Miss Perkins will see you now...

A life in a day

I love lying in bed when I've just awoken, pressing the snooze button on my alarm 5 or 6 times. 

The perfect warmth under the duvet. Stillness. No one asking me to do anything. Listening to the birdsong, in the distance a terrier barks, and the low hum of vehicles passing by. 

Crunching of gravel as our neighbour prepares for work. Any time between 10 minutes and an hour I shall get up. What a shame to have to get up at all.

Then I become aware of the ever-present tinnitus in my left ear - a very high-pitched tone that sounds almost like central heating.

Pills, pills....100mgs of Sertraline, 30mgs of Nifedipine, Vitamin B complex, Vitamim D, Lions Mane, and a soluble Vitamin C.

Always blocked up - spray some saltwater up there. I am a martyr to my sinuses. It's hereditary. I can hear my parents blowing their noses - they sound like elephants.

Breakfast is a glass of worthy green sludge, a bowl of porridge made with water with a spoonful of real honey and plump blueberries on top. 

I have to have breakfast with my headphones on to avoid the television and its rolling news; a cafetière of smooth coffee and a carton of oat milk, then go through the paper starting with the columnists I give a shit about, thereafter working through the news.

Someone's taking someone to court over a boundary issue...World News, get 7 out 15 on the quiz, then YouTube. Any NRL matches? What's Trump done now?

I walk Tomos. Meet Herb and his dog Daisy, get ignored by Dame Joan (still don't know what I've done - my feelings alternate between loathing and laughter), get the next instalment of Gillian's Mexican soap-opera life, bump into multiple others. 

Some of us humans know each others' names now - we all know the dogs' names before we know each others'.

Spend too much time on YouTube. Get angry. My version of Tik Tok.

Must write more adventures. I'm rediscovering my writing side, my creativity having been strangled by years of institutional education. 

An ember still lies there. Must get the bellows out and some twigs. Need to work on this.

I almost forget lunch. It's a powdered Huel drink. Some people say it tastes of cheesy feet. I quite like it.

Snacks are shortbread biscuits or Bahlsen chocolate biscuits washed down with a mug of tea. Maybe a banana and an orange too.

Do a shop. Go to the supermarket every day. If I'm cooking for all of us I'll get a marinated spatchcock chicken, roast some veg and have some couscous with it. Other than that I'll eat on my own; pasta with a ton of spinach, or a pizza with a ton of chilli oil.

Might go for a walk in the afternoon but avoid the pubs. Don't want to start all that again. I want to keep the moderate drinking going.

Evening might be gaming online or I'll watch a film or some documentaries. Went to the local cinema last week with Nerys and watched A Complete Unknown with Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan. It was great. Must go more often.

Repeat.

Pushing Envelopes, pulling pints

Rupert visiting for the day, Suzy down for the previous weekend with her eldest daughter, playing online with Adrian, Larry and the other goblins as well as Sacha, Tim , Boyd and Eddie. 2 days of DMing with the kids in Pilton (see below) then writing a brand new adventure for the Wells lot for a one shot. 

Going to London to do a talk to 10-15 MSc students only 6 turned up and only one asked any questions. It was okay though.

Almost every day there was something on. And I just can't do that without paying the price anymore.

So on Tuesday 25th I woke up late with a cold. First cold I've had in 2 years. And it's a stinker. Still got it just as bad a fortnight (that's UK English for 2 weeks) later. 

I've barely left the house.

The oldies never got it. But I'm still very good with hand-washing and staying out of other humans' way.

So I'm off to see the duty nurse who, apparently, is very rude. And I'm so tired.

Too much gaming?

2 days of DMing in Pilton. The kids. You know. But there's a big age difference between 11 and 14, and it showed at times, with the older kids getting annoyed at the dumb stuff the young 'uns were doing.

It's supposed to be a collaborative, team effort you see.

One evening of playing on Zoom. We're playing D&D in realmspace. I won't go into details: it's all top-secret stuff.

One and a half days of writing a one-shot adventure. 

