An end to navel -gazing

"He was black, so he might have pulled a knife out"

I see racism's on the increase. Reform - the party for the modern Daily Express reader - seems to have more batshit crazy councillors than Labour and the Conservatives combined.

And with batshit populism on the rise everywhere, it seems to have gifted the bigoted and the dim with a green light to air their prejudices, all in the name of Free Speech.

The other day a dog walker told me her daughter lives in Bristol, and her dog was attacked by a larger dog, but because the owner was black he may have pulled a knife on her so she just had to back away.

Obviously a large out of control dog is one thing. Like the dogs in question, the owners are often a 'type' .

We think of drug-dealing gangsters, but again these can be of any ethnicity. 

Why she felt the need to mention his skin colour when the majority of knife crime is black on black, to me is just racism.

It's like when you hear the phrase 'black bastard', as though the blackness of the person's skin had any bearing on his bastardness.

That's why the police mentioned that it was a white man who drove into a crowd of Liverpool football fans, as with social media had it been even mentioned that it was a brown person, the racist mob may have descended into violence, like last summer when a disturbed teenager who it was rumoured was Muslim but it turned out was not, stabbed some children to death in a nursery in Southport. 

These are scary times we live in. It feels like we're in a powder keg and one spark on social media is all it ever needs.

And it's all part of free speech. 

Which should of course come with responsibility.

The Beautiful Cathedral City of Wells...

Wells is a proper old Medieval town - and one of the smallest cities in England. It gets its city status purely by having its own cathedral.

There are plenty of stonemasons earning a living in these here parts, so I wanted to show some of the utterly shite repairs.

Someone has presumably ticked the 'okay' box and paid money for these.

This joker's used a stone repair mix instead of mortar, and it's already failed

Same again.

Obviously some left in his bucket.

Nothing like having pride in your job is there? Could have used a sponge.

Yes, that is a Grade 1 listed 850 year old cathedral behind. But who cares?

Wrong colour, too wet, and then they just leave it.

When you can do something to a certain level of proficiency and you have pride in your work, to see crap like this, you just think "What's the point?"

What is the point of me having dedicated all these years, thousands of hours, into a craft when shit like this earns people a living?

My family are musicians. My Dad still can't understand how people who could barely play could make so much money in pop music. 

Why do a good job when the people signing it off either haven't a clue what they're looking at or just couldn't care less?

And the thing is it's everywhere. For example, look at some of the new builds and see how poor some of the bricklaying is.

It's not as difficult as you'd think to make something look right, but it does take time and concentration.

I've seen some shocking work be praised by people who should know better. Even awarded with OBEs (Other Buggers' Efforts) and conservation awards. 

What is the point, indeed.

DMing the kids at Pilton

This was hard work. I'm still pretty kernackered 5 days later. 

One and a half days of prep, then 2 days of running the game with a large group of 6 kids - age range 12-16. 

That's a big range if you think back to when you were that old.

And then throw in a bag of neuro-diversity.

The youngest had quite a high level of ADHD and by the end of the 2nd day he was really getting on the edge of everyone's tolerance, but we got through it.

I had a massive tension headache, then took one ibuprofen and slept for 11 hours. 

Ah well. It's what I live for...

Dancing?? on a Saturday???

Ugh! You bastard.

I admit, it was me, in the White Hart, last Saturday. 

Boppin' about like a right Bertie. 

I think it was grab a granny night, as we used to call them.

Some joker called me a pirate on the Facebook post. 

I can see why.

As lovely old Dick van Dyke said: 

'Sing like no one's listening; dance like no one's watching.'

Gyles Brandreth in The Times, said: 

“Stop thinking about yourself. I find this one hard. We’ve all turned our lives into one big selfie. Breaking the mirror won’t give you seven years’ bad luck; it’ll add seven years to your life because happy people live seven to ten years longer.”

Good advice I think.

But what the hell am I going to do now??

T-shirt of the week

The Disclaimer T

The best writer since sliced bread

The subtleties of language

I read in the paper, that pompous old curmudgeon Kingsley Amis in his book 'The King's English', bemoaned how illiterate the world had become that he was having to devote a chapter to the difference between 'he might' and 'he may',

I had to think about this and without having had an extensive education in English grammar (comprehensive education - in the UK sense) I had to think about the context and tone of the two phrases. 

