Wotcha all. Christmas time is here again…
…And, at some point, I trust I’ll start feeling like it is. Mostly, I don’t feel like it’s nearly Christmas because every time I go into a shop, I hear the same bloody December music I’ve been hearing all month – Winter Wonderland, and Santa Claus is Coming, and so on and suchlike.
At some point several years back, that probably did make me feel like it was Christmas, but we’re talking over a decade, here, and people with ages still in single figures tend to get excited by the mere mention of stockings, so…
…Hmm. Stockings, you say?
OK, bad example. How about:
…excited by the mere mention of advent calendars, which is something I can’t say I’ve done for some time. Christmas carols make me feel like it’s Christmas, and, paradoxically, so does Slade’s “Merry Christmas Everybody,” but I think that’s because I generally only hear carols in the last week or so of Advent, and we used to sing Slade as in the final assembly of the Autumn term back at AGS.
Everything else, on the other hand, gets shoved down my throat from November onwards, with the result that I don’t associate it with Christmas anymore. But, never mind, eh?
Cheers to everyone who turned up yesterday evening, it went, though I say so myself, rather well, despite Lidl’s stupidly running out of Gluhwein.
O, and following on vaguely from the conversation we had about Interactive Fiction, and suchlike, I do recommend people faintly interested go to Adam Cardre’s website and download some – Phototopia is very good, in a linear way, but it probably a good introduction, if you’ve not done much in the way of IF before.
Also I highly recommend Varicella, which is fantastically Machiavellian – proper House of Cards stuff, in places – although I’ve found it pretty hard – for God’s sake, make a map ASAP… and if you want a proper confusing time of it, ‘Shrapnel’ is brilliant, and turns your brains out rather better than Ian Banks’ ‘Walking on Glass,’ which is fairly impressive of it.
Should be going off to work now (Portland Road isn’t going to clean itself, especially not with the real bloody Christmas tree they’ve gone and put in it) and I need to come back and sort out the washing so it has a chance to dry off before Ruth heads off to Northampton and I hitch a lift as far as Newport. All the fun of the festive season, huh?
O – and thanks to Dan & Claire for the spare monitor. It’s currently perched on a stool, and has made the DOS-box far more useable, now I don’t have to fiddle about swapping cables over before firing it up.
‘Ray, work… Still, it gets me money, which I can promptly throw away to bribe Orange to keep me connected…