1797: Holiday Season

It was my last day of work before the Christmas holidays today, and I am very ready for a break.

Once again my mind is drawn to the fact that Christmas has become a less enjoyable, less meaningful event in my life with each passing year. The day itself normally ends up being fun — at least the part up to and including opening presents and eating lunch, after which comes the slightly uncomfortable part where no-one’s quite sure if it’s socially acceptable to go off and play with their respective presents — but that excitement that I’m sure used to be there is no longer present.

Perhaps it’s to do with the fact I tend not to send cards any more. I haven’t done for several years, largely because it seems like a whole lot of hassle for not a lot of gain. Or is that even true? It’s certainly nice to receive a card from people who have made the effort — particularly those who are overseas, who oddly seem to make far more of an effort than my friends closer to home — but I haven’t felt the motivation to write any of my own cards for years now, and I don’t tend to receive all that many either. (I’m not sure many people do any more, to be honest, though I could be horribly mistaken and actually be some sort of social pariah, which isn’t beyond the realm of possibility.)

Cards used to be an exciting time, though, particularly back at school. I’d get one of those big bumper packs of cards, mentally sort them from “best” to “worst” (and within “best”, into “funny” and “vaguely romantic; suitable for people I fancy”) and set about writing a significant number of them over the course of an evening or two. I’d then proceed to hand them out, either by hand or using the “post” service that the school sometimes ran around Christmas time, and then wait to get some in return. Then there came that magical moment where I’d open a card, see that someone I quite wanted to get off with had written “love” (perhaps with kisses) instead of just “from” and I’d get all excited, my mind firmly in denial as to the fact that they’d probably written it in everyone’s cards, not just mine. I’d ensure, if I hadn’t sent them one already, that they got one of my “best” cards in exchange.

I don’t know. Maybe I’m missing a trick here. Cards are often cited as a good opportunity to remind people you care about (or at least think about occasionally) that you still exist. With the fact that I’ve been feeling a little bit isolated over the course of the last — few months? Few years? Certainly a while now — perhaps it would be in my interest to use cards to try and reach out to a few people I haven’t seen for a while.

Or perhaps it’s a futile gesture, encouraged as a means of card manufacturers to squeeze more and more money out of us every year as we’re convinced that we have some sort of obligation to send small rectangles of cardboard to as many people as possible around this time of year, when in fact all we want to do is be left alone in a bit of peace and quiet to enjoy our turkey and presents.

One or the other. Either way, I’m happy it’s the holidays, and hopefully the Christmas period will be a restful, relaxing time for everyone.

1796: Read Me a Story

Since I was getting really quite frustrated with my daily commute to and from work — there is no good time of the day where you can set out and head back without getting caught in a traffic jam with seemingly no cause — I decided to try something a bit different with my audio entertainment for said journey.

Rather than listening to the radio, with its same five adverts and playlist of approximately twelve songs, or the same albums on my phone over and over again, I decided to listen to some audiobooks.

I’ve listened to audiobooks a few times over the years, most recently when I was in the habit (that I should probably get back into) of taking a long walk most days. They provide a good accompaniment to tedious activities like walking or driving, and I’ve found they’ve had a positive effect on my mood overall, even when the M27 is at its most frustrating. The fact that I can tune out the fact I’m moving at approximately 15mph on a road designed to be travelled along at 70mph+ and instead concentrate on an unfolding narrative is pleasurable, and getting to spend more time immersing myself in a story becomes nice rather than frustrating.

The audiobooks I’ve been listening to most recently belong to a genre I haven’t read a lot of in the past: crime fiction. I can’t remember how I first came on to the Kay Scarpetta series by Patricia Cornwell, but I’ve been enjoying them so far: I’m currently about a third of the way through the third book.

For the unfamiliar, the Kay Scarpetta series follows the eponymous heroine, the chief medical examiner for Virginia, and her obligatory “buddy” cop Pete Marino. The two have an enjoyable working relationship and rapport with one another, Kay being rather sensible for the most part — with occasional lapses in judgement and a tendency to attract the main villain of each book to cause some sort of dramatic final confrontation in the closing chapters — and Marino being brash, outspoken and not always entirely tactful.

