#oneaday Day 129: Current holiday

We’re on holiday! After a three hour drive earlier today — which honestly already feels like a lifetime ago — we are safely ensconced in our accommodation at Center Parcs.

The last few times we’ve been, we’ve stayed in the apartments that are near the main plaza of shops and restaurants, but this year it was only a little extra to get a two-bedroom lodge in the woods, so we’ve gone for that as a little extra added luxury. It’s lovely having lots of space. Indeed, there’s an entire (bed)room we probably won’t use at all; presently, it’s where I dumped my suitcase so it wouldn’t clutter our bedroom.

We haven’t done very much today. It’s been nice to just relax with no worries or commitment to anything, so we’ve been enjoying that today. We had some nice dinner bought from the shop and an amazing cake, then the rest of the evening has been spent lounging, looking at the wildlife while the light was still present, then watching some TV (old school broadcast style!) and playing some video games.

Tomorrow we’re likely going to hit the pool… sorry, the “Subtropical Swimming Paradise”, and from there, who knows? We have some idle intentions of maybe going to the gym, playing some pool and going bowling, but we’re just going to take each day as it comes and decide according to what we feel like.

The Lodge brings back some nice memories. When I came to Center Parcs as a teen with my family and some friends, we always stayed in a lodge (or a “villa” as they were known then) and while some things have changed — the appliances are more up to date and the TV is, of course, a wall-mounted flatscreen instead of a hulking great CRT — but aside from that, the layout feels comfortably familiar.

It’s bringing back fond memories of my friend Ed attempting to explain the appeal of Wolfenstein 3-D to my parents over breakfast — as I recall, his 12 year old self arguing that you “just don’t notice” the bloody violence after playing a whole didn’t go down too well.

It’s bringing back fond memories of my friend Craig and I watching MTV and realising that we both liked quite a bit broader a spectrum of music than the indie rock that was fashionable at the time — after that holiday, I remember going out and buying Madonna and Savage Garden albums on the strength of the tunes we liked on the TV.

And it’s bringing back fond memories of a trip when I was young enough for my brother to still be living at home with us, and him bringing his friend Alex along. My enduring memory of that pairing was Alex, who thought he was God’s gift to women, causing two girls to fall off their bikes by saying a distinctly Leslie Phillips-style “hell-O!” as they passed by.

A lot of good memories here, then, from both the recent and distant past. It’ll be good to add a few more to the mix this year.

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.

#oneaday Day 121: Tedious Nostalgia

I’m all for nostalgia — hell, most of my online presence is built around it these days — but I’m becoming increasingly tired of social media accounts that are nothing but what I’m going to call “nostalgia fluff”. What I mean by this is that they post something that effectively says “This is a thing that existed.” and then don’t provide any sort of additional commentary or context. To put it another way, they are indulging in the exact behaviour depicted in this excellent video from the one and only Mr Biffo of Digitiser:

There’s a simple explanation for this, of course: it’s engagement bait, as is 90% of anything on any social media platform these days. By posting “Count Duckula is a cartoon series that was once on television”, the poster is counting on people showing up in the replies by the score to say “Wow! I remember this!” and “SO NOSTALGIC!” and suchlike.

Trouble is, all of that is completely fucking meaningless. It rarely starts a meaningful discussion, and the person who posted the thing in the first place certainly isn’t interested in leading a discussion, otherwise they would have posted something more substantial in the first place. So why do it at all?

Number go up, of course. Those sweet likes and shares. The cynical would note that many engagement bait accounts aim to attract large numbers of views, comments and shares so they can then sell on the account to someone else, but this doesn’t always happen. Some people really are convinced that their context and commentary-free acknowledgements that something indeed existed at some indeterminate point in the past are “good content”. Some of these people will even get snippy if someone “steals” their “content”, by which I mean posting something about the same thing they posted.

There’s a difference between this sort of thing and what I do. When I write an article or make a video about something, I’m not doing so just to go “this existed, look how knowledgeable I am for knowing this thing existed”. Rather, I do so for one of two reasons: one, to introduce the thing to other people, and that requires some additional context and commentary to explain why the thing is noteworthy; and two, to share my personal recollections of the thing in question, which often ties in with the first point.

That takes effort, though. That requires researching beyond a simple glance at Wikipedia to make sure you got the date right. That requires actual knowledge and experience, and a willingness to do something beyond the bare minimum to cater to the lowest common denominator online.

