#oneaday Day 327: Catch-up club

I missed yesterday in all the excitement. We went to Ikea and had meatballs. Yes! What a tremendously exciting day that was. I joke, of course, but it was a perfectly nice day, and the last of my time off for my birthday, so I enjoyed just having time to relax.

Today, it's back to work, although it's only a couple of days and then a long weekend for the May Day bank holiday, so it's not so bad, even if I have to endure a bunch of meetings in the meantime between now and then. I'd much rather just get on with my work, y'know?

Meetings are a scourge of modern existence. I hate Microsoft Teams and find waking up to Teams notifications one of the most depressing things imaginable, but at least if your meetings are on Teams you can get on with other things while other people are rabbiting on about bollocks you don't care about or which aren't relevant to you.

I have to give a little credit to my job here: the meetings are, for the most part, reasonably helpful and productive, and there aren't too many of them. It's not like my last job, where we would have a meeting called the "Good Morning Call" every Tuesday morning, which involved sometimes up to two hours of listening to our French colleagues very slowly reading out everything from our project management tool. When COVID hit and we all started working from home, I actually took to going back to bed while this meeting was on speakerphone (and turning my microphone and camera off, obviously) — I literally slept through pretty much every one for about six months, and no-one ever noticed.

I feel like if meetings were completely eliminated from the weekly work calendar, everyone could get so much more done. Since more often than not, meetings are used as a means of going "what stage are we at and what needs doing?", it would be far more productive for everyone to just agree that, say, on a Monday morning they just send out an email saying what they're going to be working on and if they need anything from other people. "This meeting could have been an email" is a meme for a reason, after all.

Also, people who want a "quick call" to confirm something with you rather than just putting what they want in the chat or an email can get to fuck, too. I've got shit to do, and the last thing I want to spend time doing is sitting in an environment I feel uncomfortable (video chatting) when I could be just getting on with the big pile of shit that is continuing to build up while these distractions are happening.

Ahem. Anyway. Those are my thoughts on meetings. If you can successfully run a company without endless, pointless meetings, you have my respect. Keep it up. Your employees with thank you.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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#oneaday Day 326: It's officially my birthday

It is, as promised, Actually My Birthday now, since I have been to bed since last night's post and woken up since then. I have had today (and the days surrounding it) off work for reasons I've already outlined, so today has been mostly about playing more Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and then going out for a nice pub dinner with Andie this evening. I have simple tastes.

One thing many of you will have doubtless discovered as you get older is that people inevitably find it harder and harder to buy presents for you. Gone are the days when you could circle things in the Argos catalogue and hope that one of them would be your "main" or "big" present on the big day. Nope, much more common as a grown-up to get a few little bits and pieces from your Amazon wishlist — which I'm very grateful for, by the way, those who sent such things! — and "I'll just give you some money" from the parents.

I would like to reiterate: this is fine, and not in the "room is burning around me" sense. This is good, even! Much better that one is able to get something they actually want to celebrate their birthday rather than running the risk of getting gifts they already have, gifts they don't really want but are obliged to look like they like or any of the other situations in which people in 2025 are, in my experience, brazenly ungrateful.

I got some very generous monetary gifts from both my parents and my mother-in-law, both of whom are very clearly trying to spend some of their accumulated cash to minimise the impact of inheritance tax in the future. My parents' gift paid for my Nintendo Switch 2, which is nice, and my mother-in-law has bought (well, pre-ordered) me a MiSTer Multisystem 2 from Heber Electronics.

If you are unfamiliar with the latter, it's an all-in-one FPGA console designed for playing retro games from a wide variety of home computer, arcade and console systems. FPGA means something inordinately technical that I don't understand at all, but it basically means that it's the hardware pretending to be a classic system rather than a piece of software doing its best to imitate it. That means that the recreation of the experience is pretty much 1:1 of What It Was Actually Like without any sort of emulation quirks, but with modern benefits such as HDMI out, USB storage and suchlike. There are even addon thingies you can get to use original controllers and other peripherals.

