The long road

From 1978 to 2006 at least every other year, first with a group of friends, then with a smaller group, then finally with my ex, I've happily traversed France...  oddly, given how planned some of this may appear, I was happiest just wandering around out of the 'holiday' season - mainly August - just getting up early, driving to what looks like a great place to wander around, have some refreshments, a snack lunch (NEVER borrowing a restaurant's precious table space to do this*), then either a preprandial snooze, a game of Crib or Scrabble, in the shade (I get sunburned off reflected light), finally the serious business of discussing the meal, selecting a decent bottle to split between myself and a companion... then an aperitif and a very sound sleep.

In the early days before the French government forced hoteliers and restaurateurs to treat members of their families as paid employees and (the first in a long series of tax grabs), there were a much larger number of restaurants than there are now.  The quality has declined...  there are two excellent articles which explain the reasons latterly 

And across a greater span of time 

In the SW of France, a lot of restaurateurs and café owners hated Mitterand with the kind of feral passion they would normally reserve for someone who had slept with their wife.  On one occasion, after I'd said "Mitterand" and made various uncomplimentary gestures. ended up with the chap, his wife and I amiably talking nonsense over a bottle of brandy - they were both very kind and patient putting up with my mangling of their language.  If I'd spoken English at them in that intolerable way that middle class English people do, increasing the volume until they can be heard half a mile away**, my acquaintance and knowledge of France, French and two really nice people would never have happened.

**It's no wonder that waiters often just give a Gallic shrug and go and serve someone else or disappear out the back for a Gauloise...  Retribution was delivered on one occasion by someone adding a snail to the salad.  Mrs Shouty screamed and upset their table, Mr Shouty shouted at the waiter.  After a few muttered "désolé" from the waiter and after I'd managed to control the hysterical laughter that threatened to overcome me, I shouted at them to shut up and allow the others to enjoy their meal.  They did, once they realised their appalling behaviour was being witnessed by other English folk.

This is the excellent place in Cahors where these folk paraded their incivility...

Bottom* in a Secondary Modern

I am still healthwise in pretty much the same place as I  was, but I'd like to publish some of my reminiscences...  this first one is tangentially about the inequities and vile assumptions about children in the 1960s

*I love that word, bottom , always have since my fellow scruffy 13-14 yr olds in the dunce's school, aka Secondary Modern, were given A Midsummer Night’s Dream to learn for a term project... as most of them still found farts and beating up someone else funny, this was not a good plan. With characters like Titania, Puck and Bottom, any speech with their names in was repeatedly and loudly quoted by even the neanderthal thuglings from the mud on the floor of the gene pool; Especially Puck... 

"Those that Hobgoblin call you and sweet Puck, You do their work, and they shall have good luck: Are not you he?" As for the the Wall scene;... "O Wall, full often hast thou heard my moans, For parting my fair Pyramus and me! My cherry lips have often kissed thy stones ..." 

...was a particular favourite quote as they could shout this near prefects 

Giving that play to a bunch of rejects from the education system - "Here chump, go to Secondary Modern, and learn menial tasks as befits your future servile status... Technical Drawing (TD as in TDious), Agricultural Studies, Metalwork, PE, Woodwork amongst others was probably the only time a few of them engaged with Literature.

We were taught the same way as in Reform Schools - mainly to while away the time until you could legally be turfed out to go and get a menial job... The restrictive way 'education' was structured is exemplified by the choice children / parents were given to specialise at thir-bloody-teen. You had to choose between French, TD and Art; and the other choice was between Geography and History ... 

My parents with my hyper-genius elder brother (IQ off the top end of the scale, scholarship to a public school and at 15 going off the rails and becoming a rebel with the kind of destructive capacity deployed on all and everything around him and the other 'subnormal' child just couldn't work, keep control of Machiavelli and pay attention to me. 

So I made my ill-informed choices... I deliberately did only half the TD exam (getting 49%, I was extremely good at it, but I hated the obnoxious midget - Mr Roberts - no prizes for guessing his origins - who loved picking on all 6' 1" of me), illustrated my answers in French, and did an excellent pen & ink sketch so the teachers agreed I should do Art. The other choice was a horror because I wanted to do both, but Geography was chosen for me... I was lucky in one respect because the History curriculum switched from Ancients to 19th century and I loved history up until the end of the Napoleonic Wars.. 

