Archives: Games

New Year started, as most do, at midnight. K & I were down at the Black Bottom Club in Northampton for the second year running. This year was a little different, with a rocking indie band as opposed to the more chilled jazz band of last year. Different, but not worse.

After seeing in 2011 we eventually rolled back home after a detour to drop S&G off at theirs around 2.30am. I drove, which meant sobriety for me, but K was not so hampered by the restrictions of driving laws and just about managed the stairs to bed before crashing out.

Being in bed after 3am, I was pretty disappointed that my body decided to wake me at 10am. Granted, 10am is a pretty good lie in for me, but I felt like I could do with at least a couple more hours.

I get up, grab some brekkie and make some tea and sack out on the movie room sofa to explore the 007 game K picked up for me this week to go with the free PS3 she got on her new phone contract just before Christmas. I get one stage in (the pre-credit sequence) before her ladyship awakes and comes to join me.

I shut the PS3 off and come downstairs, making us both tea. We opt for a movie and flick through the Sky planner, eventually settling on SAVE THE TIGER, a Jack Lemmon flick from the 70’s that neither of us have seen or heard of. Turns out to be pretty good, but halfway through K’s not liking it and heads off to catch some more Zzz’s. I finish the flick while updating the blog and being sure to pimp it on Twitter before shutting down to head up for some kip myself.

I realise as I’m getting upstairs that I’m not actually tired enough to sleep, so I wonder what to do with myself. I to-and-fro up and down the stairs, make some coffee and a cuppa for the not-sleeping-either K and leave her to try out her new Mario 25th Anniversary edition game on the Wii.  I head upstairs to the movie room and throw on WAR OF THE WORLDS as background while I do some stuff online.

No sooner is it on, however, than I change my mind and decide it’s about time I sort the DVD collection out. It’s been randomly thrown on shelves since we moved in August and it drives me nuts having to hunt out the film I want to watch when I used to be able to grab it from my stack without a bother in the flat.

I empty the shelves and discover I’ve got enough DVDs to entirely cover the floor and I set about constructing a heavily-geeked up system of storage, based on genre, director and other random categories.

Around 4,30 I finish up the sort, although still with minor adjustments to be made, and jump into the shower before we head over to my ‘rents for a New Year’s dinner of roast lamb with all the trimmings. Awesome meal down, we chill with the ‘rents and play some Bananagrams1 before heading back to ours and getting in just after 9.

K retreats to bed, nursing a delayed hangover and over-eating-itis2, while I jump on the corner sofa downstairs, legs up, old episodes of ED from Sky+ playing the background while I download the NYE pics and write this, the very first ‘new’ post on the combined archive blog.

I note my paunch staring at me as a look down on the laptop screen and realise just how important my fitness goals for this year are. The belly will be banished.

Despite aiming for a 2 ep max, I end up on the sofa until nearly 1.30am at which point, 5 eps in to a mini-ED-a-thon, I close up shop and head upstairs.

1. an awesome game that both Mum and I bought for presents this Christmas, based on our deep love of playing a friend’s version [↩]
2. a sad curse of my Mum’s extraordinary cooking [↩]

Hugest apologies for the lack of blogging – last week was completely manic, trying to squeeze in as much of my over-flowing inbox of work as I could before spending the weekend away in Bath with K’s ‘rents for their joint birthdays.

It was a totally fantastic time, but I was unable to fore-warn of a lack of blogging as it would have given the game away. The weekend, which was spent in a rented cottage just outside Bath in a lovely little village near Westbury along with three very good friends of the family, was a total surprise.

We took K’s ‘rents off to Longleat house for a tour, which her Mum believed was all that was happening, before she received instructions to pack for 3 days away. Arranging to travel in separate cars, we arrived with her best friend from the village back home in ours to surprise her. With the other friends traveling up from Devon stuck in roadworks, we frantically tried to delay the house tour for half-an-hour. Expecting to be told that it couldn’t be done, instead we were offered a private tour of the house for no extra charge – remarkable people at Longleat.

Despite the delay, we were still un-accompanied at 12.30 when our private showing of the great house began. It was a fascinating and mesmerising tour and I’d recommend it to anyone with an interest in history or historical houses – it’s gobsmacking. Half-way round, the staff were so unbelievably kind enough to bring the missing pair of our party up to join us when they arrived. Much surprise (although Mama D had guessed who the sixth and seventh of the party might turn out to be) and hugs/handshakes ensued before the very accommodating host could continue her tour.

Once we were done we all repaired to a local pub for a late lunch, after which we all waved goodbye to the each other before heading, in convoy, to Woodside Cottage to surprise them once again with their accommodation and the fact that all of us were, in fact, staying with them.