I wrote one the week before last, based on Wizard of Oz and Beauty and The Beast, with the screenplay in the manner of HP Lovecraft.

This week's was a time-travel extravaganza which I've always wanted to write. Being me there is zero method. I start at the beginning and bumble through to the end, changing stuff as I go, confusing the shit out of myself and writing the dialogue as the characters seem to emerge embryonically as I go.

The plot reveals itself as I overcome every hurdle. I would publish it but I nick everything so there'd be multiple copyright issues. Hitchhikers' Guide, multiple Alan Moore comic strips, Star Trek, evil toad-like tyrant (Trump obviously) and populated by the anomalous denizens of Drakkenheim, with a certain Hollywood blockbuster ending.

Run in one 3 hour session for Hannah and Katy.

They said it was probably the best adventure they'd ever played. But then again Carlsburg is probably the best lager in the world. (Hint: It's not.)

I particularly enjoyed roleplaying the AI Moulinex T3000 Food replicator.

You had to be there.

 Songs from the shower of insanity.

Singing "Oh Mr Grimble and his magical pants..." The theme song of a 1970s sitcom THAT NEVER EXISTED.

Interspersed with superfluous disclaimers/caveats of "I'm mad!! I'm mad!!"

What must the neighbours think? Lol

Shouting out "MY WINKLE'S SHRUNK!"

Well, it has a bit. But winkle-shrinkle is a thing at my age.

It's still scarily massive though.

Oh yes.

I'm 55.

That's my winkle, that is.

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!

Games Holiday 2024

But what is the meaning of the word ‘Spam’?

I’ve made it, baby!

 I’m so popular now that i got my first piece of Spam in the comments. It’s marked a turning point in my career.

Um, Actually, it hasn’t. It hasn’t done anything of the kind. 

I thought I would be deluged, but no. 

Disappointment.

Spam ain’t what it was.

Adrian still eats this.

At least there’s still lots of young women with no clothes on who like my Instagram photos.

Life in a Cotswolds Farmhouse

It’s Wednesday evening. With the exception of being driven to Tescos, I haven’t actually left the farmhouse since arriving here on Friday. I don’t really do anything like the strategic wargaming or bored-games that everyone else seems to like. I ran a Mutant Crawl Classics game for 4 1/2 hours the other day. That was bonkers and hard-work. I was absolutely drained at the end.

In the game, the characters are living a stone-age existence in a world similar to Earth, the climate is tropical, the sun large and red, the sky a teal/turquoise and the moon is replaced by a large crescent over the horizon. The object of the game is a rites-of-passage where you must go to ancient fantastic places and retrieve artifacts, which can be as mundane as thermos flasks or as fantastical as plasma rifles. 

What could possibly go wrong?

The trouble with RPGs - you have to rehearse and revise and be on top of the entire story you’re running for that session or it can be crap.

Luckily no one wanted to play it again. 

Sometimes you can wing it and it will be great, but I have less confidence I’ll be able to pull that one off. I have less capacity to absorb information these days (it was never great)  and to recall said information on cue.

Went for a pub lunch on Thursday. I couldn’t work out the taste of the burger - it was either excessively salty or excessively burnt. 

I did some role-playing for an hour as Hubert H Humphrey as the precursor to a wargame that I wasn’t a part of. I enjoyed the role-playing though. 

In another D&D game I play an incredibly camp Bard who I’m trying to keep different from Astarion in Baldur’s Gate 3. That’s fun. 

Traveller has a science-fiction setting in which I play an Australian doctor and wellness consultant obsessed with people’s nutrition, forcing Brussel sprout and mung bean smoothies on them at inappropriate moments. 

Spending a lot more time on my own. That’s just my nature nowadays though. 

Read the Saturday Times. That was a pleasure. Giles Coren, Janice Turner, James Marriott, and also the awful Gerard Butler, just because I can’t believe how truly awful he is.

Even The Times seems to be embarrassed about him, omitting the link to his column in the paper’s Comments section.