 You can see why I loathed my schooldays....

And now her sister, ruler of the dead

My Orc Warlord, Frak has subjugated the world, so meet in her very lethal, High Elven, Rogue AoW3 form... Silva the Sly; mistress of assassination, ruler by guile, charm and persuasion ...  who always carries a poisoned crystal blade.

Winter

Orange glow, night's breath,
Cold fingers hide the sunrise:
Grey dawn, Winter comes.

Please read Michelle's Tiffin Box blog, it will warm you up!

The Middle Game in Diplomacy

For those that don't know, I am a very keen games player...   I'm republishing the following to help, errrr. friends with an essential basic few concepts to help them in planning their strategies!

The Middle Game in Diplomacy

Whatever country you are playing there are a few basic guidelines which you need to follow, unless you derive a clear practical benefit from not doing so. Much of what I have to say will strike the better players amongst you as being pretty self-evident, but I have seen many glaring where these underlying tenets have been ignored by the players, to their own eventual discomfort. 

The board and countries in Diplomacy fall naturally into two parts. These bits, for want of more interesting names, are the Western Triangle and the Eastern Square. The opening period of play should see you establish a fairly solid relationship with one of your neighbours and the demise of the other one(s) in your part of the board…

You will now have to evaluate your position and determine what course, or courses, of action will lead to your final victory. The problem that you have is that several other players are also scheming towards their own inevitable final victory!

The critical factor during and immediately after the first two to three years is whether you have been able to crush all but one (or even all) of your neighbours before the other part of the board has been able to achieve a similar state. This means, for example, that if you are England you have reduced or eliminated Germany and/or England before Russia has reduced or eliminated Italy, Austria and/or Turkey.

The Politics of Defeat

It is important to bear in mind exactly what you're going to do if you haven't reached the delightful state of affairs described above. If you haven't, then you are going to have to co-operate with your neighbours to stop the other part of the board from overwhelming your side.

If you are part of a conflict which has yet to succeed in coming o the limited resolution described above and the other side of the board is already there, then you must seriously consider burying the hatchet with your immediate neighbours and setting about protecting yourselves. This can be regarded as the politics of defeat, but the fact is that you cannot win if someone else does. It is at this point that you need to establish an overt relationship with your neighbours and a covert one with one or more of the other side of the survivors from the other side. This latter "secret alliance" can work well in splitting the major alliance and gaining you ground when the situation stabilises to the extent that you can start looking forward to your own expansion again.  

It’s why talking to other players, even if they’re your active enemies is pretty much essential.  Most times it makes the game more fun, too!

This is true, even when the other half of the board is not immediately adjacent. Let us postulate a situation where Germany has Bel, Hol, Den, Par, Mar, Mun, Ber and Kie, while England has Nwy, Swe, Spa, Por, Bre, Lon, Lpl, Edi. In the Eastern part of the board, you are Turkey and have come under an attack from an Austro-Russian alliance while Italy has belatedly come to your assistance. You know that Italy is likely to come under attack by a combination of England and Germany. This looks reasonably good for survival (which it is) but it is not a good situation. England and Germany will both make headway against the opposition with your four or five centre country sniping away and weakening any defence your current enemies can make. If they split their forces and attempt to contain you whilst defending themselves, the result is a slow but gradual extirpation of your neighbours - both England and Germany will gain as many centres as you AND they are already ahead of you.

Staring Disaster in the Face

So, if you're not well ahead or at least as equally ahead as the other side of the board, then it is worth exploring ways in which the remainder of the board can stop the big boys carving the rest of you up. It is important to do this sooner than later. The real danger signals are when a unit from a reasonably settled part of the board crosses the major stalemate line (which is StP, Lvn, War, Sil, Boh, Tyr, Pie, GoL, WMS, NAf). If this has happened, then it's time to shut up shop and stop them getting any further, whichever country you are. The same is true to a limited extent when Turkey, France or Austria crosses the minor stalemate line of the ION, when Germany rounds the Straits of Gibraltar, and when Russia gets a foothold across the North Sea. This often means that they've achieved a position whereby it is going to take a concerted effort to stop them winning and thus stop you from winning.

How will you win?

