party – Dan Q

The Beer Token [Video]

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The Beer Token

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1979

The novelisation of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy came out in 1979, just a smidge before I was born. There’s a well-known scene in the second chapter featuring Ford Prefect, an alien living on Earth, distracting his human friend Arthur Dent. Arthur is concerned about the imminent demolition of his house by a wrecking crew, and Ford takes him to the pub to get him drunk, in anticipation of the pair attempting to hitch a lift on an orbiting spacecraft that’s about to destroy the planet:

“Six pints of bitter,” said Ford Prefect to the barman of the Horse and Groom. “And quickly please, the world’s about to end.”

The barman of the Horse and Groom didn’t deserve this sort of treatment, he was a dignified old man. He pushed his glasses up his nose and blinked at Ford Prefect. Ford ignored him and stared out of the window, so the barman looked instead at Arthur who shrugged helplessly and said nothing.

So the barman said, “Oh yes sir? Nice weather for it,” and started pulling pints.

He tried again.

“Going to watch the match this afternoon then?”

Ford glanced round at him.

“No, no point,” he said, and looked back out of the window.

“What’s that, foregone conclusion then you reckon sir?” said the barman. “Arsenal without a chance?”

“No, no,” said Ford, “it’s just that the world’s about to end.”

“Oh yes sir, so you said,” said the barman, looking over his glasses this time at Arthur. “Lucky escape for Arsenal if it did.”

Ford looked back at him, genuinely surprised.

“No, not really,” he said. He frowned.

The barman breathed in heavily. “There you are sir, six pints,” he said.

Arthur smiled at him wanly and shrugged again. He turned and smiled wanly at the rest of the pub just in case any of them had heard what was going on.

None of them had, and none of them could understand what he was smiling at them for.

A man sitting next to Ford at the bar looked at the two men, looked at the six pints, did a swift burst of mental arithmetic, arrived at an answer he liked and grinned a stupid hopeful grin at them.

“Get off,” said Ford, “They’re ours,” giving him a look that would have an Algolian Suntiger get on with what it was doing.

Ford slapped a five-pound note on the bar. He said, “Keep the change.”

“What, from a fiver? Thank you sir.”

There’s a few great jokes there, but I’m interested in the final line. Ford buys six pints of bitter, pays with a five-pound note, and says “keep the change”, which surprises the barman. Presumably this is as a result of Ford’s perceived generosity… though of course what’s really happening is that Ford has no use for Earth money any longer; this point is hammered home for the barman and nearby patrons when Ford later buys four packets of peanuts, also asking the barman to keep the change from a fiver.

A pint of light-coloured beer on wooden board, with the sea in the background. An orange towel sits alongside. — Beer’s important, but you also need to know where your towel is.

We’re never told exactly what the barman would have charged Ford. But looking at the history of average UK beer prices and assuming that the story is set in 1979, we can assume that the pints will have been around 34p each¹, so around £2.04 for six of them. So… Ford left a 194% tip for the beer².

1990

By the time I first read Hitch-Hikers, around 1990, this joke was already dated. By then, an average pint of bitter would set you back £1.10. I didn’t have a good awareness of that, being as I was well-underage to be buying myself alcohol! But I clearly had enough of an awareness that my dad took the time to explain the joke… that is, to point out that when the story was written (and is presumably set), six pints would cost less than half of five pounds.

But by the mid-nineties, when I’d found a friend group who were also familiar with the Hitch-Hikers… series, we’d joke about it. Like pointing out that by then if you told the barman to keep the change from £5 after buying six pints, the reason he’d express surprise wouldn’t be because you’d overpaid…

Stock photo of a barman serving two patrons, annotated with speech bubbles. One patron says "Keep the change." The barman, smiling, says "What, from a a fiver. Fuck you sir." — In his defence, Ford’s an alien and might not fully understand human concepts of inflation. Or sarcasm.

1998

Precocious drinker that I was, by the late nineties I was quite aware of the (financial) cost of drinking.

Dan, then with long black hair, sits with another young white man in a garden, in front of a table laden with several bottles of wine and around 80 cans of beer. — Sure, this seems like a responsible amount of alcohol for a party thrown by a couple of tearaway teenagers. Definitely nothing going to go wrong here, no siree.

And so when it was announced that a new denomination of coin – the £2 coin – would enter general circulation³ I was pleased to announce how sporting it was of the government to release a “beer token”.

With the average pint of beer at the time costing around £1.90 and a still cash-dominated economy, the “beer token” was perfect! And in my case, it lasted: the bars I was drinking at in the late 1990s were in the impoverished North, and were soon replaced with studenty bars on the West coast of Wales, both of which allowed the price of a pint to do battle with inflationary forces for longer than might have been expected elsewhere in the country. The “beer token” that was the £2 coin was a joke that kept on giving for some time.

Close-up of a 1998 £2 coin; bimetallic, with an inner ring of cogs expanding outwards into several interlocking spirals. — The one thing I always hated about the initial design for the bimetallic £2 coin was – and this is the nerdiest thing in the world with which to take issue – the fact that it had a ring of **19 cogs** to represent British industry. But if you connect a circuit of an odd number of cogs… it won’t function. Great metaphor, there. Photo courtesy of the late Andy Fogg, used under a Creative Commons license.

2023

As the cost of living rapidly increased circa 2023, the average price of a pint of beer in the UK finally got to the point where, rounded to the nearest whole pound, it was closer to £5 than it is to £4⁴.

And while we could moan and complain about how much things cost nowadays, I’d prefer to see this as an opportunity. An opportunity for a new beer token: a general-release of the £5 coin. We already some defined characteristics that fit: a large, heavy coin, about twice the weight of the £2 coin, with a copper/nickel lustre and struck from engravings with thick, clear lines.

And the design basically comes up with itself. I give you… the Beer Token of the 2020s:

It’s time for the beer token to return, in the form of the £5 coin. Now is the time… now is the last time, probably… before cash becomes such a rarity that little thought is evermore given to the intersection of its design and utility. And compared to a coin that celebrates industry while simultaneously representing a disfunctional machine, this is a coin that Brits could actually be proud of. It’s a coin that tourists would love to take home with them, creating a satisfying new level of demand for the sinking British Pound that might, just might, prop up the economy a little, just as here at home they support those who prop up the bar.

I know there must be a politician out there who’s ready to stand up and call for this new coin. My only fear is that it’s Nigel Fucking Farage… at which point I’d be morally compelled to reject my own proposal.

But for now, I think I’ll have another drink.

