radiance, Eureka! and Second Run. I hope to make amends on my return.

Right, time for some more water and another cooling blast from the air conditioning unit.