It is worth restating that to win a game you have to eventually capture 18 supply centres. Many inexperienced players overlook this obvious fact and don't have a "shopping list" of centres that they will need to win. Let us look at the centres, given a normal sort of game, which are normally on that list (Those that are occasionally added to the core list to complete the wining pattern are shown after the totals and in italics):

Western Triangle:

England: Lon, Lpl, Edi, Bre, Par, Spa, Por, Hol, Bel,Den, Nwy, Swe, Kie, Mun, StP, Ber, Mar (17) Tun, Ven, Rom, Nap, War, Vie

France: Bre, Par, Ma, Lon, Lpl, Edi, Spa, Por, Hol, Bel, Den, Nwy, Swe, Kie, Mun, Ber (16) Tun, Ven, Rom, Nap, War, Vie, Tri

Germany: Kie, Mun, Ber, Bre, Par, Mar, Lon, Lpl, Edi, Spa, Por, Hol, Bel, Den, Nwy, Swe (16) Ven, Rom, War, Vie, Tri, StP, Mos

Eastern Square:

Austria: Vie, Bud, Tri, Ser, Gre, Bul, Rom, Ven, Con, Rum, Ank, Nap, Smy, Mos, Sev, War, Tun (17) Mar, Spa, Por, Mun, StP, Ber

Italy: Nap, Rom, Ven, Tun, Tri, Vie, Bud, Gre, Ser, Con, Smy, Ank, Sev, Mos, Rum, War, Bul (17) Mar, Spa, Por, Mun, StP, Ber, Par

Turkey: Con, Smy, Ank, Nap, Ven, Rom, Tun, Tri, Ve, Bud, Gre, Ser, Sev, Mos, Rum, War, Bul (17) Mar, Spa, Por, Mun, StP, Ber

Russia: Mos, War, StP, Sev, Nwy, Swe, Rum, Bud, Vie, Tri, Ser, Gre, Ank, Smy, Con, Bul, Ven, Rom, Nap (19) Mun, Kie, Ber, Den, Hol, Edi, Lon, Tun, Bel

Although the Eastern side of the board has more potential areas for expansion, it also has more competitors for each supply centre then the western side of the board. You can also see that StP only appears in the core list for England and Russia. This is because it is relatively easy to stitch that side up against invaders by supporting the unit there already, which in most cases is either English or Russian. If these two countries have been eliminated (or are in anarchy) there is nearly always someone in a position to support a StP unit to stop someone else's onward progression.

It is crucial, therefore, that you try and get across one of the stalemate lines which will enable you to secure those extremely difficult last two or three supply centres. I will never vote for a win concession (unless it's me that's going to win!) if the major country has failed to "cross the line". Until that point, any player, no matter how good, can be stopped. Of course, there is always the possibility that some idiot is prepared to sacrifice a share in the draw for a petty and self-immolating revenge.

How Do You Improve Your Chances Of Winning?

There are a number of basic concepts which I use to judge how well I'm doing in a game and to assess how I can improve my situation.

Security

This is quite a simple concept to understand and it is measurable. You can establish how secure a supply centre is by counting the number of your units which can move to it and the number of other units which can move to it. If you have more units or the same number of units adjacent to you supply centres, then you're relatively safe.  (Obviously, there may be localised areas where this is not the case.)  If less units, then you are not secure and you should establish security as a priority. You can refine this by grading your security level and by grading the units next to your supply centres according to the reliability of your allies, but don't forget that you really rather encourage them towards indiscretion and they can stab you at any time. Similarly, you can count the number of units with two moves of your centres as an approximation of your medium term security.

Lebensraum

This relates to your "hit list" of supply centres. It is a count of current supply centres, plus a count of those which you might be able to get in the short term by a judicious stab. If the stab leaves you secure and in a good position to continue your onwards expansion then it is well worth doing. This assessment also gives you a idea of how close to victory (or not) you are.  Conversely if the stab doesn’t achieve this then DON’T STAB. 

Allies and Enemies

This is much more difficult to judge. It depends on your assessment of how reliable your allies are and how implacable your enemies. But that is only one part of the story. You mustn't just view your own situation. You have to view the alliance structure of the whole board and it can also be helpful to assess other countries' security and lebensraum. And the only way to do this is to have regular communication with all the other players, even the ones who appear to be implacable foes. This is because players cannot avoid giving away information if they write back; and even if they don't, a significant minority of players will act upon your suggestions, even if they don't reply! Besides which, you can stuff them up with apparently true information. Very, very, few people will throw a letter away without reading it and it is rare that they would fail to take the information in.  But don’t lie... just emphasise the facts you want them to act on.