Footnotes

¹ The recession of the 1970s brought high inflation that caused the price of beer to rocket, pretty much tripling in price over the course of the decade. Probably Douglas Adams didn’t anticipate that it’d more-than-double again over the course of the 1980s before finally slowing down somewhat… at least until tax changes in 2003 and the aftermath of the 2022 inflation rate spike!

² We do know that the four packets of peanuts Ford bought later were priced at 7p each, so his tip on that transaction was a massive 1,686%: little wonder the barman suddenly started taking more-seriously Ford’s claims about the imminent end of the world!

³ There were commemorative £2 coins of a monometallic design floating around already, of course, but – being collectible – these weren’t usually found in circulation, so I’m ignoring them.

⁴ Otherwise known as “two beer tokens”, of course. As in “Bloody hell, 2022, why does a pint of draught cost two beer tokens now?”

Three Rings ❤️ NLA

Oxford Station. Catching a train to Manchester for a get-together in memory of the Nightline Association, which will sadly be closing this year (although individual Nightlines will doubtless soldier on just as they did before the Association).

Carrying a big ol’ bag of Three Rings swag to give to basically anybody who expresses even the slightest interest. 😅

Three Rings has been supporting Nightlines since before the Nightline Association and nowadays underpins voluntary work by hundreds of other charities including helplines like Samaritans and Childline. Feeling sad that the Nightline Association is going away and looking for a new and rewarding way to volunteer? Come chat to me!

Meetup Magic

I’ve spent the last week¹ in Tulum, on Mexico’s beautiful Yucatan Peninsula, for an Automattic meetup. And as usual for these kinds of work gatherings, it was magical (and, after many recent departures, a welcome opportunity to feel a closer connection to those of us that remain).

Only after deciding the title of this blog post did I spot my own accidental wordplay. I mean that it was metaphorically magical, of course, but there also happened to be more than a little magic performed there too, thanks to yours truly.

No, I mean that the whole thing felt magical. Like, I’ve discovered, every Automattic meetup I’ve been to has been. But this is perhaps especially true of the larger ones like Vienna last year (where my “flash talk” topic was Finger for WordPress; turns out I love the excuse to listen to other people’s nerdity and fly my own nerd flag a little).

Our events team, who are already some of the most thoughtful and considerate planners you might ever meet, had gone above and beyond in their choice of location. The all-inclusive resort they’d booked out for pretty-much our exclusive use was a little isolated and not the kind of place I’d have chosen for a personal holiday. But it provided all of the facilities my team, sibling teams, and division could desire for work, rest and play.

One day, I returned to my room and discovered that in the course of their tidying, the hotel’s housekeeping team had been asked to tidy up any stray charging cables using reusable Automattic-branded cable ties. These are the kinds of nice touches that show how hard our events coordinators think about their work³!

As usual, an Automattic meetup proved to be a series of long but energising days comprising a mixture of directly work-related events, social team-building and networking opportunities, chances for personal growth and to learn or practice skills, and a sweet sprinkling of fun and memorable activities.

Stalactite-strewn cave deeply filled with clear blue water. — A particular treat as a trip to swim through a *cenote* – caverns formed by sinkhole erosion of the limestone sediment by rainwater, often considered sacred to the Maya – complete with fish, bats, and the ugliest spiders you’ll ever see.⁴

Harvey Mackay said⁵ that if you choose a job you love, you’ll never work a day in your life. That might not ring true for me every day of my working life, but it certainly feels significant when I’m at Automattic meetups.

Our meetups might not feel like “work” (even when they clearly are!), but rather like… I don’t know… a holiday with 400 of the coolest, friendliest, most-interesting people you could ever meet⁶… which just happens to have an overarching theme of something that you love.

Even the appearance of Hurricane Milton, which briefly threatened chaos to the peninsula before it was determined that its path was definitely dominated by a Florida-ward direction, couldn’t dampen our spirits but did bring us some of the most spectacular fireworks nature has to offer.

Recently-developed changes to strategic priorities, and the departure of a few of our colleagues during the recent aforementioned “realignment”, meant that my “superteam” – my team and its siblings – had a lot to talk about. How can we work better together? How can we best meet the needs of the company while also remaining true to its open-source ideology? What will our relationships with one another and with other parts of the organisation look like in the year to come?

Every morning for a week I’d wake early and walk the soft warm sands and swim in the sea, before meeting with colleagues for breakfast. Then a day of networking and workshops, team-time activities, meetings, and personal development, which gave way to evenings with so much on offer that FOMO was inevitable⁷.

Automattic remains… automaggical to me. As I rapidly approach five years since I started here (more on that later, I promise, because, well: five years is a pretty special anniversary at Automattic…), it’s still the case that routinely I get to learn new things and expand myself while contributing to important and influential pieces of open source software.

Our meetups are merely an intense distillation of what makes Automattic magical on a day-to-day basis.

Did I mention that we’re recruiting?

Footnotes

¹ Travelling light, as has become my normal.

² Excluding the two who couldn’t make it in person and the one who’s on parental leave.

³ Another example might be the pronoun pin badges that they made available in various locations, which I’ve written about already.

⁴ The spiders, which weave long thin strand webs that hang like tinsel from the cave roof, catch and eat mosquitoes, which I’m definitely in favour of.

⁵ Okay, fine: Harvey Mackey isn’t the original source, and it’s not clear who was.

⁶ Also, partially-tame trash pandas, which joined iguanas, agouti, sand pipers, and other wildlife around (and sometimes in) our accommodation.

⁷ I slightly feel like I missed-out by skipping the board gaming, and it sounds like the movie party and the karaoke events were a blast too, but I stand by my choices to drink and dance and perform magic and chat about technology and open source and Star Wars and blogging and music and travel and everything else that I found even the slightest opportunity to connect on with any of the amazing diverse and smart folks with whom I’m fortunate enough to work.

⁸ While I completely reject the magical thinking espoused by our “sound bath” facilitator, it was still a surprisingly relaxing and meditative experience. It was also a nice chill-out before going off to the higher-energy environment that came next at the poolside bar: drinking cocktails and dancing to the bangin’ tunes being played by our DJ, my colleague Rua.

Easy Socialising

This weekend I invited over a bunch of our old university buddies, and it was great.

We still didn’t feel up to a repeat of the bigger summer party we held the year before last, but we love our Abnib buddies, so put the call out to say: hey, come on over, bring a tent (or be willing to crash on a sofa bed) if you want to stay over; we’ll let the kids run themselves ragged with a water fight and cricket and football and other garden games, then put them in front of a film or two while we hang out and drink and play board games or something.

