1272: The Worst Headache in the World

I went to see Akira at the cinema this evening. I recall around the period anime first got fashionable in the UK that there was a considerable degree of snobbery about this movie, with people saying “oh, you have to see it on the big screen” and whatnot whenever it came on TV.

You know what, though? Having now seen it both on TV and on the big screen… yeah, the snobs were right. It’s spectacular.

The reason I was seeing Akira at all this evening was because my good friends George and Mitu, whose marriage we are attending later in the year, happened to be in the area and had booked tickets. George popped up on Steam earlier and asked me if I fancied coming out at short notice for a 10.30pm showing, and because I’m never really doing anything of note, I accepted. (If anyone else is in the area and wants to do something fun… try me. I’m usually available.) So thanks, George and Mitu, for getting me out of the house on a Saturday evening and seeing a film I don’t think I’ve seen for at least 15 years or so.

I first saw Akira when it came on Channel 4 late at night one evening. Well, to be more precise, I taped it, because it was on at some ungodly hour in the morning. Eventually I sat down and watched it, though, and was thoroughly bewildered by almost everything about it. I hadn’t really watched many foreign-language films before, so watching something with subtitles was new, and I also hadn’t really had much contact with anime before, either, so the concept of an “adult” animation (not that kind of “adult,” though there is one pair of visible boobs, albeit not in an even slightly titillating context) was also something new to me.

I think it’s probably fair to say that I didn’t really “get” Akira the first time I saw it. Those who have seen Akira will know that not “getting” it is part of the point, really; again, this was a concept that was somewhat new to me at the time I first saw it. I was used to things being much more literal, and indeed even today I do sometimes find it difficult to latch on to stuff that is being too deliberately obtuse.

Seeing it today, though, I feel I appreciated it a lot more than when I first saw it. It’s a real spectacle, all the more remarkable for the fact it came out in 1988 and thus would have been largely hand-animated. As George pointed out when we came out, a lot of things blow up, shatter and collapse in Akira, and someone had to animate each and every one of those bits of rock, glass and other miscellaneous bits of debris by hand. Quite a feat.

Akira’s also interesting for having quite a distinctive style. While recognizable Japanese in appearance, it doesn’t look like modern anime, nor does it look like stuff that came a little later in the ’90s. I’m mostly familiar with more recent anime, but ’90s stuff in particular has a very distinctive look that is a bit different from today, and Akira is different again.

One thing I thought that was quite interesting about the film’s look is that all the characters actually look like Japanese people, whereas from ’90s anime onwards, we tended to see a lot more in the way of the heavily-stylised, big-eyed look that typifies the medium today. The characters are also relatively subdued in their defining characteristics, and realistic in their appearance. Of the three female characters who put in an appearance in the movie, not one of them is intended to be “the hot one” or “the cute one” or anything like that — they’re just women. (Well, okay, one of them is a weird, wrinkled, old-looking child with blue skin, but eh.) Very progressive, particularly for 1988.

Anyway. I enjoyed myself. It was good to revisit a movie I hadn’t seen for a long time, and it was good to see friends I hadn’t seen for a long time, albeit in a situation where we couldn’t really talk a lot! Now it is 1:30 in the morning so I had probably better get some sleep.

1270: Black Cloud

Been struggling a bit with depression again recently. It is my own fault for not proactively doing anything about it, but once it sets in there’s really not a lot you can do about it save for just riding it out and hoping it passes.

Some people describe their experiences with depression as being strangely comforting; those negative feelings acting as a sort of blanket that surrounds them and cuts them off from the outside world. I can sort of empathise with that, but at the same time it’s frustrating.

Here’s what dealing with depression is like for me.

I’ll wake up in the morning, usually after a semi-to-very vivid dream that leaves itself half-finished. At this point I have a choice; go back to sleep and finish the dream, or get up and start the day. If I choose the former option, I’ll find it very hard to get up for several hours, regardless of how many alarms I set. If I choose the latter option — which is often quite difficult to do — I’ll generally start the day in a more positive manner.

