Ramblings, inanity and an ode

Glastonbury is off the menu....

Thankfully it's far enough away (4.3miles according to Waze) for us to not be affected by it, let alone be able to hear it. 

Certain roads are totally impassable over this long weekend at the world's biggest pop festival.

Last year my favourite artist Louis Cole played. He was one of the first acts on the West Holts stage on Friday. I had a look at the line-up this year: not a single jazz-orientated band or artist could I see. No Thundercat, Louis Cole, Kamasi Washington or whoever.

The rest of the line up I either didn't know or wouldn't get out of bed for. Lots of earnest and not-particularly-talented indie rockers, middle-classed punkers and has-beens. 

I read today Coldplay were good - but they are highly competent musicians who put on a proper show. 

Just saw a clip. So bland. Jesus. 

I'll interrogate friends who were there to see what acts were good, once they've returned to planet earth. 

I went to Glastonbury for the day in both 84 and '87. It was so different then. This was even before the ravers arrived, which was a big thing at the time as the old school hippies didn't want the festival to turn into an acid-house rave, which of course it did.

Wandering around semi-drunk on excruciatingly disgusting cider (malt vinegar with 'bits' in) looking at crap stalls and acts that really didn't do it. Wander off again. 

Back in the 80s the stalwarts were reggae bands like Black Uhuru and Burning Spear, indie bands like Spear of Destiny, Hawkwind and The Enid (for the hippies), and some other punk bands or post-punk like New Model Army and Killing Joke.

No corporate fields, no mega-stars, the sales pitch ringing out was 'Black hash, black hash!' and everything was overpriced as you were stuck there. 

I remember the anti-capitalist hedge-monkeys selling 25p cans of lager for £2 a pop. 

Yeah! Right on man!

Toilets with an Everest of human shit and flies poking through the seat. 

And the crowds! 

If it wasn't quite my thing then, with FTD it would be my worst nightmare.

Now you drive your Range Rover there, paint your face and act like a hippy for a weekend, leave the tent for some minion to dispose of, and drive back to your desk job at Slater Nazi in the City.

As you can tell, this curmudgeon never really understood festivals!

Sport

For or against? I like watching team sports - less good with other stuff. Found myself watching videos of Ronaldinho. He was wonderful. 

It's in stark contrast to the Euro Cup on at the moment. England have been so conservative and dull so far. I'm not a football fan, so has the game changed in the last 20 years to become in effect a possession -at-all-costs and zero risk affair? I get it that tournaments make all teams play differently, but the lack of creativity and flair is difficult to watch. 

Watching the NRL (Australia's Rugby League on the other hand is something else. I love the athleticism and warrior attitude of the players. The skill-set and bravery of the players is something else. Rarely is there a dull game.

And then Wimbledon is about to begin. Being a bit of a Joey I was crap at tennis. I have no interest in the game. 

Darts for the middle-classes.

Pseudo intellectual rambling

It was our monthly FTD group meeting the other day. Being a bunch of dementeds, there was a bit of confusion about the timing - 5pm in British Summer Time (BST)  or 5pm in Singapore Time Zone (SGT)?

I've always been fascinated by who I am, who I really am, who I want to be, and then trying to be at peace with who I actually am. And who truly knows themselves 100% even in an entire lifetime? 

Is anyone truly self-aware enough to realise how they impact the world around them in the present moment?

I throughly doubt it. But it's something to aim for.

Looking backwards and analysing a situation (self-reflection) is easier the older you get - and if you don't have an inkling of how you impact the world by the time you're 40 and are angry with the world because it's not exactly what you want it to be, then you're probably a lost cause.

I've always looked to myself as the problem and am highly self-critical, to my own detriment. I guess I want things to be perfect, not just good. 

I want to be witty and to have responded in a social situation with the best one-liner ever, but it fell flat or was cruel or just wasn't as funny as I thought. How can I avoid that? What should I have said?