14 adults, 8 children, and a dog stand on/in front of a garden climbing frame: Dan is in the centre. — Every one of these people is awesome. Or else a dog.

The entire plan was deliberately low-effort. Drinks? We had a local brewery drop us off a couple of kegs, and encouraged people to BYOB. Food? We threw a stack of pre-assembled snacks onto a table, and later in the day I rotated a dozen or so chilled pizzas through the oven. Entertainments? Give the kids a pile of toys and the adults one another’s company.

We didn’t even do more than the bare minimum of tidying up the place before people arrived. Washing-up done? No major trip hazards on the floor? That’s plenty good enough!

A man wearing a cap pours himself a beer from a 10-litre box. — The intersection of “BYOB” and the generosity of our friends somehow meant that, I reckon, we have more alcohol in the house now than *before* the party!

I found myself recalling our university days, when low-effort ad-hoc socialising seemed… easy. We lived close together and we had uncomplicated schedules, which combined to make it socially-acceptable to “just turn up” into one another’s lives and spaces. Many were the times that people would descend upon Claire and I’s house in anticipation that there’d probably be a film night later, for example¹.

I remember one occasion a couple of decades ago, chilling with friends². Somebody – possibly Liz – commented that it’d be great if in the years to come our kids would be able to be friends with one another. I was reminded of it when our eldest asked me, of our weekend guests, “why are all of your friends’ children are so great?”

A group of adults stand around on a patio, socialising. — It’s not *the same* as those days long ago, but I’m not sure I’d want it to be. It is, however, fantastic.

What pleased me in particular was how relatively-effortless it was for us all to slip back into casually spending time together. With a group of folks who have, for the most part, all known each other for over two decades, even not seeing one another in-person for a couple of years didn’t make a significant dent on our ability to find joy in each other’s company.

Plus, being composed of such laid-back folks, it didn’t feel awkward that we had, let’s face it, half-arsed the party. Minimal effort was the order of the day, but the flipside of that was that the value-for-effort coefficient was pretty-well optimised³.

A delightful weekend that I was glad to be part of.

Footnotes

¹ That Claire and I hosted so many social events, both regular and unplanned, eventually lead us to the point that it was the kind of thing we considered whenever we moved house!

² Perhaps at the Ship & Castle, where we spent a reasonable amount of our education.

³ I’m pretty sure that if I’d have used the term “value-for-effort coefficient” at the party, though, then it’d have immediately sucked 100% of the fun out of the room.

Murder in the Library

Two years after our last murder mystery party, almost three years since the one before, and much, much longer since our last in-person one, we finally managed to have another get-the-guests-in-one-place murder mystery party, just like old times. And it was great!

A woman dressed in a tweed waistcoat, glasses perched atop her head, sips a glass of champagne. — Full credit goes to Ruth who did basically all the legwork this time around. Cheers!

It’s still been been over a decade since we played a mystery that I wrote (though I’m hoping to rectify that within the year): this time we played D’Avekki Studios‘ Murder in the Library.

D’Avekki’s murder mystery sets use an unusual mechanic that I’ve discussed before online with other murder mystery party authorship enthusiasts¹ but never tried in practice: a way of determining at random who the murderer is when play begins. This approach has a huge benefit in that it means that you can assign characters to players using a subset of those available (rather than the usual challenges that often come up when, for example, somebody need to play somebody of a different gender than their own) and, more-importantly, it protects you from the eventuality that a player drops-out at short notice. This latter feature proved incredibly useful as we had a total of three of our guests pull out unexpectedly!

Three people sit alongside a dining table: a woman with dark hair, holding her play notes, a man wearing sunglasses and a Hawaiian shirt, grinning, and a short-haired woman in a conforming white off-the-shoulder top and bright red lipstick. There are beer bottles, champagne flutes, and Coke cans on the table. — Most of our guests were old hands at murder mystery games, but for Owen’s date Kirsty this was a completely novel experience.

The challenge of writing a murder mystery with such a mechanic is to ensure that the script and evidence adapt to the various possible murderers. When I first examined the set that was delivered to us, I was highly skeptical: the approach is broadly as follows²:

At the start of the party, the players secretly draw lots to determine who is the murderer: the player who receives the slip marked with an X is the murderer.
Each character “script” consists of (a) an initial introduction, (b) for each of three acts, a futher introduction which sets up two follow-up questions, (c) the answers to those two follow-up questions, (d) a final statement of innocence, and (e) a final statement of guilt, for use by the murderer.
In addition, each script has a handful of underlined sections, which are to be used only if you are the murderer. This means that the only perceivable difference between one person and another being the murderer is that the only who is the murderer will present a small amount of additional information. The writing is designed such that this additional piece of evidence will be enough to make the case against them be compelling (e.g. because their story becomes internally-inconsistent).

A group of people sit around a dining table; one man, wearing spectacles on his floury face, is taking the photo in "selfie" mode. The other visible characters appear to be a chef, a vicar, a librarian, a thrillseeker, and an aspiring starlet. With the exception of the photographer, they're all looking off to the side, listening to an unseen character speak. — As I recently discovered, glasses make me look like an entirely different person.

The writing was good overall: I especially appreciated the use of a true crime podcast as a framing device (expertly delivered thanks to Rory‘s radio voice). It was also pleasing to see, in hindsight, how the story had been assembled such that any character could be the murderer, but only one would give away a crucial clue. The downside of the format is pretty obvious, though: knowing what the mechanic is, a detective only needs to look at each piece of evidence that appears and look for a connection with each statement given by every other player, ruling out any “red herring” pairings that connect to every other player (as is common with just about the entire genre, all of the suspects had viable motives: only means and opportunity may vary).

It worked very well, but I wonder if – now the formula’s understood by us – a second set in a similar style wouldn’t be as successful.

A party of unlikely characters stands around and points accusingly at the "murderer" among them: it's Kirsty. — Our classic end-of-murder-mystery-party photo post makes a comeback. Extra-special hat tip to Kirsty, who ended up by coincidence being the murderer at her first ever such event and did astoundingly well. From left to right: Rory (Major Clanger), Simon (Chef Flambé), JTA (Noah Sinner), Kirsty (Phyllis Ora), Ruth (Dusty Tomes), Liz (Ruby Daggers), Owen (Max Cruise), and me (Professor Pi).

That said, nobody correctly fingered the murderer this time around. Maybe we’re out of practice? Or maybe the quality of the hints in such a wide-open and dynamic murderer-selection mechanic is less-solid than we’re used to? It’s hard to say: I’d certainly give another D’Avekki a go to find out.

Footnotes

¹ There are dozens of us. Dozens!