To put it simply, the Multisystem 2 is a console that plays almost any retro game you can throw at it, making it a nice all-in-one, self-contained system for authentic-feeling retro game fun, on either a classic CRT or a modern HDMI display. (Or both at the same time, even!) With old gaming hardware and media becoming increasingly expensive and impractical to collect for a variety of reasons, this is a great option for just… enjoying retro games. Which, ultimately, is what I really want to do with all this stuff. And having the opportunity to easily hook it up to capture hardware via HDMI is even better, 'cause then I can share what I'm doing and what I'm interested in and the things I've discovered.

So yeah. My "big presents" this year are a Nintendo Switch 2 and a MiSTer Multisystem. Pretty great, I'd say. I know my child self would be thrilled, even if I have to wait until June for one and August for the other.

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#oneaday Day 325: It's technically my birthday

It is, as the headline says, technically my birthday, but only because it has passed midnight due to Clair Obscur: Expedition 33-related reasons. I will celebrate my "official" birthday with tomorrow's post.

I spent most of today making some videos. I haven't made any for a few weeks, and I wanted to get back into things, so I picked out a few favourites from the Atari ST back catalogue to cover. Expect videos on Star Fleet I: The War Begins!, Continental Circus and Total Eclipse very soon — all three are games that are quite dear to me for one reason or another, so I'm happy I've finally made some time to play through them and provide some commentary.

This was the first recording session in the "new" study, too, and things went well. Not that there was any reason they shouldn't, mind, since the actual layout of the study hasn't really changed, just the decor. I also have a lot more stuff "put away" when I'm not using it now, too, so it's not quite as chaotic. The tidiness is rather nice; I should try my best to keep it that way. I have succeeded thus far.

The trouble with mess is once you create a little bit of it, it then inevitably spreads to cover all available surfaces. Leave a coffee cup on the side for a day or two and more will join it. Leave wires dangling everywhere and you'll eventually reach the conclusion that "ah, it's fine" and add more wires. Leave books and magazines out rather than on the shelf, and more will gradually pile up atop them "just so you know where they are". Chaos, inevitably, ensues when all of these things happen at the same time.

I do wonder sometimes why it's so hard to keep things tidy. I remember often being told as a young'un that I should tidy my room, and I often found it a bit challenging to keep my student houses under control. I suspect at least some of it is down to autism/ADHD-adjacent considerations, as I know that some other folks who deal with these mental health issues also have similar tidiness problems.

The one thing I console myself with, even when the house is an absolute pigsty, though, is that I've never got into the "hoarder" state one person I used to know had their house in. One time we went to visit them, and I'd never been in there before. I was genuinely shocked to find a house like something off a reality TV programme: literally no floor visible underneath all the crap that was everywhere. And the whole house was like it. I didn't say anything, because it's impolite to and there are almost certainly private, personal extenuating circumstances for when a living situation gets to that state.

But I've always used that as a sort of benchmark. As long as things don't get that bad, a bit of tidying up — with a bit of moaning and complaining along the way as required — it's fine. And nowhere I've lived has ended up in that state just yet, thankfully.

Anyway, that was a stream-of-consciousness ramble of the kind you only get at 1am. Time for bed. Then I can wake up and officially be a year older. G'night!

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#oneaday Day 324: A quiet weekend

First things first: I wrote about Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 over on MoeGamer, so go give that a look if you've been curious about this game and want to hear about it from my particular perspective. I have been playing this game for most of the weekend, so it's fair to say that I like it very much indeed.

As much as I enjoy having eclectic tastes and celebrating the overlooked and underappreciated games of the world, it is nice to be able to be part of "the big conversation" once in a while. For various reasons, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has seemingly been hitting the right notes with many different types of player, which is a good thing. I hope it 1) does well and 2) inspires other developers to do something like it. Because I'm all for good RPGs that aren't The Elder Fucking Scrolls making a mainstream comeback.