The stories are interesting when compared to other crime fiction I’ve encountered — be it in books, on TV, in games or in movies — in that the main focus isn’t on the police investigation, the work of an agent on the case or a private investigator. Rather, Kay is essentially a civilian, albeit one with access to information about the corpses that show up in each novel that the public would probably rather not know about. This doesn’t stop her ending up embroiled deep in the mysteries, however, and indeed it’s usually her actions that, if they don’t outright solve the case altogether, certainly put into motion a chain of events that draws the main villain out of hiding (and usually into Kay’s bedroom) in order to be caught and/or killed.

They’re formulaic and somewhat predictable at times, in other words, but they’re filled with interesting characters, and the narrator for the audiobook versions, one Lorelei King, does an admirable job at putting on unique voices for the different characters — even if all her “male” voices tend to end up sounding terribly serious about everything they say… or perhaps this is a side-effect of Cornwell’s male characters?

Anyway. I’m enjoying the experience of listening to audiobooks, and I’ve been enjoying discovering a series of entertaining crime novels in the process. There’s plenty more where that came from, too, so I should be kept reasonably sane on my journeys to and from work for the immediate future, at least…

1791: Future Press

I was browsing Twitter earlier when I came across the following quote, retweeted by someone I follow.

“If you’re a writer writing about video games, I recommend you get your face in front of a camera to prepare for the future.”

My initial reaction to this was a fairly straightforward “fuck that“, but then I contemplated it a bit further.

I still don’t agree with the premise. The written word is a powerful medium and to unequivocally declare, as some people do, that its days are very much numbered is to show that you’re extremely blinkered. Yes, there is a large audience out there who enjoy video-based content, but they’re just one group who occupy the somewhat younger end of the spectrum. And while this is an important group to court — particularly as they’re one of the key demographics for the video game industry — this doesn’t somehow mean that all the 30-40 year olds who have grown up with computer and video games since their inception are immediately irrelevant. What it should really mean is that content should be provided to cater to these different audiences, who have very different wants, needs and expectations from media relating to their favourite things.

I’m not sure how representative an example of a 33-year old gamer I am, but personally speaking, I’m not a big fan of video-based content for the most part. I can’t stand Let’s Plays, for example — I’d rather play the game myself, and there’s no way I’m going to watch someone play The Binding of Isaac or Minecraft for literally hundreds of episodes — and I’m not a fan of the numerous variations on the “angry dude shouting about something” formula that proves quite popular.

Exceptions for me are things like TotalBiscuit’s “WTF Is…” series, in which he spends 20-30 minutes giving a good overview of a diverse array of PC games, including everything from the options available in the menu to how the game itself actually works; Yahtzee’s “Zero Punctuation” series, which doesn’t rely on game footage at all and is instead actually more of a well-written comedy series that happens to explore specific games as its central premise; and Extra Credits’ (usually) intelligent discussions of all manners of game culture. These are all carried by strong personalities and well-written content, and for me represent the best that video game videos (you heard) have to offer.

Thing is, though, I’m not always in the mood to sit down and watch a video — particularly longer stuff like TotalBiscuit’s 20-30-minute affairs. I’m not always in a particularly ideal situation to watch a video, either; perhaps I’m on my phone in an area of poor signal or in an environment where I can’t put sound on — in both those cases, this makes video almost completely useless as a medium of delivery, whereas text is absolutely fine in both scenarios.

Despite all this, though, I can sort of see why more and more people are turning to these video content producers. The overall quality of video games writing is rapidly going down the pan, to my eyes, and it’s at least partly due to the continuing reliance on the clickbait advertising model. The need for page views has lead to many individual writers (and even publications) jumping aboard the insidious and obnoxious “social justice” train, stirring up pointless Daily Mail-style moral panics and controversies at every turn under the guise of cultural criticism. Long-form pieces such as those that Polygon used to be renowned for clearly don’t draw in readers in the same numbers as a table-thumping opinion piece about how terrible it is that you can kill prostitutes in Grand Theft Auto V — and, by the way, let’s just recall that the games press a few years ago was quick to quite rightly point and laugh at any mainstream publications that pulled this still exceedingly stupid line of criticism — and thus we get more and more of these perpetually outraged pieces driving frustrated readers away from sites and towards personalities who don’t subscribe to these ridiculous, borderline hysterical viewpoints.

But it shouldn’t have to be a case of one or the other. There should be a range of different opinions and writing styles; those of us who enjoy the written word shouldn’t be pushed away from it in the direction of video by the fact that all these issues are only ever explored from one single sociopolitical perspective. That’s what’s happening, though, and unfortunately I don’t see it getting any better any time soon.