² We made a minor adaptation to the formula to fit with our experience of what makes a compelling party, but the fundamentals here are as-published.

Taking a Jackbox Zoom Party to the Next Level

A love a good Jackbox Game. There’s nothing quite like sitting around the living room playing Drawful, Champ’d Up, Job Job, Trivia Murder Party, or Patently Stupid. But nowadays getting together in the same place isn’t as easy as it used to be, and as often as not I find my Jackbox gaming with friends or coworkers takes place over Zoom, Around, Google Meet or Discord.

There’s lots of guides to doing this – even an official one! – but they all miss a few pro tips that I think can turn a good party into a great party. Get all of this set up before your guests are due to arrive to make yourself look like a super-prepared digital party master.

1. Use two computers!

Two laptops: one showing a full-screen Zoom chat with Dan and "Jackbox Games"; the second showing a windowed copy of Jackbox Party Pack 8. — You can use more than two, but two should be considered the minimum for the host.

Using one computer for your video call and a second one to host the game (in addition to the device you’re using to play the games, which could be your phone) is really helpful for several reasons:

You can keep your video chat full-screen without the game window getting in the way, letting you spend more time focussed on your friends.
Your view of the main screen can be through the same screen-share that everybody else sees, helping you diagnose problems. It also means you experience similar video lag to everybody else, keeping things fair!
You can shunt the second computer into a breakout room, giving your guests the freedom to hop in and out of a “social” space and a “gaming” space at will. (You can even set up further computers and have multiple different “game rooms” running at the same time!)

2. Check the volume

3.5mm adapter plugged into the headphone port on a laptop. — Plugging an adapter into the headphone port tricks the computer into thinking some headphones are plugged in without actually needing the headphones quietly buzzing away on your desk.

Connect some headphones to the computer that’s running the game (or set up a virtual audio output device if you’re feeling more technical). This means you can still have the game play sounds and transmit them over Zoom, but you’ll only hear the sounds that come through the screen share, not the sounds that come through the second computer too.

That’s helpful, because (a) it means you don’t get feedback or have to put up with an echo at your end, and (b) it means you’ll be hearing the game exactly the same as your guests hear it, allowing you to easily tweak the volume to a level that allows for conversation over it.

3. Optimise the game settings

Jackbox games were designed first and foremost for sofa gaming, and playing with friends over the Internet benefits from a couple of changes to the default settings.

Sometimes the settings can be found in the main menu of a party pack, and sometimes they’re buried in the game itself, so do your research and know your way around before your party starts.

Turn the volume down, especially the volume of the music, so you can have a conversation over the game. I’d also recommend disabling Full-screen Mode: this reduces the resolution of the game, meaning there’s less data for your video-conferencing software to stream, and makes it easier to set up screen sharing without switching back and forth between your applications (see below).

Turning on the Motion Sensitivity or Reduce Background Animations option if your game has it means there’ll be less movement in the background of the game. This can really help with the video compression used in videoconferencing software, meaning players on lower-speed connections are less-likely to experience lag or “blockiness” in busy scenes.

It’s worth considering turning Subtitles on so that guests can work out what word they missed (which for the trivia games can be a big deal). Depending on your group, Extended Timers is worth considering too: the lag introduced by videoconferencing can frustrate players who submit answers at the last second only to discover that – after transmission delays – they missed the window! Extended Timers don’t solve that, but they do mean that such players are less-likely to end up waiting to the last second in the first place.

Finally: unless the vast majority or all of your guests are in the USA, you might like to flip the Filter US-Centric Content switch so that you don’t get a bunch of people scratching their heads over a cultural reference that they just don’t get.

By the way, you can use your cursor keys and enter to operate Jackbox games menus, which is usually easier than fiddling with a mouse.

4. Optimise Zoom’s settings

Whatever videoconferencing platform you’re using, the settings for screen sharing are usually broadly similar. I suggest:

Make sure you’ve ticked “Share sound” or a similar setting that broadcasts the game’s audio: in some games, this is crucial; in others, it’s nice-to-have. Use your other computer to test how it sounds and tweak the volume accordingly.
Check “Optimize for video clip”; this hints to your videoconferencing software that all parts of the content could be moving at once so it can use the same kind of codec it would for sending video of your face. The alternative assumes that most of the screen will stay static (because it’s the desktop, the background of your slides, or whatever), which works better with a different kind of codec.
Use “Portion of Screen” sharing rather than selecting the application. This ensures that you can select just the parts of the application that have content in, and not “black bars”, window chrome and the like, which looks more-professional as well as sending less data over the connection.
If your platform allows it, consider making the mouse cursor invisible in the shared content: this means that you won’t end up with an annoying cursor sitting in the middle of the screen and getting in the way of text, and makes menu operation look slicker if you end up using the mouse instead of the keyboard for some reason.

Don’t forget to shut down any software that might “pop up” notifications: chat applications, your email client, etc.: the last thing you want is somebody to send you a naughty picture over WhatsApp and the desktop client to show it to everybody else in your party!

The Diamonds, The Dagger and One Classy Dame

On account of the pandemic, I’d expected my fortieth birthday to be a somewhat more-muted affair than I’d hoped. I had a banner, I got trolled by bagels, and I received as a gift a pizza oven with which I immediately set fire to several pieces of cookware, but I hadn’t expected to be able to do anything like the “surprise” party of my thirtieth, and that saddened me a little. So imagine my surprise when I come back from an evening walk the day after my birthday to discover than an actual (remote) surprise party really had been arranged without my knowing!

Matt, Suz, Alec, Jen, Dermot and Doreen on a Google Meet screen. — “Hello, remote guests! What are you doing here?”

Not content with merely getting a few folks together for drinks, though, Ruth and team had gone to great trouble (involving lots of use of the postal service) arranging a “kit” murder mystery party in the Inspector McClue series – The Diamonds, The Dagger, and One Classy Dame – for us all to play. The story is sort-of a spiritual successor to The Brie, The Bullet, and The Black Cat, which we’d played fifteen years earlier. Minor spoilers follow.

Naturally, I immediately felt underdressed, having not been instructed that I might need a costume, and underprepared, having only just heard for the first time that I would be playing the part of German security sidekick Lieutenant Kurt Von Strohm minutes before I had to attempt my most outrageous German accent.

The plot gave me in particular a certain sense of deja vu. In The Brie, The Bullet, and The Black Cat, I played a French nightclub owner who later turned out to be an English secret agent supplying the French Resistance with information. But in The Diamonds, The Dagger, and One Classy Dame I played a Gestapo officer who… also later turned out to be an English secret agent infiltrating the regime and, you guessed it, supplying the French Resistance.