The day will then proceed as normal, so long as I keep myself occupied with something or other that stimulates my brain — whether that’s work, watching something on TV or playing a game. If I stop doing things, I’ll find myself staring into space, and that same feeling I have when I’m trying to get up sets in; I just don’t want to move. I feel myself being tugged in different directions: the depression wants me to just stare into space and feel sorry for myself, dwelling on all the things that I don’t want to dwell on, or that are completely unnecessary to dwell on; the rational part of my brain tells me that I’d feel better if I just reached over and grabbed the PS3 controller, or stood up and got a glass of juice, or put my shoes on and went outside for a bit. Sometimes the depression wins; sometimes the rational part of my brain wins. The rational part usually wins the war, as I am still able to function and do the things I need to do each day, but depression often scores a few victories in skirmishes along the way.

By the end of the day, I’m often left feeling mentally exhausted from having to keep the depression at bay. Sometimes, despite feeling tired, I don’t feel I can go to bed until an ungodly hour because I know I’ll just spend hours unable to sleep, my mind awhirl with conflicting emotions and anxieties. Sometimes, I’ll try and exhaust myself before collapsing into bed; other times, I’ll just pray for the best, lie down and hope that sleep claims me before too long.

Being depressed is frustrating, because there is often no particular cause for it. “What’s wrong?” people will ask. “Nothing in particular,” I’ll reply, because it’s true; there is nothing wrong, but that just feeds into the whole cycle. I start to feel guilty about feeling down about, well, nothing at all, and then I feel bad about feeling guilty; if you’ve been there, you know what it’s like.

I’ll get over it. I always do. Just needed to vent a little today.

1268: Printing Press

Print media is very much on the way out, particularly in the games industry, but I enjoy keeping some around for old times’ sake.

Specifically, as I’ve probably mentioned a few times before, I have several back issues of the now defunct PC Zone magazine on my shelf, each of which contains a single article that I wrote on a freelance basis — mostly game walkthroughs, because no-one likes writing those.

Occasionally I like to have a flip through those old magazines. It’s nice to look back on what the games industry looked like nearly 20 years ago (jeez) and see what people were excited about. It’s also interesting to ponder which grand plans came to fruition and which didn’t; which supposedly “big games” ended up being massive successes, and which were big wet farts.

One of the most interesting things about reading an old magazine in 2013, though, is realising what an impact the Internet has had on our brains. More than once I caught myself reading something in one of these old Zones and habitually looking to the end of the article for the comments section. Of course, being a magazine, there is no comments section (unless you scribble on the page yourself) and thus this is a stupid thing to do, but I found it interesting that the way The Internet works is now so firmly ingrained into my brain that I just do things like that on reflex.

The letters pages are also interesting to look at. One of the most fascinating things I rediscovered recently is that people have been whingeing about tacked-on multiplayer modes ever since 1997 — one chap got a Letter of the Month award for complaining about how X-Wing vs Tie Fighter wasn’t as good as either X-Wing or Tie Fighter because it didn’t have the story-driven campaigns of its predecessors. (He had a point.)

The other one that raised a bit of a smile was a selection of gentlemen defending the fact that they found Lara Croft attractive — yes, the low-poly, big-lipped, pyramid-breasted Lara from 1997, not the gritty one from the recent reboot. Of all things, it brought to mind the popular otaku discussion of whether “2D” or “3D” is better. (Inevitably, to most otaku, the answer is “2D”, but that’s a topic for another day, I think.) “Lara is a collection of pixels,” runs the slightly flawed argument, “and Pamela Anderson is just a collection of pixels or ink on a page, because none of us are ever likely to actually meet her.” Well, true, I guess, but… oh, let’s not get into that now.

Anyway. If you happen to have any old magazines lying around, think twice before you throw them out; they make interesting cultural artifacts to look back on, as they take a snapshot of how people thought and felt at a particular point in time. They’re also something to do on the toilet on the off-chance all the electronic devices in your house are out of battery.

1267: Strange and Horrible Day

What a strange and horrible day today was.

Most of it went well enough. I went down to Brighton to work in the Eurogamer offices as I said I was going to, and that was thoroughly pleasant — particularly getting to meet some of the people I’ve only known as names and Twitter avatars up until now.

It was after my working day ended that things got strange and horrible though.

First up, I heard the news that Ryan Davis of Giant Bomb has died. I didn’t know him personally — and in fact my only real awareness of him was he and the GiantBomb team mocking USgamer’s name when we launched — but it’s been clear from the outpouring of grief on Twitter today that he was a beloved character in the gamer community. The poor guy had just got married, too; my heart really goes out to his friends, family, fans and colleagues. I can’t really say any more than that — other people who actually know him have said it much better than I can.

