As another month races to a close – this year is going so fast! – it is time for me to do my round up of what I gave you in the previous thirty days. Hopefully you will have found something here to enjoy, and if you missed anything this is your chance to catch up.

Including this one, I will have landed in your inbox thirteen times in October – unless you are one of those who only finds me in the Reader. But hey, any views are worth having, so I’m not complaining! My first October offering was the previous monthly review:

September Fields

which was the usual set of reminders, some favourite tunes from the month,  plus a great song by Frazey Ford whose title I borrowed.

As always, the posts were skewed very much towards music – ten of them, in fact, plus another which also had a tune in it. The regular series were, of course, prevalent, starting with Tuesday Tunes, for which I gave you:

272: Numbers x 3

273: Numero Quattro

274: Peace, A Revisit and

275: Halloween 2025

I got my Halloween songs in a little early this year! And in keeping with my recently revised style for these reviews, here is a favourite song from amongst those, to refresh your memory. It just has to be this beautiful video from #273:

As well as Tuesdays, I also appeared as regular as clockwork for Song Lyric Sunday. There were also four of these last month, and they were:

What Gold Rush?

Flying Thingies

Jolly Hockey Sticks and

Weed, Whites And Wine

It’s hard for me to pick a favourite song from amongst these, as there were many good ones, but if pressed I’d probably go for this, from Flying Thingies:

A lovely little song from Fleetwood Mac’s mid-period, between the original Peter Green version and the Buckingham/Nicks takeover.

Apart from that previous monthly review my first midweek post was my annual one for World Mental Health Day. Although I have long since moved away from mental health as the main topic for my blog I don’t forget that this is where it started for me, just over thirteen years ago, and I never miss reminding you of why. WMHD is one of my two main dates for this, and this year it came as the snappily titled:

World Mental Health Day 2025

Unhappily, this past month also saw one of my tribute posts for a musician I had followed since the 1960s. He was John Lodge, of The Moody Blues, whose music I have loved from the beginning, and I shared some of the songs he wrote for the band in

Another Sad Loss In Music

The one remaining post from last month was one of the times I visited John Holton’s Writer’s Workshop. One of his prompts for that week was to write a piece around the word moment, so I did. I spent a nanosecond or two to come up with the title of

Moments

in which I looked back at some very early memories of important moments in my life.

A song from among these posts, as a reminder? OK, how about this little beauty from John Lodge, written for his newly born daughter, which seems to chime well with my Moments piece:

Emily’s Song still touches my heart more than fifty years since it was first released, and is a song that anyone who has ever been a father can relate to. That unofficial fan video gets right to its soul.

That is the end of the review, but you will know that I always like to end with another tune. Sometimes I borrow my title from a song and play that, but as today is Halloween I thought I’d close with another one for it. In his comment on Tuesday’s post Pete mentioned his favourite spooky song. It is one I have played before, though it missed the cut this year, so I thought I’d play it today for him and for you:

Monster Mash, by Bobby “Boris” Pickett and the Crypt-Kickers – a classic that deserves another hearing, I think. It was first released in 1962 and as of 2023 it was still generating around $1m a year in royalties: it just keeps rising from the grave!

That’s me done for today, and I hope you’ve enjoyed the reminders and the tunes I have played. Enjoy your Halloween, if you celebrate it, and I’ll see you again on Sunday. Take care, and beware of ghosties and ghoulies 🎃 💀 👻