My iPhone 4s returned from the repairers yesterday, though curiously its hard drive capacity had doubled to 32GB. I guess that means, in the absence of anything genuinely mysterious, that my phone has been replaced. Will it last more than 30 days? Watch this space!

My new garage project moves forward slowly and more expensively (see photo). Tree roots (and what to do about the tree), the need for an excavator and a concrete pump and sundry other items have meant that something that seemed relatively straightforward has become more complicated.

Complication and uncertainty. Not my favourite bedfellows on the whole, but ones that I need to live better with. Why not ease and certainty, my mind inquires, and why not now? Truthfully, things, stuff, going smoothly, is probably rare.

My backyard, which only minutes ago was bathed in the golden light of an obliging afternoon sun, has fallen into shadow. It is now growing cooler. Soon I will take Tom to soccer training. As the kids train in the artificial light, I will walk the perimeter of the field listening to podcasts. Again and again.

Sunday morning. The grass was still wet late yesterday afternoon after a day of late-autumn sunshine. This morning there are new threads of fresh dew, pulsing with reflected light as the breeze discomposes each blade. Now and then a miniature rainbow breaks forth from a solitary tremulous bead, reminding me, if not the birds, that our experience of light is highly subjective.

I was reading last night that the incidence of depression has increased ten-fold from that experienced by people in the first half of the 20th Century. The author posits that 'learned helplessness' is probably responsible for this astonishing change and a results, partly, from our losing a sense of control in our lives. Put another way, the way we think about ourselves and our environment, the way we perceive and internalize what happens daily - how we process change, setbacks and the occasional loss of agency - forms a vital part of the feedback loop that regulates self-esteem and the drive to act meaningfully in the world.

Our grandparents and great grandparents endured two major wars, an economic depression and far tougher living conditions than we do. Yet they suffered depression much less.

Food for thought.

The aforementioned elderly Samsung has sprung back into life following the failure of my refurbished iPhone 4s. The latter is on its way to a repairer, I hope. I might have expected two years from the new phone, but all I got was 30 days.

This is what happens when you get too pleased about tech. It lets you down, not unlike people, though generally in a more spectacular way. The pulsing white Apple logo was symptomatic of a deeper problem - the anaemic heart of a digitalized love-toy. This phone was never really attached to my hand in the manner that is often pilloried in cartoons and commentary, but it beat, nevertheless, beneath the plastic flip-cover that protected it. And it offered up its pallid heart in response to critical failure.

Don't get into bed with tech.

It's May and I am quietly happy. I have begun another study program online (The Great Courses), am preparing to build a new garage, am enjoying the turning and falling of the leaves and a new relationship has been gently blossoming. Never mind that the previous sentence should have been perhaps two sentences ( I will leave this chore to my editor), for this half-glass-full period is well and truly upon me. When will the winds turn?

Winter is barely a month away but I invariably enjoy its onset. It is not until August that I start to wonder when I might wear shorts again and be unencumbered by coats and layers. My house is not well-suited to cold weather, or hot weather, for that matter. That is a bit like me, for spring is always a happy uncladding and autumn, more a prolonged end to a feast whose beginning I have long forgotten.

Now, it is dark and really quite mild outside. Tom is at a drumming workshop of the touring African Children's Choir. Later this week my own choir will support these brilliant Ugandans at a concert in Penrith. Wisely foregoing any African songs we might know, we will sing mostly Western pop and folk arrangements. Just as we should, given the competition!

benign rend of sky
baring tender nebules of star,
vast unthinning of dusk

my tiny temple bell shakes
me from thoughts of dark clouds
catapulting autumn sky