Oh hindsight - what a bastard you are!

Story of my life. Some people just seem to find life really easy. Or they give that impression at least. I've never been one of them. I was always awkward at school. Saw the popular kids. Then similarly to girls with autism, I just tried to mask my insecurities and social spasticity by copying. 

Literally copying.

Who are we? Do we ever really know ourselves? Can we ever be honest enough to delve into the darker corners of ourselves and deal with what's there?

Probably not. 

But at any given moment, what is governing my actions? 

• Am I having a good or bad day with my dementia?
• Did I sleep well last night?
• Am I stressed or relaxed? 
• Why? Should I be?
• Did I drink too much last night?
• Have I drunk too much now?
• Am I annoying Blaise?
• Should I go home?

So many questions, so many variables. I'm glad I did a Mindfulness course to at least have the ammunition to realise the separation of SELF and STUFF. 

But the above bullet points I see like a bar chart or graphic equaliser, and try to quantify each metric in any given moment.

There's Geraint residing somewhere within my damaged brain, and then gravitating around me, my emotions, reactions, observations, motives, desires. Because I don't practice Mindfulness everyday I'm not as self-aware as I should be, but it's a good thing to at least have the knowledge of IT.

What was I saying again?

Gaming 

I ran Icewind Dale on Thursday for the Wells D&D crew. We missed Katy who has fled Pilton to avoid the festival influx (300,000?) on the village. 

I think it was a good game. I played a new wizard called Velynne. She is a posho who came to wizardry later in life, has had trauma evident in her shaking hands, talks about her débutante past with fondness, and is hanging out with the party. I like fleshing the characters out. It doesn't take much and it make s the role-playing part much more visceral and in fact easier.

On Wednesday I played Larry's Temple of Elemental Evil which was brilliant as ever - huge dungeon crawl and massive drawn-out fights. Very complicated they are, and great fun.

Monday's session with Sacha and the boys in D&G (D&D for dyslexics) was cancelled.

But Friday's fortnightly Pathfinder was a 4 hour session run by Stephen down in Rowden's Road. I like Pathfinder or 3.75 as it's known to role-players. It's a very catholic version of D&D to the rather puritan D&D 5.0. You get much more of everything - choices, special abilities, magic items - and as the DM describes it - it's more 'crunchy' -  as in number-crunching.

Because all games are essentially numbers disguised by scenarios. That's why the maths guys can 'break' a game - they scan the feats and abilities, take this that and the other, and not only can their character not be hit, it obliterates everything in front of them.

I like my witch - middle-aged lady who looks and talks a bit like 40 something Mary Beard, and hexes everything in sight. 

She used to have a stall in Camden Market.

We're doing okay in a system I used to play and which the others have never played. Good fun, and always interesting to pick up methods and tips from other game masters.

And now a poem what I wrote...

Ode to my winkle

Oh....my...winkle is a super

It came with a winkle hat

A surgeon hacked it off one day

Now what d'you think of that?

Oh my winkle is a-shrinking

It used to be magnif'

But after forty years of use

It's fallen off a cliff

Oh my winkle's short and wrinkled

It looks like a walnut whip

It's brown and short and stubby

with a light brown crusty tip

Now my winkle has retired

It got me from a to b

I liked my little winkle

But now it's just for wee.

Average post about dementia

An Apology

I know these posts are becoming more irregular, the quality goes up and down, and they also reflect my mood (so I've been told).

My day consists of walking Tomos, meeting the other dog walkers, letting the dogs play, then going to the pet shop where Tomos jumps onto the counter with both paws so they can throw him treats. We then buy a dried bit of an animal and go back to his home where he munches that part of the animal.

I come home, and make myself breakfast (smoothie, coffee, porridge with a teaspoon of honey) and then catch-up with the news and YouTube subscriptions. 

I might even perform my ablutions...