The fact that Davis had clearly touched so many lives and brightened them up made the subsequent event all the more difficult to stomach. Polar opposites, if you will; Davis as an apparent force for good; what I’m about to talk about as a clear force for shitty awful rubbishness.

I caught the train to Brighton today because Brighton is not very good with parking spaces, and also because the train fare was surprisingly cheap. In fact, it was so cheap that I paid just a couple of quid extra and got a First Class ticket for shits and giggles — Southern Trains’ First Class compartment is more of a small cupboard with eight seats in it rather than any kind of luxurious accommodation, but it was nice to be away from the noise and irriatingness of my fellow passengers.

The trip to Brighton went without incident. I played some Animal Crossing and some Velocity Ultra and was thoroughly ready to settle in for a workday by the time I got to the Gamer Network offices. It was the way back that was a little less pleasant.

The train I caught back to Southampton was rammed solid, so I was glad to be in the First Class compartment — it pretty much guaranteed me a seat. Moments after I sat down and settled in, though, another guy came in.

I will freely admit that I judged him as soon as I saw him. He was wearing tatty jogging bottoms and a tracksuit jacket, carrying a plastic bag and nursing a can of some cheap and awful-looking lager. He sat down, put his feet on the table and almost immediately started playing music incredibly loudly from his phone. My immediate prejudice against him was, it seems, entirely correct.

It became very apparent that he was deliberately trying to annoy me. I took off the headphones I was wearing to play Animal Crossing, because the combination of the 3DS woefully quiet sound output and my cheap headphones was not blocking out his shitty music. I turned to him and asked him politely if he’d turn down his music, please. He told me to “fuck off” and “stop being such a fat cunt”. I clearly wasn’t going to get any reason out of him, so I grit my teeth, put my headphones on and tried my best to ignore him, even when he was on the phone to one of his shitbag friends and was openly mocking me over the phone, knowing full well that I could hear him.

I won’t lie; I was somewhat afraid. I didn’t want to confront him over the way he was acting again, because he clearly wouldn’t listen to any sort of reason or a reasonable request. I didn’t know what to do, and I certainly wasn’t going to just walk out of the compartment and abandon the seat I’d paid for.

Eventually, the conductor showed up and discovered that — surprise! — this asshole didn’t have a ticket. I wanted to tell the conductor that he’d been being abusive and that I feared for my safety, but I utterly choked; it had taken all the confidence I had (which isn’t much) to ask him to turn his music down in the first place, and his aggressive response had destroyed any hope of me being able to be any more assertive. I just had to grit my teeth and continue to try and ignore him. Thankfully he got off the train a few stops later, so I didn’t have to suffer the entire two-hour train journey fearing for my safety and sanity.

The conductor came back after he got off and apologised to me; apparently this lout was a regular on that service, and there was really very little they could do about it. Fines wouldn’t work because his bank card inevitably wouldn’t work; they just had to grin and bear it.

Which is shit, really, isn’t it? To relate this to the earlier part of this post, there is really no justice in this world. Someone like Ryan Davis, who touched a significant number of people’s lives in a very positive manner from the look of things, is taken from the world at the age of 34 while utter wastes of space like this shitbag on the train this evening continue to survive and pollute the gene pool with their fetid stench.

1266: Hotness

It’s still massively warm, but at least our Internet is back. (It came back briefly shortly after I wrote last night’s post, actually, but by then it was too late.)

Our flat is like a fricking oven at the moment. All the hot air in the whole building rises, making our place on the top floor unbearably warm, even with all the windows open and fans running. You can feel it as you come up the stairs; pass by our first floor neighbours and ascend the stairs to the second floor (third if you’re American) and you can feel yourself pass through a wall of heat. It’s really quite unpleasant.

It’s times like this that I wish air conditioning — or indeed any form of cooling — was more commonplace here in the UK. Heating is fine — the heaters in our flat are great when it’s cold — but when it gets too warm? There’s really very little that you can do save for sit around in your pants and drink lots of cold drinks. We have been plying the poor rats with bowls of iced water, which they seem to appreciate; Lara, our slightly older rat, particularly seems to be suffering somewhat in the heat. Poor girl.

