Let there be light……eventually.

Light has obviously always been there. Even earliest man appreciated the fact that when that big fiery disc was in the sky, they could see where they were going better than when the white partially obscured disc was up there.

Man then invented fire, which potentially brought light into places where the big fiery disc couldn’t reach.

Then some bright spark (no pun etc) had a go at harnessing a recently invented phenomenon called electricity, and suddenly lightbulbs were “in”.

And now, in the year 2011, Tesco has realised this and thought “hey, this could be a bit of a money spinner”.

As the man of the house, it’s my duty to watch things break gradually over periods of time whilst contemplating doing something about it. Recently, this responsibility had me observing the three lightbulbs in the kitchen spotlights fizzle out one by one. Taking my duty ever-seriously, I waited until all three were gone, and I’d walked downstairs at 7.15am to a pitch-black kitchen and attempted to retrieve breakfast, before taking positive action.

“To Tesco!” I thought.  Later that day, I found myself asking a shelf-monkey where the bulbs were. “In the gardening department,” was the reply. After explaining a daffodil would look nice but be useless at preventing me from stubbing my foot on any available blunt object, I was then told “they’re all opposite the TVs”.

As I walked towards said department, I pondered on “they’re all“. Bit of an exaggeration, I thought. Until I reached “opposite the TVs” and discovered every single lightbulb man could ever wish to own. There were two 4 metre long shelving units dedicated to bulbs.

I wanted a plain screw-in spotlight bulb, 40W. I thought for some reason they would simply be there, in front of me, quite conveniently. What I did find was a plethora of methods for lighting your home.

There were spotlight bulbs, spherical bulbs, elliptical bulbs, bulbs that seemed to be impersonating towel-rails, bulbs that boasted “energy-saving abilities”, bulbs that were powerful enough to see through time, bulbs that changed colour at random, bulbs that reflected your mood, bulbs that did every-bloody-thing except screw-in and LIGHT MY KITCHEN.

I then spotted “Tesco Value Lightbulbs”. Exactly what Tesco value light can do cheaply, I’m not sure. Travel slower? We live in an age where, apparently, light can be provided mega-expensively or ridiculously cheaply and still be completely the same in all scenarios. At least with Tesco value food you get the bonus of having a third of the ocean’s salt content added for “extra taste” at “less cost”, as long as the cost isn’t represented by your life expectancy.

There were two other people gazing hopelessly at the shelves, index finger vaguely pointing like a futile Divining rod, whereas I went for the cocky “hands-on-hips-whilst-staring-blankly” approach.

It paid off in the end, because I got four 40W spotlight bulbs for just £3! Or should that be…I had to spend £3 just to get four poxy lightbulbs!

Bah. Who cares anyway?

I’ve Sussed Commuting

I had the recent pleasure of going to London for a day. Unusually, this actually fell into the category of “business” and therefore required me to travel during “Peak Hours”.

The train I got on was the 7.39 to London, taking exactly 1 hour. Being a total noob, I stood at a random spot on the platform and mentally accused all of the commuters of being random for gathering at seemingly arbitrary spots down the platform. Of course, when the empty train arrived, I realised that these spots were where the doors on the train would be when it stopped.

So not being the first on the train meant I had to play that game where you look at the seating arrangements where you have six seats, three abreast and facing each other, with the middle spaces only being free, and wonder exactly how much you will piss everyone off if you attempt to sit there.

However, London Midland laid on a larger train, so I wondered down the platform until I happily found a nearly-empty carriage. I found myself beginning the journey in relative comfort, with leg room and everything.

I realised I was on a side of the train I never normally travel on. This helped me spot things that I don’t normally see on trips to London. For example, I was on a relatively fast train  and during the latter half of the journey it thunders through many smaller stations. One of these stations I’d never seen before, and I doubt I’ll ever see again, as it seemed to be stuck in an era where everything was made of wood, and I’m fairly sure our brief 60mph visit completely levelled the place. There was also the station that didn’t appear to have any way onto it at all. No gates, carpark, nothing. The only sign of a town I saw was up high, where a bridge spanned the railway. It would appear the only way to leave that town is to hurl yourself 25 feet onto a concrete platform or possibly the 9:21 to Crewe.

The train got very crowded after Milton Keynes and Leighton Buzzard, and I was thankful for being tucked in a corner next to a window. I was in seat 3 of a 3 seat combination. Someone sat in-between me and the guy in seat 1. This didn’t half piss me off.

