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).
Obviously, meeting in-person with my immediate team2 was a specific goal for the event.
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.
I made magic a theme of a “flash talk”. After that ~350 people was a suboptimal audience size for close-up magic and offering to later replicate
the trick I was describing in-person to anybody in the room… I ended up performing it many, many more times.
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).
There’s plenty of reasons it was a magical trip, as I’ll explain. But after arriving late and exhausted, this view from the doorstep of my bedroom the
following morning was a great start. I made a habit of a pre-breakfast swim each morning in the warm Caribbean waters.
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.
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.4Harvey 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.
Work that feels like fun, and fun that contributes to work? Is that the secret sauce? My colleague Boro and I certainly tried to bring that energy to our workshop on the philosophy of
code reviews, pictured.
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.
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?
All the best meetings take place in bars, right?
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.
I continue to appreciate the ways that Automattic provides the time and space for me to expand my horizons. Whether that’s at one end of a spectrum learning a new technical skill. or
at the other sitting-in on a “sound bath”8.
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.
At home, I usually start my day with a skim of my RSS reader from bed. But with the sea calling to me, first, each morning of the Tulum
meetup, I instead had to suffice with reading my feeds from the nearest available hammock to the beach on my doorstep.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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?”
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.
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.
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!
Full credit goes to Ruth who did basically all the legwork this time around. Cheers!
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!
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).
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.
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.
A love a good Jackbox Game. There’s nothing quite like sitting around the living room playing Drawful, Champ’d Up, Job
Job, Trivia MurderParty, 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!
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
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
A few quick tweaks to your settings can make all the difference to how great the game looks.
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!
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!
“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.
“Hello, local guests. Wait… why are you all in costumes…?”
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.
Fortunately I was able to quickly imbibe a few glasses of champagne and quickly get into the spirit. Hic.
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.
As she had previously with Sour Grapes, Ruth had worked to ensure that a “care package” had reached each murder mystery guest. Why yes,
it was a boozy care package.
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.)
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!
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).
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.
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.
Observant readers will spot a previous effort I made this year at hosting a party online.
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!
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…?
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!
Honestly, the intermission was just an excuse to keep my chroma key gear out following its most-recent use.
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.
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 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 loopfunction introModeLoopCheck() {
if (!introMode) return;
if (video.currentTime > introDuration) video.currentTime =0;
}
function fixPlayStatus() {
// Handle "intro loop" modeif (remotelyControlled && introMode) {
if (video.paused) video.play(); // always play
introModeLoopCheck();
return; // don't look at the rest
}
// Fix current timeconst 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 statusif (remotelyControlled) {
if (lastPaused &&!video.paused) {
video.pause();
} elseif (!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 decided to carry the background theme of the video through to the web interface 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.
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!
Not being in the same room doesn’t protect you from finger-pointing.
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.
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.
Meanwhile, I had a web page with all kinds of buttons and things to press.
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.
Much love was shown for the “catering”.
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.
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):
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.
My imminent departure began to feel real when I turned over my badge and gun card and keys.
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.
Start from the left, work towards the right.
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).
Of course, the first thing I was asked to do was to put a knife through my own neck.
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.
Among the games was Play Your Shards Right, a game of “higher/lower” played across London’s skyscrapers.
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.
“Wait… all of these Javascript frameworks look like they’re named after Pokémon!”
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!
My department’s made far too much use out of that “Sorry you’re leaving” banner, this year. Here’s hoping they get a stabler, simpler time next year.
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.
When they eventually turned up late, but still earlier than our other guests, Liz and Dean quickly found themselves back in our good books.
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
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?
See: even JTA’s excited.
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.
One of the quirks of Daggerville is that they email fragmented scripts directly to your players, which they’re then welcome to read completely before they turn up (or not; whichever
they prefer).
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.
But who can the murderer be, Liz ponders, from her comfortable chair in the Accusing Chamber.
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.
Right before I opened the “Deus Ex Manilla”, otherwise known as the “Miss. Marple Envelope”, in which the solution would be found, I – as usual – encouraged a vote on who we’d be
turning over to the police.
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.