Anyway, aside from that, I've got the next three days off from work because I took them off. It's my birthday on Tuesday and I'm buggered if I'm going to work on my birthday. And the days surrounding it.

I've definitely written about this before, but I'm of the firm belief that one's birthday is absolutely sacrosanct. One should never have to suffer anything "bad" on their birthday, and one should absolutely not have to work on their birthday. The last "big corporate" job I had at Garmin allowed you two extra days off per year: once for your birthday, and once for your anniversary of starting your job there. I wish that was standard practice; it was a very nice thing for them to do, and certainly a far cry from the shitty way other corporate jobs I've worked treated their employees.

I don't think we're doing anything particularly exciting or elaborate for my birthday. I suspect we'll get a nice dinner delivered from somewhere and I will drop some hints to Andie that I would like a cake of some description. I may be coming up on 44 years old, but the Inner Child is still very much present and correct, as if you needed that spelling out for you.

Ideally it would be nice to see some other folks and have a proper celebration with cake, presents and video games, but honestly, I've kind of stopped bothering trying to get people to come and see me. There have been so many excuses on so many separate occasions that I just can't be arsed right now. I know that's probably selfish and self-absorbed and other things beginning with "self", but really, there's only so many times one can take resistance and rejection before one just thinks "fuck it" and resigns oneself to a life of loneliness. At least with my wife and my cats I am not completely alone, and I am sure I will hear from my family on my birthday, too.

But anyway. The weekend is coming to a close and I probably shouldn't blast Clair Obscur: Expedition 33's soundtrack at high volume for too much longer, if only because my wife has to go to bed and get up for work tomorrow morning. But maybe just an hour or two more…

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#oneaday Day 323: Bing biddly bing bong bingy bong boooo

Regular readers will recall I started rewatching Friends a while back. I'm up to the fifth season out of ten as of the time of writing, and I'm really enjoying it.

The "culture shock" of watching it for the first time in more than ten years has mostly dissipated now, and the fact that no-one is ever seen fiddling with a mobile phone, looking things up on the Internet or experiencing life entirely through their camera lens feels pretty much natural now. Stop to think about it, and it's still clear that the world has changed a lot — mostly for the worse, I'd say, unfortunately — but after a while, Friends has, for me, shown that it has that magical "drawing you in" nature that means it doesn't matter that it's dated in some ways.

Friends was never really about a specific time period, anyway. Sure, it acts quite nicely as a snapshot of the late '90s and early (pre-smartphone) '00s now, but I'm not sure it was ever intended to be that. Instead, it was a show that was always about the people: specifically, it was about the concept of found family, and how the group of people you chose to surround yourself with was just as important as — or in some cases, more important than — those you were related to by blood.

I must admit to a certain melancholy about viewing Friends in this light, because for all the wonderful conveniences and whatnot we have today, I miss just… hanging out with friends. I miss everything from walking a couple of miles into town during a free period of sixth form in order to get peer pressured into buying a new N64 or PlayStation game. I miss skipping lectures to go play Perfect Dark. I miss Board Game and Curry Night being a regular thing. In short, I very much miss having that "found family", because in 2025… it just doesn't feel like it's there any more, for a whole manner of reasons, not just technology-related.

But at the same time this is why I find an occasional rewatch of something pleasantly familiar like Friends to be extremely comforting. I may not literally be there with the main cast — and I wasn't back at the time, either — but the nice thing about the show is how it makes you feel included. You see the ups and downs of each of the main cast's lives; you see the little in-jokes they have with one another and you understand where they came from, because you were there when they were first coined. And you root for them; even seeing what colossal dildos they all are at various points in the series — particularly both Ross and Rachel — you cannot help but root for them and wish them happiness.