I often find myself annoyed at the perception that you “shouldn’t” post anything too long or in-depth online, “because people won’t bother to read/watch it”. This, to me, just leads to a situation where you are encouraging something undesirable. By assuming everyone is as stupid as an attention-deficit social media addict who can’t read more than a paragraph without wanting to Alt-Tab into Roblox, we just make that the norm. And that’s what these low-effort nostalgia engagement bait accounts are doing: making the bare minimum the norm.

I find the idea that you should make things as short as possible “because people will click off within 3 seconds” or whatever kind of insulting. It’s insulting to the people who don’t click off within 3 seconds to assume that everyone’s attention span is as addled as the worst people on the Internet, and it’s insulting to me to suggest that if the thing I’ve done isn’t “interesting” within 3 seconds it has no value. So far as I’m concerned, if someone is incapable of reading more than a paragraph of text or digesting a video that is more than 30 seconds long, I don’t really want them looking at my stuff anyway. It’s not for them.

That may sound gatekeepery but honestly I don’t give a shit any more. I hate how much the Internet has become a race to the bottom, and I fear it’s reached a point where it is actively harmful to both community and culture.

So I will keep going into things in as much depth as I damn well please, and if you don’t have the attention span to deal with it, that is 100% your problem.

(I know none of you reading this fall into this category, of course. Keep being excellent.)

#oneaday Day 30: A Milestone?

Is 30 days a milestone? I guess you can look at it that way, depending on if you consider nice round numbers a milestone. You can also look at 30 days as “about a month”, too, so I guess it’s significant from that respect. It’s a long way off the 2,541 daily posts from last time around, of course, but that all started with baby steps, too. And then it just kept going.

Now and again I like to hit the “Random Post” button on this site to jump to one of the myriad posts in the archives. I often find myself surprised how often it throws up the same things, given how many of them there are, but computerised randomisation is, as we hopefully all know by now, imperfect.

That gives me an idea for today’s post. I’ll hit Random a few times and see what I think of what shows up. Are you ready? Then let’s begin.

First up, Day 693 from first time around, and a post named Endings. In it, I contemplated the fact that I had just finished L.A. Noire, a game that I enjoyed a lot at the time but which I have forgotten almost everything about since. I pontificated on particularly effective endings that had stuck with me over the years — particularly downer endings. And Conker’s Bad Fur Day was one that stuck with me, due to it coming after all the foul-mouthed ridiculousness that had come before.

I still agree with this. Conker’s Bad Fur Day ends absolutely perfectly. It’s a huge bummer in a lot of ways, of course, what with our hero losing his true love, but it also provides something of a sense of “reality catching up with him”. The strange journey that Conker goes on over the course of Conker’s Bad Fur Day starts silly and cartoonish, but gets darker and darker as you progress through things. By the last few sequences in the game, things are still silly, but there’s a definite sobering undercurrent. The World War II-inspired sequence may have you fighting against teddy bears, but it’s still World War II, and a lot of people get hurt and die.

The ending of Conker’s Bad Fur Day is as much a signal to the player as it is to Conker. “Wake up,” it says. “The time for play is over. Now it’s time to get back to the grim reality of life.” Sobering, to be sure.

Next up, post 850 from first time around, entitled Diablolical [sic]. In it, I lay out how I’d been having a good time with the then-newly released Diablo III, and that I didn’t have as much of a problem with it being “always online” as the rest of the Internet seemed to. And that’s because I recognised that Diablo III, far more than its predecessors, was actually an MMO. A well-disguised one, yes, but still an MMO.

I actually stand by this assessment, though my opinion on Diablo III itself has soured somewhat for a variety of reasons. Firstly, after playing it a bunch, I realised that its setting and unrelenting grimness was just plain boring to me. The world of Diablo is a world in which there is no hope; one in which you defeat the Big Bad of the hour and there’s inevitably an even bigger bad lurking just around the corner. And once you’ve beaten all the Big Bads, they all come back, because that’s what Big Bads do in Diablo-land.

Secondly, it’s hard to get the various revelations about working conditions at Blizzard Entertainment out of my head. I’m not about to go on a big crusade about it or anything, but given that the Diablo series is already one I’d been feeling a bit “ehhh” about since the very beginning, knowing that some of the staff at the developer are shitheads makes it a lot easier to just go “fuck it” and never play anything from them again… particularly as all of their last few releases have some combination of loot boxes, battle passes or predatory “free-to-play” monetisation. So yeah, fuck Blizzard and fuck Diablo. Diablo III is still an MMO, though.