The literary critic hails The Shipping News by Annie Proux, a truly great novel bursting with flavour on every page. Nice to have my good taste confirmed.

We stay up late to recall past players and friends, some of whom are no longer with us in life, and others who were too obnoxious to be invited back. 

We try and decipher someone’s curmudgeonliness, then laugh at our own. 

Good times. 

We are a 14 yard skipful of neuroses.

I’m loving staying in bed. It’s much better than walking around looking for things to do. Just staying here so comfortable and warm with my thoughts. 

Oh well, I suppose I’d better be social…

Brix and Me

So I’ve been looking at videos of The Fall who I didn’t like very much. I first came across them at Maidstone College of Art sharing a house with some fine artists.

I saw an interview with Mark E Smith and at that moment the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen (I was 19) and that was Brix, his wife.

80s beauty

When she was in the band they were at their best.

Oh, the life we could have had.

So that was in a way, quite depressing.

Really pretty small blonde women with beautiful big smiles. Most of whom turned out were Jewish.

Do I have a type? I certainly did back then. 

It’s weird to think ‘that’s it‘ on the relationship front.

I don’t think I could have one anymore as it’s not fair on the other to burden them with the illness and also what do they get out of it?

And I just want to be left alone for hours at a time.

But I don’t think that last bit is anything to do with the illness. 😜

Mark E Smith and me

So I then watched lots of Fall songs and clips of interviews. I watched him eviscerate the ever fawning Lauren Laverne. I enjoyed that. 

Rediscovering through streaming sites or Youtube all that music we turned our noses up at or didn’t understand back in the day.

But he was needlessly rude and cruel to so many people, with fights on stage and a revolving door of band members.

What a diet of booze, fags and speed does to you.

He was a fascinating character. He didn’t sing but he could, he wasn’t a poet, but more of a performance artist. He was loyal to Salford, bitter about Northern industrial decline but also wallowing in the grime and depression of it, a tyrant to his band, a narcissist who cared nothing for people’s approval, a refreshingly original thinker who called things out not to toe the trend but because it was true as he saw it.

Self-destructive, charismatic, a one-off.

Charisma beats looks - which is what attracted Brix to him.

The world needs people like Mark E Smith.

Glad I never met him.

Smalltown Attitude

Maybe I should rename this blog. Sounds like a punk fanzine from the 80s.

Maybe it was.

Gossipy little places where people talk a thousand miles an hour about people you don’t know and don’t care about. 

People’s lives often begin at home and end at the town or village’s boundaries.

And everyone’s mad at my age. Half given-up, half fed-up. Shaking your head in either despair or laughter.

God…

That’s what dreams are for, I guess. Me and Brix living the life…

…in Shepton.

D&D-skilling

Being Boring

So I had this whole blogpost. And it was so boring; I didn't want to inflict it on you.

So you'll be pleased to learn I haven't.

I'm so interesting I have a series of novelty t-shirts. This is the latest:

My Mother does not approve

I have had many compliments from people in the pub. Well, it is the height of wit and sophistication, after all. 

That settles it: I shall buy some more.

I've always wanted a t-shirt that says 'The band on your t-shirt is crap.' You could have a whole load:

'All your opinions are rubbish'

'Why do you work at that place?'

'You're the Dungeon Master...' (I hear that a lot.)

'Why that outfit?'

They could really have an impact. Thought-provoking and fight-inducing Tees.

I should also write my guide-book for elderly - 'Around London in 13 toilets.' 

That's a good dollar, the toilet market.

Hampshire

I spent the weekend with friends in Hampshire. I'm very lucky to have friends like these - proper friends. Always there for each other.

Their dog Douglas is a golden Labrador and he is lovely. He's very calm and loving. 

I do love dogs as you know.

It's lovely to have them in your life. I've come to believe animals are nicer than humans. Well, I don't personally know any Komodo Dragons or stonefish, but you get what I mean.

Rupert (human) is very nice too. I keep calling him Wilbur (dog). I have no idea why.