Commuting TO London is relatively easy. Of course, the fun really begins when you commute THROUGH London.

Travelling on the Underground during peak hours requires you to voluntarily strip yourself of anything that you would remotely call a “human right”. You even have to ignore the basic need to quench your own thirst, lest your abrupt hand movements clumsily knock someone on the arm, which in turn creates a spectacular assault-based domino effect that escalates in severity until the final person in the chain ends up losing an arm to a manic businessman with an iSword app on his phone.

The first train from Euston was full. Actually, no it wasn’t full. It was crammed with the kind of precision and efficiency that made me wonder if I was witnessing a Guinness World Record attempt. There was absolutely no space left on it, and moments before the doors closed, someone tried to get on. They created space out of NO SPACE. Surely this guy needed to talk to Stephen Hawking. The doors closed and this guy was moulded into the curve that makes the side of a tube train. His neck looked particularly painful. By painful, I mean broken in about 4 places. But instead of hospital treatment, he sought out his phone and seemed to be unaware that he should be in any kind of discomfort.

The next train was marginally better, and I braved it. I somehow shuffled between all the spaces, like a coin being shoved into the rows of other coins on one of those pointless 10p machines at Megabowl, and found myself wrapped a bit awkwardly around the centre pole, like a partially melted curly-wurly around a chair leg.

A man bustled on with moments to spare and ended up close to me. He then proceeded to get out a newspaper (The Daily Mail). This was a defiant two-fingers up to the situation if ever I saw one. This guy was clearly thinking “this is MY 4 square centimetres of space and I’m going to bloody use it”. He may have imagined that he looked normal, but actually he was only able to read about 6 words at a time due to the paper practically being imprinted onto his retiners. Combined with the fact his other hand was dangling uselessly despite his arm being raised, and the comical lean due to one leg being thrown out for balance, he looked more like a right-wing Thunderbird puppet.

I had to get off at Embankment and change to the District Line. Commuters do not obey any laws when striding between trains. Nobody allows you to double back, and attempting to do so will result in a slow-motion multi-person pileup, at the end of which someone explodes violently. If you need to be over THERE and it means crossing a steadily moving flow of commuters, you just go for it, and sod them. This attitude worked in my favour, and it actually is the attitude you need to ever contemplate commuting in general. Bloody sod them.

Because that’s their attitude towards you, after all.

And I’ve grown not to care, because down in the London Underground the word “sorry” means little more than “pity me, for I dwell where THAR BE DRAGONS”. Nobody could give a shit, and if they did, they’d charge you £58.30 for it anyway.

Car Park Wars

Jem and I made the joint decision to go to Milton Keynes on Saturday, for a change of scenery and to buy a couple of necessary items for upcoming birthdays.

One thing neither of us took into account was the fact that it was a Saturday and it’s now October. In retail terms, this means “SHIT! CHRISTMAS IS ALMOST TOMORROW!”

The major shops had decked our their Christmas departments already, and the simpletons were flocking in to look at the purdy baubles and coo moronically.

These simpletons obviously needed to park their cars somewhere. And on arriving in Milton Keynes, Jem and I discovered that “somewhere” was “anywhere that tarmac is visible”. The decision to come to Milton Keynes quickly moved from being a joint one to being solely and utterly my fault. As the driver in this situation, I felt this was particularly harsh.

At first we tried a multistorey, near XScape. We pulled into the entrance and then stopped. I thought someone was doing some stupid up ahead until I realised the carpark was out of tickets, and we were waiting for cars to leave so that we  could enter.

The scale of our foolishness was becoming ever apparent. After 2 minutes, a car left. Another few minutes, and we were the ones waiting. Two cars then left in quick succession. And we entered.

We set about trying to find out which spaces these cars had vacated. However, we noticed that the entire floor above where we came in was for disabled parking. The significant issue that arises from this is that if a few disabled drivers leave, the ticket machine will offer entrance to a few regular drivers when there are no bloody spaces left.

Which is how we came to be circulating the carpark in a humourless convoy, sharing roll-eyed exasperated expressions with our fellow travellers as it became apparent that the cars that were leaving the carpark had only entered it 7 minutes beforehand.

7 minutes after entering the carpark, we left.

I decided to try the John Lewis’ carpark. Only after entering, however, did I realise it was “Free”. It was pande-fucking-monium. I felt like setting up a camera overlooking the whole carpark and filming it for 30 minutes, speeding it up and overlaying Benny Hill music. Cars were pointing in every direction. Various BMWs and 4x4s were arrogantly waiting down each lane, ready to poach a space should someone return to their car.

