Birthday Bank Holiday

This year, Anna's birthday coincided with the Easter Bank Holiday weekend so I thought it might be nice to drag her, kicking and screaming, to various shopping centres and insist that she choose lots of nice things that I could buy for her.

Saturday was spent wandering the mean streets of Bath. Fortune didn't exactly favour us - a planned visit to a glass-blowing workshop was unavailable when we arrived, and the rain made our efforts to locate particular shops a bit soggy. I thought that Google Maps on my iPhone would guide us swiftly to anywhere we desired, but Bath has recently undergone a fair bit of redevelopment, and many businesses have moved from one end of town to another.

In the end though, it all worked out. Our wanderings unexpectedly took us past a comic shop, where Cam was able to stock up on reading material. This sustained him through the periods of waiting while Anna compared and contrasted various items of clothing, before deciding what to try on.

In the end, it was a good day, but just the first installment of a double-header weekend.

Monday saw us returning to the station for another journey, this time to Bristol. We'd decided to book tickets online (seating can be very limited on that particular route) but there was an issue with the tickets when they emerged from the machine. Despite identifying this before we travelled, we had to pay for another set of tickets, and pay a non-refundable £10 admin fee to lodge a refund request, and then discover that no seating had been reserved for us. However, I have learned the valuable lesson that you should never ever use First Great Western's website, so that's something I suppose.

Bristol was great fun. We stopped at a lovely patisserie where my eggs benedict was just so beautifully done that Cam actually admitted that he wished he'd ordered it too. This finally brought balance and closure to the great Stirling Fish Finger Sandwich issue from our Road Trip last year, and I think we can all move on with our lives ;-)

After taking time to consider all the shops, Anna returned to Harvey Nichols and bought the boots I knew she was going to. Everyone was lovely to her, allowing her to savour the retail moment, despite an effeminate little personal shopper who bleated something about "not taking photos in store".

And then it was time to leave, escaping from Bristol before the credit card company could get a response team out to hose down my overheating credit card.

Cake, chocolate, comics (and in Anna's case, dresses and handmade boots) - a good time was had by all.

Where will it all end?

I've been deferring the inevitable moment for quite some time, but I have now hit the new level-cap in Lord Of The Rings Online.

Which is bad.

I shudder to think how many hours I've spent in this game, let alone how much it costs to play month after month. The truly scary thing is that my habit shows no sign of abating. As well as having a character at the maximum level 65, I also have a second one at level 52, so there's plenty more game to play. And, by the time I've maxed both of them out, there will doubtless be another expansion pack available to download...

I'm still in control. I don't need LOTRO Anonymous, not yet anyway. I could give it all up tomorrow if I wanted. But tonight, maybe I'll just play for one more hour...

Mac and me - the beginning

For the longest time, I made derisive comments about Macs. I ridiculed their lack of software, their unbuttoned mice, and their style-over-substance design. I certainly never intended to get one.

But in the end, I was driven into the arms of a Mac by my PC. Partly it's the constant angst of virus threats, the endless Windows updates, and the fact that the computer frequently gets bogged down doing myseterious tasks that I never asked it to do. Mainly though, it's the fact that my photos look too light / too dark / the wrong colour.

Now I know that this is largely down to my monitor. But my most recent monitor has recently decided to get upset with the drivers for my graphics card and really don't see why I should be expected to deal with this nonsense anymore. It's supposed to work.

Apple products seem to just work. They do what they're meant to and they do it pretty well. I bought an iPod, and it was great. I bought an iPhone and it was great. So I have high hopes for the Mac I have now bought.

Sure, it feels weird not knowing my way around. Everything seems a little too friendly and simple for someone who's spent years on PCs. But the biggest problem is that I can now see my photos perfectly. And I can now understand why so many of them were getting rejected by the stock photo agencies - all those simple lighting and colour issues that I could have easily fixed if I'd been able to see them.

So, fingers crossed, this is the start of a beautiful friendship. I'll still play games on my PC and use it for music and web stuff. At least, I will until it annoys me into doing those things on the Mac...

Another year older...

It's a curious thing, but every birthday after 29 seems to have come with a slight tinge of regret. At first, I thought it was all in my head, but now I'm beginning to suspect that I really am becoming a grown-up, with all the disappointment and hassle that entails.

The clincher was probably when Anna asked me not to shave for a few days, saying she'd like to see what I looked like with a beard. I pointed out that she'd seen that before, but I had a couple of days off so I went along with the idea. The results weren't great - beards seldom are - but in my case I seem to have a random scattering of silver stubble that makes the darker bits look dreadfully patchy. It wasn't something I'd particularly noticed before, and then I remembered that my oncoming birthday had a "4" as its first digit, and made the connection.