Typing and flab

My typing is getting worse. Much worse. I'm having to correct so much of it as I go. I do have bad days and good days with these things.

In fact I've just raised the chair and I've already improved my typing...

But with FTD while you have ups and downs, your head will never be clear of the fog again.

So while the panic is over, I do notice decline in certain areas.

I'm properly flabby now too. 

Again.

So I am improving my breakfasts with porridge with seeds , berries and real honey. I had it this morning and it took almost the same time to make as toast. Easy. And delicious too.

I also need to borrow my sister's bike and ride around as my legs are like Crazy Legs Crane's.

Exhibit A

TV and Shit

So, as new TV series drip-drip through after the actors' strike in the US, here are some what I watched recently.

For All Mankind on Apple TV. Started off interestingly with an alternate history where the USSR beat NASA to the moon. It then focuses on the families of the astronauts. I started to fast forward through those bits to the actiony bits. This is not what sci-fi really is. I'd say it became rather like Eldorado in space. 5/10.

3 Body Problem on Netflix. Based on a 4 part series of sci-fi novels by Liu Cixin. It features lots of improbable cigarette smoking in Western offices and the Wow signal from 1977, which a Chinese scientist decoded and replied to, which turns out not to have been the best idea. It's interesting. I binged it over a couple of days so it must be good. 8/10

Fallout on Prime. Interesting and beautifully styled. But like a book I didn't watch it the next night and then 2 weeks passed. DO I care about the people in it? Not really. 6.5/10

The gaming bit you always ignore

On my 2-part session of DMing for the kids over Easter, I asked them in preparation to specifically use the old analogue method of character creation with dice, pen and paper: creating the character from concept, through to rolling for their ability scores, selecting their skills, abilities and spells, then methodically working them up to level 4, which makes them more powerful and involves some thought and some arithmetic.

2 of them did, and 3 didn't. 

The three who didn't just pressed go on the computer charactermancer and ended up with characters whose ability scores were random, so you can get a super intelligent barbarian who has the physicality of a middle-aged librarian, and the kids get frustrated because their characters are useless.

It's not much fun when you can't even pick up your battleaxe.

The modern world is all about labour-saving, shortcuts, saving time. The offshoot is deskilling: being oblivious to processes and ultimately being unable to fix or improve things.

We are reduced to pressing a button on a computer which number-crunches in microseconds, making the decisions for you.

The next session I run we are going to roll characters in the old way, which is actually part of the fun, but it does involve some thought.

I know reading big books can be a bore, but you really could force yourself to just read the bit that's applicable to your character. 

I made a late start to photography after buying a terrible digital camera in 2003, and then I went to college and learned photography using a totally manual, large-format camera and made expensive mistakes using 5"x4" Polaroids and film. 

I learned to use my own judgement when using any camera after that. 

Similarly with masonry - some people calling themselves masons can't use the hand-tools, and some places on site you can't get to with an angle-grinder - mallet and chisel is the only way.

We have deskilled ourselves over generations. Understandable as many of the jobs were exhausting and let's face it, horrible. 

But the upshot of this is we are becoming Eloi and Morlocks. And fast.

Conclusion: you can never learn too many skills. 

Icewind Dale

I'm currently preparing the above title for our next 8 month long Dungeons and Dragons adventure. Like Tomb of Annihilation it takes place in an extreme environment, and is epic in scale.

But what is slightly off-putting is the size of these adventures: this book is 300 pages long, and details new monsters, characters who the players will meet, environmental hazards, small quests, side-quests, the main quest(s). 

Let's play humans!

I can imagine this being very off-putting for new players/Dungeon Masters.

When I started 40 years ago, an adventure was 12-30 pages long, written by computer programmers (without being computer programs) and you needed to almost decode the entire adventure in order for it to make sense and be playable. 

But they were concise, the information was all there, and once you got used to them they were easy to run.

Now they're 10 times the size. That's a big difference.

But we started last Thursday and had a good time. The session zero was great - we fleshed out the characters and they are already very distinctive. 

Let's go!