Buying food, some chores around the house. Then  watch reams and reams of YouTube. If I'm doing chores I listen to Times Radio or The Rest is Politics or Page 94  -the Private Eye podcast. If I'm shopping I just have the noise-cancelling on and nothing else as you'd be amazed how loud supermarkets are - the chatter, the air-con units, the trolleys etc. 

I no longer have a subscription to The Times but I like the radio show as it features some of my favourite hacks - Matt Chorley, Giles Coren, James Marriott, Rachel Sylvester among others. It can be very funny.

I am actually reading The Guardian. I also watch John Harris who I've seen speak at one of those posh festivals - and he just goes to small towns and talks to people in the street about what their concerns are. He's so personable and unpretentious - he just gets people to unload. He's quite brilliant at it.

So what have you been up to then?

Gosh. Er, I'm not sure. I'll have to look it up on the calendar. 

Erm, not much it would appear. 4 game sessions last week, looking at buying a gaming computer but can't justify it, watching YouTube, and 2/3 nights of heavy drinking. Not big or clever. At least I'm not drinking at home anymore.

This week I have been doing lots of gaming - 2 sessions on Wednesday alone - and running my Thursday group. At the beginning of the session I couldn't remember the last location the party were at so I went with one and got it wrong - they'd killed the giants a two to three weeks previously.

That was a bit worrying. Making new memories is, you see.

So it wasn't the greatest start. Everyone seems to love the role-playing bits, so I can get all RADA about it and camp it up.

Making up daft names and basing the characters on other kids' mums from school, amalgams of people I've met and sometimes just putting a few traits on a piece of paper and assuming a [silly] accent.

One example is I'm using Mrs Sxxxxx as a rather scary Tiefling (cambion) Wizard called Avarice. She speaks to the characters in a rather emotionless Thames estuary monotone, constantly berating them for their failings and general incompetence. 

I should have done acting but I was so incredibly oversensitive as a child I could not bear to be made fun of, so I daren't expose myself on stage.

So I'm doing it now. It's nice to improvise  - I wouldn't be able to memorise a script anyway - especially now.

What I SHOULD be doing

I should have performed my ablutions already, that's for certain.

I should be making notes on Icewind Dale  - this has become procrastination No1 for weeks now.

I should have replaced Nerys's sills.

I should be doing more chores around the house.

I should be reducing my drinking even further.

I should be more careful when I'm out and about. But I love socialising and when the mood takes me I don't want to stop.

I should manage it all a little bit better though.

Rediscovery of the Week

Then I found this - from Around the Horne - the super-popular 1960s comedy radio programme. I always loved these camp comedians from this era but especially our Kenny. 

An autodidact, but a really troubled, conflicted soul, who was disgusted by his homosexuality, he could be utterly charming and hilarious one minute, then utterly vulgar and cruel the next.

He read lots of stories on Jackanory and he was spell-binding. And also the Carry On films of course.

I love his word play and erudition, his voices and outrageousness. Poor bugger. 

We don't have characters like that anymore.

Thought for the day

A therapist is someone you pay to tell you that you're right and everyone else is wrong. 

Dementia Philosophy Post

Epicurus or Zeno?

I was never interested at all in Biology or Chemistry, but I loved Physics. When I did Julius Caesar for O-Level English Literature I looked into Brutus and Cassius's philosophers of choice: Zeno the stoic for Brutus and Epicurus for Cassius.

In short, stoicism is living a life of virtue accordance with nature, where calm reasoning supersedes emotion.

Epicureanism is about living life to its pleasure without resort to Hedonism. It was a version of  Zen in its own way - you wanted peace, pleasure in small things and no excess in materialism or emotion.

Sound quite similar, but they became opposites.

To me reading up on these guys was a revelation, and much more interesting than the text was then to a 15 year old boy who liked looking out of the window.

Physics and philosophy - the subjects of dreamers. Now that would have been a curriculum I could have got behind.

In the end art and history for A-Levels.

