LARPing Around

I was bit confused when one of my staff requested Friday off - so she could prepare for a LARPing weekend. Needless to say I had no idea what she was talking about; but did I care? I certainly did.

Discreet enquiries to other staff members revealed that the gentle lady in question liked to partake of Live Action Role Playing, meaning dressing up in fanciful costume (leather apparently) and beating the hell out of other participants using latex and foam weapons. A strange way to vent your frustrations, but then again...

Needless to say I googled LARPing and found loads of specialist clothing companies and armourers (as well as pinching the above photo off some-one's site). And it's not just ladies from Petersfield that like this sort of thing. LARPing is everywhere - Belgium, across America, and Germany. They've moved on from the old roundheads vs cavaliers re-creations of Civil War battles. Your modern LARPer will have a specially themed event (Conan the Barbarian meets Godzilla in the Temple of Arkan, sacrifices at 4.00pm, bar opens at 6.00pm, bring axes).

Somehow I feel quite pleased that I'm leaving my job in less than three weeks. I do work with my back to the lady LARPer and I just feel a little uneasy about her. I don't think I'll ask her if she enjoyed her weekend when I go back to work on Monday.

Masterchef - First Cake

Ouch! It doesn't look very good does it? My first attempt at baking a cake (an educational process intended to climax with the production of a Rambling Nappa Christening Cake in the summer) did not impress the judging panel. Here are a few of the comments.

1. It would have been sensible not to have iced the cake while it was still hot (so the icing simply ran straight off like molten lava)
2. What's that strata of fat running through the sponge?
3. It hasn't been cooked long enough.
4. More baking powder.
5. No, Nigella's all wrong. You don't just bung everything in the mixer and hope for the best.
6. What do you mean it has gone down the waste disposal unit? (the mother of the child)

Oh well. Back to the drawing board.

Bags of Nonsense

Well done Marks and Spencer. You are doing the right thing by charging us for plastic carrier bags. And how predictable the reaction of other retail giants who are not following suit. A couple of years ago the French government outlawed the free issue of plastic carriers in supermarkets and there has been no violent protest (apart from the Rambling Nappa who repeatedly arrives at the checkout of his local Shoppi with a laden trolley - having forgotten to bring his reusable, hard-wearing 3 euro bag with him - again, and again).

Wales (and I hardly ever agree with anything Welsh) is likely to issue a similar ban. Why, for heavens sake, can't we?

Not so boring - Jonno

I'd got this image of Jonny Wilkinson as an admirable, but terribly boring English sportsman. A dullard in the mould of Tim Henman. The sort of person you'd find it terribly difficult to strike up a conversation with unless it was about the intricacies of playing backhand volleys off the baseline using multifilament stringing at max tension, as opposed to catgut. Then I read Wilkinson's piece in Monday's Times in which hardly a mention was given to Saturday night's victory in Paris. Instead he wrote entertainingly and interestingly about having a rather splendid lunch the following morning with Toby Flood and Mathew Tait (irritatingly "Taity" and "Floody") at Yves Camdeborde's Le Comptoir off the Boulevard St Germain.

I guess that if you can slot penalties like Jonny, then you have little difficulty in getting a Sunday lunch table at a place like that. But it was a surprise to find a likeable-sounding human being lurking behind the grim facade.

Singing in the Rain

Many apologies for my enforced absence. Orange Broadband failed my household on New Year’s Eve, and after four weeks of expensive and entirely useless phone calls to Mumbai (Orange technical support division) I still had no broadband service. Accordingly I left Orange and am now a happy Pipex customer with full blogging facilities to hand. My phone contracts with Orange will also cease shortly and I’ll cheerfully and insistently find an alternative supplier. I recommend all my readers to take note and to steer well clear of all Orange products unless they concern fruit.

So what’s been happening? Personally only two news items to report. The first is that the Rambling Nappa managed to ramble last Sunday from his front door in Rowlands Castle to the town of Petersfield ten miles away. I didn’t ramble back again (preferring a lift home from the long-suffering wife), and was left both blistered and knackered from the sudden surge of activity. Heaven knows how people get the stamina to run a 26-mile marathon (or my senior cousin the oomph to cycle from London to Paris - repeatedly.

The second news item concerns a brief conversation I had yesterday with my Managing Director. We agreed that a parting of the ways was a sensible course from both our points of view - so I’ll be unemployed by Easter.

Fortunately I’m not the least bit despondent about this turn of events. I had become dispirited by book-selling and the seeming impossibility of competing profitably with Amazon. I have a backlog of things to do – which includes writing two works of fiction (one for adults, and one for children) and the clearing of the final debris of fifteen years running bookshops (yes, I still own shelves, cctv cameras, tills, stacks of books, and accumulated junk). I have volunteered to bake a christening cake for the latest grand-daughter (this requires an educational process as I’ve never baked a cake before). I need to lose weight and get fit. There’s the prickly issue of selling the house in France. It would be wonderful to sort out my finances so that I could take the long-suffering wife away for a proper holiday. There’s some good cricket coming up this summer (okay I did get up at 5.00am today, saw very quickly how badly things were going for England in New Zealand, and went straight back to bed). In other words I’m rather looking forward to having time to do a few of these things.

I also vow to blog more diligently…

No Broadband means No Blog

Thankyou Orange!

Towards the end of December my Orange home broadband failed. So far nearly nine hours of (expensive) phone calls to a call centre in India have failed to provide a solution. It wasn't until I googled "Orange PPP Server Down" on someone else's computer that I realised that this is a very common problem that drives Orange customers completely mad.

I'm changing broadband supplier and expect to resume blogging very soon....

Enter the House of the Lord (at a price)

In London for a couple of days selling investment books at the World Money Show. The venue is the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre - just across the road from Westminster Abbey - a perfect opportunity to reacquaint myself with that huge hulk of a place of worship. I can only spare myself 15 minutes or so, enough time to have a quick muse by Poet's corner and to take in the vastness of the place.

There is a slight catch however - an obligation to part company with a tenner in order to gain admission. Okay, so there is some small print to the effect that if you simply wish to pray then you can enter free, but I reckon that my fifteen minutes would be primarily spent as a tourist (although I might take a quick kneel-down if the knee joints can bear it). I do not enter.


London is a very expensive city, and tourism is vitally important. A hotel room is £100, a short taxi trip can cost more than a month's wages in Petersfield, and the cost of a couple of theatre tickets plus dinner for two is enough to try the bank balance of half the visitors to the World Money Show (many of whom were being exhorted by fellow exhibitors to invest in US property - going cheap with a wonderful exchange rate to help you).

Westminster Abbey is a major tourist attraction and, like the British Museum and National Gallery, should not depend on tourist money for its upkeep. The abbey receives funding from neither the church, or the state, and personally I think that is absolutely wrong. If a building is used (famously) for state occasions, then my tax money should go to support it. Then tourists (many of whom are British) could walk proudly through the great doors without forking out £24 for a family of two adults plus two children (special offer).

Oh heck! I'm ranting again.