Bacon Solves Little, Improves Much

Even when you’re not remotely ready to think about Christmas yet and yet it keeps getting closer every second.

Even when the house is an absolute shambles and trying to rectify that is one step forward/one step sideways/three steps back/now put your hands on your hips and wait, what was I supposed to be tidying again?

Even when the electricity keeps yo-yoing every few minutes as the country continues to be battered by a storm.

Even when you spent most of the evening in the hospital with your injured child and then most of the night habitually getting up just to reassure yourself he’s still breathing (he’s fine, by the way!).

Even then, there’s still the comfort of a bacon sarnie for breakfast. 😋

Brioche bun loaded with thick cut bacon rashers, plated, on a wooden surface.

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Babies and Baubles

For a long time now, every year we’ve encouraged our two children (now 10 and 8 years old) to each select one new bauble for our Christmas tree1. They get to do this at the shop adjoining the place from which we buy the tree, and it’s become a part of our annual Christmas traditions.

A highly-reflective 'soap bubble' glass bauble hangs alongside a glittery gold teardrop-shaped bauble, lit by green and blue fairy lights.
This approach to decoration: ad-hoc, at the whims of growing children, and spread across many years without any common theme or pattern, means that our tree is decorated in a way that might be generously described as eclectic. Or might less-generously be described as malcoordinated!

A cluster of three baubles hangs among pink and white fairy lights: one is a multicoloured assortment of bells, another is a plain white bauble decorated with glittery green and red spots, a third is a transparent plastic sphere containing a colourful children's drawing of a stocking.
But there’s something beautiful about a deliberately-constructed collection of disparate and disconnected parts.

I’m friends with a couple, for example, who’ve made a collection of the corks from the wine bottles from each of their anniversary celebrations, housed together into a strange showcase. There might be little to connect one bottle to the next, and to an outsider a collection of used stoppers might pass as junk, but for them – as for us – the meaning comes as a consequence of the very act of collecting.

A decoration in the form of a bejewelled exotic bird hangs between a traditional bauble with a rippled texture and a hand-painted decoration showing a potted tree.
Each ornament is an untold story. A story of a child wandering around the shelves of a Christmas-themed store, poking fingerprints onto every piece of glass they can find as they weigh up which of the many options available to them is the most special to them this year.

And every year, at about this time, they get to relive their past tastes and fascinations as we pull out the old cardboard box and once again decorate our family’s strangely beautiful but mismatched tree.

It’s pretty great.

Footnotes

1 Sometimes each has made a bauble or similar decoration at their school or nursery, too. “One a year” isn’t a hard rule. But the key thing is, we’ve never since their births bought a set of baubles.

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Balance bikes are just better

if [the option of a balance bike] isn’t available, you can convert a normal bike into a balance bike by removing the pedals and lowering the seat. Once the kids has learned how to balance as they roll, add the pedals, raise the seat, and watch them go.

An excellent suggestion from fellow RSS Club member Sean McP (he’s been full of those lately; I’ve been enjoying encouraging drivers through our village to slow down by smiling and waving, too).

Like Sean, I learned to ride a bike using training wheels (“stabilisers” on this side of the pond). Unlike him, I didn’t have any trouble with them, and so when I came to hear about balance bikes as an alternative learning approach I figured they were just two different approaches to the same thing.

But when our eldest learned using stabilisers, she really struggled, and only eventually “got it” with an un-stabilised bike and lots and lots of practice. It’s true what Sean says: for most children, learning to balance atop a bicycle is harder than learning to pedal and/or steer, so that’s the bit we should be focussing on.

Our youngest is (finally) ready and keen to learn to cycle, and so I’m thinking that when I get him his first bike (maybe for Christmas!) I’ll get him one that, were I to put the seat into its lowest position and remove the pedals, he could use as a balance bike for a day or two to get the feel of the thing before re-attaching them and letting him try the full experience.

Wonder Boy

There are video games that I’ve spent many years playing (sometimes on-and-off) before finally beating them for the first time. I spent three years playing Dune II before I finally beat it as every house. It took twice that to reach the end of Ultima Underworld II. But today, I can add a new contender1 to that list.

Today, over thirty-five years after I first played it, I finally completed Wonder Boy.

Entryway to "West View Leisure Centre", decorated in a bright, abstract, 80s style.
I first played Wonder Boy in 1988 at West View Leisure Centre, pictured here mostly as-I-remember-it in a photo by Keith Wright (used under CC BY-SA 2.0 license).