It was not the smoothest nor the most-sophisticated “kit” murder mystery we’ve enjoyed. The technology made communication challenging, the reveal was less-satisfying than some others etc. But the company was excellent. (And the acting way pretty good too, especially by our murderer whose character was exquisitely played.)

JTA downing a Jeroboam of champagne. — The largest bottle, though, was with us: we opened the Jeroboam of champagne Ruth and JTA had been saving from their anniversary (they have a tradition involving increasing sizes of bottle; it’s a whole thing; I’ll leave them to write about it someday).

And of course the whole thing quickly descended into a delightful shouting match with accusations flying left, right, and centre and nobody having a clue what was going on. Like all of our murder mystery parties!

Google Meet transcript with the words "You are the Jewish", which nobody said. — I’m not sure how I feel about Google Meet’s automatic transcription feature. It was generally pretty accurate, but it repeatedly thought that it heard the word “Jewish” being spoken by those of us who were putting on German accents, even though none of us said that.

In summary, the weekend of my fortieth birthday was made immeasurably better by getting to hang out with (and play a stupid game with) some of my friends despite the lockdown, and I’m ever so grateful that those closest to me were able to make such a thing happen (and without me even noticing in advance).

Watching Films Together… Apart

This weekend I announced and then hosted Homa Night II, an effort to use technology to help bridge the chasms that’ve formed between my diaspora of friends as a result mostly of COVID. To a lesser extent we’ve been made to feel distant from one another for a while as a result of our very diverse locations and lifestyles, but the resulting isolation was certainly compounded by lockdowns and quarantines.

Mark, Sian, Alec, Paul, Kit, Adam, Dan and Claire at Troma Night V. — Long gone are the days when I could put up a blog post to say “Troma Night tonight?” and expect half a dozen friends to turn up at my house.

Back in the day we used to have a regular weekly film night called Troma Night, named after the studio who dominated our early events and whose… genre… influenced many of our choices thereafter. We had over 300 such film nights, by my count, before I eventually left our shared hometown of Aberystwyth ten years ago. I wasn’t the last one of the Troma Night regulars to leave town, but more left before me than after.

Earlier this year I hosted Sour Grapes, a murder mystery party (an irregular highlight of our Aberystwyth social calendar, with thanks to Ruth) run entirely online using a mixture of video chat and “second screen” technologies. In some ways that could be seen as the predecessor to Homa Night, although I’d come up with most of the underlying technology to make Homa Night possible on a whim much earlier in the year!

WhatsApp chat: Dan proposes "Troma Night Remote"; Matt suggests calling it "Troma at Homa"; Dan settles on "Homa Night". — The idea spun out of a few conversations on WhatsApp but the final name – *Homa Night* – wasn’t agreed until early in November.

How best to make such a thing happen? When I first started thinking about it, during the first of the UK’s lockdowns, I considered a few options:

Streaming video over a telemeeting service (Zoom, Google Meet, etc.)
Very simple to set up, but the quality – as anybody who’s tried this before will attest – is appalling. Being optimised for speech rather than music and sound effects gives the audio a flat, scratchy sound, video compression artefacts that are tolerable when you’re chatting to your boss are really annoying when they stop you reading a crucial subtitle, audio and video often get desynchronised in a way that’s frankly infuriating, and everybody’s download speed is limited by the upload speed of the host, among other issues. The major benefit of these platforms – full-duplex audio – is destroyed by feedback so everybody needs to stay muted while watching anyway. No thanks!
Teleparty or a similar tool
Teleparty (formerly Netflix Party, but it now supports more services) is a pretty clever way to get almost exactly what I want: synchronised video streaming plus chat alongside. But it only works on Chrome (and some related browsers) and doesn’t work on tablets, web-enabled TVs, etc., which would exclude some of my friends. Everybody requires an account on the service you’re streaming from, potentially further limiting usability, and that also means you’re strictly limited to the media available on those platforms (and further limited again if your party spans multiple geographic distribution regions for that service). There’s definitely things I can learn from Teleparty, but it’s not the right tool for Homa Night.
“Press play… now!”
The relatively low-tech solution might have been to distribute video files in advance, have people download them, and get everybody to press “play” at the same time! That’s at least slightly less-convenient because people can’t just “turn up”, they have to plan their attendance and set up in advance, but it would certainly have worked and I seriously considered it. There are other downsides, though: if anybody has a technical issue and needs to e.g. restart their player then they’re basically doomed in any attempt to get back in-sync again. We can do better…
A custom-made synchronised streaming service…?

Homa Night architecture: S3 delivers static content to browsers, browsers exchange real-time information via Firebase. — A custom solution that leveraged existing infrastructure for the “hard bits” proved to be the right answer.

So obviously I ended up implementing my own streaming service. It wasn’t even that hard. In case you want to try your own, here’s how I did it:

Media preparation

First, I used Adobe Premiere to create a video file containing both of the night’s films, bookended and separated by “filler” content to provide an introduction/lobby, an intermission, and a closing “you should have stopped watching by now” message. I made sure that the “intro” was a nice round duration (90s) and suitable for looping because I planned to hold people there until we were all ready to start the film. Thanks to Boris & Oliver for the background music!

Next, I ran the output through Handbrake to produce “web optimized” versions in 1080p and 720p output sizes. “Web optimized” in this case means that metadata gets added to the start of the file to allow it to start playing without downloading the entire file (streaming) and to allow the calculation of what-part-of-the-file corresponds to what-part-of-the-timeline: the latter, when coupled with a suitable webserver, allows browsers to “skip” to any point in the video without having to watch the intervening part. Naturally I’m encoding with H.264 for the widest possible compatibility.

Handbrake preparing to transcode Premiere's output. — Even using my multi-GPU computer for the transcoding I had time to get up and walk around a bit.

Real-Time Synchronisation

To keep everybody’s viewing experience in-sync, I set up a Firebase account for the application: Firebase provides an easy-to-use Websockets platform with built-in data synchronisation. Ignoring the authentication and chat features, there wasn’t much shared here: just the currentTime of the video in seconds, whether or not introMode was engaged (i.e. everybody should loop the first 90 seconds, for now), and whether or not the video was paused:

Firebase database showing shared currentTime, introMode, and paused values. — Firebase makes schemaless real-time databases pretty easy.

To reduce development effort, I never got around to implementing an administrative front-end; I just manually went into the Firebase database and acknowledged “my” computer as being an administrator, after I’d connected to it, and then ran a little Javascript in my browser’s debugger to tell it to start pushing my video’s currentTime to the server every few seconds. Anything else I needed to edit I just edited directly from the Firebase interface.