Next up, an earlier post: number 303, from 2010, in which I ponder the nature of Panic Stations. Specifically, through some exceedingly heavy-handed masking, I outline the things that cause me a sense of irrational anxiety, even when I know they’re not anything really worth getting het up about. 2010 was before I’d really sought any sort of help for mental health, and well before I’d been diagnosed with either anxiety or Asperger’s, but I still recognised anxious feelings in myself — and my brain’s tendency to blow things out of proportion.

This post is one I should probably return to now and again to remind myself not to get so wound up about stupid things.

Finally for today, an even earlier post from 2010: number 57, Look into the Eyes, in which I talk about the Derren Brown show my ex-wife (who was, at that point, just my wife) and I had been to see at the Mayflower theatre in Southampton. I really enjoyed that show, and both of us had a lot of time for Derren Brown. I feel like we don’t see much of him these days; I wonder what happened to him? Looking on Wikipedia, it seems he’s still active, but I guess the changing nature of how we look at media these days makes him less visible — I don’t watch “TV” any more, for example, and that tended to be where I saw him the most.

All right, that’s enough looking back for one day. My cat has just been sick and the other cat is eating it. I think that’s as good a cue as any to just go to bed.

2321: Treading the Boards

0321_001

Watching popular British topical panel show Mock the Week, which has an inexplicably large number of episodes available on Netflix — peculiar to me due to the topical, timely nature of it, not because of any particular lack of quality — reminds me somewhat of one of my favourite activities at university: participating in the university Theatre Group.

We did all manner of things as part of the Theatre Group. We put on plays, of which I was in several, including Macbeth (which we rather edgily revamped to make it look like The Matrix, like no-one had ever done that before), Ivan Turgenev’s A Month in the Country (which we took to Edinburgh, only to discover that the Edinburgh Fringe audience wasn’t as receptive to tragic Russian love stories as we would have liked) and Alan Ayckbourn’s Round and Round the Garden from the Norman Conquests cycle (which we also took to Edinburgh and discovered that the Edinburgh Fringe audience was a lot more receptive to Alan Ayckbourn).

I also directed an entertainingly chaotic production of Twelfth Night after my co-director sent me an email one morning informing me that she would be late back to university at the start of the spring term because she’d decided to go skiing, and would I mind awfully directing the show by myself because she didn’t want to? (That production gave me more nosebleeds than I’ve ever had in my life, but it was one of the most memorable experiences of my university career, in a good way.

We also threw great parties, usually (but not always) after a production, and had a regular night out at local grotty (but cheap) club Kaos. But the thing that I miss the most, I think — and the thing I’m reminded of when watching shows like Mock the Week and Whose Line is it Anyway? — is the regular improvisation sessions we had just prior to the regular nights out at local grotty (but cheap) club Kaos.

The improvisation sessions grew out of the warm-up activities that had become a Theatre Group tradition when starting rehearsals. These tended to be simple but fun activities that could double as drinking games in a pinch, but were often also designed to get our minds warmed up as well as our bodies and voices, and so quite often incorporated improvisation of various types.

Theatrical improvisation games are a lot of fun if you let yourself get drawn into the experience. This is something I always enjoyed about acting ever since secondary school Drama lessons: getting swept up in a role and feeling like you really were, just for a moment, someone else. And in improvisation you’re not confined by a script: you can take things to some very strange places indeed.

In fact, these improvisations eventually grew into a semi-regular improvisation-based show that the Theatre Group put on called Count Rompula’s Showcase. When you showed up to a Count Rompula’s, you never quite knew what you were going to get. On one particularly memorable occasion, the audience was subjected to The Web of Dan, a rather avant-garde piece that the eponymous Dan and some of his friends had joked about in rehearsals for other shows. I wasn’t directly involved with this eventual production, though I was at least present for the genesis of the idea in the rehearsals.

I miss those days a great deal. I’m occasionally reminded of them when we play Final Fantasy XIV, usually on patch day, and devolve into a series of cringeworthy puns based on the environment and enemies we’re fighting in a new dungeon. (The introduction of the icy dungeon Snowcloak was particularly good for this, as you can imagine.) But nothing will quite match the magic of those days when we sat in a circle, miming the action the previous person had said while saying a completely different action we wanted the next person to perform. Or performing scenes based on silly props. Or, indeed, playing Deutsche Erotika, which sadly is not quite as entertaining as its name might suggest.