The evening was spent in a bit of a haze of trying to work out who was where (K and I being in the annex across the way), whether anyone wanted to eat anything (verdict: no, but cake will do nicely) and what we were up to the next day (eventual decision, whatever we wanted) before we all engaged in a frankly hilarious round of card games before taking ourselves to an early bed.

The next morning, to my surprise, I was awake before the house opposite, heading out on a paper run before breakfast. After a chilled out morning, K and I headed into Bath itself to catch up with a an old friend over lunch and a personalised tour of Bath, which included some very strange people reading poetry in a taxi and more gorgeous architecture than you could shake a stick at.

In the evening, after a brief afternoon nap, we all enjoyed dinner together before a dynamite game of Scattagories before crashing out.

Weirdly, I woke up on Sunday morning feeling absolutely awful. I’m not sure if I was over-heating and dehydrated or had eaten something disagreeable the previous day, but my head was pounding and I felt incredibly sick.

As the others all headed off to Lacock Village and Manor, I stayed in bed with K watching over me and ended up sleeping until gone 3pm, at which point I woke up feeling almost right-as-rain, save for a lack of energy from lack of food.

Another evening of fun-and-frolics was met with an early(ish) morning this morning, getting up to breakfast, pack and leave by 10 am. As the others began their trek home, K and I decided to take a more leisurely turn back to MK, stopping to catch up on Lacock (where I discovered they’d used the Abbey to shoot portions of the Hogwarts cloisters in the first two Harry Potter films), taking pics and enjoying tea in the oh-so-English tea-shops that abound in pretty little villages around the country.

On the road home from Lacock we got minorly lost around Cirencester before coming through the most beautiful village/town we’ve been through on all of our travels. The name escapes me, but I want to live there.

Coming through Bicester on the way home, we stopped at Bicester Village, which K had never seen. After wandering the stores deciding that we can’t afford anything there (sorry, we didn’t like the look of anything there), we jumped in the car and headed home, only stopping for the briefest of traditional post-tour stops at Borders and then a quick meal at a fantastically-valued but chronically unfriendly pub before getting home around 7pm, unpacking our things, changing the bed, showering, blogging and – now – going to bed.

It’s been a great weekend and it’s been really nice to totally remove myself from work for a few days. Now it’s back to the grindstone and on with the first of my 3 talks in 10 days.

The alarm arouses us both at 7am and we roll somewhat lazily out of bed, showering, dressing and packing an over-night bag to take with us.

I run K down to the hospital for an acupuncture appointment and head back to the flat to collect the bits and pieces we’d realised we’d forgotten on the way down there, most notably the iPod, which would have lead to some 5 hours of driving forcing Radio 1 on us.

I get back to the hosp just as K is coming out – impeccable timing – and we head straight off for Oxford. We get there surprisingly quickly after a near-miss with a mini-coach which decided to pull across my path while I was trundling along the country road at 60. We park up at St Giles and walk down the freezing cold street round the corner to Blackwells, the awesome pre-Borders Borders at the heart of the student world of the town. K’s never been there, so I delighted in showing her the wonderful underground cavern that disappears beneath the house-front of the shop on the main street.

We spend half-an-hour wandering aimlessly around and I grow slightly disappointed at the absence of a lot of the books that got me excited last time, although knowing how much I could have spent if they were all still there, it’s probably a good thing they weren’t. On our way out, we head up a staircase that I’ve never ventured up and we find ourselves in a whole new part of the shop with modern fiction (classed as anything from 1950-odd) and a brimming children’s section.

K finds a whole load of her new-favourite Jasper Fforde books – a necessary since I’d been nice and picked some up for her without realising they were an official series and so needed to come in a specific order. Order restored to her collection and a bizarre comedy book bought for our host this evening, we departed across the street so I could wander through their Art & Film shop, where I am torn between two books and end up getting one which will hopefully positively impact the production levels of the Live Life Then Give Life docs that we’re shooting through the year.

We wander back to the car through the positively freezing winter’s air and pick up a copy of the Big Issue from a poor guy who looks like he’s on the verge of frostbite but still has a cheery smile on his face and is genuinely grateful when we pick one up. We’d passed him on the way in to the town, but not had change and I think he recognised it as the classic excuse for not buying – he seemed really surprised that we’d actually gone back and got one.

We headed up to the Nuffield to get my bone-density scan done, just a precautionary scan to keep a check on how my calcium levels are doing and how brittle my bones may be as it’s pretty common with CF to develop osteoporosis and can be exacerbated by some of the transplant drugs I’m on.

Post-scan we head across the road (and round the corner a bit) to the Churchill to catch up with my CF team, who now I don’t have my port in anymore, I have little reason to see apart from the odd check-up or annual review. It’s great to see them all and catch up with the gossip including flicking through the slideshow of one of the physio’s weddings which was being planned when I was last incarcerated in the Churchill – it seems like such a long time ago now, it really is like another life.