My first experience of the game, in the 1980s, was on a coin-op machine where I’d discovered I could get away with trading the 20p piece I’d been given by my parents to use as a deposit on a locker that week for two games on the machine. I wasn’t very good at it, but something about the cutesy graphics and catchy chip-tune music grabbed my attention and it became my favourite arcade game.

Of all the video games about skateboarding cavemen I’ve ever played, it’s my favourite.

I played it once or twice more when I found it in arcades, as an older child. I played various console ports of it and found them disappointing. I tried it a couple of times in MAME. But I didn’t really put any effort into it until a hotel we stayed at during a family holiday to Paris in October had a bank of free-to-play arcade machines rigged with Pandora’s Box clones so they could be used to play a few thousand different arcade classics. Including Wonder Boy.

A young girl in a pink leopard-print top plays Wonder Boy on an arcade cabinet.
Our eldest was particularly taken with Wonder Boy, and by the time we set off for home at the end of our holiday she’d gotten further than I ever had at it (all without spending a single tenpence).

Off the back of all the fun the kids had, it’s perhaps no surprise that I arranged for a similar machine to be delivered to us as a gift “to the family”2 this Christmas.

A large, arcade-cabinet-shaped present, wrapped in black paper and a red ribbon, stands alongside a Christmas tree.
If you look carefully, you can work out which present it it, despite the wrapping.

And so my interest in the game was awakened and I threw easily a hundred pounds worth of free-play games of Wonder Boy3 over the last few days. Until…

…today, I finally defeated the seventh ogre4, saved the kingdom, etc. It was a hell of a battle. I can’t count how many times I pressed the “insert coin” button on that final section, how many little axes I’d throw into the beast’s head while dodging his fireballs, etc.

So yeah, that’s done, now. I guess I can get back to finishing Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap, the 2017 remake of a 1989 game I adored!5 It’s aged amazingly well!

Footnotes

1 This may be the final record for time spent playing a video game before beating it, unless someday I ever achieve a (non-cheating) NetHack ascension.

2 The kids have had plenty of enjoyment out of it so far, but their time on the machine is somewhat eclipsed by Owen playing Street Fighter II Turbo and Streets of Rage on it and, of course, by my rediscovered obsession with Wonder Boy.

3 The arcade cabinet still hasn’t quite paid for itself in tenpences-saved, despite my grinding of Wonder Boy. Yet.

4 I took to calling the end-of-world bosses “ogres” when my friends and I swapped tips for the game back in the late 80s, and I refuse to learn any different name for them.6, saved Tina7Apparently the love interest has a name. Who knew?

5 I completed the original Wonder Boy III: The Dragon’s Trap on a Sega Master System borrowed from my friend Daniel back in around 1990, so it’s not a contender for the list either.

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Mental Elf Day

Christmas Jumper Day at the kids’ school. Because I’m the “embarrassing parent”, I joined in for the school run too.

(Also for my meetings today, obviously.)

Selfie of Dan wearing an "elf costume" Christmas jumper and matching hat with bell.

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Absence/Presents

I’m probably not going to get you a Christmas present. You probably shouldn’t get me one either.

Dan, wearing an "elf costume" Christmas jumper, looks into the camera while cuddling a French Bulldog. The pair are sitting on a beige sofa.
All I need for Christmas is… a woolly jumper and a dog, apparently. (And I only need the latter if the goose doesn’t get delivered.)

If you’re one of my kids and you’ve decided that maybe my blog isn’t just “boring grown-up stuff” and have come by, then you’re one of the exceptions. Lucky you.

Children get Christmas gifts from me. But if you’re an adult, all you’re likely to get from me is a hug, a glass of wine, and more food than you can possibly eat in a single sitting.

Top-down view of a dining table set with a Christmas-themed tablecloth. The meal has concluded and the seats have been vacated, but large amounts of food - most of a turkey, half a nutloaf, lots of mashed potato, several sprouts, stuffing balls, and chestnuts, some roast potatoes and parsnips, an entire boat full of gravy, and almost a dozen Yorkshire puddings - are still set out.
Turns out the real meaning of Christmas was eating yourself into indigestion all along.

I’ve come to the conclusion – much later than my mother and my sisters, who were clearly ahead of the curve – that Christmas presents are for kids.

Maybe, once, Christmas presents were for adults too, but by now the Internet has broken gift-giving to the extent it’s almost certainly preferable for me and the adults in my life if they just, y’know, order the thing they want than hoping that I’ll pick it out for them. Especially as so many of us are at a point where we already have a plethora of “stuff”, and don’t want to add to it unnecessarily at a time of year when, frankly, we’ve got better things to spend our time and money on.