Having assessed all these factors, you are in a much better position to determine your future strategy and to decide what to do and when to do it.
 

I mentioned stabbing. A stab (except for the first few moves) should be used sparingly and only when (a) it is required to put you in a winning position and offers significant gains; and (b) you can hold what you've taken. Ration yourself to perhaps one or two stabs a game. Whenever possible resist the temptation to lie about what you are going to do - lying destroys credibility, so you might as well only lie if you are going to get something out of it. 

(First published in Gallimaufry Issue 53, edited and updated this date.

Memories of a sausage...

In 1964, in the international restaurant at the only campsite in Leningrad, I ate a small piece of sausage, which the person behind the counter had taken off the counter (with her sausage like fingers*) put into a saucepan of theoretically hot water, pulled out, cut into four 2" long chunks put onto 4 flyblown plates and put them onto the counter. She put her hand out for the roubles, which was about £10 (a helluva lot of money in those days). It had so much gristle in it that I could not finish it. 

We came across her sister driving a huge road engine, laying tarmac, arms as thick as my thighs.  This was in the middle of Leningrad.  I'd like to tell you the name of the street, but because it was the cold war, there were no street maps available, apart from one in a 1901 St Petersburg Baedeker my father had purchased from a second-hand stall**.  All the road names were in Cyrillic script, without Latin equivalents...  This 'great adventure' as my father called it, started to turn into a film noire when one of the traffic policemen (loudhailer on chest, red in face, brandishing pistol) got off his platform, shouting at us to stop.....

We had been driving the wrong way up a one-way street... matters were not aided by my brother whispering "burn on, Dad, burn on!" while this bloke, now almost purple with rage at these law-breaking capitalists sitting like stupid oxen with total ignorance on their faces at his language. We were, in fact, lying capitalists, because we could certainly understand the word passport, and we had no intention of giving them to him... we made our escape by being shepherded in reverse all the way back down this street by the by now furious cop!

(A picture of a very similar dormobile)

Back at the campsite after these twin delights, my mother decided to cook us egg and chips in our battered old dormobile. One of the simplest, but most welcome meals we had.  But there was a catch: one of the proscribed items listed on our visa was potatoes, so we had to dispose of the potato in an open drain.  There was to be more clandestine disposal before we would leave the Soviet Union, but perhaps another time.

*she looked like a gurning Arthur Mullard, and you could see tracks of all the food she'd handled and 'cooked' on her off-white apron, her face set in a permanent scowl....

**Sadly this was worth a lot more than he realised, in today’s prices £1,652!

Well, that was a bit of a gap...

So, where have I been, briefly:

Since I last wrote I've nearly died three times.  On one occasion my blood pressure dropped to  68 over 38, I collapsed on my stairs, upside down; the district nurse who found me after 23 hours, called the ambulance.  She thought she wouldn't see me again. Another occasion after a three month patch in hospital, my hands went blue - that was a kidney infection too, but complicated by Raynaud's disease - a beautiful pastel blue, whilst it was sealing the capillaries and destroying the nerves in my finger ends. And to cap it all, I had to sleep on a special bed (a Nimbus 3) which they put together wrong and gave me a monster pressure sore, which has lead to severe contact dermatitis.. I dropped 97 lbs in weight...  I am the lightest I've been since I was 12 years old.

So not only am I recovering these, but also from the leg ulcers with periodic infections [at one point I had to fight to get the consultant not to cut my left leg off), kidney problems.  Please ignore any typos... I  have to use a wireless keyboard, holding it in my left hand while pecking at it with the other as I can't sit down.  It's going to be a very long time before I'm entirely better, but given that I was in hospital for the best part of 9 months, and nearly died...  The  cause of the repeated, deadly kidney infections was a nearly undetectable layer of infected tissue in a thigh which appeared perfectly OK on the outside.

As you can guess I've been concentrating on staying alive and looking after myself.  No council help for moi....  a real catch 22 situation, but it has forced me into being active and getting around the house which is improving my muscle tone. 