And the nice thing is, you know they get that happiness, because it's that kind of show. Even if you've never seen the show all the way to the end, you almost certainly know what at least some of the main "resolutions" are going to be. Arguably it's only really Joey who is left without a real sense of wrapping things up neatly — and his spin-off series didn't really fix that either, though I must confess I haven't seen it — but even so, one gets the feeling he's probably going to be all right.

It's a bit sad how many of the Friends cast are no longer with us. Matthew Perry was, of course, a tragic loss a couple of years back, and I was sad to learn recently that James Michael Tyler, who played the recurring coffee house barista Gunther, passed away in 2021. Add this to the fact that several people from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, which I watched all the way through a while back, are also no longer of this world, and it's a little bit sobering. At least they all have a wonderful legacy to leave behind.

This got a little more morbid than intended, but whatchagonnado. Friends is still a wonderful thing, and I am really enjoying my rewatch of it. There's nothing quite like returning to the media you loved in your formative years to bring a teensy bit of comfort to the bleakness of modern existence. If you haven't done it for a while, I highly recommend it.

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#oneaday Day 319: Construction complete

You wanted to see photos of the finished study/office/retro gaming room, right? No? Well tough titty, you're seeing them anyway, because my wife worked her arse off on this all week, then I did a bit of work putting stuff back where it's supposed to be. The results are, I hope you'll agree, striking and pleasing.

First, a slightly out-of-date "before" shot, if it please you:

The whole thing was getting a bit cluttered, so we had a bit of a clear-out a while back. With a heavy heart, I packed away the "real hardware" Atari computers, since the vast majority of stuff I do with them for video is via emulation anyway, and those went in the loft. A bunch of the software that didn't really need to be on display — mostly stuff like productivity software for the Atari ST, and big box PC games I didn't have a means of installing (and which, in most cases, I had digital copies of anyway) — also went in the loft.

Over on the desk on the right, I also upgraded to a two-monitor setup to use with the mini PC I bought a while back, so I could make the room dual purpose: retro gaming space and home office. Aside from those changes, this is pretty much the state of the room before. Note the grotty horrible carpet that came with the house and the unnecessary wall-mounted TV. (We put that in with the intention of using it for Chromecasting YouTube videos and suchlike, but I never used it, so my wife has reclaimed it to put in her shed.)

Behold, then, the glorious transformation that has unfolded over the last week!

Would ya look at that? A few simple changes and it looks like there's much more space. Plus you will hopefully notice the subtle change in overall design, colour scheme and theming. My wife wanted to go loud with the decor in here, to fit with the "retro" vibe. I wasn't entirely convinced on her colour choices to begin with, particularly the yellow, but I had also made a moderate deal out of not really caring what colours she picked, because, frankly, I didn't.

Y'see, I grew up in a house where the default was to paint the walls white. This isn't a criticism of my parents; it made for a nice, consistent, clean look throughout the whole house that could then be supplemented with additional wall decorations such as pictures, bookshelves, ornaments and suchlike. It works for them, and with the house having looked that way for so long now, I wouldn't have it any other way, even if as a kid I sometimes wished they wouldn't be so boring every time they painted a room.

To be fair, I don't remember them redecorating any rooms very often, which is the one benefit of painting them something plain: you don't really need to redo them unless you damage them significantly, which never happened in my time living in that house. The one major change they've made since I moved out is expanding the downstairs toilet into a full-on shower room, replacing a little weird closety alcove thing that used to be at one end of the entrance hallway.

But I digress. Fact is, I grew up in a house that was predominantly painted white, and thus I never really developed any particularly strong preferences about decor. Walls were just walls.

Andie had a plan, though, so I trusted in her sense of style (which has done the rest of our house proud, to be fair) and allowed her to do her thing, painting the coving, skirting boards, doors, frames and radiator bright yellow, with a contrasting deep turquoise for the walls and ceiling. Two walls would be a sort of "feature" with that incredibly loud wallpaper.

One of the main reasons Andie wanted to do up this room was not to change its design and colour scheme, but to replace that horrible carpet. And, she figured, since we'd have to rip everything out to do the floor, we may as well change up the design a bit also.