Dan, wearing a Princess Twilight Sparkle / Frank Herbert's Dune crossover fan art t-shirt, sits on a grey sofa in front of a lit Christmas tree, holding a glass of wine. At the other end of the sofa JTA, a white man with a thick beard and glasses, reads to a (tired-looking) young boy. All three are surrounded by books.
I’ll still be participating fully in my household‘s “book exchange” Christmas Eve tradition, though, because it’s awesome.

Birthdays are still open season, because they aren’t hampered by the immediate expectation of reciprocity that Christmas carries. And I reserve the right to buy groups of (or containing) adults gifts at Christmas. But individual adults aren’t getting one this year, and they certainly shouldn’t feel like they need to get me anything either.1

I don’t know to what extent, if at all, Ruth and JTA will be following me in this idea, so if you’re somebody who might have expected a gift from or wanted to give a gift to one of them… you’re on your own; you work it out!

Here’s to a Merry Christmas full of presents for children, only!

Footnotes

1 If you’ve already bought me a gift for Christmas this year… firstly, that’s way too organised: you know it’s only October, right? And secondly: my birthday’s only a couple of weeks later…

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Festive Cranberry & Cinnamon Bagels

Noticing that our bagel supply was running low and with two kids who’d happily fight to the death for the last one if it came down to it, I decided this weekend to dust off an old recipe and restock using the ingredients in our cupboard. For a festive spin, I opted to make cranberry and cinnamon bagels, and served a few at my family’s regular Sunday brunch. Little did I know that they would turn out to be such a hit that not one from the resupply would survive to the end of the day, and I’ve been pressed into making them again in time for breakfast on Christmas Day (or, as Ruth suggested as she and Robin fought for the last one in a manner more-childish than the children ever would, I could “make them any time I feel like it; every week maybe?”).

Cooling rack full of rustic bagels.
Even the slightly-charred one turned out to be flipping delicious.

If you’d like to make your own, and you totally should, the recipe’s below. I prefer volumetric measurements to weight for bread-making: if you’re not used to doing so, be sure to give your dry ingredients a stir/shake to help them settle when measuring.

Festive Cranberry & Cinnamon Bagels

Yield: 8 bagels
Duration:

Bagels ready to go into the oven.
When my dough is unevenly shaped I call it “rustic”. These are rustic bagels, ready to go into the oven.

Ingredients

  • 360ml warm water
  • 5ml (1tsp) vanilla extract
  • 60ml clear honey
  • white of 1 egg
  • sunflower/vegetable oil for greasing
  • 10g instant yeast
  • 950ml strong white bread flour
  • extra flour for kneading
  • 40ml golden caster sugar
  • generous pinch salt
  • 240ml dried fruit, half cranberries (sweetened), half raisins
  • heaped teaspoon ground cinnamon
Bagel
Eyes on the prize: this is what you’re ultimately aiming for. You might even make a less-“rustic” one.

Directions

  1. Whisk the yeast into the water and set aside for a few minutes to activate.
  2. Combine the flour, one quarter of the sugar, and salt.
  3. Make a well, and gradually introduce the water/yeast, mixing thoroughly to integrate all the flour into a sticky wet dough.
  4. Add the vanilla extract and mix through.
  5. Knead thoroughly: I used a mixer with a dough hook, but you could do it by hand if you prefer. After 5-10 minutes, when the dough becomes stretchy, introduce the dried fruit and continue to knead until well integrated. The dough will be very wet.
  6. Mix the cinnamon into the remaining sugar and scatter over a clean surface. Using well-floured fingers, form the dough into a ball and press into the sugar/cinnamon mixture. Fold and knead against the mixture until it’s all picked-up by the dough: this approach forms attractive pockets and rivulets of cinnamon throughout the dough.
  7. Rub a large bowl with oil. Ball the dough and put it into the bowl, cover tightly, and leave at room temperature for up to two hours until doubled in size.
  8. When it’s ready, fill a large pan about 6cm deep with water, add the honey, and bring to a simmer. Pre-heat a hot oven (gas mark 7, 220°)
  9. On a lightly-floured surface and with well-floured fingertips, extract the ball of dough and divide into eight (halve, halve, halve again). Shape each ball into a bagel by pushing-through the middle with your thumb and stretching out the hole as you rotate it.
  10. Submerge each bagel into the hot water for about a minute on each side, then transfer to baking sheet lined with greaseproof paper.
  11. Thin the egg white with a few drops of water, stir, then brush each bagel with the egg mix.
  12. Bake for about 25 minutes until golden brown. Cool on a wire rack.
Buttered bagel.
Most bagel recipes I’ve seen claim that they freeze well. I can make no such claim, because ours barely cool before they’re eaten.

