#oneaday Day 821: Tomorrow is holiday

We're off on holiday tomorrow! It may seem extravagant to have two going-away holidays in the same year (to the exact same place, no less), but as I've mentioned previously, our prior attempt earlier in the year was spoiled somewhat by worrying over a certain idiotic orange cat who had decided to explore the Great Outdoors the week before we went away.

I am pleased to report that Oliver is, as I type this, safely inside our house, and has given no indication he is going to escape. (I know, I know, he gave no indication that he was going to escape last time, but he doesn't even seem interested in sneaking out of the front door when we put the bins out any more, even.) This means that, barring any sort of major disaster which occurs over the course of the next 24 hours, we will be able to go away on holiday without any sort of guilt or unease, and just enjoy ourselves. (Hopefully no major disasters will happen between tomorrow and the 14th of September, either.)

I'm really looking forward to some time away. I'm looking forward to spending some time in the pool, for a combination of just relaxing in the water and actually getting a bit of exercise by, y'know, swimming. I'm looking forward to our spa day. I'm looking forward to our inevitable trip to The Pancake House, and buying at least one Massive Cake from the ParcMarket.

Center Parcs, in its various forms, has become rather special to me over the years, even though I know there are almost certainly plenty of reasons one could criticise it. And it all, as with so many other things in my life, extends back to my childhood and adolescence.

I forget exactly what year we first went to Center Parcs, but I do remember the trip itself. My brother was still living at home, and he brought his friend Alex with him. One of the most enduring memories of the trip was Alex, who fancied himself a bit of a womaniser, causing two girls to fall off their bikes by delivering a thoroughly Leslie Phillips-style "Hell-O!" at them as they rode past. My other enduring memory of the trip is the fact that, at the time, Center Parcs used those weird Dutch toilets where you poo on a little platform rather than into a bowl of water. Most disconcerting.

On that first trip, I was still pretty young, as I can determine from my brother still living at home with us, and thus I was still pretty nervous about things like water slides. I do remember going on "the slow slide" at the pool, which is the longer of the two, and enjoying it, but also being too scared to go on either "the fast slide" or "the big white slide", the latter of which is just a big wet slope made out of the slipperiest material known to man. These slides are all still present at the Center Parcs pool complex to this day, along with the Wild Water Rapids, which I did not go on on this first trip.

Some years later, we went on another trip to Center Parcs, and I took my friend Edd with me. This was partly as payback (positive) for his family graciously taking me along with them on a trip to Gran Canaria, and we had a good time. My enduring memories that time around are of being old enough to enjoy the slides a bit more, and having a great time on the Wild Water Rapids. A particularly vivid memory is of getting halfway down the Rapids, only for Edd to pop up from under the water going "Hoo-haa-haa!" (which is what we thought the blue SS guards in Wolfenstein 3-D said, rather than "Schutzstaffel", which you probably shouldn't shout in public) and pretend to machine-gun me. Good times.

I also remember an awkward conversation over breakfast in which Edd attempted to convince my Dad that bloody violence in video games was fine because "you just stop noticing it after a while". That, it turns out, was not the most convincing argument, but did not result in me being disallowed from playing games like the aforementioned Wolfenstein 3-D and Doom, even though I had historically not been allowed to watch 15- or 18-rated movies.

There was another trip to Center Parcs at some point where I went with my friend Craig, and my one enduring memory of that particular trip was seeing Savage Garden and Ray of Light-era Madonna on the television, and us both realising that we actually quite liked both of them despite historically having been "indie rock" boys.

Andie and I have now been to Center Parcs ourselves a number of times, and it still feels like a proper example of "being a grown-up" to go on a holiday like this by ourselves. I mean, I know we technically are both "grown-ups", but as I was talking about with my therapist recently, I still find it immensely difficult to think of myself as such. This is not an altogether unusual position to hold, it seems; no-one in this world really knows what they are doing, it's just some people are better at hiding that fact than others.