Bless the majority of those working in the NHS, which is under immense pressure.  I may resume my rants, but the very few rotten apples, and the occasional honest mistake should not hide the honest effort that health professionals put into the job.  So thank you to the staff of 4 hospitals and 9 wards!  But there are major dysfunctional aspects caused by managerial and administrative staff making decisions that impact on the core aspects of the clinical role.  However, the biggest culprit have been successive governments, whose inability to realise that constantly reorganising demotivates and confuses  staff


So that's where I've been!

An Alien Encounter of the Green Coated Kind

If you are offended by swearing, please do not read any further!

I was going to tell you about my MRI scan, wasn't I?  And I'm only 6N *whimper*...  At first I thought it was aliens, subjecting me to this strange ritual... they had all dressed up in green uniforms...  but they had sent me to a different building, leaving me to find out that I was 15 minutes early needing to get to a building 1200 yards away on bandaged feet in slippers and hobbling along on a walking stick.

Oh how we laughed!  I met an old friend, a chap who has LOVE on one set of knuckles and HATE on the other.  We passed the time of day while my feet complained... eventually I made it into the antechamber to the Alien spacecraft.  There was one person who directed me, a la Star Trek, to follow the green arrows [And yes I was thinking there was simply too much green in all this].. to an antechamber... where I was told I would wait for the .... examination.

I sat my by now spent carcase on the biggest and most imposing chair I could find.... did they not know this was Chumbles of the Internet....  a legend in his own lynchtime?  They told me they would be a short while, because the consultant had f****d off for a quick ciggy break (my words not theirs).  Aeons passed; I need not have crucified myself hurbling and hurpling along that 1200 yards.  But!  I am not without resource, I had brought a small bottle of water: I finished that.  A book with 3 chapters to go: I finished that.  My patience: I'd almost finished that when an orderly (ho ho ho) arrived and took me through a group of supplicants.  A lot of these had appendages of the artificial kind and plastic tubes...  a strange pulsing noise and flashing lights came from a room...  I was swiftly lead past into the second antechamber, and told to take off my garments with metal in them...  Aliens, witches and MRIs are a bit similar, iron f***s 'em up, but they were wise to this.

They made sure my mobile phone was also with my garments and stowed in a lead lined safe ('Screws up our antennae chief, we bump into each other in the dark and get all horny')  But I knew it was to keep me from calling for help on my handy.

They then wheeled out some poor bastard who looked just liked the poor s*d who'd preceded me in the queue for the colonoscopy in December.  You know, the utterly zonked out one, with blue skin who leaked pain in psychic waves....  I was starting to wonder whether I could out-hobble them down the corridor when they grabbed me, chucked me on a trolley cart, stuck a f***ing great plastic widget between my legs, strapped me in and then....

... stuck a needle in my arm.  This is for the cannula.  So they can pump you full of stuff...  One of the greencoats looked at me and clearly thought: dirty old b*gg*r, I'll fix him, but her fellow alien spotted that I was leaking red fluid all over the place....

At this point, they mopped up, simulating concern (but with that certain edge of stress that says: you s*d, why are you bleeding?)  They then fled the room...  They threw over their shoulders "Don't worry, it won't hurt, but in Scotty's name stay still."  There was a low hum and the platform I was on moved into the enclosed chamber, my fat upper arms constricted against the sides with me staring at an old fashioned video screen with measurements and flashing numbers and.... a countdown!

Kind of them to tell me when I was going to be inseminated with one of their green coat wearing kind.... And then, lights flashed and

BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM

...

Strangely I felt nothing; more numbers, more distances, more lights flashed and

BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM

...

And then I was told that it was all done and don't worry about the blood on my clothes: lucky I was wearing black, piss off and I would hear from the Alien gynaecology unit in due course.  By now I was certain they were.  Aliens that is...

Well.  That went well didn't it?

And onwards to BT Infinity!

Don't get me  wrong, BT isn't a bad service and the speed of connection in this area is streets ahead of the competition, but..

I have spent too much of today, reviving a Thinkpad T40... this was because I rang the BT broadband helpdesk in Utter Pradesh (by name and by nature) to be asked to do all the things I had just done, in my underwear, in the cold last night, simply to play my games and read my regulars.  I mean, how much am I meant to suffer before I lose my latest Chess game.