Other web clients’ had Javascript to instruct them to monitor these variables from the Firebase database and, if they were desynchronised by more than 5 seconds, “jump” to the correct point in the video file. The hard part of the code… wasn’t really that hard:

// Rewind if we're passed the end of the intro loop
function introModeLoopCheck() {
  if (!introMode) return;
  if (video.currentTime > introDuration) video.currentTime = 0;
}

function fixPlayStatus() {
  // Handle "intro loop" mode
  if (remotelyControlled && introMode) {
    if (video.paused) video.play(); // always play
    introModeLoopCheck();
    return; // don't look at the rest
  }

  // Fix current time
  const desync = Math.abs(lastCurrentTime - video.currentTime);
  if (
    (video.paused && desync > DESYNC_TOLERANCE_WHEN_PAUSED) ||
    (!video.paused && desync > DESYNC_TOLERANCE_WHEN_PLAYING)
  ) {
    video.currentTime = lastCurrentTime;
  }
  // Fix play status
  if (remotelyControlled) {
    if (lastPaused && !video.paused) {
      video.pause();
    } else if (!lastPaused && video.paused) {
      video.play();
    }
  }
  // Show/hide paused notification
  updatePausedNotification();
}

Web front-end

Finally, there needed to be a web page everybody could go to to get access to this. As I was hosting the video on S3+CloudFront anyway, I put the HTML/CSS/JS there too.

I tested in Firefox, Edge, Chrome, and Safari on desktop, and (slightly less) on Firefox, Chrome and Safari on mobile. There were a few quirks to work around, mostly to do with browsers not letting videos make sound until the page has been interacted with after the video element has been rendered, which I carefully worked-around by putting a popup “over” the video to “enable sync”, but mostly it “just worked”.

Delivery

On the night I shared the web address and we kicked off! There were a few hiccups as some people’s browsers got disconnected early on and tried to start playing the film before it was time, and one of these even when fixed ran about a minute behind the others, leading to minor spoilers leaking via the rest of us riffing about them! But on the whole, it worked. I’ve had lots of useful feedback to improve on it for the next version, and I might even try to tidy up my code a bit and open-source the results if this kind of thing might be useful to anybody else.

Sour Grapes… a Murder Mystery in Lockdown

It had been a long while since our last murder mystery party: we’ve only done one or two “kit” ones since we moved in to our current house in 2013, and we’re long-overdue a homegrown one (who can forget the joy of Murder at the Magic College?), but in the meantime – and until I have the time and energy to write another one of my own – we thought we’d host another.

But how? Courtesy of the COVID-19 crisis and its lockdown, none of our friends could come to visit. Technology to the rescue!

I took a copy of Michael Akers‘ murder mystery party plan, Sour Grapes of Wrath, and used it as the basis for Sour Grapes, a digitally-enhanced (and generally-tweaked) version of the same story, and recruited Ruth, JTA, Jen, Matt R, Alec and Suz to perform the parts. Given that I’d had to adapt the materials to make them suitable for our use I had to assign myself a non-suspect part and so I created police officer (investigating the murder) whose narration provided a framing device for the scenes.

Sour Grapes clue showing on an iPhone screen. — Actually, the interface didn’t work as well on an iPhone as I’d have expected, but I ran short on testing time.

I threw together a quick Firebase backend to allow data to be synchronised across a web application, then wrote a couple of dozen lines of Javascript to tie it together. The idea was that I’d “push” documents to each participants’ phone as they needed them, in a digital analogue of the “open envelope #3” or “turn to the next page in your book” mechanism common in most murder mystery kits. I also reimplemented all of Akers’ artefacts, which were pretty-much text-only, as graphics, and set up a system whereby I could give the “finder” of each clue a copy in-advance and then share it with the rest of the participants when it was appropriate, e.g. when they said, out loud “I’ve found this newspaper clipping that seems to say…”

The party itself took place over Discord video chat, with which I’d recently had a good experience in an experimental/offshoot Abnib group (separate from our normal WhatsApp space) and my semi-associated Dungeons & Dragons group. There were a few technical hiccups, but only what you’d expect.

The party itself rapidly descended into the usual level of chaos. Lots of blame thrown, lots of getting completely off-topic and getting distracted solving the wrong puzzles, lots of discussion about the legitimacy of one of several red herrings, and so on. Michael Akers makes several choices in his writing that don’t appear in mine – such as not revealing the identity of the murderer even to the murderer until the final statements – which I’m not a fan of but retained for the sake of honouring the original text, but if I were to run a similar party again I’d adapt this, as I had a few other aspects of the setting and characters. I think it leads to a more fun game if, in the final act, the murderer knows that they committed the crime, that all of the lies they’ve already told are part of their alibi-building, and they’re given carte blanche to lie as much as they like in an effort to “get away with it” from then on.

Of course, Ruth felt the need to cater for the event – as she’s always done with spectacular effect at every previous murder mystery she’s hosted or we’ve collectively hosted – despite the distributed partygoers. And so she’d arranged for a “care package” of wine and cheese to be sent to each household. The former was, as always, an excellent source of social lubrication among people expected to start roleplaying a random character on short notice; the latter a delightful source of snacking as we all enjoyed the closest thing we’ll get to a “night out” in many months.

This was highly experimental, and there are lessons-for-myself I’d take away from it:

If you’re expecting people to use their mobiles, remember to test thoroughly on mobiles. You’d think I’d know this, by now. It’s only, like, my job.
When delivering clues and things digitally, keep everything in one place. Switching back and forth between the timeline that supports your alibi and the new information you’ve just learned is immersion-breaking. Better yet, look into ways to deliver physical “feelies” to people if it’s things that don’t need sharing, and consider ways to put shared clues up on everybody’s “big screen”.
Find time to write more murder mysteries. They’re much better than kit-style ones; I’ve got a system and it works. I really shout get around to writing up how I make them, some day; I think there’s lessons there for other people who want to make their own, too.

Planning a murdery mystery — Those who know me may be surprised to hear that the majority of my work planning an original murder mystery plot, even a highly-digital one like *Murder… on the Social Network*, happens on paper.

Meanwhile: if you want to see some moments from Sour Grapes, there’s a mini YouTube playlist I might get around to adding to at some point. Here’s a starter if you’re interested in what we got up to (with apologies for the audio echo, which was caused by a problem with the recording software):

Without The Bod

Eight years, six months, and one week after I started at the Bodleian, we’ve gone our separate ways. It’s genuinely been the nicest place I’ve ever worked; the Communications team are a tightly-knit, supportive, caring bunch of diverse misfits and I love them all dearly, but the time had come for me to seek my next challenge.