I’m heading down to Brighton tomorrow to work in the Eurogamer office for a change. It’s nice to have the option to work in an actual office with other people — this is something I’ve not had the luxury of doing in previous games writing gigs, so I intend to take advantage of it every so often, if only to break the monotony of working from home. (Also, hopefully the EG offices have air conditioning, which will save me gasping for breath in this oven of a flat. Also, I owe Chris Donlan a sandwich.)

One thing I’m actually quite looking forward to about the trip to Brighton is having a commute where I don’t have to drive. Finally — finally — I have a commute long enough to play some handheld games on. There will be some Animal Crossing, Velocity Ultra and possibly some Persona 4.

For now, though, there will be a large glass of something cold and wet in an attempt to cool off a bit, then sleep. Or, alternatively and more likely, very little sleep and instead a lot of sweaty tossing and turning as I attempt to get comfortable in an environment which is not in the slightest bit comfortable.

Moan moan moan, I know. At least Andy Murray won the tennis earlier. Supposedly that’s important or something.

1265: Warmness

It is extremely hot here at the moment. Judging by Twitter this evening, this particular climatic condition is not isolated solely to Southampton, but this doesn’t make me feel that much better.

I’m currently writing this post on my phone because for some frustrating reason our Internet has gone down. I’ve rebooted the router several times and it’s still not playing with us. I’m not entirely sure why I’m telling you this, but writing a post on my phone like this tends to put me in “stream of consciousness” mode more than anything else. (The WordPress app still doesn’t have a word count facility, either, so I just keep banging on until it “feels” about the right length.)

Family Guy is currently on BBC3. I do quite like Family Guy, but the frustrating way about its being broadcast on BBC3 is that whatever dribbling idiot is in charge of the scheduling for that otherwise atrocious station clearly has no idea how to broadcast something in chronological order and without repeating the same episode at least twice a week, sometimes more. These are all repeats anyway, so there’s really no need for this repetition, particularly when iPlayer is a thing that exists.

I say I quite like Family Guy, but there is one exception: that fucking episode with Surfin’ Bird. It was doubly annoying when it was on recently, because, as mentioned above, it was on twice in one week. I wasn’t even watching it and it irritated me. I know that episode is supposed to be irritating, but it just goes much too far in its irritation factor.

Anyway, my concentration is shot right now due to the combination of typing this on my phone, Family Guy on the TV, Andie playing Animal Crossing next to me and the rats playing in their cage at the end of the bed. (We brought them into the bedroom so they could have some company, and also because it’s slightly cooler in here; they don’t seem to like the heat all that much!)

As such, I’m going to call that a night there. Hopefully our Internetz will be back tomorrow, which will allow me to type something on a proper computer rather than using just my thumbs!

1264: Smash the World’s Shell

I finished watching Revolutionary Girl Utena at last today.

Honestly, I’m really not sure what to make of it. I don’t mean I didn’t like it — I did — but rather, I feel like I’ve woken up from a dream and don’t really know how to parse what I watched.

As anyone who has watched Utena will tell you, of course, this is part of the attraction of the show. It is a show that prides itself in its surrealism, symbolism and deeply metaphorical nature. There’s a sense throughout that nothing is quite as it seems, and that you probably shouldn’t be taking some of the things that happen over the course of the 39 episodes too literally — not least because none of the characters appear to. They seem to shake off the frankly utterly baffling things going on with alarming rapidity, which leads you as the viewer to question whether those things were really happening at all, or whether they were merely representative of something else.

One of the best yet most frustrating things about Utena is that there are no definitive answers, though. The show’s creator, I’m told, enjoys taunting fans and deliberately misleading them, and pointedly won’t say what the definitive explanation for it all is. This might be because there isn’t a definitive explanation for it all; or it might simply be an attempt to get people to figure it out for themselves, come to their own conclusions and take whatever they want from the show as a whole.

In some respects, the whole thing reminded me somewhat of Silent Hill, of all things. Obviously the two series are very different from one another despite having a common heritage — Silent Hill is Japanese psychological horror, while Utena is colourful Japanese anime — but both actually have a surprising amount in common, not least of which is the fact that both are pretty open to a hefty degree of interpretation.