Catch-up out of the way, we leave them to treat the patients who need them more than me and get on the road up to Bradford. The motorways are pretty clear, barring a little bit of late-afternoon traffic around Sheffield and we hit the M62/606 around 5ish, then whack the Sat-Nav on and hunt out Dazz’s place of work, where we drive straight past him in the street. The man collected, we head over to Shipley to his new flat and commence the warming of said homestead both literally (given the chill-factor) and metaphorically (it being a new pad).

We chill and chat and eat and watch DVDs and generally have a giggle, while I spend half-an-hour sorting some Live Life stuff for tomorrow in the middle of it. Dazz has also brought all his retro gaming North with him, which includes an ancient Game Gear with Lemmings on it, which keeps us all entertained for a large part of the evening as the conversations are punctuated with outbursts of swearing at misbehaving creatures hurling themselves to their deaths.

Around midnight, we all decide to call it a night and then spend an hour trying desperately to inflate Dazz’s new air-bed, which has to stand in for the sofa-bed which is due to arrive next week.

Eventually we flop into bed around 1am and near-enough pass out.

The day doesn’t start quite as early as I’d hoped to get up, but the alarm wakes me at 9am and I clamber out of bed and zombie my way to the kettle to brew myself a coffee in my swanky new cafetierre and drum up a cup of tea to rouse K with.

Once we’ve fallen out of bed and into some cleaning clobber we set about the flat. Seeing as we’ve only been in the flat for the odd evening and hardly any other time for the last week or more, things have been piling up, dropped off or unceremoniously dumped in the lounge, hallway, study and even the bathroom for want of a place to put bags down when we’ve come through the door and hit the sofa in “veg” mode. There is a lot to do.

We start by emptying all the Chrimbo packages and bags with gifts and attempting to find homes for everything, playing the DVD commentary on Pick of Destiny while we work. Halfway through the lounge, K reminds me that she wants to cook for the party tonight and requests I make a start on the kitchen so she can set-to on the cooking once she’s cleaned the bathroom.

I knuckle down the the washing up, re-organising and general scrubbing of the kitchen until it’s at least in a fit and clear enough state for K to rustle up her famous sausage rolls and more. Once I’m done I change out of my homewear into something a little more presentable and venture out into the big wide world to grab some last-minute things.

I start over at Mum and Dad’s, picking up a ‘script Dad had collected from teh chemist up the road from them for me. I stop and grab a bite of lunch (I’d forgotten to eat at home), then get way-layed by the sprawling mass of old photographs strewn across the dining room table. The ‘rents are getting their loft insulated (or at least inspected for insulation) and so have had to clear everything out of it.

Aside from the 15 boxes of stuff my bro’s squirreled away (ironically enough) up there, plus 2 or three boxes of my stuff and the same of their keepsakes, they’ve found a veritable treasure-trove of ancient photographs that show, among other things, that I was honestly and truly very cute once-upon-a-time. Knowing they don’t read this, I feel it safe to say I also found a pic of my Aunt’s wedding in which her husband actually had hair. Even Mum didn’t remember him having that much on top when they got married. Mind you, it was only 24 hours after my Nana’s funeral, so I don’t suppose Mum was paying a great deal of attention – it’s amazing the little tid-bits of info you find out going through old stuff.

Tearing myself away from Pa and his table of goodies, I left home with a hammer and some dishes to put dips in (we’re a touch lacking on the catering-supply front) and a bottle of wine for the festivities and made my way back towards home, aiming to stop at a local shop to pick up the bis and pieces.

The spanner is thrown by a text from K saying she needs all sorts of other things she hadn’t thought of when we went shopping twice in the last two days, namely the ingredients for Nigella’s Girdlebuster Pie – a desert so rich in sugary goodness that it’s sure to evaporate from any freezer in the country within minutes of the “ding” of completion on the kitchen timing clock. That said, it’s too cold for my overly-sensitive teeth to bear, so I have no idea if it’s actually tastes nice.

Once I’d collected the bits and pieces from the scrum that was Asda on New Year’s Eve as everyone tried to cram their last minute bits and bobs through the aisles, I headed back home.

Dazz had dropped in to say hey before heading back up North again for his New Year’s party up there and, bless him, ended up right in the middle of a veritable cleaning frenzy as we cleared, cleaned and moved things all over the flat to make it hospitable for the half-dozen or so guests we were expecting.

Once Dazz had gone and K had managed to calm herself down a bit in the bath (cooking brings on the fretful side of K, much like in her mother), I shot out to Maccy D’s for a nutritious evening meal to keep us going – with all the cleaning and cooking and cleaning we’d done, I wasn’t about to start cooking and messing it up even more.

Once we’d scarfed our hard-fought for junk food, K then turned my “no more cleaning” plan on it’s head by pouring half a jug of warm toffee over the pie and, in turn, the chopping board underneath it, then the kitchen surface, then the blender, then down the draws and finally onto the floor. It was a work of comic genius that seemed….well… somewhat less comic at the time.