Anyway, tomorrow we are off for yet another excursion into the forest. I will continue to blog while I am there, as usual, but I may be quiet on the socials while I am away. It is nice to have a bit of peace and quiet — and this time around, it will be nice for said peace and quiet to not be interrupted by intrusive thoughts worrying about whether or not we are ever going to see our beloved pet again.

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

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#oneaday Day 387: A weekend off

I didn't get around to making any videos. Well, that's a partial lie: I got some scripts done for quite a few, I just didn't record any. It's still very warm, I was feeling pretty tired, and I just didn't want to. So rather than feeling guilty about it, I just enjoyed the weekend, relaxed, played with my cats, played some Xenoblade Chronicles X (I'm finally into the new Definitive Edition story material) and just had a generally nice time.

Andie and I have also booked a holiday for later in the year. We're off to Center Parcs again, because it's a holiday destination we both like very much, and we were given some very generous tenth wedding anniversary gifts from both our respective sets of parents, so we're spending a hefty chunk of them on a nice holiday. While on previous visits, we've only gone Monday to Friday, this time we're going Monday to Monday. It's a lot more expensive to do that, but it also means you have a lot more time to unwind, relax and generally have fun.

We're going to the Longleat Forest site this time. We've been to this one a couple of times, as well as the Elveden Forest one. The Elveden Forest site has some nice memories for me, as it's the one I went to with my parents a couple of times as a kid — though of course it's changed quite a bit since then — but Longleat is a bit closer and arguably a bit nicer. We've lucked out with our accommodation, too; despite not paying up for the option to choose where your lodge is, we're in the "central" area which is not very far away from the main plaza area where most of the shops and restaurants are, so that will be nice. We're still getting an old lady-style wheelie bag to carry the shopping in, though, because balls to carrying heavy groceries on foot. We learned that to our cost last time!

So that's something to look forward to in September, which isn't really that far away now. We're nearly at the end of June, after all, which means just over two months until we can escape from It All for a bit and enjoy some quiet time in the forest. I'm really looking forward to it.

The world is a terrible and awful place right now, and it's very, very easy to feel overwhelmed by it all. So I'm very much looking forward to a week of not having to think about all the horrible things that exist in this world, and just enjoying myself. It is an important thing to allow yourself that time every so often, even if you're a committed "activist" for a cause (which I most certainly am not), because if you don't allow yourself that time to unwind, you're just doing yourself a disservice, and quite possibly mental harm in the process, too.

So yeah. The countdown to holiday has begun, and I'm sure the knowledge that I get to escape for a bit is going to make the next couple of months of work fly by! At least I hope so. It's been a difficult few months, for reasons I won't get into now (nothing to worry about, it would just be unprofessional of me to comment on specifics in such a public place) but I think, I think we're getting over the worst of it now. In fact, we're already starting to get ahead of schedule with stuff planned for next year! How exciting.

Anyway. My Sunday is rapidly disappearing, and I want to go and play some video games before I get to bed at a vaguely reasonable hour. So, on that note, good night — and remember: book yourself some holiday, even if you don't go anywhere. Time off is important!

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#oneaday Day 133: Back to life, back to reality

We're back home! Boo! Although honestly, we're both kind of knackered, so it's nice to get back home, see the cats and have the prospect of our own bed waiting for us. It's been a lovely break, and we enjoyed a final dip in the pool before we departed early this afternoon, but now we both need a day or two to get ourselves back in working order for a vaguely normal existence from Monday onwards!

I was pleased to see that my cat Patti has been getting along with my mother-in-law while we were away. Patti is a very shy, scared cat when confronted with anyone other than us, but it seems that she's learned to trust my mother-in-law over the course of the last few days. The pair have spent some time together before and they had a similar outcome; Patti hid for the first little while, but eventually came out and became quite friendly and sociable once she determined once and for all that there was no threat, and, in fact, there was the distinct possibility of being spoiled with treats.