I’m glad I got out of the games press when I did. I don’t want to sit in front of a camera — I don’t look good on camera: I’m fat, I have bad hair, I’m perpetually unkempt (even when I try to be… kempt), I have terrible dress sense, I have dry skin on my face that flares up when I’m stressed and, moreover, I find it terribly difficult to act naturally when being stared down by a camera — and, on the writing side, I have absolutely no desire to become a source of further moral panics or fuel the perpetual outrage machine. So there doesn’t really feel like there’s a place for me anyway.

It’s sad, really; there’s a clear gap in the market here for some old-school media — magazines! — of the ilk we had in the ’80s, ’90s and early ’00s, but no-one seems to actually want to fill it. I can’t be the only one hungry for this sort of thing, can I?

1788: Sleepless

I am tired. Really tired.

Like, falling asleep at inappropriate moments tired. Well, maybe not quite full-on falling asleep, but I was most certainly at serious risk of it while sitting at my desk earlier.

It was that kind of tired where you think you’ll just close your eyes for a moment and refresh yourself, then “wake up” a couple of seconds later, hoping that no-one noticed you were drifting off.

It’s a frustrating kind of tired because it’s not a kind of tired you can easily get over. A cup of coffee doesn’t shift it, and it always tends to come early in the day when you can’t really get away with a nap… Particularly if you’re at work.

Fortunately I’m now at home, in bed, having watched The Apprentice, and am now ready to go to sleep. And I’m terribly sorry to not write anything more interesting at this point, but as I believe I may have mentioned earlier, I am very tired.

So I’m going to go to sleep at last. Good night!

1786: That Monday Feeling

It was Jim Davis’ comic creation fat cat Garfield that made me aware of the world’s dislike of Mondays during my formative years, but as time has passed I’ve come to appreciate the chubby orange one’s worldview. Particularly when your Monday goes as badly as mine has.

I thought I was over the bum-AIDS I’d been afflicted with for the last few days of last week and part of the weekend, and indeed most of the day passed without incident. On the way home, however, I was in a fair amount of pain and — again, I’m sorry to be sharing such revolting imagery when you may well be having your dinner or midnight snack — had to rush straight to the toilet when I got home for a fairly explosive session.

Of course, the return of bum-AIDS wasn’t quite enough to make my Monday a misery. Oh no; this morning our toilet decided to stop flushing, so even with full knowledge of the fact that I wouldn’t be able to easily dispose of my… product, I was sat there, disgusting myself, not wanting to contemplate the destruction I had left in my wake nor how I was going to set about making things right again. (Our interim solution until we fix the problem — which looks like a problem with the syphon, for any aspiring plumbers out there — is simply to throw buckets of water down the toilet. Retro.)

Of course, the return of bum-AIDS and our toilet failing to do anything resembling flushing normally wasn’t quite enough to make my Monday a misery. Oh no; my headphones broke, too. To be fair, they were only a cheap £10 JVC pair I picked up from Tesco several years ago, but they were comfortable, sounded good and had served me well for quite some time. Inexplicably, they chose to completely break as I removed them from my head as I arrived at work today, however; not just a simple “something popping out of where it should be, easily fixed” break, either — this was a proper big chunk breaking off and promptly disappearing somewhere on the floor, not that it would have done me much good to retrieve it anyway.

Of course, the return of bum-AIDS, our toilet failing to do anything resembling flushing and my headphones breaking wasn’t quite enough to make my Monday a misery. Oh no; the lanyard that holds my work ID card and keys broke, too. I don’t even know how this happened, but again, a bit just fell off, disappeared and was consequently unfixable. (Fortunately, I happened to have a spare.)

Of course, the return of bum-AIDS… are you getting the picture yet? The rubbishness just kept coming and coming and coming until by the time I got home and had finished my business I was left feeling utterly defeated by the day.

Hopefully tomorrow will be better. But right now, I’m not holding my breath. Except when I walk past the toilet.

1779: A Quiet Night In After a Night Out

I’ve pretty much come to accept by now that I don’t really “do” big social occasions. And by this I mean that I generally don’t have a lot of desire to “go out” in the sense that people tend to use the non-specific phrase “go out” — that is to say, going to a pub, sitting and drinking and not really doing anything interesting or exciting.