So I'd turned the hub off, and the router, made myself a small libation, got the torch back out, replugged the stuff into their sockets in an artfully hidden corner of the room... several decads of minutes, having found the carefully filed number which doesn't simply route you through to a message telling you to go to wibbly-wobbly-woo and look it up on the interweb thingie. Just how am I supposed to do that when you fools at BT have poked my virtual eyes and ears out?

And I get through to the only human interface that BT still have. Some poor so and so even further into the night with a degree manning a help desk responding mostly to people who forget to plug their laptops in when their batteries run out. No wonder they sound tired, knackered and fed up... at 3 in the morning, watching the cockroaches run around the wiring in the basement of some sweatshop with 96 degrees of both humidity and temperature trying to speak patiently to some well-fed English idiot... and I am not overtelling this, their conditions are horrible...

But that's not my problem! I have a seige coming to completion on two cities and need to pull my troops if my attack isn't going well and this bozo is telling me to check stuff I've already checked, run tests I've already RUN AND I'M GETTING VERY ANGRY! So I tell him to hold the line, take more BP tablets and tell him I used to do his job, but now it's been outsourced to monkeys who get paid peanuts. I think my faux sympathy might earn me some consideration... in spite of the phone harpies recording the conversation and even though English is his second or third language, he hangs the phone up...

Well, I go swinging from one telephone menu to another until I reach the same call centre in Utter Pradesh... must be a quiet night... it's the same bloke! So I faux apologise and say that I've now done all he asked me to. And repeat it when he repeats back to me all the steps. Trouble is, now he remembers the phone harpies and is going to get me to do every. damned. step. and. tell. him. once. I've done that. I bite the inside of my cheek (eating the remains of pork scratchings, I tell him this so I get some of my own back). I get through all this...

Do you have a laptop Mr Chumbles. It's late, it's an unguarded moment. Now I have both and stupidly tell him this. He tells me I need to connect it to the hub with a lan cable. The laptop was last connected to the net in November 2012. It will take forever to boot up, update Widows*, update the AntiVenom software and recharge the battery sufficiently to do what he asks (5 hours to be precise - I've done this whilst writing my memoirs),

I give up. I go to bed. I know perfectly well it's a screw up at their end, I just want someone there to admit it. But every so often I wake up in the night and thank my lucky stars I am not an outsourced help desk guy in Utter Pradesh.

*Widows TM: the code name for Windows 9

A serious thought to start the year...

I was reading an article in the Guardian.... Vicky Coren is unquestionably the woman with the combination of looks and mind I most lust after and fear talking to. A honey with a mind like a steel trap. She was writing in Comment is Free in the Guardian about the expansion of the original hunt for hidden crimes by Jimmy Savile. I guess I'm born near enough to remember the witch hunts for communists in the mighty US of paranoid A to see the parallels... the witch hunts have begun, and because the actual crimes are undeniably abhorrent, this appears to give licence to all kinds of activities that would otherwise be castigated as either disproportionate or inappropriate.

I am going to get some flack here. Since thinking about the VileSa [Jimmy Savile] I have seem trying to put my instinctive revulsion for the man from when he was a DJ behind me (bad taste joke - ignore) and try to see the situation from a balanced perspective. Very, very difficult. I have an astonishingly violent reaction to people who hurt other people. Cannot abide bullies at any price.
 
But the thing is this. Stoke Mandeville Spinal Injuries centre as part of the fallout from this has been forced into giving the monies given by SaVile to other charities. The unit has been absolutely key to providing a new approach, a new capability to many, many thousands of people crippled by horrid injuries, including our War Heroes as the Sun would say. And SaVile's contribution to the funding this was critical.

This is why mob rule does not work. Why the will of the majority has to be tempered by people we trust to make balanced decisions. For all he was a monster on an individual level, some part of me wonders whether there wasn't some part of him trying to find redemption through good works.  If there is a hell, he is probably in it, but I have no personal evidence.  And that is the point.  All of what we hear is via the same broken media that covered it up in the first place.  Like a state's evidence guy they're all assiduously hunting around for anything to conceal their own incapacity.  The moral bankruptcy of most of the media never fails to live down to my expectations.