Oliver, meanwhile, has seemingly had a lovely time. He's already a very sociable cat, and it sounds as if my mother-in-law has had a nice time playing with him. We reckon he's probably about a year and a half old at this point, and he still loves to play for hours; we'll often hear him kicking his toys around well into the early hours of the morning once we've gone to bed, and he is showing no signs whatsoever of slowing down just yet.

A few packages arrived while we were away. One was a pair of swimming shorts that I paid for next-day delivery on in the hope that they would arrive before we left; needless to say, they did not, in fact, arrive on the next day thanks to Yodel being fucking idiots. "We need some more information about your address," they said. "Please contact us." They did not provide any means of contacting them, so I had to go ferreting through their support pages until I found the dreaded "Live Chat" option, then had to endure the obligatory Indian person with broken English copy-pasting set phrases and platitudes from their handbook, only for the outcome to be "we don't actually need any information about your address, we just fucked up and didn't even attempt to deliver it", which was nice. But at least I have a spare pair of swimming shorts for future excursions, I guess.

The one package I was hoping to arrive hasn't come yet, though: a box of all the Atari-branded sauces. As someone who enjoys sauce, I'm looking forward to trying these, and I also think it will make a fun video to try them all for the first time on camera, so I'm hoping these will arrive sometime soon. Sadly, they're not here yet and don't look like they've even been dispatched as yet, so I will have to wait a little longer to learn exactly what Yars' Revenge tastes like.

Anyway, I'm pooped and my back hurts, so I'm going to bed, in my own bed. I suspect I will not wake up until quite late tomorrow. And that's fine. I'm technically still on holiday, even though I'm back home. And I intend to continue enjoying that holiday until work starts again on Monday!

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#oneaday Day 132: Broadcast Television

It must seem incredibly quaint to people who grew up after a certain point to know that when we wanted to watch something on television, we used to be beholden to an arbitrary schedule that wasn't decided by us, the viewers.

Sure, pay-per-view and on-demand services existed, but they were often extremely expensive and in some cases still beholden to someone else's schedule.

Today, of course, if you want to watch something you just call it up from any of the bazillion streaming services available, or raid your network-attached storage that is loaded up with pirated movies you've torrented over the course of the last decade.

Streaming services have their own drawbacks, of course, with the two main ones being that there are about as many streaming services as there used to be cable packages, and the dreaded "analysis paralysis", where being given complete freedom to choose anything often causes you to end up choosing nothing.

The reason I bring this up is because while we've been away on holiday, we haven't had any TV-connected streaming devices with us. And you know what? It's been kind of nice. We've watched a bit of telly while we've been here, and it's just been whatever happened to be on while we wanted to just zone out for a bit. And broadcast television as it exists today is more than happy to cater to this type of viewer.

You know the sort of thing: shows that require zero commitment or even attention, like game shows and reality TV programmes about traffic police. Mindless garbage, to be sure, but somehow to me will always feel less offensive than attention-deficit slop on services like TikTok and YouTube Shorts. Perhaps that's just my age talking — and to be clear, there's plenty of broadcast TV I find too offensively awful to even watch as background noise — but everything we've watched "by chance" this week feels like something I've actually got something from, even if it's just some general knowledge trivia. I absolutely do not get that from "pov: u ordered a large fish and chips at wetherspoons".

Anyway, it's time to go home tomorrow, so it will likely be back to not watching any broadcast TV at home. It's been a nice change, though, and a reminder that some forms of media still aren't quite as dead as some people would like you to believe.

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#oneaday Day 130: Rest and Relaxation

Well, that's our first "full" day of holiday over and done with, and we've had a pleasantly relaxing, chilled out day. The temptation when coming somewhere like Center Parcs is to want to be doing stuff all the time, but honestly we've had a very nice day today just visiting the swimming pool in the morning, getting some bits and pieces from the shop for lunch and dinner, and then just enjoying hanging out in our lodge.