1717: The Story of Your Mail Archive

During a quiet — and, I won’t lie, somewhat bored — moment today, I decided to take a look back in my GMail archive and see exactly when I started using that account. I’ve had a number of different email accounts over the years, some of which have lasted longer than others, but I had a feeling that GMail had stuck with me longer than anything else. (Except perhaps for Hotmail, which I keep around to sign up for things I don’t want to sign up my “real” email address for. And for my Xbox Live account, because in Microsoft’s wisdom, they don’t allow you to change the email address associated with your account, meaning I was forever stuck with it, not that email really matters to Xbox Live anyway.)

Sure enough, my GMail account has been with me for somewhere in the region of four or five years or so. Prior to that, I made use of a .mac/MobileMe/iCloud account (the name has changed several times since I opened the account in 2007 as part of my employment at the Apple Store), and before that, I was using Yahoo. Prior to that, I was using various different proprietary addresses that I got with Internet service providers, and since I moved every year while I was at university — and quite frequently thereafter, too — I changed email address a lot, much to, as I recall, the annoyance of my brother, who never knew which address to contact me on.

Anyway, I digress; my GMail account hails from 2009, and it was interesting to take a look back to what was going on in my life around then. I can use this blog for that too, of course — and often do, as narcissistic as that might sound — but looking back at past emails is a little different because it’s not just a record of my thoughts spilling out on the page as I saw fit to express them; it’s my thoughts spilling out on the page as I saw fit to express them to another specific person.

As those of you who have been reading this blog for a few years will recall, 2010 was Not A Good Year for Pete, and indeed the early pages of my email history reflect that to a certain degree.

Before that, however, was an email from a former colleague containing nothing but this image:

It still makes me giggle.

Anyway, the first few pages of my GMail are actually made up of messages imported from my .mac/MobileMe account, which I was running in parallel with GMail for some time (and indeed still am, though I don’t really use it any more). In those early messages, I can see the first time I was hired as a professional games journalist — Joey Davidson and Brad Hilderbrand were good enough to take a chance on me and hire me for the now sadly defunct Kombo.com. The pay was crap, but it was something at a time when I had nothing else, and I got something far more valuable out of that experience: friends. People I still speak to today — indeed, just today I had a quick chat with Joey via instant message, which was nice.

Around that time, I was preparing for a trip to PAX East in Boston, at which I’d have the opportunity to meet a number of members of the Squadron of Shame for the first time — and to catch up with some I’d had the pleasure of meeting once or twice before. I was also looking forward to the opportunity to cover a big event as a journalist, though sadly I wasn’t enough of a bigshot at this time to be able to score a proper press badge, and as such had to write about things at the show largely from a consumer perspective.

Shortly after my return from PAX East, you may recall that my life fell to pieces, and you can see almost the exact moment this happens, since there’s a sudden flurry of sympathetic messages from friends and family alike. Thus began a very dark period in my life, and one that still, I must admit, brings tears to my eyes to relive, even when looking at it through the cold, clinical view of plain text.

So let’s not do that.

Instead, fast forward a bunch of pages and I was very surprised to spot an email from a familiar name: Shahid Ahmad, who is now best known as Sony’s most enthusiastic employee, and champion of the Vita. Shahid apparently commented on one of my posts somewhere — I can’t quite tell where from the email exchange, but it was a post about the game Mr. Robot, which I recall enjoying a great deal — and we’d evidently had a discussion about Chimera, a game which he made back in the days of the Atari 8-bit and Commodore 64 home computers, and which he has trying to remake ever since. (He was talking about a remake a while back on Twitter; apparently, he’s been trying to make this happen since at least 2010.)

Somewhere around the 37,000 email mark (still in 2010), I seemingly start using GMail a bit more for communicating with people and signing up for things. There’s still a bunch of stuff coming in via MobileMe, but messages without that tag are starting to appear more and more.

Around the 35,000 email mark, I start working for GamePro. Of all the sites I’ve worked on over the years, I think GamePro is the one that I think of most fondly and am most proud of. I feel I struck a good balance with my news coverage, and there was tangible proof that I — specifically me — was responsible for bringing in a significant amount of new traffic with the work I was doing. Unfortunately, this seemingly wasn’t enough to prevent the site from being unceremoniously wiped off the face of the planet some time later, but it was nice to know at least.