If you think about a rich boy and a poor boy, the rich boy may get in to Oxford, but the poor boy might if he tries hard enough. 

Or you ask your uncle if he has a non-percussive drill bit. If he's a DIY enthusiast he may just have one. If he only dabbles now and again he might have one.

'May' is just the higher likelihood.

That's it. 

Aural hallucinations 

I always put on ambient music from the Calm app when I go to bed. I have to have absolute darkness as well, so I wear a silk eye-mask which every time I wake (at least once every night for a pee) is around my neck.

But I've recently been hearing music in white noise, and the other night just as I was dozing off a trumpet fanfare. 

Bear in mind this was at 1am and despite it coming from the music room - and we do possess a trumpet - no one was minded play it at that time.

Luckily it only lasted a second, but it was a little startling.

Coupled with my slight visual hallucinations of white objects in my peripheral vision suddenly pinging into existence like a like they've just been switched on, this must be a taste of things to come.         

Pilton psychos

I just spent 2 days Dming in Pilton for the older kids. It was good fun, but as usual utterly exhausting. I realised on Thursday that the adventure I'd hoped would last the 2 days was almost complete, so I spent another couple of hours on Thursday evening setting up a concluding part. 

It was a bit of an obvious adjunct to the first part but their parents had paid for the time so that was all that was important. 

The whole premise was the party had met up as the only non-goblins at an ancient citadel. One of the party had found a large oval crystal on a dead goblin. They fled the citadel with the goblins in pursuit, fleeing into a valley. But the goblins eventually caught up with them and a battle ensued, ending with a stray arrow hitting a hornets' next and scattering the gobbos.

The main part of the quest was a whodunnit as 2 warring families in a vibrant market each accuse the other of sabotaging their respective businesses. 

Initially the traders were reluctant to talk to strangers, so the party had to endear themselves to the locals by taking part in 'It's a Knockout'-style games, and the locals would more readily impart clues that would lead the party to come to a conclusion.

The lad to my left was getting frustrated as he just wanted his character to kill everything then set fire to what was left, so for the last part on Friday I put in a ton of extreme violence to satisfy him. 

We were like that at his age too, and look how well we turned out!

Kids, eh?

I guess this is how writers of sagas set things up - have a bunch of threads which you don't know initially where they’re going to go, but which you can work out later. 

It's better to have unresolved threads which can become plot-hooks, than none at all.

Not having them means you have to start again with a brand new adventure each time. 

3 days later and I'm still absolutely wiped out by this 2 day session.  

What I'm reading

Earth to Moon - by Moon Unit Zappa. Autobiographical tale of growing up in a counter-culture family with a workaholic artist for a father and a long-suffering wife for a mother. 

I'd read the real frank Zappa Book which was pretty dissatisfying. This is far more honest and thorough as to how Frank’s behaviour affected his family. For instance, he would sometimes return from long tours with a groupie to sleep with - leaving his wife Gail upstairs to sleep on her own. Nice. 

Then he’d be in his recording studio in the basement for the rest of the time, sleeping during the day.

So we see the flip side of the artist - the solipsistic, narcissistic, self-indulgent, tyrant. The art comes first; everything else is secondary. The genius must be tapped.

The parents would wander round naked, and shout at each other, there were murals of orgies the kids hated and all the while her mother got increasingly frustrated and angry.

All Moon wanted was to spend time with her dad and get a hug from her mum, which were never forthcoming.

Moon writes brilliantly and I'd give it an 8/10.

I'm also reading another autobiography, this time by Adrian Edmondson, called 'Berserker.' It's supposed to be funny but having been a fan of Rik and Ade back in the day, the humour feels so familiar that I feel I've heard all these jokes before. 

I'll plod on with it as I'm still at the beginning.

What I'm watching

I was watching multiple YouTube videos on politics, but it's just an endless loop of the same shit. 

So then I started watching interviews with the very out-there maverick film makers I really like - David Lynch, Russ Meyer, John Waters and Werner Herzog.

Great Russ Meyer montage from Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, but may be a bit rude for Alison...