It was my work Christmas meal this evening. Andie and I both went along and we had an enjoyable time. The food was very nice, the home-made cakes for dessert were frankly ridiculous in size (the entire cake was literally the size of an average human head, and a single slice offered roughly as much “cake” as you would get in about ten normal-sized slices anywhere else) and the entertainments laid on by two of my colleagues, who had clearly spent a significant amount of time planning the evening together, were fun.

Once all that finished, though, and we were into the “freeform” part of the evening — the part where you’re supposed to lounge around, sip your drink and make small talk with the people around you — I felt absolutely no desire to stick around whatsoever, and neither did Andie, so we made our excuses, headed back home and were safely in our own house with the heating on well before 9pm.

I’ll hasten to add at this point that our lack of desire to stick around for the “freeform socialising” that follows more organised and/or structured fun was nothing to do with the people we were with. On the contrary, I like my colleagues very much: I enjoy working alongside them, I have a decent relationship with them in that we can chat about stuff other than work as well as have a good old complain about whatever has gone wrong with our respective jobs (95% of the time through no fault of our own) to a sympathetic ear, and I do enjoy having the opportunity to go out and socialise with them outside the office, which can, as anyone who has worked in a large corporation will be able to attest, feel somewhat oppressive at times.

No, my desire to scarper after the meal and the activities were done was more to do with the fact that I simply don’t find socialising for socialising’s sake to be very fun or enjoyable. In fact, in most cases, I find it to be the exact opposite of fun and enjoyable: a feeling of anxiety starts to build up in my mind as I subconsciously count the seconds of silence that have elapsed between me and the person standing closest to me, and I start running through potential conversations in my mind before rejecting all of them on the grounds that they might make me sound like I’m “trying too hard”. Ultimately, I tend to just end up sitting in a corner feeling thoroughly miserable and, frankly, why would you voluntarily put yourself through that when the door is right there?

Socialising with a purpose, though? I’m fine. I love a board game evening or an afternoon of Mario Kart with friends. I enjoy a post-performance meal after a show that we’ve all participated in — though it’s been a good few years since one of these now. In other words, I appreciate opportunities to socialise where there are things to do — enjoyable things, that is — in lieu of unmemorable, instantly forgotten small-talk, and likewise I appreciate opportunities to socialise where there are ready-made conversational topics like “how did the show go?” or “we sure showed that giant plant monster who’s boss, huh?”

I’ve come to accept this part of myself over the years. I just worry a bit at times that other people might not be quite so understanding.

1773: Panel Beater

It was fashionable a while back to hate on that staple of British TV, the comedy panel show. I’m not entirely sure what there was to complain about — aside from the sheer number of this type of show on our screens, of course — but I never quite fell in line with what appeared to be popular (well, Twitter) opinion.

Why? Well, because I really enjoy panel shows. They’re simple, enjoyable, lightweight, eminently disposable entertainment that are perfect for vegging in front of the TV, watching over dinner or falling asleep in front of. They don’t place any particular demands on the audience, though if they’re a topical show they can be one means of viewing the week’s happenings, albeit through a comedically skewed lens.

And some of them have been running for a very long time indeed, which is impressive in itself. Have I Got News For You is, I believe, one of the most long-running examples, but I was surprised to discover the other day that music quiz Never Mind the Buzzcocks has been running for double-digit years, too.

These shows have remained fairly true to their original format over the years, though Never Mind the Buzzcocks has degenerated into chaos in an extremely enjoyable manner as the years have passed, with the latest series fronted by Rhod Gilbert being more like a bunch of slightly drunk mates sitting around pissing about than an organised game show.

The format has given us some true greats of television in more recent years, too. Few could deny that the show now most readily associated with the plummy tones of Stephen Fry — Q.I., of course — is an absolute classic of entertaining, educational television that masterfully combines cheeky humour with genuinely interesting facts about the world we live in and the people we share it with.

I’ve even pondered experimenting with the format myself in the form of a video games podcast in the panel show style. I still think it has a ton of unexplored potential in non-mainstream TV spaces, and think it would be an interesting thing to do at some point. It would also require a ton of preparation, however, so I’m not sure how practical it would be to do on a regular basis. Something to ponder, though!

1772: Around the Virtual World

I find Internet culture endlessly fascinating and, at times, more than a little terrifying.