Aside from my own developments, it’s also interesting to see what names I still know today have been up to over the years. It’s nice to see Tom Ohle of Evolve PR’s name crop up a bunch of times, for example — that man’s one of the hardest-working PR folks in the business, and also someone who always put across the impression of genuinely believing in the games he was representing — as well as folks I’ve worked alongside moving from outlet to outlet.

And then, of course, there’s the first appearance of Andie in my Twitter direct messages (Twitter’s email notifications used to look a whole lot different!) and… well, we all know what happened there. (She’s sleeping upstairs in the house we own together right now as I write this.)

So anyway. Having rambled on for over a thousand words about nothing more than my email archives, I think I’m ready to call that a night. It’s been an interesting trip back along memory lane — not always pleasant or comfortable, but certainly interesting — but I think I’ve sated my curiosity for now, at least.

So what’s the earliest email you still have, dear reader?

1543: Secret Diaries

Sue Townsend apparently died today. As with any “celebrity” (or at least well-known person) death, I’m not sure whether I really feel “sad” about this, but it’s certainly the end of an era, and I definitely have some very fond memories of her work.

The Adrian Mole books that she wrote are, I think, the books I’ve re-read the most number of times in my life. When I first acquired copies of the first two books — battered old hand-me-downs with pages falling out; copies that I imagine used to belong to my brother — I had literally no idea what to expect. I didn’t even know whether Adrian Mole was a person or some sort of anthropomorphized Wind in the Willows-style character.

It wasn’t very long before I was hooked. I started reading them at just the right age, and managed to catch the subsequent books at similarly relevant points throughout my life. While I’ve enjoyed the whole series over time, I feel that the first two books in particular — The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4 and The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole — remain the highlights for me. I retain, to this day, something of a fascination with teenage life; a fascination that I can continually indulge thanks to anime, TV shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and all manner of other media. I think it’s the whole “coming of age” thing that appeals to me; seeing people go through genuinely formative experiences and changing as a result.

The events that transpire in the Adrian Mole books are all rather mundane in nature, but help to shape Adrian into the person he later becomes. While he ends up not exactly realising a lot of his potential in later life, he remains, for the most part, a relatable character with whom I often found myself identifying, particularly in the early books. His feeling of slight detachment from the rest of the world, particularly when it came to being “cool”, making friends or talking to girls, was something that I also found myself experiencing, and while I stopped short of considering myself an “intellectual” at the age of 13, there were times that I felt I could have been writing that secret diary myself.

In fact, I did write several secret diaries over the years, beginning shortly after when I read the Adrian Mole books. Sadly, all of these (to my knowledge, anyway) have been lost to the mists of time, usually because I ended up writing something that embarrassed myself so much that I threw the whole thing away so there was absolutely no risk of anyone else ever having the chance of stumbling across it. I kind of regret that now; much as I regularly like browsing back over my entries on this blog — the Random Post button at the top is a vaguely fun time if you have nothing better to do — I also liked looking back over old diaries and reading my thoughts and feelings about things. During my teenage years, entries were often about girls and my various feelings towards them, inevitably unrequited. During my university years, entries were often about girls, too, but also, I feel, sparked the beginning of my coming to understand my own anxiety and depression issues — issues that I’m still coming to terms with today.

If nothing else, writing down thoughts and feelings about things — even the most mundane things — can prove to be an enormously cathartic experience. I know that the fact my romantic (and, uh, erotic) feelings towards several girls in high school were inevitably unrequited was made somewhat easier to deal with by having that “release” of writing down how I felt about these things at times; and when I tried my hand at writing a diary again a couple of times during my university studies, it proved to be similarly helpful.

What I’m doing with this blog is, for the most part, the same thing; the difference here is that it’s public and digital rather than scrawled in biro and hidden under my mattress. Regular readers will know I’m pretty open about a lot of things, though, and the world hasn’t ended as a result; perhaps if someone had inadvertently stumbled across those secret diaries — or, if they did, spoken up about them — it wouldn’t have been all that bad.

Or perhaps it could have been the most mortifying experience in the world. I guess we’ll never know, now.

Oh, and if, by any chance, through some twisting and turning of the worldlines, my 14-year old self ends up reading this? Give up on Nikki, mate; she’s well out of your league.