Waters and Herzog are just brilliant speakers and I could listen to them for days. I do a pretty good Werner Herzog impression. He is a one-off and his early works like The Enigma of Caspar Hauser are like a Bruegel painting come to life. He doesn't make films like other people. His documentaries are also wonderful.

John Waters is a great raconteur and there are a ton of interviews on YouTube which are hilarious. The 'Pope of Trash' started off making films with all his misfit friends in the late 60s and ended up making Hairspray (the original - not the musical), Cry Baby and Serial Mom - the latter which I've never seen. 

Herzog shares a joke with his leading man

It's nice to see people like this succeed, especially when cinema is dominated by the likes of James Cameron and Michael Bay🤮.

I've also watched Silo season 2 on Apple TV which is terrific. And I'm currently rewatching the totally unique Severance, created by Ben Stiller, in preparation for season 2 which premiers on January 17th.

The most original programme in years

Plans for 2025

The usual: drink less, exercise more, go to the cinema, theatre and take some walks in the country. 

What's more important than the above is to improve my rather crap social life by visiting friends.

So ideally all of the above but with an emphasis on getting out and about - which is precisely what Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD) prevents you from doing! The old executive functions being offline and all that.

I shall have to battle forth and keep going.

VERDICT: Must try harder!

A-frolicking and a-prancing in Wells

Great British Breakfast

Marvellous breakfast. Coffee was terrific - perfect strength and oatmilk-to-coffee ratio. Left the extra-large blueberries in the honeyed porridge just long enough to slightly stew them and take the sharpness away.

Gurt lush.

Kemi Badenoch has just been declared Conservative party leader.  The party of Disraeli, Churchill, Macmillan, Thatcher and Truss have elected the first black leader of any main political party.

I don't think Labour will even elect a woman leader for decades. There are reasons for this, and the main of which is the dyed-in-the-wool sexism of Trade Unions who still select the candidates.

Matthew Syed of The Times wrote an article where he applied to become a Labour Party candidate. Articulate, intelligent, reasonable - yet to apply in Labour you have to be approved by each table representing different sections of the party. 

I guess he was a bit too posh for some.

By contrast Matthew Parris, also of The Times and a former Conservative MP, wrote that when it comes to defining The Conservative Party, it isn't ruled by political ideology but rather it defines itself by what it isn't. So they do it by saying 'we don't like what Labour is doing' so they push back against it.

I guess that's a bit like defining what Britishness is: we say what it isn't, which is why Trump disgusts us so much. 

He is the antithesis of Britishness at its best.

Halloween, Shmalloween...

Being a misery guts I don't do the American 6-week festival of Halloween. 

Rather like being oblivious of that tennis tournament in SW London every June/July when I was organising my 50th birthday party, when hotel prices go up to £900/night.

I didn't even think to do a Halloween-themed adventure for Dungeons and Dragons at Pilton this year,. 

It just passes me by. Rather like Harry Potter.

So this half-term thanks to Edspired Tutoring, I ran an oldie but a goody. 

Nice team of kids too. Smart, enthusiastic, friendly and funny.

I tried to prepare by reading and making notes but it just was not happening. I found it impossible to knuckle down and get stuck in to the text. 

So I winged it. Again, having picked an adventure which I'd run 3-4 times before it was much easier to just run straight out of the book.

It went really well.

I think.

Indulgence

Look at this. While the 6 week festival of Halloween drags on some bright sparks had the idea of making themed drinks. This is Northern Monk's Witches Fingers - that's their spelling not mine.

Yes, it is actually that colour.

It's just food colouring, rather than eye of newt and lark's vomit.

Friends Reunited

Sarah, The Arty Teacher. 

I realised that throughout my pretensions of trying to be cool, Sarah and I were actually quite similar. We were both bored by 80% of schoolwork and did pretty much the minimum. Well, if you've got Ernie going up and down the playing field mowing the grass, it's far more interesting and soothing (hypnotic even) than learning German grammar or balancing some equation or other.

Both of us found revision for exams almost impossible, and duly did badly in our A-Levels.

I wonder if we're similarly neurologically diverse?

Haven't changed in 30 years. Well, Sarah hasn't...

