#oneaday, Day 246: Feel the Fear

Irrational fears are weird. It’s human nature to feel the “fight or flight” response, of course. But the things which trigger said response are very peculiar indeed.

Take spiders. I remember being mortally afraid of spiders when I was a kid, and I’m still not particularly fond of them right now. As in, I’d probably freak out and do the dance of fear should one start crawling up my arm. Though I’m fine with little ones now, whereas any spider of any size used to scare the shit out of me. And, growing up in the country, we got some quite big spiders.

Now, fear of the kind of car-sized man-eating spiders you get in hot countries and/or under your toilet seat in Australia? That’s perfectly rational. But fear of tiny little spiders that you can literally blow away accidentally by breathing on them? Less rational.

And then you get into the more esoteric phobias out there. Pogonophobia: the fear of beards. How does that come about? I remember suffering from this one, too, when I was a kid. My father returned from a trip abroad with a beard he didn’t have before and I was freaked out by it. I don’t know if it was because he looked so different from how he did before, or if I just had some deep-seated need to be far away from beards at that particular age. Thankfully I’ve got over that particular fear now, otherwise my Bearded Justice credentials would surely be revoked.

And then there’s the really odd ones, like Lyssophobia, which is fear of hydrophobia. A phobia of a phobia is almost too meta for words. Except it’s not, because there’s a word for it. But surely it’s possible to get into an endless loop in that way? Is there someone out there who’s afraid of being afraid of hydrophobia? Possibly.

The human mind is a mysterious, strange and wonderful thing, and there are some things which will probably never be understood. Fear is one of those things. It’s a powerful motivating factor for some people; driving oneself to stay as far away from one’s fears as possible can spur people on to do things that they really want or need to. But at the other end of the spectrum, it’s surely easy for some fears to become dangerous obsessions, or crippling social disabilities.

In that sense, those of us who are just afraid of the idea of a big hairy spider with poison fangs have probably got the better end of the whole deal.

Though I think we can probably all agree that encountering a bright red spider with a beard who looked like the devil and was offering you a jar of peanut butter would be a fairly universally terrifying experience.

#oneaday, Day 245: Obituary or Rebirth?

Dear GOG users,

We have recently had to give serious thought to whether we could really keep GOG.com the way it is. We’ve debated on it for quite some time and, unfortunately, we’ve decided that GOG.com simply cannot remain in its current form.

We’re very grateful for all support we’ve received from all of you in the past two years. Working on GOG.com was a great adventure for all of us and an unforgettable journey to the past, through the long and wonderful history of PC gaming.

This doesn’t mean the idea behind GOG.com is gone forever. We’re closing down the service and putting this era behind us as new challenges await.

On a technical note, this week we’ll put in place a solution to allow everyone to re-download their games. Stay tuned to this page and follow us on Twitter and Facebook for updates.

All the best,
GOG.com Team

An hour or two ago, that message had done the rounds of the Internet. If you hadn’t seen it yet, I apologise for being the bearer of bad news. If you head on over to Good Old Games right now, that’s all you’ll see. No store. No games. No community. All gone.

For the uninitiated, Good Old Games was the place to go to purchase and download DRM-free copies of old (and not so old) classic games for low, low prices. It was, for a long time, the only place to go to find the classic Sierra adventures, or sci-fi Wolfenstein 3D spinoff Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold, or the best puzzle game of all time, The Incredible Machine. I wrote a number of pieces for that site, so yes, I have something of a vested interest in it and actually feel pretty sad about its apparent demise. But even if I didn’t have such a personal stake in it, it was a fantastic place to go to pick up the games of my youth. Even better, they’d been tweaked and optimised to work on current hardware.

The tragic news above comes after a tweet posted by the company a few days ago:

Sometimes it’s really hard being DRM-free… hard to keep things the way they are and keep management and publishers happy 🙁

It didn’t sound good. Someone was obviously putting a bit of pressure on the company, and some cracks were starting to form. Those who had supported the service since the beginning knew that a DRM-free service in an age of rampant piracy was going to have its work cut out for it. But was that really the reason?

No-one knows as yet. No-one except the people at GOG, who are playing their cards close to their chest. The community are assured that this isn’t the end of GOG, however, just the end of this chapter of its existence. Those who have purchased games from the service in the past will be directed to a “solution” to re-download these games in the next few days. And some announcements will hopefully be forthcoming very soon.