One of the most interesting things about Internet culture is how small it makes the world seem at times. I recall when online connectivity was just starting to become a thing — beyond the old-school world of direct-dial bulletin board systems, that is — and as well as the obnoxious phrase “information superhighway” being coined, a second, lesser-known but rather accurate phrase came into brief usage: “global village”.

The concept of the Internet — or, perhaps more accurately, the Web — as a global village is an interesting one, and if you spend some time wandering around online, you’ll come to recognise the village’s various haunts. There’s the village hall that hosts everything from coffee mornings to neo-Nazi rallies (Facebook). There’s the pub where everyone is always talking over everyone else and no-one’s really listening to one another (Twitter). There’s the deceptive village shop that looks small but actually carries a frighteningly comprehensive array of products of all descriptions (Amazon). There’s the coffee shop where socialites of all descriptions like to hang out and have in-depth discussions about everything from literature to their sexual conquests (Reddit). And there’s that dark, unlit back alley that very few people go down, but down which you’ll find either an army of like-minded outcasts or a horde of terrifying monsters, depending on your outlook (4chan and its successor 8chan).

There’s far more to the Internet than this, of course; the global village has become more of a town over the years, but it’s never really lost that sense of having “landmarks” around the place: easily recognisable places from which you can easily get your bearings and which, should you choose to make them your regular hangouts, provide a sense of comfortable (or sometimes uncomfortable) familiarity.

They’ve all evolved over time, too. Take Facebook; when it originally launched, it was designed for college students. Then it expanded to take in young, cool people in general, and allow them to keep in touch with their close personal network of friends easily. Then it expanded again to become more public and open. And today, of course, almost everyone is on Facebook to some degree or another, regardless of age, gender, interests and even level of computer literacy.

Change hasn’t always been for the positive, of course — although how you regard these changes, positive or negative, is partly down to your own individual feelings and how you want to communicate online. Twitter and I, for example, parted ways when it was becoming increasingly apparent that the microblogging service was being used by a lot of people more as a broadcast medium — and sometimes an echo chamber — than a means of communicating effectively. Its inherent limitations started to strain at the seams as people, for some inexplicable reason, started to think that it was an appropriate medium for having in-depth debates about complex issues. (It really isn’t.) Then the marketers found it, trying to encourage us to tweet using the hashtags for their products seen on adverts or TV shows — who does this? And over time the noise built and built and built until, much like Facebook, it was not what it once was. For some people, it’s still fun; for me, it had lost much of the charm that caused me to use it a great deal in the first place.

There’s a lot going on behind the scenes in a lot of places, too. Take Wikipedia, for example; at face value, it appears to be a perfectly reputable source containing a vast array of information about pretty much anything you would care to name. Ostensibly being a reference work, much of it is written in an impartial, unbiased manner — though there are exceptions. And it’s in those exceptions you start to see that yes, this is something that is put together and constantly maintained by humans, many of whom are doing it simply because they enjoy doing it. Dig further and take a peek at the inner workings of Wikipedia and you’ll see that it’s far from a solo effort; teams of editors are constantly discussing, debating, arguing and even fighting over the most peculiar of topics; in order to deal with such situations, the site has formed its own quasi-government to arbitrate disputes, with unfortunate instances going through strict, formal procedures managed not by Wikipedia creator Jimmy Wales, but by councils of users. It’s fascinating to observe.

There are billions of people on the planet, a significant proportion of whom now have some form of access to the Internet. With that in mind, it’s kind of crazy how small the Internet feels sometimes. That “global village” really is a thing and, while just like any other village, not everyone gets along with everyone else, the virtual world we’ve all helped build together is a fascinating thing indeed.

Just be careful if you venture into some of those dark corners. You might not like what you find… but on the other hand, there’s always the possibility of being pleasantly surprised, too. Explore at your own risk!

1769: Knackered

To be perfectly frank with you, dear reader, I’m not at all sure what I should write about today, so I’ve come to the oft-reached conclusion that I should just start typing and see what spews forth from my brain onto the page, like a violent eruption of creative vomit into the toilet of online publication.

I’m tired. I may have had Monday off from work thanks to our holiday, but it’s still been a long week. It hasn’t been the best week either, frankly, not because of any real specific happenings, but just from a mental health perspective. I don’t know whether it’s a sort of “comedown” from the nice time we had away or if it’s something a bit more deep-seated, but I’ve been feeling thoroughly miserable this week for a variety of reasons, which has probably been pretty clear from at least a couple of my recent posts.