(For anybody out-of-the-loop, I’m moving to Automattic after surviving their amazing, mind-expanding recruitment process).

Being awesome as they are, my team threw a going-away party for me, complete with food from Najar’s Place, about which I’d previously raved as having Oxford’s best falafels. I wasn’t even aware that Najar’s place did corporate catering… actually, it’s possible that they don’t and this was just a (very) special one-off.

Following in the footsteps of recent team parties, they’d even gotten a suitably-printed cake with a picture of my face on it. Which meant that I could leave my former team with one final magic trick, the never-before-seen feat of eating my own head (albeit in icing form).

As the alcohol started to work, I announced an activity I’d planned: over the weeks prior I’d worked to complete but not cash-in reward cards at many of my favourite Oxford eateries and cafes, and so I was now carrying a number of tokens for free burritos, coffees, ice creams, smoothies, pasta and more. Given that I now expect to spend much less of my time in the city centre I’d decided to give these away to people who were able to answer challenge questions presented – where else? – on our digital signage simulator.

I also received some wonderful going-away gifts, along with cards in which a few colleagues had replicated my long tradition of drawing cartoon animals in other people’s cards, by providing me with a few in return.

Later, across the road at the Kings’ Arms and with even more drinks inside of me, I broke out the lyrics I’d half-written to a rap song about my time at the Bodleian. Because, as I said at the time, there’s nothing more-Oxford than a privileged white boy rapping about how much he’d loved his job at a library (video also available on QTube [with lyrics] and on Videopress).

It’s been an incredible 8½ years that I’ll always look back on with fondness. Don’t be strangers, guys!

The Ambassador’s Notebook (Murder Mystery)

Short version of the review: a few teething problems aside, we all had a wonderful time and we’d certainly consider a Daggerville game for our next murder mystery party. The characters were, on the whole, wonderful characters well-realised and fully-developed within the constraints of the genre, the twist was clever, there were moments of great hilarity (such as the point when we realised that there’d been a veritable conga-line of people stealthily following one another around the hotel), and the event built up to a fun and satisfying conclusion. I’d suggest that you all keep an eye on Daggerville in the future.

As implied earlier this week, this weekend Ruth, JTA and I had planned to host the latest in a long series of murder mystery party nights (a handful of which have been reviewed on this blog). Despite our earlier worries, we eventually filled the “missing” slots in our party with our friends Liz and Dean: exactly the couple we’d planned to fill it with in the first place, but they’d been painfully slow at RSVPing.

We’ve played a lot of murder mystery games over the years: we could probably be described as connoisseurs of the genre, and that might be worth bearing in mind when you read what we had to say about this particular event. To enumerate, there’s been:

The entire back catalogue of Paul Lamond‘s Murder a la Carte / Inspector McClue series
Several of D’Avekki Studios‘ Murder Mystery Party series
A game in which nobody was murdered by Freeform Games
And several murder mystery games that I’ve written: one in a “scripted” style, the rest in an “open” style

That said, this latest party really had the opportunity to cross the board, with Liz and Dean having never been to a murder mystery night before and (other) Liz and Simon having been to only a few. And to top it all off, we were working with a completely new game from a creator of whom we’d had no experience. What could be more exciting?

You see: I was contacted a little over two months ago, via my web form, by a Martin from Daggerville Games, a new murder mystery party provider of the “buy-and-download” variety. Upon visiting their website, I was immediately struck by some of the similarities between their signup form (which asks for player names to be associated with characters, genders to be chosen for characters whose gender can be selected based on the gender balance among the players, and email addresses to which invitations will be sent) and a prototype one of my own design, used in the construction of my upcoming games Murder at the Glam Rock Concert and Murder on the Social Network, the first of which we hope to host in about a year’s time. I mentioned this to Martin, in the hope that they won’t think I’m ripping them off if I eventually put some of my pieces online for the world to play, too.

The Daggerville folks, perhaps anticipating that I would be likely to blog about the event in hindsight and thus provide them with some free publicity, offered me a voucher for a free game of my choice, which I accepted. After a little discussion, we settled upon The Ambassador’s Notebook, a 7-player murder mystery set in a rural 1920s hotel and revolving around the untimely death of a Mr. Sullivan, presumably related to a valuable journal that was in his possession.

In order to keep the spoilers at the tail end of this blog post (there’ll be a nice big warning before you get to them, so you can refrain from reading them if you’re planning to someday play this game yourself), I’ll cut to the chase and first provide a summary of the night as a whole.

We all had a fun time: as usual for these gatherings, there was good wine, great company, and spectacular food (Ruth had, once again, put together a wonderfully thought-out and thematically-sound menu): honestly, under these conditions we’d be pretty-much guaranteed a good night no matter what. The murder mystery itself was a scripted affair similar to those you’ll find in any off-the-shelf kit, but with a few quirks. For a start, as hinted above, everybody gets their fragments of the script (along with dialogue entry and exit cues) very early on: it’s possible, permitted, and even encouraged that players read their script before they arrive for the event. Some of us were concerned that this might result in “spoilers”, and a few of those of us who did pre-read our scripts said that they regretted doing so, so be aware: it’s a spoiler-risk.

Unlike similar-styled games, though, players aren’t given additional information outside of the script, and we all felt that this made things challenging when it came to the discussion breaks. All that we had to go on for our deliberations was exactly what we’d all heard, just minutes before, tempered by our own speculation. Sometimes somebody would ask, or consider asking, a valid question after somebody’s whereabouts, alibi, or history, but no answer was forthcoming because all that we had, collectively, was the script. This caused additional confusion when, for example, Liz’s character mentioned JTA’s character by his first name, it was a surprise to everybody… even JTA, who had no idea to begin with that it was supposed to be his name!

None of the problems we experienced “broke” the game, and we found our way to a reasonably-satisfactory conclusion. A majority of us voted correctly, determining the identity of the murderer, and Ruth even managed to identify an important twist (albeit not based on anything more than speculation: the “flash” was a little subtle for us). There were a few anachronisms in the script, but they’re of the kind that only nerds like us would notice (the National Theatre is mentioned despite the fact that it won’t be founded for another four decades or so, and a character makes a reference to a frozen turkey, even though freezing of meat in the West wasn’t yet commonplace, for example). We’d have really liked to have each had a brief – even just half a page! – to tell us each more about our own characters (their names, for example, as well some of the secrets that they might be concealing and any established relationships they have with other characters), and if we knew that Daggerville were adding this feature, it’d make us far more-likely to buy their products in future.