Personally speaking, I’m hoping it’s good news. There were a ton of games on the site that I’d love to have had the chance to play again. Games like Gabriel Knight 2, which a friend borrowed some time ago and never gave back, and now I can’t remember which friend it was.

The games of this era represent a time when gameplay was everything and graphics were necessarily limited by the hardware of the time. And it may just be nostalgia talking, but some of my fondest memories of childhood and adolescence come from the games I was playing at the time. It’d be shame if the memories of these games fade. But, as I say, GOG claims that this is not the end, just the end for the service in its current form.

So pour out a stiff drink, take off your hat and, I don’t know, sing a mournful song in honour of GOG or something. Hopefully they’ll be back better than ever sometime soon.

Rest in peace, GOG. For a little while. Then come back as an awesome zombie who wants to sell us old games rather than eat our brains.

WHATAREYABUYIN’?

#oneaday, Day 244: Halo? More Like…

I have a peculiar and complex relationship with the first-person shooter genre of gaming. On the one hand, I have very fond memories of growing up playing Wolfenstein 3D and Doom. In fact, as I may have shared before, such was my obsession with Wolfenstein 3D and the early days of the mod scene, that 10 of my levels are part of the official Apogee “Super Upgrades” expansion pack, a feat which netted me $200 and means that I can technically call myself a professional game developer.

On the other hand, I have vivid memories of playing Halo, Gears of War and Modern Warfare 2 and getting inordinately frustrated with sequences that are so difficult they require you to play, die, play, die, play, die, play, die, sometimes for hours at a time until you figure out the way to beat that particular sequence.

Such is the experience I’m having with Halo: Reach at the moment. There’s no denying it’s a great game, and the sheer amount of stuff that Bungie have crammed into the game is incredible. The fact that any mode can be played in multiplayer, and the fact that Forge World actually allows the construction of some truly hilarious structures, is enough to make me adore the game and praise its name for all eternity.

What was almost enough to make me fling it out of the window, though, was the Campaign mode. I had played through the mission called “The Long Night of Solace” and was reaching the end of it. Those who have played that mission will know it’s the awesome one that includes space combat. As a matter of fact, the space combat was so good I happily proclaimed on Twitter that I’d play a whole game based on that engine. And I stand by that. It was stunning. Not only that, it allowed a full 360 degrees of movement, which is practically unheard of in console-based space sims. So hats off to Bungie for that.

Unfortunately, all of the hard work that mission did to convince me that yes, Halo is not all that bad really, was promptly undone by the very last sequence of that mission. Here, you get jumped by about six Elite Specialist enemies, all of whom are armed with weapons that are quite capable of one-shot killing you. Not only that, but they spread out around the room so there is no place where you can find cover. Not only that, your companion who, it should be added, has an absolutely fucking massive gun and is invincible, is utterly useless at killing them, so of course it’s up to Muggins, sorry, Noble Six, to save the day.

I must have repeated that sequence a good thirty or forty times. By the end of it I was literally screaming obscenities at the television. I was very glad that no-one else was in the house.

“Well, then,” you may say. “Don’t play the Campaign mode. Play the stuff you do like.” But… Achievements…

In seriousness, I do kind of want to play the Campaign mode through to its conclusion because of my good friend Mr George Kokoris‘ regular assertions that Halo‘s lore is, in fact, far more in-depth and interesting that “OMG SPACE MARINEZ AND ALIENZ LOL”. And to be fair, thus far I’ve mostly enjoyed the Campaign. I just find it a pity that there are short sequences such as the one I’ve described above that (temporarily at least) spoil the experience. It causes a curious ping-ponging effect where I bounce back and forth between loving and hating the game. Sometimes I get stuck on the “hate” part, and it’s for that reason I never beat the original Gears of War and have no interest in the remainder of the series. There was one sequence that involved a sniper who repeatedly one-shotted me in that game that eventually caused me to turn it off, put it in its box, trade it in and never speak of it ever again except to slag it off.

Hopefully it won’t come to a fit of nerd rage with Reach. At least there’s plenty of other stuff to enjoy if the Campaign does get too much.

#oneaday, Day 243: Fun Things To Do in the Dark

I like the darkness. It lends further credence to my own theory that I am, in fact, a vampire. I can happily stay awake all night if necessary, find the night-time inherently appealing and drink blood. Actually, I don’t drink blood. Forget that last bit. DOMINATE! There. You’ve forgotten all that vampire talk now, right? Good.