Age approaches. And with it, I can doubtless expect a host of other unwelcome changes. How long before I start buying clothes from Marks & Spencer? How long before the Daily Express starts to make sense? How long before I start tidying up after myself?

Overall, I suspect being ancient is probably going to be rubbish, but there are silver linings, of course. My beautiful wife (despite being older than me) seems to have completely avoided aging since I met her, so she's almost getting younger in a comparative sense. And nobody expects me to have mainstream music tastes any more (though to be fair, I never did). And, most important of all, I get cake today.

So, just as I did when I got to my thirties, I'm going to tell myself that these ones doesn't matter - I'm not old until the next multiple-of-ten milestone. Now, about that cake...

The "E" Word

Oh dear, it's an election year again, and that means politics. Of course, this can sometimes be the source of some good fun, and I was taking a look through some websites when I came across this modified poster.

The caption made me smile, but it also made me think about something rather sad.

Going to one of the best schools in the country is now something shameful.

"He went to Eton" is a phrase often delivered with the same tone as "He parks in handicapped spaces" or "He's cruel to animals".

How messed up is that? It's one thing to feel threatened by a home counties accent, but quite another to suggest that anyone lucky enough to receive the finest education should really aspire to an inner-city comprehensive. "We certainly wouldn't want our Prime Minister to have attended a good school - whatever would the Europeans think?!"

Our society is tolerant, but it can be tolerant of the wrong things. Drink-driving is wrong. Theft is wrong. Violence is wrong. Going to a particular school, whether it's Eton or Swanmore Secondary School*, isn't.

*Well, Eton's all right, but I'm not sure I'd recommend Swanmore if that awful Mr Carlin is still on the staff ;-)

Battleship

It's always nice to see games you've been involved with doing well, and it's been especially gratifying with Battleship.

It was FinBlade's first project with EA and everyone worked really hard to make an iPhone adaptation that not only looked great, but played really well. And it's not all "B3" and "D7". There are exciting new game modes, with airstrikes, torpedo attacks, and even an orbiting laser weapon that pulverises the oceans and everything on them. But you you can still play classic modes if you prefer.

It was really great to find that Battleship was in the iTunes Top Ten on Christmas Day. And on both sides of the Atlantic too!

These aren't just *any* chocolate truffles...

No indeed, these are the tragic chocolate truffles that I thought I could make myself.

It all started out so well. I walked in on a Channel 4 programme called Kirstie's Homemade Christmas, where a reassuringly large woman was doing a feature on how to make chocolate truffles. This seemed mostly to involve eating chocolate and saying how nice it was, so I was immediately encouraged that it was something I could do really well.

The large lady explained that you heat up some whipping cream, add a spoon of honey, then melt in lots of grated chocolate and stir it into a yummy-looking goop called a ganache. This should be left overnight to cool and thicken. Resisting the temptation to eat my ganache, I dutifully left it overnight to cool and thicken.

Next day, I did as the not-insubstantial Kirstie had done - donning gloves, dusted in cocoa powder, and making little ball-shaped bits of ganache.

"That looks like a poo!" she had squealed, as she dropped a brown glob onto a tray. I was greatly encouraged to find that my own creations were similarly beautiful.

Now, came the tempering of the chocolate, a mouth-watering process whereby chocolate is melted, then tipped out onto a large marble slab and smoothed to a cool gloss with a palette knife. I had actually bought a granite slab and palette knife especially for this, and found myself daring to dream the chocolatier's dream as I worked away happily...

...but the sweet dreams turned bitter.

On TV, the generously-proportioned presenter took robust, spherical orbs of ganache and dipped them, one by one on a fork, into her tempered chocolate. Sadly, my own ganache resembled a series of unsuccessful bowel movements - flat splats that drooped and oozed off the fork almost immediately. The few that made it to the tempered chocolate simply sank without trace.

And this is where I wonder if I have been duped. Yes, I may need more chocolate and less whipped cream. Yes, I might try cooling the ganache on a larger tray to thicken it more. But no, I do not believe the ganache plops that Kirstie crafted were the same ones she dipped into her chocolate moments later. Who was that smiling chocolatier standing by her side, and were the firm balls perhaps his not hers?

It's academic now, of course. Just when I thought it was safe to come out of culinary retirement, this disaster has set me back another 10 years. In a house where I'm only 3rd best cook if I don't count The Cat, it's best to accept my limitations and play to my strengths. From now on, I'll focus on eating.