Both are riddled with psychosexual imagery, too. Neither are outright explicit with it — though Silent Hill 2 does feature a scene where Pyramid Head, that game’s iconic recurring monster, is raping a tailor’s mannequin — but both feature a very strong sense that sex and sexuality are a core theme. In Silent Hill’s case — particularly Silent Hill 2 — there’s a sense of guilt and shame attached to sexual desires for a variety of reasons; Utena, meanwhile, is rife with both phallic and… uh… whatever the word for the vaginal equivalent of phallic is… imagery. (Just “vaginal”, I guess, but that doesn’t seem to fit quite right.) There’s a strong sense of Utena’s characters reaching sexual maturity and coming to terms with that in different ways, much as James had to come to terms with aspects of his own sexual desires in Silent Hill 2.

Frankly, I’m not sure I’m intelligent enough to be able to do a particularly deep reading of Revolutionary Girl Utena without spending a significant amount of time researching, but suffice to say I enjoyed it and very much respected what it was doing, even if I didn’t always understand it fully. As I say, though, that was probably sort of the point all along.

If you’re curious, I’ll share a super-interesting essay I read earlier immediately after finishing the series. It doesn’t claim to be a definitive interpretation of the show, but it’s certainly a plausible reading of it, and definite food for thought. Check it out here.

1260: Which Way?

To be perfectly frank with you, dear reader, I sometimes feel like I’m running out of things to write about on this ‘ere blog.

It’s not true at all, of course — there’s always something to write about, however niche interest it might be. But on more than one occasion I’ve sat down to write and wondered if it was really worth talking about the thing I feel like talking about. My usual response to this particular mental block is just to say “fuck it” and write it anyway, with the usual disclaimer that anything I write here is my own personal opinion and does not reflect the opinions of etc. etc. you know the drill from a million and one Twitter bios.

I do sometimes question why I’m still writing this. This is the 1,260th day since I started writing something on this blog every single day, and my reasons for writing have changed considerably over that time.

Actually, I’m not sure that’s entirely true; my reasons for writing here have always been nothing more noble than “for personal satisfaction” and “to have something interesting to do”. My feelings towards the things I’m writing have obviously changed in parallel with my life situation at various times, however: when I first started blogging daily, I was still working in teaching and having a thoroughly miserable time; this then proceeded through my 2010 trip to PAX East, a mini-vacation that I maintain is one of the most carefree, happy times I’ve ever experienced; through the breakup of my marriage; the general collapse of my life as a whole and the subsequent rebuilding thereof.

I find it quite interesting to look back every so often and see the course my life has taken, whether that’s through manually navigating to fondly-remembered posts — yes, even with 1,260 daily posts, I still have specific favourites and can usually navigate to them fairly quickly — or clicking the “Random Post” button at the top of the screen.

One thing I have found is that I was at my most creative when I was at my most miserable. I won’t lie to you, dear reader, I most certainly haven’t shaken off the Black Dog of depression by any means, but I’m a lot better than the emotional wreck I was during the downfall of my marriage. But while I have absolutely no desire to return to those dark days, I do find it intriguing that I found it a lot easier to come up with creative, funny, off-the-wall posts when I was suffering. Perhaps it was a defence mechanism: putting up a barrier around the pain I was feeling in an attempt to not “bring down” everyone around me; perhaps it was just a way of attempting to make myself feel better. I don’t know. Whatever it was, I miss it in a perverse sort of way; the flashes of inspiration I had in those days don’t come quite as often as they once did.

Said flashes of inspiration were three years ago, though, so it’s entirely possible that I’m just older and wiser(?) or, at the very least, just older. I don’t really feel that different, though; perhaps it’s a subtle thing. The evidence is there, after all.

Anyway, I’ve pontificated for long enough about nothing at all, but at least it’s given me an entry for today. I am tired now. I think it is time to go to sleep. Good night!

1254: I Typed This Post (Except the Title) With My Eyes Shut

I’ve always been pretty good at touch-typing, so I thought it would be an interesting experiment to see how well I could type a blog post with my eyes shut. This is the result. I apologise in advance if it is completely indecipherable.

It’s interesting, doing this, because it makes me realise how much I rely on muscle memory while I’m typing. I can visualise where the keys are in my head, which is all very well and good, but I can’t tell whether or not I’ve made any typos in the process.

Actually, I sort of can. I can “feel” when I’ve typed something incorrectly (assuming my hands were in the right place in the first place) but going back to correct it when you’re not looking at the screen is actually somewhat difficult.

I wonder how well I’m doing. More to the point, I wonder how many words I’ve typed so far.