Mostly this recipe’s here for my own reference, but if you make some then let me know how they turn out for you. (Oh, and for those of you who prefer when my blog posts are technical, this page is marked up in h-recipe.)

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These Dragon Christmas Decorations Are Tearing a Neighborhood Apart

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

by River Donaghey

Dragons

A Louisiana woman’s unusual Christmas decorations have inadvertently ignited a beef on her street—because they’ve apparently got her boring-ass neighbors worried that she’s a member of a “demonic cult.”

Author Diana Rowland just wanted to celebrate the spirit of the holiday season by, naturally, setting up a bunch of inflatable dragons on her front yard. Of course, dragons are an appropriate and welcome addition to a lawn at any time of the year, bringing a nice Khaleesi vibe to an otherwise routine patch of grass—but one neighbor wasn’t having it.

Rowland took to Twitter last Friday to post an anonymous letter one of her dragon-hating Grinch neighbors left, calling her decorations “totally inappropriate” and laying on some very thick self-righteous trash about “the true meaning of Christmas.”

Just glorious. The real joy of this story is that after the owner of all the dragons posted online about them (and about the snotty note she’d received from her anonymous neighbour) she quickly received donations allowing her to expand her lawntop collection of the beasts, so now there’s even more of them.

Not Christmassy enough for you yet, anonymous neighbour? Perhaps she can be persuaded to, I don’t know, construct some kind of nativity scene with them or something…

 

If your kid stops believing in Santa this year…

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

by Imgur

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“In our family, we have a special way of transitioning the kids from receiving from Santa, to becoming a Santa. This way, the Santa construct is not a lie that gets discovered, but an unfolding series of good deeds and Christmas spirit.
When they are 6 or 7, whenever you see that dawning suspicion that Santa may not be a material being, that means the child is ready. I take them out “for coffee” at the local wherever. We get a booth, order our drinks, and the following pronouncement is made: “You sure have grown an awful lot this year. Not only are you taller, but I can see that your heart has grown, too. [ Point out 2-3 examples of empathetic behavior, consideration of people’s feelings, good deeds etc, the kid has done in the past year]. In fact, your heart has grown so much that I think you are ready to become a Santa Claus.

You probably have noticed that most of the Santas you see are people dressed up like him. Some of your friends might have even told you that there is no Santa. A lot of children think that, because they aren’t ready to BE a Santa yet, but YOU ARE.

Tell me the best things about Santa. What does Santa get for all of his trouble? [lead the kid from “cookies” to the good feeling of having done something for someone else]. Well, now YOU are ready to do your first job as a Santa!” Make sure you maintain the proper conspiratorial tone.

We then have the child choose someone they know–a neighbor, usually. The child’s mission is to secretly, deviously, find out something that the person needs, and then provide it, wrap it, deliver it–and never reveal to the target where it came from. Being a Santa isn’t about getting credit, you see. It’s unselfish giving.

My oldest chose the “witch lady” on the corner. She really was horrible–had a fence around the house and would never let the kids go in and get a stray ball or Frisbee. She’d yell at them to play quieter, etc–a real pill. He noticed when we drove to school that she came out every morning to get her paper in bare feet, so he decided she needed slippers. So then he had to go spy and decide how big her feet were. He hid in the bushes one Saturday, and decided she was a medium. We went to Kmart and bought warm slippers. He wrapped them up, and tagged it “merry Christmas from Santa.” After dinner one evening, he slipped down to her house, and slid the package under her driveway gate. The next morning, we watched her waddle out to get the paper, pick up the present, and go inside. My son was all excited, and couldn’t wait to see what would happen next. The next morning, as we drove off, there she was, out getting her paper–wearing the slippers. He was ecstatic. I had to remind him that NO ONE could ever know what he did, or he wouldn’t be a Santa.

Over the years, he chose a good number of targets, always coming up with a unique present just for them. One year, he polished up his bike, put a new seat on it, and gave it to one of our friend’s daughters. These people were and are very poor. We did ask the dad if it was ok. The look on her face, when she saw the bike on the patio with a big bow on it, was almost as good as the look on my son’s face.