It's strange, isn't it? Even when you're doing the sort of things you'd usually do at home, they somehow feel more "special" when you're doing them somewhere out of the ordinary. I had a cheese baguette at lunchtime and it was approximately 48% more delicious by virtue of the fact it was prepared and eaten by me in a forest cabin rather than our house.

The wildlife around here is insanely tame. Earlier in the day, a group of ducks came up to our window and actually started tapping on it. They somehow knew we'd just made sandwiches, and wanted to participate. At other times, we've had deer and squirrels come right up to the patio doors, clearly begging. It seems the advice to not feed the wildlife mostly falls on deaf ears. And the wildlife, it appears, is not above being cute in an attempt to get food.

For activities that don't involve going outside, I decided to play through Ufouria: The Saga on Evercade while I was here, and I beat it earlier today. That was thoroughly satisfying; it's a great game, and I'm glad I took the time to play it. Perhaps some words on MoeGamer about that one when I get back.

Anyway, it's now well after midnight and I should probably sleep. No real plans for tomorrow except to have dinner out, and perhaps do some "Adventure Golf". Toodle pip.

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#oneaday Day 115: Forest getaway

I slept terribly last night and consequently woke up this morning feeling like absolute garbage. It didn't improve much as the day went on, but I feel vaguely more human now, just as it's about time to head to bed.

I can, at least, console myself with the fact that the wife and I have booked a much-needed holiday for in a couple of weeks. We're going to Center Parcs in Elveden Forest again. This is, I believe, the third time we've been to Center Parcs together generally, and the second time we've been to Elveden Forest. It's actually the fourth time I've been to Elveden Forest, as I went twice when I was a kid: once with my parents, my brother and one of his friends, then again some years later with my parents and one of my friends.

Center Parcs can be a pricy holiday, particularly if you start getting involved in the activities they offer, but honestly even if you do pretty much nothing for the time you're there, it's still a thoroughly pleasant getaway. This time around, we're taking a two-bedroom villa (or "lodge", I believe they call them now) as it was only fifty quid more than the apartments we usually go for. That should provide plenty of space to spread out, relax and enjoy ourselves.

I was kind of hoping that the next time we went away on holiday, I'd be in a better physical condition, but that's very much a slow process that has kind of stalled a little bit of late. I'm still down in weight from where I was, but I've been really struggling with motivation, so I've decided to take a short break from attending Slimming World meetings, at least until after our holiday, and then decide what to do after that. I have been deriving some satisfaction from the Fitness Boxing sessions I've been doing, though, so once I feel a bit better after today's crappy feeling, I'll be back on that.

Anyway, regardless of the state I'm in, I'm looking forward to some time away. It's good to get away from it all now and again, have a change of scenery and spend some time in an environment where there's zero pressure. And I well and truly intend to "unplug" as much as possible from the Internet while I'm away. I'll still post my daily blog there, and we'll almost certainly take some gaming equipment with us, but other than that, I intend to pretty much completely ignore that the rest of the world exists for a while, and I'm very much looking forward to that.

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#oneaday Day 56: Disconnect

I'm officially on holiday for a week! I don't have anything much planned for the time off, aside from our trip on Thursday to go and look at pianos, but I'm going to try and be vaguely "productive" with my time. That means I'm going to try and force myself out in this heat and into the gym — once I'm in the air conditioning, I'm sure it'll be fine — and I'm going to record some videos, and perhaps write some stuff.

One thing I'm going to try and make an effort to do is not look at "online" stuff as much as humanly possible. I'm not going to look at Twitter (easy, since I don't have an account any more except the official one I use for work), I'm not going to look at Facebook (ditto), I'm not going to look at BlueSky (easy enough) and I'm probably going to try and ration my Discord usage as much as possible also.

I just don't want to know, you see. I don't want or need to know what people are arguing about today, or what the worst people on the Internet are being sexist, racist or transphobic about today. I don't want to know about the seemingly endless parade of layoffs in the games industry. And I don't want to know how shit online media in general is. I know all these things. They are not going to change.