Still, no matter, I guess, because the weekend is here, and that’s time to rest, relax, recharge and… something else beginning with R. (No, not that. Honestly.) Andie is away for most of tomorrow for a friend’s birthday party celebration drinks type thing, so I’m taking the rare opportunity to go spend some time with one of my local friends (and regular board gaming buddies) at the weekend. We’re going to play some Wii U and possibly some board games, and he’s going to experiment with cooking things that sound far too ambitious but which will hopefully be tasty if they come out all right.

We shall see, I guess.

The onset of winter isn’t helping with the whole “feeling a bit low” thing. It’s got to that point in the year where it’s dark when I leave the house in the morning, and by the time I get out of work it’s dark, too, making me feel like I live in perpetual night-time. (The fact my office doesn’t have a whole lot of natural light going on doesn’t help, either, and hours of fluorescent lights and computer screens every day isn’t particularly restful on the eyes. It’s no surprise that I feel like I need some new glasses, but after the opticians I went to last got my prescription wrong not once but twice I’ve been hesitant to waste more time on eye tests and getting glasses made.)

It’s cold, too. Not cold enough for snow and ice, thankfully — there’s only been one morning so far where I’ve had to chip frost off my car, though naturally this occurred before I’d actually remembered to purchase an ice-scraper — but still uncomfortably chilly. We have at least figured out both how to turn on the gas fire in our living room (which I’m still convinced works through black magic, since the stuff in it looks like it’s burning but actually isn’t) and how to turn on the heating in the rest of our house using the old-ass combination of dodgy thermostat and rattly electric timer. We thought for a while that the heating wasn’t working, but — my Grandad would be proud of me — a bit of wiggling the valve thing in the airing cupboard seemed to make it start working again without too much difficulty. That saved an expensive call to a heating engineer, anyway.

So that’s been my day and my week, then. Quite looking forward to tomorrow, it should be fun to get out of the house and do some stuff for a while. As of right now, though, I feel very much like curling up in bed with my Vita is the right thing to do, so I think that’s what I’m going to go and do.

1767: More Weird Dreams

Had another in my increasingly lengthy line of peculiar dreams last night — the kind that somehow manages to stick in your memory after you wake up. There was nothing lavatorial involved this time around, however.

There was, however, nudity.

I dreamed I was at work. Boring, sure, but I had just returned to work after a few days away, so it’s understandable it was on my mind. My dream work wasn’t quite the same as my actual work, however; for some reason, I was doing my day job as normal, only I was sat at a computer at a work surface on the outside of the “Maths area” from my secondary school — the large, open-plan area that was often turned into one or two improvised extra classrooms depending on the size of that particular year’s cohort.

I was also naked.

For some reason, my nudity didn’t seem to bother any of my colleagues, who were coming and going around me much as they do in my actual office. None of them were naked, but it was almost as if they didn’t see the fact that I was. I, on the other hand, was very much conscious of the fact that I didn’t have any clothes on, and it felt like it wasn’t an entirely deliberate decision to be there in the nip in the first place. It’s not that someone had forcibly taken my clothes off or anything; my clothes had just simply ceased to be at some point during the working day, and I had seemingly figured that the best means of dealing with this was just to sit down and get on with my work as if nothing out of the ordinary was going on, despite the fact that almost everything save for the work I was doing and the people around me was out of the ordinary.

Eventually, my colleague Tony came up to me, and I stiffened — not like that, you filthy pervert — in preparation for, if you’ll pardon the obvious pun, a dressing-down due to my lack of clothing. It didn’t happen, however; Tony had come over to me to offer a different kind of feedback, and it had nothing to do with my bare bum or winky.

It turned out all the work I had been doing all morning was in the wrong language. I don’t know how this would have happened, given that all the work I do is in English anyway (with the odd document in Welsh when appropriate — though thankfully for my total ignorance of the Welsh language I don’t have to actually write these) but it had somehow happened today, the day when I was working naked. I’m not even sure which language was the “wrong” language — thinking back on it now at the end of the day, I have German in my mind for some reason, but I often have German on the mind because it’s an inherently entertaining language to me — but Tony was absolutely adamant that all the work I had done was in the wrong language, and needed to be sorted out.

I then woke up before I could sort it out, and it was time to go to work. I made doubly sure I was wearing trousers before I left the house.