We've replaced nearly all our carpets across the whole house with laminate flooring now; at this point, only the spare bedroom still has carpet; all of the rest save for the toilet (tiles) and bathroom (vinyl flooring) is laminate floor. It's a change for the better; much easier to keep clean (particularly with cats) and it just looks plain nice. It gives rooms a nice feeling of space that grotty old carpet just doesn't quite provide. I might feel differently if we had had nice carpets in here originally, but we emphatically did not.

We took the opportunity to tidy up my setup a bit, also. Rather than having everything connected all at once, I decided to put just the main console units on display on the shelves, and keep the SCART cables and power adapters in an easily accessible set of drawers beneath one of the desks. That way, if I want to play on a particular console, I can just bring it down off the shelf, pick out the appropriate cables, hook it up and play.

To better facilitate this, we also invested in some desktop plug sockets, which are a brilliant thing. No more ferreting around behind the desk to plug and unplug things, which was always a nightmare even when I wasn't as fabulously fat and unfit as I am now. Now I just plug and unplug from the desktop itself. Sorted.

Here's Patti checking out the Atari ST games. Yes, I know the spine for Hostages is the other way around to all the other games. For some reason, a significant number of French games insisted on printing their spines the opposite way around to literally everything else on the ST. Ah, the French, and all that.

And here's Patti offering her thoughts following her inspection of the entire room. I think she approves. I certainly do.

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#oneaday Day 318: Renovations, again

My wife has very kindly spent the last week renovating my study, and we spent the vast majority of today putting stuff back into it. She's replaced the horrible carpet with laminate flooring to match (most of) the rest of the house, painted a couple of walls and put some exceedingly 80s-inspired wallpaper up on two of the walls. We're not quite finished putting everything back in there yet, but I'll be sure to share some photos when everything is where it should be.

Like most projects like this, it's been an opportunity to take stock of what I have, what I want to keep out and readily accessible, and what can safely go in the loft or bin. We already had a fairly ruthless clearout of stuff into the loft a few weeks back, but these renovations have been the next step. While it is nice to have all one's Stuff out and accessible, there comes a point where you have to consider if you're really ever going to use Timeworks DTP for Atari ST, or if it was just out on the shelves because it looked nice on the shelves.

The basic summary of what we've done is thus: I've kept out all the Atari ST games and the few Atari 8-bit games I have non-pirated copies of. These are both a nice backdrop for my videos and handy to refer to when making said videos, even though I actually make the videos using emulation of various descriptions rather than real hardware. The real Atari 8-bits and STs have, regrettably, made their home in the loft for the moment, as although I love using them both and will never fully get rid of them, emulation for both is in such a good place now that there's really little benefit to having the real things out, particularly as video capture from emulation is about a zillion times easier than capturing from real hardware.

I've also rethought my previous setup of having all the consoles hooked up and ready to go, with just a SCART cable needing changing to switch between them. Instead, I have just the consoles out on display on the shelves, and the power bricks and SCART/aerial cables are in a set of drawers under the desk, easily accessible. This means I don't have to worry about the horrific tangle of wires that was down the back of the desk, particularly as we've fitted some desktop plug sockets to make plugging in and unplugging stuff super-easy. It also leaves me with a lot more desk space, and means that I can play with the console a bit closer to me when I do want to use the real hardware — very helpful for easily changing cartridges or just hitting "reset" to go back to the various Everdrive menus.

The one thing we haven't quite had the energy to do today is move my home office back to where it should be. I'm going to continue working from the downstairs living room for tomorrow, and we're going to take care of putting the office stuff back in its appropriate place tomorrow evening. Then it will all be done, and I will share photographs and you will be in awe. Or at least you'll think "that looks like quite a nice room", I hope.

Anyway, we're both very tired, so it's time for a nice sit down and then a big sleep. Or, at least, a regular-sized sleep until we both have to get up for work tomorrow. Boo!