Instead, I would like a nice, quiet week off, away from it all as much as possible. This will demand a certain amount of willpower, of course, but I'm confident I can find enough things to occupy myself with that I won't need to idly flip through social-related apps on my phone. I have games to play, books to read, episodes of Deep Space Nine to watch, music to play, videos to make and all manner of other things. So why should I waste my time with stuff that, on balance, makes me miserable?

I shouldn't, obviously. So that's the plan. Minimise looking at anything potentially upsetting, frustrating or annoying online and just enjoy the things I have around me. I will, of course, still be checking in here and those videos I'm making will be up on YouTube, but aside from that… a bit of "digital detox" is just what the doctor ordered for a week. I hope it leaves me feeling refreshed, because heaven knows I feel run-down right now.

Time for the first sleep of the holiday, then. Bring on the aircon!

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1750: Time Kompression

Page_1 Once again, time has been proving itself to be somewhat fluid. I've only had a week off from work, but it feels like an eternity; it probably helps that I've done one hell of a lot of things in said week off — most notably going back and forth to Scotland, but also last night's trip to London for Distant Worlds as well as a few other things — but this would seem to disprove the whole "time flies when you're having fun" theory; I've certainly been having plenty of fun, but this week feels like it's been an extremely long one.

I'm not complaining; it's been nice to have what actually feels like a really long holiday when, in fact, I've only been away for a week. I feel quite rested and relaxed and, necessity of waking up at an ungodly hour for a commute that doesn't suck all of the balls aside, pretty much ready to face the day tomorrow. I'm sure I'll be back into the same old routine before long, but that's not really a bad thing; routines are comfortable and familiar, and form the backbone to one's existence. Routines mean that breaks like I've had this week feel all the more meaningful and enjoyable; times like this week are honest-to-goodness breaks when I don't have to worry about anything and can just enjoy some legitimately completely free time.

This is something I never really got when I was working from home. Although most of the publications I worked for were perfectly happy for me to take a few days off here and there, it was sort of hard to justify doing so when I have a laptop and could work from literally anywhere there was an Internet connection. Indeed, on a number of occasions I found myself working hard well into the night when I should really have been relaxing and enjoying myself doing other things, but I was always keen to make a decent impression with the effort I made — that and, in the case of things I wrote regularly, such as my Japanese gaming column on USgamer, I didn't want to let down my audience.

This is something I never really got when I was a teacher, either: you can't just take a day (or week, or month) off here and there when you're working as a teacher; you have to go by the holiday calendar the school follows. This makes things both restrictive and prohibitively expensive; school holidays are "primetime" season for travelling, tourist attractions and, indeed, pretty much everything, so the prices are jacked up accordingly. Not only that, it means that there's just no letting up, even when you need a break for the sake of your health — mental, physical or both. Couple that with the guilt trip you get when you take a day off genuinely sick — you're expected to provide a full day's worth of lesson plans for cover teachers to use even if you're on your deathbed — and the whole situation is just rather shitty all round.

So now I am pleased to enjoy my times of holiday, because they're just that — time off. Nothing to worry about. No work I "should" be doing while I'm away; no "I'll just check in on the office email"; no "I'll just pen a quick article on that" — just rest and relaxation. Bliss.

1201: WE AR GOINGON HOLLYDAY TUMOROW

Well, we are. I'm looking forward to it a lot, even though my innate Britishness prevents me from showing any outward signs of it.

It's the first proper holiday either Andie or I have had for quite a while, and it's the first one I've had for ages where I haven't had to do at least some work in it. (As it happens, depending on when my new gig starts, I may find myself having to do some work while I'm out there, but at present I'm as free as a bird, which is a very pleasant feeling indeed.)