To think, it's 30 odd years ago. We reminded each other of things we found excruciatingly embarrassing we'd said or done when we were...kids, essentially. But having been in contact over the last few years again, this was the first time we'd seen each in the flesh. 

We did the Cathedral, Vicars' Close and Bishop's Palace. Proper tourists we were.

Sarah has a business in which she provides teaching resources to a global client base. 

Check out the website. It really is something else.

Shelley who is so tiny that if it wasn't for her glorious hair and smile she would not be visible to the human eye.

She has the health of about 3 normal humans. She glows with wellness.

We laugh a lot. I like making her laugh. 

I always did. 

Then she said she'd seen something really profound while on a school trip in Sierra Leone, and she communicated it in a way that I suddenly felt the profundity too. 

What was it? 

A little boy, malnourished, stopped and stared for about 10 minutes at children in a private school playing football. It was as though he realised with his little 7 year old mind that he would never be part of that world. 

Suddenly the mood had changed, and hearing the immortal words of Alan Partridge ('I want to keep it lite...') I said something dumb, and we were back to normal again. 

Phew. 

Clare is the adult who accompanies me from time-to-time. 

We went to a cafe and I saw it had Basque Cheesecake on the menu. OMG - last had that at Brat  years ago. Best cheesecake ever, and I AM AN EXPERT.

It was nearly £5 a slice and while it was delicious it was about half the portion we were expecting. 

Mmn. 

I felt that was a bit mean. We wandered around through the autumn leaves and got another coffee then walked home. 

Clare's dog passed away recently, which is very sad. She is very laid back (she always was) and I can't imagine the stress she's been under recently what with her dog, moving house and stuff.

We talked about the awful things women do to their bodies - Brazilian butt-lifts, botox, filler and other implants and injectifications. 

Big old ugly duck lips. 

One of the things that women often have conversations about is 'What would you change about your body?'

Talk about fuelling self-loathing.

I thought about it. As a bloke, you're paranoid about the size of your John Thomas, my head's too large, and I'm rather puny. But those are things I can't do anything about. 

Perhaps I should change my sense of anxiety to that of contentment - be accepting of who I am and how I look. 

Yes - contentment. That's the part I want to change. 

It's a brain-thing, not a body-thing.

This week made me realise that I spend too much time on my own. 

I need the company of people more than I realise.

Mods

A lot of computer-based - and lately console games - have become open-sourced (is that the right phrase?). That is, opening up the innards of their games allowing clever people to add code to enhance the gaming experience. 

For example, they will update the graphics and make them higher in resolution, or add bonus content to the site in the form of extra adventures or crazy daft things - one of which is turning dragons into Thomas the Tank Engines.

The modding community, on their way to work.

Skyrim is the most modded game of all time. It was released in 2011 and I thought it was amazing, but time has taken its toll and it looks very dated indeed with its blurry, dull graphics and limited voices (very few actors playing all the rolls) and dialogues. 

There's not much that can be done about the latter, but it is astonishing what modders have achieved (if you ignore some of the more teenaged attempts...) with additional plots and stories, the use of additional voice actors and all the graphics enhancements.

(Vanilla = original)

I know I should be doing the cleaning and stuff... 

I'm actually looking forward to playing D&D with other adults soon as we haven't done a proper session in over a MONTH!

Shocking.

But I want to end on this enigmatic photograph which I imagine was taken in either Regent's or St James's Park.

What does/can it mean?

Caption competition?

Sensible post about shirts

Sleep

Yes. That. 

Dream tons, which according to my sister and Robert Winston is a sign of good quality sleep. 

I'm certain bad quality sleep over the years contributed to my condition.

Nevertheless, I woke up this morning (thankfully) after erotic dreams about an old flatmate (female). 

My bedroom was like a scene from the Hangover movies.

Pillows everywhere except the bed, duvet halfway up the arse and books and iPhone on the floor. I'm glad I have the whole bed to myself or I'd be guilty of assault and battery.

Thankfully no ladyboys anywhere. 😬

Been really busy of late. Even putting together a complicated piece of flat-packed furniture (a wardrobe with drawers and doors) which took 3 hours (if Ikea is Lego this was the Technical Lego version) took it out of me. I was knackered: just slumped in a chair watching TV for the rest of the day.

