Deprecated: Function get_magic_quotes_gpc() is deprecated in /home1/gerardsw/public_html/travel/wp-includes/formatting.php on line 3964
IMG_20150311_061215

“No one gets pardoned for living”

So says DEATH.

News to no-one, I’m sure: Terry Pratchett died last week. While on a book-by-book basis he probably wasn’t my favourite author he was certainly one of my top five, and with the number of books he produced his writing probably gave me more cumulative pleasure than anyone else. He’s one of the few, very very few, authors I’ll reread, and there was always something new to take from each reading. What started out as a couple of books for light entertainment developed into a series taking a very deep and satirical look at a lot of goings-ons in real life. I’ll miss his writing.

As I mentioned to a few people, his is the first “celebrity” death that provoked any feeling in me at all and I think the reason for that is twofold. Firstly, spending so much time enjoying his work creates a connection that wouldn’t otherwise be there for me, obviously. I think the other side of it, though, is related to the manner of his slow passing: dignified but angry at what the progression of Alzheimer’s was doing to him. Dying slowly and in a way that prevents me enjoying life is something I feel pretty strongly about preventing, and a trip to Switzerland (unless elsewhere is more enlightened by then) would be on the cards for me in that situation. I hope, in the end, that his death was on his own terms.

The three tweets were what affected me most, I think (loltwitteremotions). They were just such an incredibly appropriate send-off.

pratchett death

Ook.

 

 


 

Right, enough morbidity; on with the show! It’s been an action-packed March so far, the cobwebs have definitely been blown off after the (slightly) quieter winter months and it’s back to lots of getting out-and-about.

First up this month was a night out at the Secret Theatre with Erin, Jimmy and Jo. Ever since experiencing The Drowned Man last year we’ve been very eager to try immersive theatrical stuff again, so when I spotted the event being advertised somewhere I snapped up a few tickets right away. It was a bit secretive (clue is in the name!) but it turned out to be a performance based on Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’. While it wasn’t on the same level as TDM – much more linear, just one storyline, audience fully guided – it was still an excellent show, and a lot of fun. Bonus points for the amazing venue, a private member’s club kitted out in 1920s fashion. Gilded ceilings, weird artwork, random (impressive!) stuffed animals, I liked it a lot! Apparently only £300 per year membership and you can bring up to five friends in with you, who’s with me?!

IMG_20150305_195444

IMG_20150305_195736

 


IMG_20150305_214728 IMG_20150305_202223 IMG_20150305_215900 IMG_20150305_194255
 


IMG_20150305_202314 IMG_20150305_214804

IMG_20150305_214820
Yep, that’s Jimmy getting jiggy with a corpse

 

I’m pretty sure we’ll be keeping our eye out for more of these in future!

 


 

Next up was a Saturday afternoon of boardgaming at a gaming bar in northeast London. There are a few gaming pubs and cafes popping up now and we’d been talking about checking then out for a while, was good to finally get around to actually doing it!
This one was Loading Bar and the very reasonable deal was that you play some of their dozens of modern boardgames and in return you buy drinks while playing. As I said, very reasonable! They don’t do food, which is a bit of a downside, but they also don’t mind you bringing in takeaway so once you’re aware of that it’s OK. The gaming was good fun but unfortunately had to be cut a bit short short as they had some kind of event or music or something boring like that going on in the evening. Not ideal, but we went to a nearby unbearably-trendy cocktail bar to console ourselves and intend to return for more gaming sometime very soon.

IMG_20150307_191247

 

 


 

That was Saturday. On the Sunday I decided I wanted to do a mega-walk; we’re going on a hiking weekend at the start of May so some practice seemed in order! We were heading out on the train in the afternoon so I planned out a huge roundabout route between our house and Liverpool Street Station. It was a really nice crisp day and I had plenty of podcasts to listen to so what turned out to be a roughly-15k walk was very enjoyable, if mostly not very scenic. There were some bits that weren’t just streets,though; pictures as proof!


IMG_20150308_101510 IMG_20150308_094911
 

A couple of years back we did quite a few of the Capital Ring segments around London and they were excellent, we really should get back into the habit of those again. Something something all our weekends booked up until almost June something something. Severe first world problems.


 

Reece’s birthday dinner was on the 11th; his 30th, so a bit special, and Steph had organised a surprise dinner for him at our place because we had room for the ~15 people who were coming. Everyone was assigned some food to cook; I grabbed dessert and spent two very fun and fruitful evenings creating a host of things both new and old. I may have gone slightly overboard (who, me? With dessert? Naaaah….), to the extent that I had to discourage offers of people bringing along other desserts which I did feel a little bit bad about (sorry Jo!).

Reece was successfully surprised and an excellent evening was had; much wine was drunk, wheels of cheese nobbled, cheesy food consumed, cheesy desserts lapped up – there was a cheese theme, you might have noticed. I struggled a little bit with not being in charge of the food – allowing other people to take control of my kitchen proved to be challenging – but I managed to get over it. I’m used to being the host and turning that off wasn’t easy!

Pictures, then links to the recipes for the things Erin and I prepared.

IMG_20150311_192146

IMG_20150311_200036


IMG_20150311_203740 IMG_20150311_194903
 

IMG_20150311_212553

 

Desserts, all in the last picture (yes, I’m gently nudging you back in the direction of my website ;-))

Sweet Ricotta Fritters
Lemon Curd Bars
Mascarpone Brownies
Apple Yoghurt Pie-Cake
Chocolate Ricotta Cheesecake
Flourless Chocolate Chip Brownies

 

 


 

Last Thursday was supposed to have been my next DnD session but I unfortunately ended up having to pull out. It had been a busy week, and the start of a two-week spell where only one evening would Erin and I have to ourselves; that definitely felt a bit too much! We had a nice quiet night in instead, and I felt much the better for it afterwards.