1312: Hoarding

Occasionally I look around and wonder why I keep some of the crap I do.

I’m actually not that much of a hoarder — I’ve been fairly ruthless about throwing useless crap out on several occasions, usually when moving house — but there are some thing that, over the years, I just haven’t been able to bring myself to part with.

One of the things that’s stayed with me for over half my life now — well, several things, really, if we’re being picky — is my old school work. Not all of it — reading through old school books would make me cringe — but some of it. Most notably, I appear to still have most of my coursework assignments from A-Level Sociology (and possibly GCSE Integrated Humanities, too), all my course notes from A-Level English Language and I even found one of my GCSE (or possibly A-Level… I forget) Music compositions the other day — a piano piece called “The Storm” that I momentarily contemplated giving a French title (“L’Orage”, which I’m not even sure is grammatically correct) before mentally punching myself in the face with a silent admonishment to not be so fucking pretentious.

The aforementioned English Language notes actually moved binders during the course of my studies, but I still have the previous ring binder they were in before they got a bit too… big. Said smaller binder was decorated on the inside covers by my friends and I (mostly me) with a series of fake classified advertisements, many of which are in-jokes that I can still remember but which, going by past experience attempting to resurrect them with my old school friends, are probably remembered by only me. For example, I can remember exactly whom the advert “Ninja Assassin Wanted to Eliminate Annoying Twat in English Class” refers to; likewise, I remember who the phone number for the adjacent “Ninja Assassin for Hire” panel belonged to. Other jokes are a little more obvious: an advert inviting people to acquire fake identification to get served in pubs by writing to the local police station (postcode PE19 999, obviously); an advert for a new book called “How to Use Windows 95 Without Getting in a Stress” (judged “indispensible” by the Daily Mail, apparently); Poppets offering a new “Rabbit Poo” flavour.

Interestingly, the inside cover of my English Language folder also marks an instance of Capitalising Things to Make Them Sound Like Official Things that predates TVTropes by a good few years, and also displays a convincingly large amount of evidence that I held some sort of deep-seated grudge towards Cambridgeshire Careers Guidance for some inexplicable reason. It’s also quite magnificently dated by the references made throughout the adverts — the ad for the fictional PC product Mr Volpe’s MATHS! Is Not Boring… Honest proudly boasts of “16-bit colour video starring Mark Hamill and Patrick Stewart” and “music by Oasis” along with the fact it’s “powered by Id’s Quake Engine”; meanwhile the Hanson Interactive CD-ROM apparently came with “tickets to see Hanson live, a working sniper rifle with live ammunition (for use at concert) and actual footage of band members being dismembered horribly” (with no apparent realisation that if they’d already been recorded being dismembered then there’d be no-one to shoot at the concert).

It is, in short, a rather eye-opening glimpse into my psyche from when I was around 15. I’m not sure it’s a healthy image, but eh. It helped make me the person I am to– WAITAMINUTE

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.

1225: Red Wizard Needs Z’s Badly

I’m exhausted. I’m not quite sure why I feel so utterly exhausted because I slept well last night and today hasn’t exactly been a particularly strenuous day. We played a couple of short games this morning before departing the pleasant country farmhouse we’d been staying in over the weekend, drove back, then, presumably, did our respective “Things” once we got home rather than immediately falling into a coma like I feel like doing right now.

The only thing I can possibly attribute it to is the two gin and tonics I had last night. I don’t really drink any more so even a tiny bit of alcohol tends to have quite a strong impact on me — disappointingly, this doesn’t tend to take the form of getting amusingly giggly or wobbly any more; rather, it tends to just make me a bit tired, particularly the day after I’ve been drinking. I guess what I’m enduring is a sort of hangover, albeit a rather pathetic one that will be immensely disappointing to those who used to enjoy past drunken (and post-drunken) ramblings.

The other thing it could be, of course, is the fact that we stayed up until about 2 in the morning playing various combinations of board, card and computer games, then tumbled into bed (not together) before waking up relatively early (for a bank holiday Monday, anyway) today.

Either way, it’s not a particularly good show, is it? I vividly remember the days when I’d happily stay up all night just for the hell of it (and regret it for the majority of the following day, particularly if there were any university lectures involved) and consume several gallons of alcoholic beverages before texting people I fancied messages with lots of X’s on the end of them (the number of X’s was typically proportional to how much I fancied them) and collapsing into bed, quite possibly fully-clothed.

Depressingly, the time when I was able to behave like that on a regular basis was over ten years ago now. Longtime readers will doubtless note that the posts I linked to above were from relatively early in this whole #oneaday lark, but they were isolated incidents rather than something I was doing on a regular basis.

Actually, I say “depressingly”, but I don’t really feel the need to stay up until ungodly hours in the morning and stagger in as pissed as a fart on a regular basis. At the tender age of 32, I’m more than happy to spend my evening lounging on the sofa watching some entertaining videos or playing a game. It doesn’t stop me from indulging in a late night once in a while, of course — apparently I just have to be prepared to deal with the consequences the following day!

Now I am going to go to bed and possibly sleep for about a thousand years. (Note: It will probably not be about a thousand years. Probably more like 8 hours or so, I imagine.) Good night, and hopefully I’ll have a more lively brain that is willing to talk about something a bit more interesting on the morrow.

1148: On the Stage

I happened to be online earlier when a university friend of mine posted a Soundcloud clip of a comedy set he performed recently on Facebook. (That was a clumsy sentence. I apologise profusely. He posted the set on Facebook, he didn’t perform it there.) I had a listen and found it immensely entertaining. Here it is:

At least, there it is if the embed code works correctly.

(EDIT: It did not. Here is a link to it instead.)

Anyway. Listening to Mr Millerick strutting his stuff and yell at British Gas on the stage got me thinking rather nostalgically about the reason I know him, and one of my favourite parts of university, which was my involvement with the university Theatre Group.

The Theatre Group was known at various junctures as Theatre Group, Blow Up and Rattlesnake! (with an exclamation mark) and I cannot for the life of me remember where the latter two names came from. I first joined it in my first year during that period of time when you feel like you should join some sort of club and meet people. I had enjoyed the two productions I’d been involved in at secondary school (The Wizard of Oz and Twelfth Night, if you’re curious) and so I figured I’d try out for the university’s luvvies society. One of my flatmates was also involved in the group, so I was glad to know there’d be at least one friendly face there.

The first production I was involved in was Macbeth. The Matrix hadn’t long come out, so this marked the beginning of that phase when it was seemingly obligatory for everyone doing Shakespeare to do something Matrix-inspired, particularly if you were a student theatre group. By all accounts our production was pretty spectacular (and massively over budget) — it was a hugely enjoyable experience, though to be honest I didn’t feel I got to know that many people that well at the time. The fun of being on stage was enough to make up for that, though.

Over my time at university, I was involved in several other productions, including a double-bill of French play L’Epreuve (A Test of Character) by Marivaux and Black Comedy by Peter Shaffer; Turgenev’s tragic love story A Month in the Country (which we took to the Edinburgh Fringe to modest success); Alan Ayckbourn’s Round and Round the Garden from The Norman Conquests (which we also took to the Edinburgh Fringe to more noticeable success — turns out punters are more interested in relatable, gentle comedy in proper theatres rather than tragic Russian love stories performed in botanical gardens several miles away from the main Festival area); and doubtless some others that have slipped my mind along the way. As time passed, I got to know a lot of the Theatre Group peeps well, and they became close friends.

One of my favourite things that the group did, though, was our Monday night improvisation sessions, where we all showed up, played some theatre games that we normally used for “warmups” in rehearsals for shows, then went out and got really drunk. Although these sessions weren’t particularly structured, everyone got involved (even shy, retiring wallflowers like myself) and everyone was immensely supportive of each other’s efforts. So successful were these events that they eventually spawned a semi-regular event in the Theatre Group’s calendar — Count Rompula’s Showcase. It had a more grand title which I’ve sadly forgotten, but Count Rompula was certainly involved in there somewhere.

Count Rompula brought us a variety of memorable performances, including one known as The Web of Dan. The Web of Dan started as a running joke among the group at Edinburgh, if I recall correctly, in which we figured it would be amusing if we did some sort of experimental theatre that was just Dan (obviously) trapped in a web and saying vaguely profound things. Count Rompula helped make this a reality, and it was glorious — though I do have to wonder what those people who showed up and had no idea what the big in-joke was thought.

Of all the aspects of university, Theatre Group is the thing I miss the most. One day I might actually succeed in getting these people back together for some sort of entertaining improvisation session (or, more likely, a drinking session) but in the meantime, I have very fond memories that I believe will stay with me for many years.