But the darkness is good. It’s an eternal mystery, what lies out there. Even in a room you’re intimately familiar with, sitting there in the dark can put a whole new spin on things. Reach out to where you thought the wall was and grasp nothingness because it’s slightly further away than where you thought it was. Look at the tiny strip of light coming in through the gap in the curtains and wonder where it’s coming from.

And sit and think. This is not always a good thing, as the total absence of other stimuli often causes your brain to start thinking about all the things you’ve been avoiding thinking about. But it’s also an opportunity to sit and dwell on pleasant thoughts, too, assuming negative thoughts aren’t clouding your mind too much.

And if they are, you can always do one of the following things.

Torchlight

I’ve found torches and small lights fascinating since I was a young kid. When Silent Hill 2 came out, by far my favourite thing about it was the way that shadows got cast in the world as you walked around with that tiny flashlight. I’ve often sat and just shone a light around, casting shadows from different angles and looking at the way they move as the light moves around. It’s oddly hypnotic.

Shadow Puppetry

The socially acceptable alternative to the above, which looks a bit weird if you start doing it when other people are present, is shadow puppetry. Shine a light and use various bodily appendages to produce the shapes of all sorts of things. Then, inevitably, make them fight, shag and/or eat each other.

Find Your Way

In the dark? Hungry? Then live life on the edge. See if you can make your way to the fridge without turning on any lights and/or breaking your neck on the stairs. This domestic obstacle course is the ultimate test of how well you know your own house. And you’re rewarded at the other end not only by food, but by light, too. Assuming the light in your fridge works.

Scary Movies and Games

Everyone knows scary things are more scary in the dark. So flip on the TV, shut the curtains, switch off the lights, turn the speakers up loud and whack in a scary DVD or game. If you have a special someone whom you are able to either cling onto, or allow them to cling onto you, now is the time to go get them and enjoy some clingage.

Sit and Stare

Your eyes do weird things in the dark. Even though there’s nothing to look at, the way your eyes work make it feel like you can see things sometimes. Was that a real shadow over there, or are your eyes playing tricks? See how long you can stare into the darkness and see what happens. Particularly good for those who are feeling depressed, as the effort of concentrating hard on literally nothing at all will distract you from those unpleasant thoughts.

All right, those are all a bit lame. But I still like the dark. And I have done all of the above. Recently.

#oneaday, Day 242: Original and Best

I p-p-picked up a Penguin earlier (note to Americans: this is a chocolate biscuit, not an actual penguin nor a low-cost paperback reprint of a classic novel) and was dismayed to see a word on the wrapper that seems to be becoming more and more common on the foodstuffs of my childhood: “Original”.

To me, the word “Original” written on something implies “Hey! You used to like this. But very soon, we’re going to do something that utterly destroys your memories of it, like adding fifteen new flavours completely unnecessarily!” The word “Original” implies that there are soon to be “non-Original” varieties. While I certainly wouldn’t be averse to the idea of a chocolate mint or chocolate orange Penguin bar, it does seem somewhat unnecessary given that a number of other chocolate biscuit maufacturers have the whole “flavoured chocolate biscuit” thing pretty well stitched up. Similarly, Penguin have had the whole “chocolate-coated chocolate biscuit with chocolate cream filling” thing working for them for many years now. So why the change?

The ultimate sacrilege of this type I’ve seen is Rice Krispies. Rice Krispies are Rice Krispies. You can customise them with milk and sugar and those interminably homosexual mascots they have, but they’re still Rice Krispies.

Not any more! They’re “Rice Krispies: Original”, which again implies that there are soon to be “non-Original” Rice Krispies invading our cereal cupboards. The thing is, non-Original Rice Krispies already exist. They’re called Ricicles (sugary Rice Krispies) and Coco Pops (chocolatey Rice Krispies). So are we going to lose these established, recognisable and, to some (who really enjoy cereal, like, a bit too much), beloved brands? Perhaps.

Why does this happen, though? Perhaps it’s part of the growing culture we have where Choice is Good. Yes, Choice is Good. But there are some things where we don’t really need quite so much of it. Breakfast cereals and chocolate biscuits being two such examples. Mobile phone packages and varieties of bottled water are two more. Electricity tariffs. Types of coffee. Whether I want chillisaucesalad on my kebab. Too much pressure!