Saturday we had a separate DnD session at Sid & Abby’s. For lunch Sid put together his fantastic Salad Olivieh and between the five of us we put away a ridiculous amount of food. I can’t tell you how tasty that thing is, but you should find some and eat all of it. Bellies full (oh, so very full) we spent the rest of the day sailing the high seas; well, that and rescuing our Captain, Mark, from some trouble he got into because we left him alone a bit too long without adult company – let’s just say he favoured the direct route to dealing with a situation; he ended up in a cage. Oh, and I bought a goat! And we all definitely got high on cloves. (Am I still talking about DnD? You might never know.)

 


 

(we’re all the way up to March 15th now and it’s currently the morning of the 20th – getting there, and just as well I’m not leaving all of this until the end of March!)

 


 

On Sunday we were out again, this time to a weird-sounding interactive…something?…taking place in central London. All I knew about it when I booked is what’s described here, with the selling tagline being:

“You’ll be tailing someone who works in the heart of the financial system. You’ll need to blend into the city around you, so that you don’t draw attention. We don’t have permission to be doing this. We don’t have permission to be here. What happens next – well, that’s up to you.”

We had separately been in conversation with a guy over email during the previous week and had a playlist set up on our phones for use during the game. We had to separate when it started, then things were directed via a text messaging system (instructions, and also responses to texts with keywords) and playing various of the playlist voice tracks. I’m not going to go into a huge amount of detail here, but it was good fun – kinda like a treasure hunt while learning more about obscure bits of the City of London, all while wandering around the area around St Paul’s. It ended with a group of us (because there were other players as well) planning and executing a stalking followed by a mugging! That was interesting, and in the post-mortem in the pub afterwards I was definitely drawing comparisons between what we did (had been convinced to do) and “just following orders”. Definitely an interesting experience, overall.

I got some pictures of things while wandering around St Paul’s:


IMG_20150315_123018 IMG_20150315_131230  IMG_20150315_123540 IMG_20150315_123110
 

And I really liked this view:

IMG_20150315_121547

 

 


 

Monday – cocktails with Colman at the top of The Shard. Expensive cocktails, but not really excessive when you consider the view – which was excellent, but unfortunately turns out to not be very photogenic (curse you, second layer of glass):


IMG_20150316_190832 IMG_20150316_190825 IMG_20150316_203230 IMG_20150316_203240
 

 


 

Wednesday we went to a BBC Radio 4 recording of Newsjack, one of their 30-minute comedy shows. I’d never been to a recording before so it was quite interesting to see how it all worked and what exactly was required to get a decent 30-minute slot. Also, really can’t complain about free tickets to a bit of decent comedy!

IMG_20150318_192920 IMG_20150318_192908
 


 

 

And that’s pretty much us all up-to-date. However, there’s a reason (apart from Terry Pratchett stuff) that I really wanted to do this blog post now rather than, as per usual, waiting until the end of the month, and hence got up at 5:30am to finish it off! This Saturday (i.e. tomorrow) we’re taking part in something very exciting that I wanted to talk quickly about in advance – a Megagame, Watch The Skies.

I can only give a short introduction to it now, but I’ll probably do an entire blog post on our experience afterwards. I first heard about Megagames (and the previous iteration of this one in particular) when a video from a London-based boardgame review site went viral last June. They had done something different from their normal boardgame reviews and taken part in Watch The Skies, and taken a video diary of their experiences. I can highly recommend watching the video, it’s very good but it’s about an hour long: link.

Watch the Skies 2 is happening Saturday where something like 150 players will be taking control of ~50 nations, aliens, corporations and various other organisations. Play starts at 10am and ends at 5pm; those 7 hours in between will be incredibly draining, exciting, frustrating, highly-strung, exciting, exciting, … :-)

Erin (Production), I (CEO), Sid (PR) and Abby (Research) are together playing LEXCorp, a friendly (honest!)mega-corporation. We’ve spent the last week discussing the rules, coming up with ideas and strategising (otherwise known as plotting) – plenty of fun without having started playing at all!
We’re also getting properly into character, which is why I’ve had my suit dry-cleaned and Erin is the proud owner of a hard hat. Abby has done awesome work on a badge/logo for us:

WTS Badge

 

This is going to be so much fun. Did I mention being excited?

IMG_20150313_062236

 

 

More – probably much, much more – on WTS after we play!


 

And to finish, a couple of nice pics from recent runs:


IMG_20150311_061215 IMG_20150313_061708


Notice: compact(): Undefined variable: limits in /home1/gerardsw/public_html/travel/wp-includes/class-wp-comment-query.php on line 821

Notice: compact(): Undefined variable: groupby in /home1/gerardsw/public_html/travel/wp-includes/class-wp-comment-query.php on line 821

Warning: count(): Parameter must be an array or an object that implements Countable in /home1/gerardsw/public_html/travel/wp-includes/class-wp-comment-query.php on line 399

Deprecated: Function get_magic_quotes_gpc() is deprecated in /home1/gerardsw/public_html/travel/wp-includes/formatting.php on line 3964

Deprecated: Function get_magic_quotes_gpc() is deprecated in /home1/gerardsw/public_html/travel/wp-includes/formatting.php on line 3964

Deprecated: Function get_magic_quotes_gpc() is deprecated in /home1/gerardsw/public_html/travel/wp-includes/formatting.php on line 3964

Leave a Reply
Deprecated: Function get_magic_quotes_gpc() is deprecated in /home1/gerardsw/public_html/travel/wp-includes/formatting.php on line 3964

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *