Author: admin

I wanted to like Dungeons and Dragons, I really did. It was cool, lots of my friends played, it incorporated all the things I liked, or kind of liked, and I just never really got into it.

Part of the issue is that when I was in high school, I was never quite the right kind of nerd. I was on the library club, and Reach for the Top, but then I ended up on the yearbook, not the chess club, or math club. I did all the sciences except for biology (I cannot see through a stereoscopic microscope at all, even now with glasses), but not computing science. I missed out on the really formative hardcore nerd stuff.

At university, I joined the Gamesters of Triskelion, but everyone else already played and had characters and knew the games, and I didn’t. I also joined the women’s centre, and they didn’t really understand the appeal of nerds at all (not that the nerds really understood the feminists for their part). Within a few years, Dungeons and Dragons was waning, making way for computer games.

I bough this die recently, a kind of nostalgia for a youth I almost had.

This little dude is only two inches high (and most of that is hair) and made of beads. He has a safety-pin attached to his back, but I’ve never really worn him.

I just think he’s so manic and bright – he sits on my mantelshelf and waves.

Late afternoon sunlight and tree bark – I couldn’t resist the combination. The light was almost like Johannesburg light, although it was cold. Having lived most of my life at 27 degrees off the Equator, I find the light up here too weak and low, most of the time. This day was an exception.

I was walking home when I spotted this – a pristine Glenn Miller casette tape case, with a casette in it, lying on the patch of earth around a tree stump. There was nothing else around, no other litter or anything, and it looked like it had been placed there deliberately. Very weird.

Postscript – it is apparently Glenn Miller’s birthday, so I assume this is an homage.

Walking home today, about six o’clock, this was the canal. Peaceful and calm, although cold, and the light a lovely blue. It was almost too dark to take the picture, hence the slight blur, but it was so lovely to see, I had to use the pic.

Before we moved to Preston, we looked up the town on Flickr, to see what we were getting ourselves into. One of the pictures was of a telephone pole just like this one, with wires going in all directions to the local houses. It was captioned something like “twenty-first century communications networks in Preston”. It was a great picture, and when we moved to Preston we saw just such poles everywhere. There;s even one outside our house, visible from the kitchen window. The thing is, though, the phones work fine, so does the Internet, which is faster and cheaper than anywhere I’ve ever lived, and it all comes through those wires, so we shouldn’t complain.

This is a candleholder Martin bought in a junk shop in Porto last year. It’s quite cheap, and clearly salvage from a catholic church somewhere, but not shating my squeamishness about catholic regalia, he insisted on it.

The junk shop was quite something, packed with rubbish, but holding some interesting finds. We battled a bit, because the old woman who ran it spoke no English, but she managed French, as did I, so we bought forks, of all things, and a few other knickknacks, and this candle holder. It lives on the mantelpiece, and that’s the startlingly-textured wallpaper of the living room behind it. Yet another example of the interesting wallpapers of this house.

London is full of people. And I mean FULL of people. I still think of myself as a city person, and I miss cities, but I am clearly not used to people, because London left me feeling claustrophobic and overwhelmed a lot of the time. It didn’t help that I wasn’t feeling well, but I just felt I was constantly bupbing into people, getting in their way, having them in my way. It was loud, and too warm, and generally quite unpleasant. We did find an amazing find, though: the Masonic Temple. Martin wanted to see it, so we went, and when we got there, there was a museum and a tour, so we got to see the inside of the temple, and the most incredible mosaic. The whole thing is rather nazi-soviet, though, having been built in 1928 or thereabouts, the height of Deco – all hard edges and massive spaces. The mosaic covers the curved spaces between the walls and ceiling, and is largely light blue and gold, with illustrations of key scenes, symbols and figures. The whole thing was awe-inspiring, but once again, no pictures allowed.

This is Lincoln’s Inn Field, in London. We were in London for two days, on an impromptu trip, which went rather oddly. On Thursday, I had no time to take pictures, and so this picture and the next were taken on the same day: Friday.

It’s a lonely tree, on the edge of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, which were once attached to Lincoln’s Inn, one of the four Inns of Court at London. I have no idea what any of this means, to be honest, but the field is lovely: quiet and green, and surrounded by trees. It’s really just a park, but it was a sanctuary from the almost insane claustrophobia of Sir John Soane’s Museum which, although, fascinating, I found oppressive with the weight of all that stuff. No photography allowed, though, so you’ll have to take my word for it.

We are not big on cat toys or furniture, although we love our cats to a point pretty close to delirium. Partly it’s a matter of taste – most cat toys and furniture are ugly, but it also a matter of not really thinking about getting them things. They do have boards to scratch, bought for pennies at the hardware store, and I did make catnip toys once, but Oliver dismembered them rapidly. We’ve tried beds, but none of them worked, except for this one, which Oliver is pretty much always in. The thing about this, is that it’s hanging off the radiator, so it’s nice and warm. He used to sleep on the floor next to the radiator, and that’s why I bought it. He slept under it a few times, until I actually lifted him up and put him in it, and then he was hooked. I like it because it’s in my study, so I have a companion while I’m *ahem* working away.