The upshot of all this is that people begin expecting choice in everything they do, even when it’s completely inappropriate to do so. Look at education; both the Government and parents seem to expect teachers to be able to deliver a personalised, customised experience for every child. There’s even an official “programme” for it: Every Child Matters. And yes, they do. But there are 30 children in an average classroom. And one teacher. Perhaps one or two assistants. Have you ever tried to get thirty different people, some of whom already have attention-deficit disorders, to do a selection of different things? It’s immensely difficult and nigh on impossible. But it’s expected. Because Choice is Good. Personalisation is Good. People should be able to have the experiences they want, when they want them.

So, with that in mind, balls to non-Original Penguins. They’re destroying our education system.

Possibly.

#oneaday, Day 241: The Gogglebox

Television is generally a good indication of what to expect from a country’s culture. Of course, it’s not the be-all and end-all of their cultural output. Thank God. But it does give some indication of the values of that country, the things they find entertaining and their general outlook on life.

Tonight I happened to catch a little bit of possibly the most uninspiring quiz show I’ve ever seen. It takes the very essence of England and Englishness—grey boringness; small talk about grey, boring things; reluctance to show any sort of enthusiasm whatsoever—and turns it into a spectacular example of how to get what is a pretty well-established format amazingly wrong.

The show is Eggheads. It appears to pit a team of clever people against a team of “Ha! They’re from the public! They must smell awful!” people. Presumably it’s intended to be some sort of triumphant David and Goliath situation, with, at some point, the team of great unwashed defeating the people with two brain cells to rub together.

There’s one very simple thing this programme gets wrong. Tension. Quiz shows are made by their tension. It can be created in many ways, and for many, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? is perhaps the best example, as it uses all of them. Music. Audience reactions. A host who milks the situation for all it’s worth. None of these are things that require lots of money and flashy effects to produce. They simply require a bit of personality. And, crucially, an audience.

Eggheads doesn’t have an audience. This means that even the most spectacular victory scored by the hoi-polloi is greeted by absolute, complete and utter stony silence. And this means the participants have no energy whatsoever. If they won, they’d probably just nod their head sagely and go “oh, thank you.” It’s the televisual equivalent of when you find yourself sitting outside the headmaster’s office and all you can hear is the ticking of a grandfather clock. Assuming you went to the kind of school that had grandfather clocks in it.

Contrast this with even the most cheap and nasty of American game shows and you’ll see a very different side of things. You’ll see participants whooping, hollering, cheering, jumping around and generally acting like they’re happy to be there. Of course, you have to be in the right mood to find this entertaining, as overzealous enthusiasm can be just as grating as stark boringness if you’re in the wrong frame of mind. But it somehow seems rather more appropriate for the game show format than what I witnessed tonight.

As for Japanese game shows? They do stuff like this. Kind of like The Generation Game. But, you know, good.

#oneaday, Day 240: Making your Mark

It’s odd (and not a little morbid) to think about the things that you leave behind that people might remember you by. Those little marks you make on the world, whether they’re physical marks scrawled on a toilet door with permanent marker pen, mental marks left in the mind of people or now, technological marks, too.

There’ll always be a little trace of me left in Southampton thanks to largely-pointless but fun geotagging app Gowalla. When I first downloaded said app, there weren’t many people using it but I liked the idea of it. Go out, walk around, “collect” places. If nothing else, it was a nice way of building yourself your own custom tourist map of a place.

So on more than one occasion, I went out for a walk with the specific intention of creating a bunch of Spots around Southampton. This became something of an obsession, with the vast majority of Spots around the city centre being created by me. General way of telling: if it has a lengthy and slightly sarcastic description, or is the kind of thing you wouldn’t find on a typical tourist map (such as “The Pedestrian Crossing That Makes The Funny Noise”), it was probably created by me.

Now, as pointless as Gowalla is in many respects, there are many reasons why it’ll always hold a fond place in my heart. Firstly, as I say, it’s been my way to leave my mark on Southampton. I “found” these places and tagged them the way I wanted them to be tagged. This means that Greggs on East Street will forever be remembered as “fine dining for chavs”. At least until they realise and ask politely for the description to be changed. Which, let’s face it, they probably won’t.

But the second reason is that my wandering around, creating these spots, marking my territory (as it were… albeit with less piss than is usually implied by that phrase) caused me to meet one of my dearest friends from that city. She happened to use Gowalla, stumbled across some of my sarcastically-described Spots and decided that the person who tagged Greggs as such was someone she’d like to get to know better. So we progressed from stalking each other via Gowalla, to tracking each other down on Twitter, to chatting on Twitter, to finally meeting face to face. It was one of those random instances of chaos theory at work, where one little choice made slightly differently would have meant we’d never have met. And, given what was going on in my life at the time we met, and how much she helped me through that difficult time, that would have made things go very differently for me.