Once the toffee was cleared and I’d remembered that I’d forgotten to chop up the veg stuff for the dips, I hurriedly set to it as our first guests arrived and the Wii was set up with extra controllers. Mid-way through our first game on Mariokart we were joined by the rest of the party and it all went swimmingly from there.

Most of the night was spent challenging each other and subsequently either screaming with frustration or laughter at Sonic and Mario at the Olympics, an insanely tiring game that essentially involves almost as much physical activity as competing in the Games themselves.

Once we’d all entirely exhausted ourselves, we settled on a more sedate game of Articulate, one of our Christmas presents and spent a good deal of time laughing our socks off at our ineptitude.

Without realising it, Midnight crept up on us and we flicked over to the last 15 minutes of pre-midnight musical fun with all the famous faces and those people you recognise and know you should know but just can’t place their names.

Midnight (and our leap-second for the year) came and went amid much hugs, smiles, good-wishes and clinking of glasses and the guests slowly ebbed away until K and I were left with the last vestiges of the clearing up before calling it a night just before 2am. We’re clearly not as hard-core as we used to be, but I’ll tell you something, I couldn’t have gone on any longer.

I blame the Wii. And Sonic.

We’re up relatively early again just before 9am, getting up and dressed for the trip to Guildford.

We leave the flat around just before 10 and stop briefly for petrol before hitting the back roads round Aylesbury to the strangely empty M25 and make the journey door-to-door in a little under 2 hours, which is pretty much a record.

I give my Godson, Li’l C, a big hug and say hey to the family, grabbing a cuppa and a seat in the lounge to catch up. It’s immediately apparent (it’s hard to miss) that they have just got Guitar Hero World Tour for Christmas, which is the Wii game that involves not only strumming along on an electronic (as opposed to electric, ie “real”) guitar but also comes with a second, base guitar, a microphone for vocals and, most excitingly of all, an electronic drum kit. Awesome.

Before the tea is drunk, C has set it all up and we’re jamming away to Livin’ on a Prayer, Beat It and Eye of the Tiger, which just so happen to be the easiest songs of the lot to play, especially for a mal-coordinated muppet like me. I may think I’m Animal when I’m playing, but I’ve no doubt I look more like a fat-faced ferret struggling wildly to free itself from the clutches of a peckish bird of prey.

Once we’d exhausted the ear drums of the rest of the family and I’d proven myself incompetent, we sit and grab some lunch in the conservatory before deciding on a game of Boggle to keep our brains going and avoid the mush-inducing Wii for a little longer.

We’re one game in and my phone rings with a number I don’t quite recognise. I almost ignore it, but then pick it up and am delighted I do as it’s my bro. We catch up and go over his Christmas (rubbish) and current plans (better) and likelihood of further adventures (slim, till R&R), before I fill him in on the goings-on of the fam back in Blighty.

I go back to the game and get my butt kicked by my 11-year-old Godson, at which point we decide to make the most of the fading sunlight and hit the hills for a walk.

Being the master of Geography that I am, I had entirely failed to ever note or notice the fact that Surrey has hills, but wow, are they beautiful. Today they were covered in a Dickensian rolling mist which obscured the distant towns and cities and created a timeless feel of total isolation – not a modern artifact to be found anywhere in sight once you’re beyond the car park.

We watch the sun drop behind the hills then repair to the quaint little village of Shere, which K and I instantly fall in love with and want to start house-hunting in, to a little tea-shop for hot-chocolate and cake.

We warm up enough to feel our feet and jump back in the car, heading home to round 2 of Guitar Hero, during which we each take turns to laugh our heads of at each other and I prove my ultimate smug-git personality by coaching K into managing not to get boo-ed off halfway through a track. I told you Eye of the Tiger was easy.

We eventually call it quits after an hour-and-a-half has slipped by without us realising and we head back up the motorway around 7pm. It’s similarly and amazingly empty as this morning and we’re back in near-record time, save for a brief stop in at Asda for some various bits and pieces, including some dinner for tonight.

K’s keen to pick up a new Wii game or two for the New Year’s Eve party tomorrow, but the games counter is closed so no dice. Instead, being on a sales-spree, we hit the DVD racks and pull out copies of In Bruges and Tenacious D: The Pick of Destiny, the latter of which we’ve not yet seen.

We get back to the flat (in darkness again) and I throw the dinner in the mircowave (classy) as K throws the D in the DVD player and we kick back and laugh our still-pretty-chilly socks off.

We the DVD’s done we debate throwing something else on, but decide that since we’ve got a heap of house-cleaning to do before the party tomorrow, we should really be calling it a night pre-midnight tonight, so we turn the TV off and hit the sack.