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#oneaday Day 317: Kitchen essentials

I'm not a particularly amazing cook or anything, but I do make a decent chilli and curry. Over the years, my wife and I haven't been super-extravagant in the things we've bought for our kitchen, but in the last couple of years or so in particular, we've come across a few things that are pretty much essentials, and which I recommend anyone who spend any amount of time in the kitchen, regardless of ability level, should invest in.

The first is simple: non-stick pans that are actually non-stick. We'd been working with the same pans for a long time, but a few trips to Lidl ago, my wife picked up a couple of new frying pans that she thought looked both decent and reasonably priced. Reader, they are a marvel. I do wonder how long they will remain this way, but certainly right now, frying anything in them is an absolute pleasure.

Absolutely nothing gets stuck to the bottom, even with my typically rather aggressive approach to heat management (somewhat unavoidable with induction hobs, in my experience) and this, in turn, means that they're very easy to clean. And as we all know, chipping burnt-on crap off the bottom of pans is no fun at all. So save yourself the hassle; spend the money and get some decent non-stick pans.

The second is an air fryer. I know it's a haha funny meme (for some reason) to enthuse about air fryers, but seriously, if you don't have one, get one. Not only is it good for "frying" stuff without immersing it completely in oil, it also makes an excellent substitute for your oven if you're cooking small stuff, like, say, a portion of chips or some breaded chicken breasts.

It will take you a little experimentation to convert "oven" times to "air fryer" times (you generally need quite a bit less time — in my experience, anywhere between 50-75% of the stated oven time) but once you've nailed that, it's so much more convenient. And, like the non-stick pan approach, air fryer trays are a lot easier to clean than a whole-ass oven.

You can get cheap air fryers, but I would recommend you splash the cash a bit and go for a good one, preferably one that has multiple baskets. We have a Ninja one and it's great. The two baskets can be set up independently, and even "synced" with one another so the second one comes on after the first one has been cooking for a certain amount of time. No more bunging everything in the oven for the same amount of time and hoping for the best!

I will also note that an air fryer makes a surprisingly good toasted cheese sandwich. It's not quite up to Breville standards, but it's a whole lot less messy to clean up afterwards. If all you care about is that your cheese sandwich goes "crunch" a bit, then air frying a cheese sandwich is a great thing.

The third thing is a rice cooker. These come in all manner of levels of complexity, but ours is a super-simple one: you just pop in the amount of rice you want, add an appropriate amount of water (in my experience, roughly twice as many cups of water as you have rice) then turn it on and leave it. Pretty much perfect rice every time, though ours does have a tendency to stick a bit to the bottom. It's easy enough to clean, though, because the main pain is removable and can even be stuck in the dishwasher if you're super lazy.

Between these three things that I've outlined above, we cook almost everything we eat. They are, without a doubt, the best kitchen investments we've ever made — and if you're lacking any or all of them, I highly recommend adding them to your kitchen, too.

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#oneaday Day 313: Memories of Me: the curious intimacy of school concerts

As a Kid Who Could Do Music, I was involved in performances of various kinds from a pretty early age. I have fairly vivid memories of, as a primary school-age kid, participating in the Bedford Music Festival, at which I would play piano duets and trios with other equally young pianists from my local area who were studying under the same teacher. I remember taking the Yamaha YS-200 keyboard to my Nan and Grandad's house to put on "concerts" for them, complete with synthesised applause when I finished a piece. And, of course, when we had visitors, I was often asked to play for them on my piano at home.

It wasn't until secondary school that I really started doing a lot of public performance, though. I joined a number of the musical groups at my school, including the concert band, jazz band (known as Dance Band), orchestra and choir, and through being a member of those groups (as well as my solo performance abilities), I participated in, I think, pretty much every school concert that happened between me joining the school in Year 7 and my leaving it after Year 13.