When it came time for Son #2 to join the ranks, my oldest came along, and helped with the induction speech. They are both excellent gifters, by the way, and never felt that they had been lied to–because they were let in on the Secret of Being a Santa.”

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First up: why do people post galleries of images of text to Imgur? At that point, you’re taking some information, making it take up more space, be readable by fewer people, be harder to translate, inaccessible to robots, and result in less-readable text. It drives me nuts. Anyway, I converted the original images (which you can find behind the link if you really want) into text, above, thereby improving the entire thing immeasurably.

That minor rage out of the way: I’m not a fan of telling children that Santa is “real” in the first place, but if you’re going to do that, the approach promoted by the author of the above might come a close second. I’ve always seen the concept of Santa as being the representation of the spirit of anonymous gift-giving, and I love it for that reason. Just like the Easter Bunny representing the spirit of hiding chocolate eggs for other people to find, this approach fosters honesty, maturity, and the joy of the season and doesn’t have to detract from the magic of Christmas.

Merry Christmas, everybody.

Bodleian Advent Calendar

Hot on the tail of Pong, I wanted to share another mini-project I’ve developed for the Bodleian: this year’s digital advent calendar:

Bodleian 2018 digital advent calendar
If you look closely, you’ll find I’ve shown you a sneak-peek at some of what’s behind tomorrow’s door. Shh. Don’t tell our social media officer.

As each door is opened, a different part of a (distinctly-Bodleian/Oxford) winter scene unfolds, complete with an array of fascinating characters connected to the history, tradition, mythology and literature of the area. It’s pretty cool, and you should give it a go.

If you want to make one of your own – for next year, presumably, unless you’ve an inclination to count-down in this fashion to something else that you’re celebrating 25 days hence – I’ve shared a version of the code that you can adapt for yourself.

Sample advent calendar
The open-source version doesn’t include the beautiful picture that the Bodleian’s does, so you’ll have to supply your own.

Features that make this implementation a good starting point if you want to make your own digital advent calendar include:

  • Secure: your server’s clock dictates which doors are eligible to be opened, and only content legitimately visible on a given date can be obtained (no path-traversal, URL-guessing, or traffic inspection holes).
  • Responsive: calendar adapts all the way down to tiny mobiles and all the way up to 4K fullscreen along with optimised images for key resolutions.
  • Friendly: accepts clicks and touches, uses cookies to remember the current state so you don’t have to re-open doors you opened yesterday (unless you forgot to open one yesterday), “just works”.
  • Debuggable: a password-protected debug mode makes it easy for you to test, even on a production server, without exposing the secret messages behind each door.
  • Expandable: lots of scope for the future, e.g. a progressive web app version that you can keep “on you” and which notifies you when a new door’s ready to be opened, was one of the things I’d hoped to add in time for this year but didn’t quite get around to.

I’ve no idea if it’s any use to anybody, but it’s available on GitHub if you want it.

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Christmas Cheer with Bytemark

For the last eight winters, we at Three Rings have sent out Christmas cards – and sometimes mugs! – to our clients (and to special friends of the project). The first of these was something I knocked up in Photoshop in under an hour, but we’ve since expanded into having an official “company artist” in the form of our friend Ele who each year takes the ideas that the Three Rings volunteer team have come up with and adapts them into a stunning original design that we’re proud to show off to our clients.

Three Rings' 2009 Christmas card
Our first Christmas card, in 2009, was knocked-up quickly and printed only a couple of days before the Christmas posting deadline, but it kicked-off a tradition that’s grown every year since.

This year’s card is still winging its way to some of our more-distant customers, as Three Rings is used in six countries, and so it doesn’t yet appear on our gallery of previous cards. But here’s a sneak peek:

Three Rings' 2017 Christmas card
Last week, I helped stuff a little under 400 of these into envelopes and put stamps on them all for delivery to our UK customers. (Our international customers needed slightly more-careful attention.)

For most of Three Rings life, our server’s been hosted by the awesome folks at Bytemark. We had a brief dalliance with Amazon Web Services for a while but had a seriously unsatisfying experience and we eventually came crawling back to Bytemark (complete with a conveniently-timed Valentines’ Day message expressing our love for them and our apologies for our mistake). What I’m saying is that we’ve made a habit of sending seasonal greetings to our buddies at Bytemark – and this Christmas was no different – but what surprised us was what we received from them this year:

Christmas card - and cake! - from Bytemark.
Bytemark sent us not only a Christmas card but a fancy-looking fruitcake! Thanks, Bytemark!