I learned to touch-type when I was very young. I learned through the use of an Atari 8-bit computer and the use of computer magazines, which in the 80s tended to include type-in listing s for games and various other bits and pieces each month.

If you’re too young to know what a type-in listing is, it’s this: a program is printed in the magazine, and if you copy it into your computer’s programming language BASIC and run it, you’d have a fully-functional program of some sort to play with — usually a game.

Usually these programs were written in BASIC so you could see how they worked and adapt them for your own purposes. However, sometimes they were written in machine code, which meant they were nothing but a string of numbers in hexadecimal format. Not something you can decipher at all, really.

Anyway, the reason I am so good (hopefully) at touch-typing today as I (possibly) am is because I spent so long copying these listings into my Atari. I’d type with my hands on the keyboard while simultaneously looking at the magazine. The magazines I read came with a special program that checked for typos when you were copying out listings, so you could make sure you’d copied everything exactly.

Anyway, through the process of copying out these programs while not looking at either the keyboard or the screen, I learned to touch-type pretty well.

I hope I haven’t embarrassed myself by this post being completely indecipherable. I am also coming up with this nonsense on the spur of the moment like a freewriting exercise; I didn’t plan anything beforehand. So hopefully you’ll forgive the stream of consciousness that is currently erupting from my fingers.

I wonder how many words this is now. It feels a bit weird to be sitting here with my eyes closed. I’m actually quite sleepy, so I hope I don’t suddenly fall asleep in the middle of typing this. I’ve had a few cups of coffee at my friend Tim’s house this evening, though, so that’s probably unlikely for an hour or two at least.

We’ll see.

Anyway, I think I’m probably running out of patience for this little exercise, so I’m going to sign off at this point and publish the post as-is. If you can’t read it because I’ve made too many mistakes, please bear in mind that I was typing it with my eyes closed. Can you do any better? Show me in the comments if so.

That’s enough. Enough. STOP!

1251: Bottomless Memory for Irrelevant Nonsense

I have, as the title suggests, a bottomless memory for completely irrelevant nonsense. I’m not sure how or why I have developed this particular characteristic, and it very rarely comes in handy, but there it is.

Occasionally it is a good icebreaker when hanging out with people that I have known for many years, as coming out with something that apparently only I remember often makes people laugh. And, as we all know, making people laugh is a good means of keeping a social situation going. (There are only so many times you can get away with starting a story with “Do you remember when…?” in a single gathering, however.)

I have no idea what causes my brain to remember the things it does, however. Let me give you an example, and you’ll see that there’s really no reason I should remember this particular incident.

When I was at school, a member of my main friendship group was a kid called Daniel. His main distinguishing features were his crooked teeth and his very outgoing, borderline insane nature — the latter of which frequently came to a head in Drama lessons. (An unrelated memory to the one I’m about to recount is the time my friends and I put together a short play called “The Time Trial of Dr. Paradox” in which Daniel played the titular villain, whose crowning moment was when he screamed “I want him tracked down by 2400 hours!” and knocked a small globe onto the floor, causing it to go rolling away and make our mutual friend Andrew almost piss himself with laughter.)

Our drama teacher for one year was actually also our school’s headmaster at the time, one Mr Cragg. Mr Cragg was a pleasant sort of middle-aged man, all beard and jovial nature. He would have made a good Father Christmas if his hair was white. He enjoyed playing theatre games in Drama lessons, and one day we were playing one that involved fruit. I don’t remember the exact game itself, but the bit of the memory I have inexplicably clung on to in the intervening 15+ years is the way in which Mr Cragg said the word “raspberry” (“Razzzberri!”), which my aforementioned friend Daniel found immensely amusing for weeks afterwards. He also found the word “Bilberry” similarly amusing, but that’s fair enough; I found it quite amusing, too, because it sounded a bit like “dildo”.

Well, okay, not really, but we were in our early teens; I’m not even going to pretend we had a particularly sophisticated sense of humour.

What puzzles me is how and why that memory has endured for so long. Why on Earth do I remember the way my old headmaster said the word “raspberry,” and the fact my friend Daniel found it incredibly amusing? I find it difficult to believe that if I ever saw Daniel again — I haven’t seen him since leaving school — that if I walked up to him and went “Razzzberri!” he’d have the slightest fucking clue what I was on about.

Ah well. I suppose it makes for good stories. Or at least confusing ones.