I absolutely loved school concert night, for a whole host of reasons. Firstly, it was simply fun to perform: to take all the hard work we'd done in each group's weekly rehearsals and finally show off what we'd accomplished. I don't remember any major disasters happening at any time, either; the leaders of the various groups (also the school's main music teachers) were all pretty fastidious about ensuring we could perform things to the best of our ability, and they also seemed to make good choices of pieces that were appropriate to the overall ability level of the group as a whole.

For those who have never performed as part of a large ensemble, it's quite something. Your part might not stand out as the most important or recognisable, but every instrument playing something plays an important role in the overall texture and timbre of the piece being played. If you're playing it right, people might not notice you as an individual performer — though this does, of course, have the side effect that if you play it wrong, people will definitely notice.

For me, it was satisfying to be part of something bigger than myself. It was fascinating to see a rather tedious 3rd Clarinet part actually having some importance to a greater whole. And it was wonderful to feel a connection with the people around you, all of whom were there for a common purpose: to make music, to entertain people, and to express themselves.

I think this is a big part of the reason that I always found school concerts to be immensely romantic occasions. I've talked before about how, throughout secondary school, I fell in love with a lot of girls, and many of these flights of what were ultimately passing fancy started on the evening of a school concert. There was something curiously intimate about sitting next to someone in the middle of a large ensemble, performing with them, supporting one another. That feeling of connection was even stronger with the other members of your section, and particularly with your partner on your specific part.

And so it was that I inevitably came away from each school concert feeling like I was on cloud nine, not just for a satisfying performance that had gone down well with the supportive audience of parents and teachers; not just for the feeling that there was something in this world that I was good at, that gave me value; not just for the praise I got from my teachers, my peers and other parents, particularly when I performed solo; but because I had, through the music, enjoyed what I felt was an incredibly intimate moment of connection with another person.

I'm almost certain that my fellow 3rd Clarinet partners at various points didn't feel the same way, which is why I never attempted to "make a move" on anyone — not that I had the confidence to do that, anyway. But for that evening, that wonderful, romantic, evening when the school concert took place, I felt genuine happiness and closeness with other people, quite unlike at any other time in my life.

I kind of miss it. I haven't been a member of a musical ensemble for a very long time and my clarinets and saxophones haven't been out of their cases for many years, either. But I still have those pleasant memories; the recollection of the feelings that I felt at the time. It didn't matter that they were one-way or unrequited; to have just been there in the moment was enough, and that's what makes those memories intensely, deeply precious to me.

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#oneaday Day 312: Memories of Me: the teachers who inspired me

I've talked before about how I think my schooldays, and particularly my time in Sixth Form (which was at the same school) were among the happiest times of my life. Once I'd got over an initial bout of bullying in Year 7, of course, which was resolved by me punching my tormentor firmly in the face just as the headmaster was coming around the corner.

One of the reasons I think back so fondly on my time at school — particularly secondary school, which is what I'm going to focus on today — is because I had a lot of great teachers who inspired me, encouraged me, recognised the things I was good at and generally did a great job of making me feel like I wasn't a completely worthless human being with terrible hair, atrocious dress sense and a complete inability to socialise normally. (Retrospectively, of course, I recognise that the latter aspect — and perhaps some of the others too — stem from my autism, but I didn't know that back then.)

I thought I'd describe a few of them today. I don't know what happened to any of them after I left school, as I didn't stay in touch with any of them — something I kind of regret a bit, now — but I can say, with confidence, that they made a positive impact on my life in some way, and the memories I have of the time I spent learning with them are some of my most treasured.

Let's think through subject by subject.

In the English department, I had a run of excellent teachers over the course of the years of both compulsory and post-compulsory education. There was Ms Derbyshire, who reminded everyone of Victoria Wood with her general demeanour and tone, and who had a delightful sense of humour. There was Mr Bowie, who was probably the "coolest" teacher in school, who knew his stuff and managed to be knowledgeable without being a nerd. He taught me about Jeff Buckley. There was Miss Idziacysyk (I think that's how you spell it — it's been a very long time since I wrote it and Google is no help!), who took no shit but was also a really knowledgeable teacher of both English Language and English Literature. And there was Mr Lack, who was a kind and gentle soul unless you pissed him off.