Not only did Bytemark send us a delightful Christmas card (with a pixel-art picture of Sana literally burning the logs) but they included a fabulous-looking fruitcake. Thanks for bringing a little bit of extra cheer to our Christmas, Bytemark!

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Ice and Lemon

I recently finished reading a novel called Ice & Lemon, which was given to me by my mother for Christmas (my reading list is quite long at the moment; I’m only just getting close to catching up!). I could tell you about what I liked about the book – and I will, in a moment – but before that I’d like to mention what makes this book personally so spooky to me, as a reader.

Ice and Lemon, by Pete Hartley
Ice and Lemon, by Pete Hartley

My mother got it for me because the coincidences apparent on the front and back cover appealed to her:

  1. The author’s name, Pete Hartley, is remarkably similar to my father’s name, Peter Huntley.
  2. The strapline contains a date, and that date is my mother’s birthday.
  3. The protagonist of the story is called Daniel, which is – prior to that point in the late 1990s when I started going by Dan among virtually everybody – my name.
  4. The front cover shows a picture of a baby’s hand, and Ruth‘s expected delivery date of New Year’s Eve was thus a hot discussion topic for us all around Christmas-time.

Okay, so – that’s a handful of quirky coincidences, certainly, but I’m sure if you looked at every volume in a bookshop – in the right frame of mind – you’d find a dozen other novels that seemed similarly fortuitous. But as I began to read the story, I discovered that I shared a lot more in common with the story’s Daniel than I could have possibly predicted. It was almost as if I were reading an alternate-history version of my own life – it’s incredibly easy to see how believable choices made in the early 2000s could have lead to a reality that even-more closely paralleled with my own:

Dan with a golden banana nailed to a stick.
In 2006, I won an award of dubious value for my stand-up act: a gold-plated banana nailed to a plank of wood hewn from the funniest tree in town.
  • Daniel’s partner is called Claire. In 2005, when the story is set, I too had a partner called Claire.
  • Daniel grew up in, and lives in, Preston, near to the football stadium and his local supermarket, the Deepdale Road/Sir Tom Finney Way Sainsburys. I grew up in Preston, and my parents houses are both within sight of the football stadium. My father used to, and my mother still does, do their shopping at the Deepdale Road/Sir Tom Finney Way Sainsburys.
  • The story begins with Daniel travelling back from a trip to Spain. I too spent time in Spain in 2005.
  • Daniel is a stand-up comedian and a veteran of the Edinburgh Fringe. I had an incredibly-short career as a stand-up comedian, and of course I too have a history with the Fringe.
  • Some time after an apocalyptic event takes place, Daniel joins a group of survivors who call themselves “Camp Q” (no explanation is given for the choice of name). Some time after the date of the event as it appears in the story, I changed my surname to Q.
The Sainsburys on Deepdale Road/Sir Tom Finney Way, in Preston.
Before the apocalypse, Daniel did his shopping here. Before I moved to Aberystwyth, so did I.

There are about a hundred smaller coincidences in Daniel’s story, too, but after a few of them you stop looking objectively and you can’t help but see them, so I’ll spare you the list. If I wanted to, I’m sure I could find plenty of things that definitely didn’t fit me: for example, Daniel’s significantly older than me. That sort of blows the alternate history idea out of the water. But nonetheless, it was a disturbing and eerie experience to be reading about a protagonist so much like myself, travelling around a post-disaster area that I personally know so very well. I feel like I ought to reach out to the author and check that he’s not just pranking me, somehow. His son features in the book, but somehow the coincidences that naturally occur as a result of this are less-impressive because they’re pre-informed.

The book itself is pretty good: a soft science fiction story full of a thorougly-explored post-apocalyptic grief. Very human, and very British, it exemplifies that curious sense of humour that we as a nation exhibit in the face of a disaster, while still being emotionally-scarring in the sheer scope of the tragedy it depicts. The science of the science-fiction is… questionable, but it’s not explored in detail (and it’s only treated as being speculative by the characters discussing it anyway, who aren’t scientists): this is a story about people, suffering, and survival, not about technology nor futurism. There are a handful of points at which it feels like it could have done with an additional pass by a proofreader; while occasionally distracting, these typos are not problematic. Plus: the book contains the most literal deus ex machina I’ve ever encountered (and thankfully, it doesn’t come across as lazy writing so much as general wasteland craziness).

It’sunder £3 in ebook format, and if I didn’t already own a paperback copy, I’d be happy to pay that for it. Even if it didn’t make me feel like I was looking at an alternate version of myself.

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