One of the most telling and emotional comparisons for me is from the wonderful To Kill a Mockingbird - the film which in my mind made Gregory Peck one of the finest actors of his generation. The lynch mobs represent the majority... those who react to the moment and who only after a long period of consideration can come to the long, the better view. 

And how to eat an artichoke!

Artichoke has much more to it than shown by chefs; it's one of the great messy starters.  The whole thing should have the whiskers removed from the bottom of the beast and the outermost leaves removed; boiled in salted water and then served with a small bowl or ramikin of Normandy salted butter; the dinner then peels the leaves one by one from the beast, dipping the base of the leave into the butter and stripping the gorgeous titbit of flesh away.  When you have used up the leaves which repay their dividend, then remove the rest of the useless flaccid small leaves and the wretched and aptly named choke, poor the remainder of the butter over the exposed and delectable heart and scoff!   You will end up with butter all over your chops and a huge pile of discarded, stripped leaves in the middle of the table/

As for Jerusalem artichokes... if you've ever had to spend a couple of days digging them out of someone's garden then you would not regard them with anything other than horror.  Double-digging in a wet and cold Spring to a depth of 2' over an entire garden and I'm pretty sure I did not get all of them; but after two days I was so tired and cold, I couldn't dig any further down. Ifor, the bloke whose garden it was kept saying what good topsoil it was...

Another light has gone out, and yet another

Just recently almost my last remaining really  close friend has died.  For the blog let's call him RJW. 

RJW as he was popularly known in the UK Diplomacy hobby was one of the founding fathers of the UK hobby, His 'zine, Mad Policy was one of the foundation and seminal zines of Diplomacy, first published in August 1972, he went on to publish more than 150 issues with a circulation which was international.

Mad Policy was also home of the Zine Poll for a lot of the time, eventually winning it, after a controversial change of rules in the eighties, which then resulted in RJW passing it on to John Piggott in 1986*. 

RJW was also one of the organisers for many years of Manorcon, which was an eminently successful games convention in the UK started in 1983 and still running. 

Richard was also instrumental in formulating the idea of the formation of the IDA/UK.  As Stephen Agar says: "...interest in Britain was focused on the Calhamer Awards which were organized by the IDA in the States. Thanks to some electioneering, British zines were nominated in 9 of the 11 categories and duly went on to win all 9 awards. This feat was accomplished by the fact that 75 of the 400 or so active UK players had voted in the poll, as opposed to a mere 50 votes from the 2,000 or so active US players. The US promptly changed the rules."  This coup was deliberately plotted it has to be said as a slightly nationalistic response to being patronised by some US players!  However, RJW remained good friends with people like Edi Birsan and Conrad von Metzke, in spite of some opprobrium.  It's worth saying that Richard loved to cock a snook at any kind of pomposity or pretension.

RJW also hated any kind of mawkish sentimentality, which rather showed itself in his spare, dry wit and prose.  He absolutely loved to puncture my innate tendency to pomposity.  Now, I shall have to resort to listening to what he would have said, like an additional internal critic.

His Imrryr by-line in Mad Policy was from Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melnibone series, RJW was a very avid collector of Moorcock and read a lot of Science Fiction.  He was also a great fan of Star Trek, Doctor Who and Blake’s 7 and also particularly loved the film Excalibur.  Besides this he was a very great fan of early 60s UK female pop singers like Susan Maughan and Sandie Shore and collected rare songs and records by such until he died.  His collections, besides a mountain of SF, also included cigarette cards, which he turned into a semi-profitable hobby in his retirement.

On a personal level, Richard was my best friend.  His qualities were those of a true Englishman as both he and I saw them: honourable, decent, honest and loyal.  His passion as a one-time resident of Essex was for the county and England cricket teams, the latter which I shared with him, and he did so love to crow over the success of his team over mine in the county championship.  But Richard's real passion was for the football (soccer) team closest to him in his youth and to his heart throughout his life, which was West Ham.

One of the reasons why Richard became and was such a close friend of mine was that we both shared a passion for strategy board games that took a long time... Britannia, Civilization (the Hartland Trefoil game) were just two of these.  If you don’t get on with someone very well, spending many hours staring at each other over a board would have been intolerable.  He played to win and was a very careful strategist, hugely capable when it came to assessing probabilities.  Which was understandable as he had a gift for figures.  He started his working life as a statistician with British Aerospace before progressing on to a very senior position for BAe.  This involved supporting negotiations with the UK government providing statistical and financial information for BAe during these.  He said that his experience in playing Diplomacy was invaluable in achieving results at these meetings!

