Direct, from the toilet of inertia!

Increase the sleep

Top tip for dementia people is sleep. I was only getting 7-8 hours of sleep last week. As a result I couldn't concentrate on reading or preparation very well.

Last night I got 9 hours. This morning I was able to read the Saturday Times  - obviously not all of it - but several of the articles, and was able to skim-read others.

Ideally I need 9-10 hours of sleep every night now, just to be as fully functional as I can be these days.

I still feel tired though. You just have to get used to that bit.

Thing is, I'd promised the 2 players who could make this week's D&D session that I'd have an adventure for them - a special one-off adventure. And I got myself in a right old tizz about I don't mind saying, cor lumme, stone the crows etc!

Dungeons and Dragons update

2 players only this week, so I cobbled together a Wizard of Oz meets Beauty and the Beast meets something or other. I added things, tried to keep it simple, added more stuff, crossed out some other things, and in the end completely confused myself.

I've been watching a few David Lynch films recently which contain a few Oz references, and of course  the darkness and horror you'd expect.

I tried to keep the elements simple, coherent, but it wasn't making sense in my head. Then I read some advice about stories, you need fantastic locations, a reason to be there, clues, some red slippers (2 odd shoes in this case) a fairy made of adamantine...and so I meandered off the beaten track as I do, and lost my bearings.

I read it over and over and under again. No map of the land, except the one in my head, and I didn't know if it was enough or not. Would it sustain an evening? Would it even just fall flat and everyone get angry as they wasted an evening when they could have done something that wasn't SHIT?

So I got to Seager Hall in Union St and there were Hannah and Luke, and we started, and it went okay. In fact, they seemed to love it. 

It was all a bit Disney but with Bodaks, Helmed Horrors, Hags and other nasty things. Big huge walls of thorns the size of the Pentagon, scary castles, but a happy ending. 

Bramble Buttons, Nanny Grumbles and Grotbags

Got to have a happy ending.

So it was a perfectly good 'one-shot' as we call them. I just no longer have the clarity of thought to truly know if something is good or will even work any more. 

Luckily the improvisational skills are strangely still there to paper over the cracks!

The greatest interview ever

Peter Bogdanovich who was part of the new hotshot directors at the time (1970?) interviews John Ford - proper old school director of Westerns often starring John Wayne or 'Duke'. The new meets the old.

Don't worry - it's only a minute and half long.

Remembering the olden times

I've always been nostalgic at heart, and I have very fond memories of the television of my youth. Good, old-fashioned family entertainment, where generations could sit together and enjoy inoffensive entertainment without recourse to foul language and gratuitous penis shots just to be relevant and 'cutting edge'.

These days programmes have to be 'relatable', whereby a popular retard goes to look at Renaissance paintings which they've not only never encountered, but also don't care about, so we witness their ignorance and inanities in order to offset our own feelings of ignorance and/or stupidity.

I mean, look at these programmes from Channel 4. Family entertainment my arse.

Rylan learns...brain surgery.' But he only has 24 hours before his first patient. Can he remove the tumour successfully? 

String Theory with Joey Essex. Professional fuckwit gets lost in WHSmiths

Allan Carr's Top 50 Bumholes.

What ruddy nonsense! 

So it's time to look back to the Golden Age of British television! Where true entertainers - professionals - were the order of the day. Whether they'd learned their trade at Butlins or the old music halls, they'd all graduated from the university of hard knocks, and tough surprises!

Here are a few of the highlights, all of whom are sorely missed.

Shitting with Norman

We join popular entertainer Norman Vaughan on a toilet in mid- defecation where he interviews a variety of music hall stars, constantly interrupting his guests mid-sentence to answer for them. Occasionally punctuated with off-mike plops which Vaughan finds hilarious and grades with a thumbs up or thumbs down.

Jizz and Minge

Deirdre Jizz and Doris Minge, the old music Hall act whose real names were Arthur Tit and Reg Mump. Dressed as old ladies, they would sing unfunny songs around a harmonium played by a black and white minstrel, all the while goading each other about the other's personal hygiene or lack thereof, and end up directing their anger in the form of harmless race-based gags toward the minstrel.

Young Racialist of The Year

The annual event hosted by Katy Boyle and Gripper Stebson, to find the white supremacist of 1978: a golden year for Nazi youth as it turned out. The winner receives a Chelsea smiler, a life-time's supply of Wilkinson Sword razor blades and as many sweets as they can nick from Baldy's ice cream van without getting caught and duly receiving a buggering.

"And the title of Young Racialist of the Year 1978 goes to..."

"Give us 50p fatty or yer 'ead's going to down the toilet!"

Mike and Bernie's Celebrity Skid marks

Watch Mike and Bernie Winters race each other in a series of state-of-the-art British Leyland cars. This week Bernie's Austin Princess is up against Mike's Allegro Vanden Plas in some field or other in Lincolnshire.

If you listen closely 'Diddy' David Hamilton provides a completely inane and superfluous commentary which was actually meant for another programme entirely, but no one at the time noticed.

Guest stars Bob Todd, The Lovely Anna Dawson and The St Winifred's School Choir in the grand finale: "Mike's jump of Death". 

The series was banned after this episode. Which was for the best.

Nonce goes the 70s

There was a big 50s revival back in the day. Who can forget Grease, Showaddywaddy, Darts, Rocky Sharp and the Replays, or Dickie Tremble and the Reacharounds? All the while, hosted by a seemingly endless supply of loveable household paedos (Savile, Jonathan King, Chris Denning etc).

Children's TV was also a big thing back then. 

Who can forget Terry Spangles and The Winkle of Doom, which saw the eponymous hero... 

Right. I've had enough now.

'To shit is vulgar; to plop, divine!'

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.