When I retrained I chose stonemasonry but in retrospect I should have been a field archeologist.

Hindsite is a bastard.

Morning Walks

I love walking Tomos. He's such a happy dog. He wants to meet everyone and say hello. 

Today we stopped by the moat and saw the cygnets who are now growing up and are half the size of their parents but still with the grey plumage.

We also saw tiny baby moorhens! 

I love their feet too.

They were the size of a goose egg each, with black fluff and bright red beaks. There must have been 8 of them. They were so tiny they would alternate between paddling and then walking on the pondweed. Like Rallycross, but for wildfowl.

Tomos is always looking to run and play with other dogs. Some dog owners are very nervous, and unsurprisingly their dogs become nervous wrecks too. Dogs are social animals and the majority of the dogs we let off in the field by the moat and they run and play bitey-face for as long as they can. Tomos being of great working stock can go on all day.

Elmer Tomos

I hate getting out of bed but I really enjoy walking Tomos and meeting the other dog walkers. Yin and Yang, eh? 

Or to put it another way, bloody 'dualistic world shit', to quote the great thinkers Derek and Clive.

Gaming Bit

Back playing Baldur's Gate 3 on the computer.

Rosie is my little halfling (Hobbit) bard. She's leading the merry band of misfits through the Sword Coast and into the Underdark. She's 3 foot high with red hair, facial tattoos and piercings. She's already slept with 2 of her party. I think she'll have all of them by the end of this adventure. 

It's good fun running through this again. It beats endlessly pouring over my D&D adventure book waiting for the information to absorb into my brain. 

There are so many variables involved in this game - almost impossible to have the exact same experience twice.

You see I can feel my interest in tabletop D&D waining. I've had this before a few years ago and then it came back with a vengeance, so hopefully that will be the case now.

Maybe I'm no longer able to make new memories, which is why when Dungeon Mastering older adventures I've run before it's easier. I'm hoping that this adventure just happens to be an anomaly and that I'll be back in the thick of things, living and breathing the adventure we're playing at any one time and able to run it like I used to, acting out the characters, doing their voices and describing the story in rich detail with all the atmosphere intended.

If not then there's nothing I can do anyway, and I'll have to move on and find something else. I still enjoy playing, which is much easier to do. 

That's where the stoicism comes in.

Hives

This is a recent thing. I thought they were bedbugs or cat fleas initially, but they're either an allergy or a response to stress. 

Being on Sertraline I'm never that conscious of being stressed, but J and I are going through the divorce proceedings and she's been really good with me. It will all work out for the best. However, the process is not unstressful.

The hives may be an allergic reaction to soft fruit. I'm eating a lot of strawberries at the moment.

In fact, the timing is so apt me being here for my parents as both can't move very far and rely on me to do the shopping, ferry them to and from medical establishments and do other stuff for them. 

Is this part of a cosmic plan? Is everything settling in place as part of the grand narrative?

Bollocks it is.

Anyway, my brain hurts now.

The (brain) fog is growing thicker, as am I

Weekend in London

Just come back. Left on a coach on Sunday morning, getting to Hammersmith at 12pm precisely, then met the players in the Willoughby as normal - or as normal used to be -  and played Soulbound RPG. It's a bit like D&D in a broken world of dread fantasy. It uses a simpler d6 system as opposed to a D20 system, so it's easier to pick up.

Adrian ran it and it was very good, even though my character got ripped to shreds at the end. 

It was a noble sacrifice. 

I then stayed at Adrian and Lisa's and had a lovely meal in the garden, and watched as Lisa pointed out a flying stag beetle in the sky above, which zipped past at 10pm, which are endangered thanks to humans.

I then went to bed early, zonking out at 11pm in the room with my amphibious and invertebrate buddies, croaking and hissing away. It's like falling asleep in a rainforest without the getting-eaten bit.