In Maths, I should give particular praise to Mr Wilbraham, who had a… strange reputation to anyone who had never taken classes with him — a reputation I shan't repeat out of respect for him… and the fact we never really knew if it was true or not — but who turned out to be an excellent, friendly, supportive and good-natured teacher. I disliked Maths intensely, but I put up with it and somehow managed to remain in the top group for it throughout the entire time I was forced to take it, and the lessons with Mr Wilbraham in Year 10 and 11 were probably the closest I had to "favourite Maths lessons".

In Science, I had a lot of great teachers, too. There was Miss Bartlett, who everyone fancied because she had long blonde hair and wore quite short skirts, but who also got us involved in doing practical experiments pretty much from our first lesson in Year 7. There was Mr Allured, who had a booming voice you could hear a mile off, and a personality (and moustache) that made him feel like everyone's dad. And there was Mr Maskell, who looked like Harry Secombe and was a cheerful soul, always keen to show us his "volcano" experiments in the fume cupboard.

Music was a focus of my time at secondary school, and I had a wonderful time studying with, at various times Mrs Choy-Winters, Mr Murrall, Mr Wrigley and Miss Garrick. Each had their own specialisms, but all were incredibly supportive of me, and keen to make use of the fact that my musical skills, particularly on the piano, were significantly ahead of pretty much all of the rest of the school. I ended up doing a lot of accompanying various musical groups during my time at school; school concert nights were some of my favourite times of the year. There's probably a whole post in me just on school concerts, so I'll save any further discussion of that for then. I will just add that I have recurring mild nightmares about disappointing my Music teachers and no-one else from this list.

I managed to wangle things at GCSE so I could do Theatre Studies alongside Music instead of having to do an Art or Technology class I really didn't want to do. There was only one drama teacher at our school, known as Miss Unsworth — although the headteacher Mr Cragg occasionally taught drama lower down the school — and she was quite the character. She was definitely a "theatre person", and she taught us a lot both through our lessons and in the productions of The Wizard of Oz and Twelfth Night I took part in during my time at school.

In Modern Languages, we had the good fortune to have a native German speaker known as Herr Haubert. We used to take the piss a bit because of his somewhat stern attitude, his rather severe moustache and the fact he perpetually smelled of spearmint — for some reason, our teenage selves became convinced that this was because he was always chewing mint flavoured condoms, not actual mints or gum, which would have made more sense — but I can't deny that he was a good teacher. Immersing us in the target language right from the first lesson, I can still remember a decent amount of German that I learned in those classes. Not enough to be confident or fluent, but definitely enough to get by in an absolute emergency.

In the Humanities, or "Hums", we had several great teachers. There was Mr Watts, who was our formidable head of Sixth Form, an excellent history teacher and someone who didn't believe anyone under the age of 15 had any right to exist in his line of sight; Mr Mason, an ageing hippie who taught Geography and could bring an entire class to silence by lowering the volume of his voice rather than raising it; and Mrs Lloyd, who helped make my A-Level Sociology studies entertaining and fascinating.

I had a look back at my school's website, knowing full well that I was there a very long time ago at this point and thus was unlikely to see any familiar names, and I was proven correct. I suspect many of the people I've just mentioned have retired or perhaps even passed on by this point, which is somewhat humbling to think about. Wherever they are and whatever they're doing, though, I hope they know that they had an impact on me, and that I still think about them very fondly. It's true that your school days play a crucial role in defining who you are — and the teachers who guide you through those school days are an incredibly important part of that.

So thanks to all of the teachers of my youth, both the ones I've mentioned and the ones I've inevitably forgotten. My life may not have gone exactly as planned in numerous ways, but I always felt I had a solid foundation to build from, and it was all thanks to them.

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