I've also been prepping White Plume Mountain for DMing to kids this week in Pilton, organised by my friend Katy from Edspired Tutoring. 

Everything is still doable - but it's taking it out of me. It just serves to remind me that in no way would I be able to work full-time anymore. 

DMing for Kids

It's half term and for the last 2 days I've been DMing for a party of teenagers who went through the legendary White Plume Mountain - a bonkers funhouse dungeon from 1981, which I've mentioned numerous times in previous posts.

The first thing to say is they were really nice people. By the second day they were thinking more about strategy and working with each other rather than on the first day when they acted as individuals. 

I had to rejig their characters around as they were pretty under-optimised. But with that done and some general advice about spell combinations, they went from being at the edge of a TPK (Total Party Kill) to triumph, but it was still enough of a challenge to get them to be fully immersed in it all.

They enjoyed themselves (apparently), and I'll look forward to DMing them next time, but I have to ask myself -  in the voice of a corporate trainer from Basingstoke -  "What are my learnings?"

1. Have a Session Zero. This would be a pre-game session on-line to flesh out the characters and discuss roles and strategies within the group, and to ensure they haven't done anything daft in the character generation.
2. Insist on character generation being done old school - analogue. With DND Beyond, you can just click and print out a character sheet. That's okay, but when you generate a character level-by-level with dice and pencil and paper, you know the character far better. The high level characters generated had way too many abilities  - I likened it to making a choice in a restaurant with a menu that runs into pages. Just have 4-5 choices in any situation marked out - quickens the game and makes it far less frustrating for everybody.
3. Run a lower-level adventure. Plenty of good one-shots to be had with a heavier role-playing element than WPM, and lower-level characters have fewer options - see menu analogy above.

Where's me pills??

In Wells one has to - apparently - give the Health Centre 5 days notice before the prescription is available in the pharmacy. In Kingston it was only 2.

I'm not quite used to this yet.

I will run out on Monday. I have picked them up earlier before, so I'm hoping they'll be there on Saturday morning. 

In fact, being a born worrier and now fixated on things like this (partly probably due to retirement and not having anything particularly to worry about, but mostly due to FTD) I think I'll call the practice to see if they can hurry it up.

Not having Sertraline for a day is...inadvisable. I may turn into Mr Hyde...and I don't want that.

Nor does anyone else.

Not finding solace in televisual delights

Amazon are now putting dreadful commercials into their programming every 12 minutes, unless you pay another £3 a month on top of your Prime subscription. 

Monsters.

Netflix are due to start the same scheme. I realise there was an actors' strike but there is very little decent programming on either at present. So little that they've even started pushing awful 70s and 80s sexploitation films onto the Prime platform. 

Rubbish.

So after watching an Orson Welles documentary, I then went back to my customary YouTube options - 

1. Boxing
2. What's Trump said now? 
3. Dungeons and Dragons
4. Other

So I went to other and started watching music clips, which I have neglected to do for too long. 

It was great. I began with the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band then sublimed (as one does) onto Heatwave and 70s British Disco which often had a heavy West Indies influence. 

Some great singers. 

I always thought Heatwave was an American band. In fact the 2 lead singers were Americans but the keyboard player and main songwriter was a guy from Cleethorpes called Rod Temperton who'd had a job filleting fish. 

That's him on the keyboards.

Anyway, he eventually went on to work with Quincy Jones and wrote songs for Michael Jackson for Off The Wall and Thriller, and hit songs for other people throughout the 80s and 90s, 

Apparently (I'm quoting from the wonderful Gilles Peterson) after Lennon and McCartney Rod Temperton was commercially the most successful songwriter Britain has produced.

How cool is that?

Characters

Definition being distinct individuals who don't follow trends, are eccentric and amusing.

There appear to be fewer and fewer these days. Of my friends, David Bowles and Martin Duncan-Jones were characters. 

Of the people I admire, many can be defined as mavericks/characters: Zappa, Viv Stanshall, Ivor Cutler, 

When you needed raw sex-appeal to be a popstar

There don't seem to be any anymore in the pop world: just products. 

I don't have anything against them.

It's just that I don't have anything for them, either.

It's my belief that in an increasingly bland and homogenised world we desperately need some characters.

That's all.