The short review would be: a few teething problems aside, we all had a wonderful time and we’d certainly consider a Daggerville game for our next murder mystery party. The characters were, on the whole, wonderful characters well-realised and fully-developed within the constraints of the genre, the twist was clever, there were moments of great hilarity (such as the point when we realised that there’d been a veritable conga-line of people stealthily following one another around the hotel), and the event built up to a fun and satisfying conclusion. I’d suggest that you all keep an eye on Daggerville in the future.

[spb_message color=”alert-warning” width=”1/1″ el_position=”first last”]Spoiler warning: reading beyond here could result in seeing spoilers. Don’t read on if you’re likely to ever take part in a game of The Ambassador’s Notebook.[/spb_message]

Aside from the lack of character “introductions”, another thing we found difficult in this game were issues in the script. The script for “The Neighbour” ended up one-number out of sync in the middle of Scene 2, where her ‘line 42’ indicated that a different person should be talking to what the rest of the scripts said. On another occasion, the script for “The Proprietress” seemed to be missing a line (although other characters had the ‘tail end’ of that line). The character of “The Journalist” can be played by a man or a woman, and although I selected “male” when I filled in the form, some of the scripts referred to the character as a woman! At first I thought that this might be related to difficulties some of us had had receiving the emailed scripts (Martin at Daggerville was incredibly helpful at sending out fresh ones, though), but we found at least one instance in which one person flip-flopped between referring to “The Journalist” as female or male!

(there’s a video I’ve put together of some of the highlights of our evening, but there’s possible spoilers in it)

Personally, though, my favourite moment of the night came right at the start, as we all introduced our characters. One of the Liz’s, an American, had decided to play her character as an American, and introduced herself as such. “Oh,” said the other Liz, whom she’d just met, “Are you going to do an accent?”

Wanted: Two Murder Suspects

We’re hoping to have a mini-murder mystery this Saturday, 2nd November, in Oxford, and after a series of people who can’t make it, we’re in need of two people to come along and play. If you want to come then, basically, you’re in, and we’d love to have you.

We’re looking for either two women or a man and a woman, but even if you haven’t got a “date” to bring, if you can make it then let us know and we’ll try to find somebody to fill the other gap. Just leave a comment and I’ll get back to you soon!

Buying a House, Part 4 – Call To Arms!

This blog post is the third in a series about buying our first house. In the third post, Ruth, JTA and I had acquired some lawyers and started the conveyancing process…

We’re moving house! And we want your help!

There’ve been… a few hitches with the house move. A few little hurdles. And then a few big hurdles. It’s been a little challenging, is what I’m trying to say. I’ll write about that in Part 5, but for now: we need your help!

Here’s what we’ve got:

A weekend in which we want to move (27th – 28th July).
A van (probably).
A lot of furniture, piles of boxes, and all the board games in the known universe. – a lot of stuff!
Three people: one of whom has really dodgy knees, one of whom is pregnant, and one of whom managed to concuss himself last time he tried to move house – not the best crew in the world, perhaps.
Lots of alcohol that needs drinking.

Here’s what we need:

A couple of extra pairs of hands who are willing to load and unload vans in exchange for:
- Pizza
- All the booze you can eat
- Being among the first to see our new home!

(cynical folks might notice that pizza, booze, rental vans and friends are a lot cheaper than professional removals companies, especially for short hops across to the other side of a city)

Simply put: we need you!

Can you help? Can you be free for some or all of the weekend of 27th & 28th of July, to come and shift boxes in exchange for good times, booze and snacks? If you are, we’d love to have you over. Ruth has written more about the wonderful perks that you’ll enjoy if you can help us, so – if you’re free and can get to Oxford – please come! And it’ll be lovely to see you, too!

Days Like Weeks

You know how when your life is busy time seems to creep by so slowly… you look back and say “do you remember the time… oh, that was just last week!” Well that’s what my life’s been like, of late.

Enjoying a beer at the launch of Milestone: Jethrik, the latest release of Three Rings.

There was Milestone: Jethrik and the Three Rings Conference, of course, which ate up a lot of my time but then paid off wonderfully – the conference was a wonderful success, and our announcements about formalising our non-profit nature and our plans for the future were well-received by the delegates. A slightly lower-than-anticipated turnout (not least because of this winter ‘flu that’s going around) didn’t prevent the delegates (who’d come from far and wide: Samaritans branches, Nightlines, and even a representative from a Community Library that uses the software) from saying wonderful things about the event. We’re hoping for some great feedback to the satisfaction surveys we’ve just sent out, too.

The Three Rings Birthday Cake. It boggles my mind how they've managed to make the icing look so much like plastic, on the phone part. — The Three Rings Birthday Cake. It boggles my mind how they’ve managed to make the icing look so much like plastic, on the phone part.

Hot on the heels of those volunteering activities came my latest taped assessment for my counselling course at Aylesbury College. Given the brief that I was “a volunteer counseller at a school, when the parent of a bullied child comes in, in tears”, I took part in an observed, recorded role-play scenario, which now I’m tasked with dissecting and writing an essay about. Which isn’t so bad, except that the whole thing went really well, so I can’t take my usual approach of picking holes in it and saying what I learned from it. Instead I’ll have to have a go at talking about what I did right and trying to apply elements of counselling theory to justify the way I worked. That’ll be fun, too, but it does of course mean that the busy lifestyle isn’t quite over yet.

My sister Sarah, with TAS managing director Adrian Grant, prepare to announce the winner of the Peter Huntley Memorial Award for Making Buses A Better Choice.

And then on Tuesday I was a guest at the UK Bus Awards, an annual event which my dad co-pioneered back in the mid-1990s. I’d been invited along by Transaid, the charity that my dad was supporting with his planned expedition to the North Pole before he was killed during an accident while training. I was there first and foremost to receive (posthumously, on his behalf) the first Peter Huntley Fundraising Award, which will be given each year to the person who – through a physical activity – raises the most money for Transaid. The award was first announced at my father’s funeral, by Gary Forster, the charity’s chief executive. Before he worked for the charity he volunteered with them for some time, including a significant amount of work in sub-Saharan Africa, so he and I spent a little while at the event discussing the quirks of the local cuisine, which I’d experienced some years earlier during my sponsored cycle around the country (with my dad).

So it’s all been “go, go, go,” again, and I apologise to those whose emails and texts I’ve neglected. Or maybe I haven’t neglected them so much as I think: after all – if you emailed me last week, right now that feels like months ago.