But I would not wish to give the idea of an earnest man, as those who have read Richard's press saga in this august zine, you will know or guess that RJW was witty, charming, creative and highly intelligent in print as well as in person.  A great conversationalist, some of our joint flights of fantasy and extemporisation got us into some strange situations!  You will have (or can) read of the spoof which he and I perpetrated on the UK hobby in launching my zine Gallimaufry under a pseudonym, as part of which he created Selena King, a femme fatale for the hobby, and then proceeded to torment Pete Birks with her for a while, by getting people to send cards from her from all over the world!

Let me finish with my recollection of one such piece of insanity, which occurred back in the late 1970s.  In those days there was an annual holiday get-together called Eurocon, typically taking place in France.  That year Richard and Claire had agreed to give me a lift down and back.  In France in those days, there was nearly always spare capacity in hotels so getting a couple of rooms was not too much of a problem.  Until on the way back we found one which, to our horror, only had one last room left above the kitchen.  So I said that I would sleep in the car, but Richard and Claire being lovely people, because the room had a cot bed, wouldn't hear of it.  So we went downstairs, Claire went out for a walk and left Richard and I to secure the room.  This caused some whispered conversations which we realised was caused by them thinking that Claire was une Belle de la Nuit and that we were going to enjoy a bit more than just the meal and a sleep.  Madame's son, who was our waiter, was terrified by the thoughts of what we might do later on and so we regaled him with little winks and whispered "Ménage a trois!".  We could not resist.  Needless to say we had a fitful night as the room was above the kitchen with all the pots and pans, but eventually we got to sleep!

He was my friend: decent, honest, charming, witty, loyal and funny besides being a great gamesplayer!  After 40 years of friendship I will very much miss him.

*I have just heard that John has also passed away, a couple of weekends ago, Sic Transit Gloria Rana...

A trip to remember

My father made us 'do' Copenhagen on the cheap by buying a Dormobile and a second-hand 2 man pup tent for 'the boys' (as if you could use a collective term for a sadistic thug of an acquisitive, amoral elder brother and an introverted, bookish younger sibling - both over 6' - constantly at war).  "It will be educational..."

2 weeks of driving in a battered old camper van at never more than 45 mph through the Low Countries (so named because slow, long-distance travel on endless flat autobahns is horrible). Nights spent rolling up to campsites putting up a ropy old tent in the near dark with your mortal enemy before squeezing back into the van to eat warmed through tinned rubbish*, before the pair of us increasingly feral siblings were shoe-horned into the leaky old tent.

Mile after mile of boredom; across the N German plain and up into Jutland... Dutch fields, German fields, Danish fucking fields ... we stopped for a day in Copenhagen - my mother insisting we saw the Tivoli Gardens, but we had no money for the rides etc. then up the coast to the Helsingborg ferry, down the Scanian coast to catch the Lübeck ferry.

By this stage my father confessed that money was a 'bit tight' so we weren't to go near the hot buffet ...  I was so, so hungry i started silently weeping, shoulders shaking; folk at other tables started to turn and stare at us so I was allowed to get 2 bangers, mash and baked beans as my parents reckoned that would be cheapest ... Back to the table with 5 minutes to boarding giving my father his wallet back... "How much?" "s'free - part of the fare" I engulfed this heavenly, properly cooked food in 2 minutes. It was the highlight of the holiday for me... we had to grind our way back, penniless, ravenous ... I'm amazed they let us back into the country ...  2,700 miles in a fortnight at an average of 28 mph... 😢

*I've mentioned before just how abysmal a cook my mother was? Well on this trip she managed to plumb new depths of culinary disaster... the exploding steak and kidney pie trick she left at home... but boiled spuds with no salt, burnt baked beans, boil in a tin frankfurters came with us because "We can't trust that foreign muck"  Jesus, the rest of us were so fucking hungry we used to bless the late arrivals because on the few occasions we were early my brother and I used to go and stand near where others were cooking whimpering and salivating away, tears in our eyes hoping they would take pity on us and feed us a few scraps.  My father would come and haul us back lying through his teeth that "Food was ready"