Morning: I'm incapable of logistics these days (one of the reasons my work became impossible) so I got to New Malden station to see Sacha and Alice, but then panicked about trains being late and missing my train home, so I texted my apologies and ran back onto the platform.

Nerys was at Castle Cary to pick me up at 2pm. And here I am. 

I am absolutely hanging inside - I feel like I need descaling from head to toe. I need to be abstemious for a while; my stomach is distended and I feel like shit. 

Let's try and bring myself back on the tracks.

Pond Life

You see, I've become almost completely reactive. Just watching YouTube clip after YouTube clip. 

Reading only a bit. 

Sat here in my man-cave looking out of the window then turning 90' back to my screen. My brace of views.

Going to the supermarket, walking Tomos. Taking one of my parents to the hospital or doctor what seems like twice a week.

Going to the pub. Drinking too much. 

When I walk Tomos I think dumb things, make up stupid names like Dame Hillary Frankensplurter or Cedric Mufflespart, Doris Minge...that kind of thing.

I resort to childish playground humour. 

(If you hadn't noticed.)

Walking in Waterloo station today, wearing a Mutley T-shirt, I felt I looked rather like a disabled - dressed funny by my mother - in contrast to all these stylish people walking past. 

What the well dressed man in Wells is wearing this season

Damn. I used to be stylish - more so than these buggers. I should try harder. 

You just don't get the gentlemen's outfitters in Wells.

You help your mates

It was nice to meet up with people this weekend. 

A lot of the gaming sessions have been cancelled recently for one reason or another, which is disappointing. Still, last week during half-term I had a call from my friend Katy, of Edspired Tutoring fame. She was running a game in Pilton Working Men's Club for the kids, and she was suffering with food poisoning. 

That morning, Jacqui and I had had a difficult but necessary meeting about our divorce, which I'm glad we had. I received the distress call from Katy in the form of a text-message at 10.43am midway through the meeting, and managed to get to Pilton by 12.30.

Katy was white as a sheet and really having a horrible time, so we co-ran the game  - the kids were really good actually - aged from about 9-14. Very sweet some of them. And they knew the game too. 

It was nice to help. Because that's what we do for each other.

Without that, what do we have?

This is one of my favourite YouTube clips. Because this guy is a real character and epitomises the phrase 'salt of the earth'.

Reasons to be cheerful

When you're having a bit of a lull in your abilities it's important to try and keep going and concentrate on the stuff you can do. I can a still run a game of D&D but I'm not all 'over it' like I used to be. What I mean is, I don't know it as vivdly as past adventures. The key parts haven't resonated in my mind like they used to. It's all a bit more hazy.

It's a combination of my deteriorating cognitive faculties and that this particular adventure is just more difficult to run. 

Well, anyway, whilst I can still do these things so that people don't notice, I won't be able to forever. Maybe one day I'll just say - 'I can't do it anymore' - and that day will come sooner or later. 

Shame, as I've got some really good Kickstarters due to arrive over the next 12 months that I may not be able to appreciate...

So, I've had some really nice times recently/ Meeting up with Tanith, Robin, Anita and Nerys, bumping into Aisha and having a gossip with her, meeting Matt and Floyd outside my house on their daily walks for a chat, catching up with Herb and his dog Daisy when I'm walking Tomos in the morning, and then looking forward to playing online on Monday evenings with Tim, Sacha, Eddie and Boyd, on Wednesdays with Larry, Callum and Ross, and on Thursdays in person with the Wells crew of Simon, Matt, Luke, Katy and Hannah, then the socials with Clare and everyone else.

And in the summer going to stay with Mat and Suzy and Rupert and Sophie, and more gaming and lounging and chatting and relaxing, and hopefully seeing Mark H and Will and Ben and Becks in Wells some time.

I'm conscious that I'm actually lucky to know so many people, have an active social life and have things to look forward to. Because some people don't, and I can't imagine how depressing that must be.

And also Helen Mirren.

Thank you, universe.