Holidays are ludicrously expensive, aren't they? Well, depending on where you go, obviously. But for the most part, if you want to go somewhere nice and/or abroad, you'll generally find yourself having to pay through the nose just to get there, and then a whole bunch on top of that once you are there, assuming you actually want to, you know, do stuff. Fortunately, we're lucky enough to have some friends where we're going (all right, the primary reason we're going on holiday is to visit them) and as such the expenses while we're actually there will be significantly less than had we had to find a hotel for the time we're out there. So thank you enormously to our gracious hosts for putting up with us!

This will be the second time I've visited Toronto. I really enjoyed my last trip there, as it's an interesting city. Those who live there probably take it all for granted by now, but I was struck by its incredibly multicultural nature. I'm not talking like British multicultural, either, where you have districts that are predominantly Asian, Polish, whatever — no, I'm talking about this strange and wonderful thing Toronto has going on where you'll be walking down one street and it's Chinatown, then you'll walk down another and the architecture is completely and utterly different and the people are likewise completely and utterly different. It's quite chaotic, in a sense, but in a thoroughly pleasant sort of way.

The other reason I'm looking forward to visiting Toronto, of course, is the people we're going to visit. Mark and Lynette are some very dear friends whom I haven't seen face-to-face since 2010 and my trip to PAX East, at which I got to meet a whole bunch of people from the Squadron of Shame for the first time. I've often said that that trip was one of the most genuinely happy times of my life, and I stand by that; the fond memories are made all the more potent by the fact that everything else in my life pretty much fell to pieces shortly after that trip, but fortunately, as long-time followers will know, things are in a much better place for me now.

I'm looking forward to seeing Mark and Lynette (and their friends, too, some of whom I'm already acquainted with) because they are My Kind of People — people with whom I can nerd out about Persona, anime, JRPGs, board games and all manner of other geeky stuff. Don't get me wrong, I very much enjoy spending time with my friends who live near me here in Southampton, but very few of them are "into" the same things to quite such a degree as I am. Sure, a lot of them are gamers to varying degrees, but an unfortunate side-effect of the games industry's diversity these days is that not everyone is into the same things. One of my regular board gaming buddies is massively into Minecraft and Skyrim, for example, whereas I think I'm pretty much "over" both of those games, largely because I have such an astonishingly huge Pile of Shame to play through and thus don't really want to devote any time to two potentially endless experiences. I don't really know many people in this country — certainly not anyone I can just pop over for a coffee with — who would get quite so excited about, say, Ar Tonelico or Trauma Team as me.

Still, I guess in one sense this is a sort of good thing — I'm grasping here, I know — because it makes those rare opportunities to get together with Your Kind of People special occasions to be enjoyed and treasured. I'm hoping the coming two weeks will be memorable and fun not only for me and Andie, but for Mark, Lynette and anyone else who gets involved, too. There will doubtless be plenty of board and video games along the way, plus eating good food with good friends.

Can't wait. So I should probably get to bed so I don't miss our flight in the morning, huh? Catch you on the other side of the Atlantic, then.

#oneaday Day 728: Lag

I've had a somewhat inconsistent experience with jetlag on this particular trip. The other night when I was playing Ascension until 1AM, I was absolutely fine. Yet tonight, it's 9.30PM and I'm knackered. Doubtless I will sleep shortly and awaken at approximately 4AM, when it will be freezing cold. At least it will give me some time to get some work done ahead of visiting the fine Mr Whittington tomorrow.

Part of this evening's tiredness can probably be attributed to a fairly busy day, however. We took a trip into San Francisco, rode the cable cars and walked a whole lot. I discovered what the hell "taffy" is (chewy, and available in a huge variety of flavours) and enjoyed some calamari and fries by the Bay.

As with so many trips away, time is passing far too quickly. There's only so much you can do in a week — particularly if you have a bit of work to do along the way — and it's easy to get to the end wishing you'd done more. Ideally we'd have had the chance to stay over here a bit longer, but that's not really practical at the moment, sadly.

On that note, I feel I'm going to have to bid you all farewell as I can barely keep my eyes open. Time to sleep early, and wake up at stupid o'clock in the morning; an inversion of my usual habits back home!