Down one lane were TWO huge 4x4s, facing each other. I could see both drivers looking at each other. I was hoping to witness some epic battle between an immovable object and an irresistable force, but one of them must have received intel, as they buggered off sharpish.

There weren’t just cars waiting down the lanes in the carpark. Some people waited outside the exit to John Lewis’. If someone left with a bag, they would find 8 cars stumbling over each other to follow them back to their own car.

I adopted the “opportunistic” strategy, where you don’t stop moving in the off chance someone manages to leave the shop unnoticed and get back to their car.

Some guy obviously had the same idea, and not only that, when a car in front of him left, he bungled his other half out of the door and got her to stand in the space, shouting “SANCTUARRRYY!” (well, maybe not quite, but it was certainly over the top).

In the end, my approach paid off. A guy snuck through the exit unnoticed by not carrying a bag of any sort, and saw me looking at him. “I’M OVER HERE!” he shouted, pointing at the largest pick up truck ever.

HALLELUJAH!

The hate-filled looks we got as we parked our car were so powerful that they could have powered Wales for a fortnight, especially as we were n00bs to the carpark (I overheard one woman saying in dismay “I’ve been trying to park for 40 minutes”).

So, Milton Keynes. Don’t go there on a Saturday. Or near Christmas. Actually, move the shopping centre into Warwickshire somewhere, and don’t go there. Ever.

Old Computer Games – May Cause Excessive Teeth Grinding

Having played most of the major modern games and completed them without breaking much of a sweat, I was bored and looking for something that I thought would keep the gamer part of me occupied for “just a few hours”.

So I bought Crash Bandicoot. This was originally for the first Playstation. It was made in 1995. Gotta be a doddle.

I eagerly begin playing the game. Crash Bandicoot is a hyperactive…bandicoot….who has to rescue his girlfriend from an evil scientist who’s set up base on three islands and an airship. He keeps his airship tied to the top of the third mountain. It was my aim to make this spectacular lack of initiative his own undoing before a couple of hours were up.

I was stuck by the fourth level. And I regret to say that it wasn’t even anything tricky. It was simply a jump between two platforms that were so positioned as to be literally just close enough to each other. If you jumped prematurely by even the most immeasurable amount, the game would blandly send you falling into oblivion, tacking on a cheap “firework whistle” as you fell in a particularly unsympathetic gesture.

I found myself thinking “wait a minute, in modern games I’ve destroyed five bipedal robots the size of houses that are capable of launching eleventy nuclear missiles at my face”. And here I was foiled by empty space.

We have to admit it. Computer games were quite a bit trickier in those days. Level designers didn’t bat an eyelid at stripping you of 10 lives whilst you attempted to walk across a room. Nowadays, to tender for the less fortunate gamers (i.e. the total spanners), games have been softened. If a challenge takes more than 5 minutes of actual thinking, a character will pop up and drop a remarkably well-coded hint like “If I were you, I really wouldn’t stand in front of that door whilst pressing the X button”.

Older games, or games that are based on old formats, amuse me in their rigidity. Older games would often give the illusion of having a completely open environment. You’d only realise you were severely restricted if you tried to walk through a particularly flat looking hedge and were rebounded back.

Another game I have has lots of a cut scenes. Each cut scene plays out with the characters in set positions, doing set things. Even if you kill this guy in the bedroom, when the cutscene is triggered, he will have somehow negotiated his way down two flights of stairs and will now be in the kitchen. If you shot him, he will now have a knife stuck in his chest. Older games stick their fingers up to continuity and embrace ease-of-coding.

Modern games have developed ways of keeping you in certain areas. I bought Jem a game for her DS recently, which goes by the name of DRAGONQUEST, or PIXIETREK, or GOBLINAMBLE, something along those lines. She was getting quite irritated with a princess who required near constant feeding. If you wandered too far away to explore other areas, her condition would decline alarmingly. If she died then the game would be over.

This game also asked Jem to put her name in at the start. “JEMMA” she typed. A bit later, the character’s wife gives birth to a child, a boy. An approximate conversation follows:

“What a handsome baby! Strong as an ox I say.”

“Yes darling. What shall we call him?”

“I was thinking of Maddison. It’s the name of a warrior, a fearless leader, someone who will explore where others won’t…!”

“Well…that’s alright I suppose.”

“What were you thinking?”

“Well….I think JEMMA is a much better name.”
Hah.