So I’m certainly glad that I’ve left a “mark” on a few places over time, be it physically, emotionally or technologically. Because you never know when those marks might lead to something great, even after you’re gone.

#oneaday, Day 239: Brain Fart

The term “brain fart” is one of those things that always makes me giggle. This is because I am English, and thus anything that involves the word “fart” is automatically hilarious. You can imagine the chaos that ensued in German lessons at school when we discovered that the German word for “father” is pronounced “farter”.

But I digress, before I’ve even started.

Brain farts are conclusive evidence that the human race still has scope to evolve further. There is no rational explanation for why we should experience such ridiculous lapses in judgement, memory and perception. But we do. Every single day. And every time it happens, we feel utterly ridiculous and very glad that, usually, no-one was around to see our stupid action.

The three examples above are all things that everyone has surely done, and probably recently. But there are hundreds of examples throughout everyday life. You don’t even have to be up and about and doing anything.

Take writing, for example. One of my favourite brain farts that occurs whilst writing is the inadvertent creation of portmanteau words. This happens because my brain writes faster than my fingers can type. My fingers can type pretty fast (85wpm, fact fans) but my brain is faster by virtue of the fact that it doesn’t have to actually move or indeed do anything except think. As such, I occasionally find myself thinking of the next word as I’m typing the previous one, and end up typing the end of the next word onto the current one. Let’s say that for whatever reason I am typing the words “dribbling mandibles”. I’ll start typing “dribbling” and maybe get as far as “drib” before my brain has already jumped ahead to the end of “mandibles”, meaning I’ll end up typing “dribdibles”, which clearly isn’t a word but should be. Fortunately I usually catch these when they happen. I’m actually quite tempted now to write a whole post where I leave all of them in and see if the text is still understandable.

Of course, being conscious of said brain farts renders them immediately impossible to recreate, so I’d just end up producing my own peculiar language and retreating into my own little world and having another kind of brain fart like I am right now where I get distracted halfway through a sentence and forget exactly what the point I was trying to make was, or indeed how to finish said sentence which means it runs on forever and ever until I finally decide to stop it decisively. Like that.

The worst kind of brain fart, though, is the one where you forget someone’s name. Usually immediately after they’ve told you it. Inevitably, you will be thrust into some sort of situation where you are required to introduce the people you are with to someone else whose name you may or may not remember, and you’ll introduce one of them in the hope that they’ll pick up on your imperceptible signals (so imperceptible that you’re not actually doing anything other than thinking “PLEASE TELL THEM YOUR NAME” really hard) and take you out of this hideous situation. But it never goes that way. Fortunately, most people are polite enough to fill an awkward silence and not point out that you’ve clearly forgotten some information that was put into your brain not two minutes previously.

So brain farts are fun. And rubbish. That is all.

What, you wanted something more profound? I’ve had a hard week.

#oneaday, Day 238: Nerd Rage

As a new acquaintance from Twitter would say, nerd rage is one of the most formidable forces known to Man. It is a dreadful and terrible force, both specific and unfocused at the same time, often showing itself via the personification of inanimate objects who really don’t know any better and are just attempting to do their job and failing. Raging at said inanimate objects or poorly-constructed pieces of software rarely does any good, but it is commonly assumed that it makes one “feel better”.

As the years have passed, though, everyone’s bullshit-tolerance threshold has lowered significantly to the stage we’re at now, where if something doesn’t work immediately and instantly and then remain working 100% of the time, people blow their top and spew their vitriol to whoever will listen, which is usually the Internet. Assuming the Internet connection isn’t the thing which is causing the nerd rage, in which case alternative outlets have to be explored.

This is why issues such as the Xbox 360’s infamous “red ring of death” smart so much. Not only is it a shoddy flaw in the system which should never happen in the first place, but people’s tolerance for such shoddiness is far lower now than it would have been, say, twenty or thirty years ago. Hell, in the days of the NES, everyone was quite happy to accept the fact that if a game didn’t boot up first time, it clearly and obviously meant that you had to blow in it to “get the dust out” despite no actual evidence that it was actually dust causing the game not to work correctly. And no evidence that those tiny flecks of gob that probably got into the cartridge circuitry while you were blowing in it actually helped matters, either.

It’s also why we get such whingers in places such as Apple’s App Store. “OMG 1 STAR COZ IT DIDNT WORK ONCE THIS IS A DIGSRACE REFUND PLZ”. “Is it working now?” “Yes, but…” (etc.)

It’s fair enough to want things to “just work”. Apple in particular like to pride themselves on the fact that their products “just work” (which they do approximately 95% of the time, which means the remaining 5% incites nerd rage of a degree you’ve never seen before, particularly amongst recent converts and/or Android users). But it’s worth remembering a time not so long ago when we enjoyed tape load errors, boot errors, numerical error codes you had to look up in a book, garbled graphics, tape decks that chewed up tapes and then spat them out, CD players that seemed to deliberately wait for you to insert your favourite disc then sprout internal blades to scratch the crap out of it and dial-up network connections where it was possible to get a “busy” signal for hours at a time. And there was no Internet to spew your vitriol over back then.

Nowadays we have complicated devices and software that no-one except superhumans understand really, and established solutions such as blowing on it, shaking it, hitting it, shouting at it, turning it off and back on again and setting fire to it don’t work. So the only thing left to do is get frustrated. And possibly call up one of those superhumans. Because everybody knows at least one. (Note: If you don’t know a superhuman nerd or don’t want to bother them, you can save yourself a lot of time by referring to this chart.)

In other news, the router here is rubbish and crap and I hate it and it disconnects Xbox LIVE every five minutes when I’m playing Fable II and it doesn’t like WordPress and SRSLY who uses AOL nowadays anyway and… (repeat to fade)

#oneaday, Day 237: Town and Country

I’ve experienced both town and country life for significant proportions of my life, now. My childhood and teenage years were spent living in a country village which had a shop, a couple of pubs and not a lot else. Then I spent my university and beginning of my “adult” life in various urban areas, mainly Southampton. In said urban areas, there were lots of shops, lots of pubs and lots of over things too. Now I am back in the former place. (The country. Keep up.)

I’m in two minds as to which I prefer. On the one hand, it’s nice to live in the city and be able to walk to anything you want to do. On the flip side to this first hand (there may be a few hands, so be prepared) are the things I’ve commented on before; the casual rule-breaking, the dirt, the filth, the chavs, the people who think it’s acceptable to talk shit at you in the street when you’ve never met them before, the fact that the police come out any time there’s a football match, the fact that dogs shit in the street… wait, there was something good in there, I’m sure…

On the other hand (that’s two, keep count) the country is quiet, peaceful, serene. You can go for a walk outside and not meet anyone else, least of all someone who wants to call you something unpleasant. As a matter of fact, if you do run into someone in the country, they’ll probably politely say “hello” or “good morning” to you, which is a practice that would probably get you a punch in the neck in most built-up areas around the UK. They’ll probably also be walking a labrador or golden retriever called Horatio or Barnabas (whose poop they will always clean up) and have a walking stick, even if they’re only in their twenties. On the flip side to this second hand (so that’s the back of hand number two) living in the country comes with its own downsides. Having a village shop is all very well, but some places don’t even have that. And there are plenty of times that the shop here has come under threat of closure due to the “scandalous” way in which some owners have run it. This being a tiny country village, of course, someone running the village shop in a way which is different to how it used to be run by people who were liked by the village is seen as a crime roughly equivalent to raping a kitten whilst butchering orphans and laughing maniacally. I apologise profusely for the mental image you may have in your head right now. Pervert.

Then there’s the fact that you actually need a car to get anywhere. This village I’m in now did, for the longest time, not have a bus stop. The nearest bus stop was two miles away. Meaning you had to drive to it. And said bus stop went to the nearest town (seven miles away) once a week for market day. And then once back again. Meaning that if you missed the one coming back, you were either stuck in St. Neots for a week (which is not a place you want to be stuck for an hour, let alone a week) or you had a long walk ahead of you.

I don’t know, though. I’ve been here for a day and a bit now and it’s been relatively peaceful. Granted, I have been housebound while shifting heavy boxes, setting up computers, TVs and consoles so I haven’t felt the need to go out and do anything just yet. Perhaps the stultifying boredom will come soon. Or perhaps I’ll feel the urge to become one of those people with a massive house, three dogs and a roaring log fire. You know, like a proper English person.

Hmm. After checking my bank balance, that may be some time off, yet. Oh well. It’s something to aim for, right?