If you pay attention to following a fragmented script, you might lose track of a clue. But if you pay attention to the clues, you might lose track of your place in the script. It’s a
challenge.
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!
The lack of “character sheets” did encourage imaginative ad-libbing, for example, such as Simon’s decision that his character had just come over from Australia.
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)
Our traditional end-of-game shot shows the murderer, played by Dan, accused by the rest of the participants. (Ruth is behind the camera)
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?”
We’re hoping to have a mini-murder mystery thisSaturday, 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’ll be playing a scenario called The Ambassador’s Notebook, courtesy of Daggerville Games. But only if you turn up!
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!
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!
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!
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.
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.
I’ve had a few weekends fully of party. It’s no wonder I’m knackered.
Andy’s 30th
First, there was Andy‘s 30th birthday. Ruth, JTA and I slogged our way over to Cardiff to celebrate in style with pizza,
booze, and dancing.
Dancing to Black Lace at Andy’s 30th birthday.
Siân‘s got more to say on the subject, but suffice it to say this: it’s been a long, long time since I’ve found myself
dancing in a nightclub until half past two in the morning, then grabbing a thoroughly disgusting-looking (but remarkably good-tasting) portion of fried food as an after-club snack. Oh,
and Alec drooled all over himself long
before he ended up sharing a bed with me.
Honestly, I didn’t think I had it in me to party like that any more: I’m such an old man (having myself turned thirty a good year and a bit prior). Didn’t stop me from getting up before anybody else the following morning for a quick geocaching
expedition, though…
Summer Party On Earth
The following weekend was the Summer Party On Earth: an event that
started out with Ruth saying “Let’s have a summer party!” and finished as a nostalgia-themed marathon of epic proportions.
This… was a party with everything. It had kids’ toys like Brio wooden railway, Lego bricks, and a marble run; it had soup and buffets and a barbeque and cakes; it had board games and
party games and drinking games; it had beer and wine and cocktails; it had the world’s tiniest and most-nettley geocaching expedition… and from the time that we first started
entertaining guests to the moment that the last of them left, it lasted for an exhausting 36 hours.
Some early guests play Ca$h ‘N’ Gun$, a live-action game of gun-toting gangsters.
It was particularly interesting to get together with people from all of our varied social circles: workmates, former workmates, local friends, distant friends, partners of friends… all
kinds of random folks coming to one place and – for example – pointing foam guns at one another.
Gareth, Rory and Adam put the finishing touches on their (second) wooden railway layout. I’m pretty sure we ‘lost’ them for more than half of the party as they disappeared into the
‘playroom’.
In order to help us identify, classify, and dispose of some of the vast collection of booze that Ruth has recently inherited, JTA invented a drinking game. What can I say about it?
Well: it certainly brought us all a lot closer together to suffer through some of the drinks we were served…
Everything seems a little blurry, and Alec isn’t grimacing as much as he did with some of the other drinks he’s been forced to try.
As usual for any party at which Ruth caters, everybody was required to consume their own weight in (delicious, delicious) desserts, and we only just finished eating the very last of the
party food, almost two weeks later.
Matthew & Katherine’s Wedding
Finally, then, just the weekend after that, was the wedding of two folks I know via the Oxford Quakers: Matthew
and Katherine.
Matthew and Katherine cut the cake in the garden of the Quaker Meeting House.
I turned down the curious “What to expect at a Quaker wedding” leaflet as I entered: after all, I felt like an old-hand now, after helping make Ruth & JTA’s wedding into one of the most spectacular events ever. Well, maybe I shouldn’t have, because
every wedding is as different as every bride and groom, and Matthew and Katherine’s was no exception. They’d clearly put so much thought into exactly what it is they wanted to do to
celebrate their special day, and – with their help of their friends and family – had pulled everything together into a beautiful and remarkable occasion.
The céilidh. More weddings should have cèilidhean.
For me, particular highlights included:
One of the most adorable couples ever.
Not just a “vegetarian-friendly” meal, but one where vegetarianism was the norm (and guests were required to state if
this wasn’t okay for them).
Catching up with folks who I don’t see as much of these days as I might like (and meeting new people, too).
A céilidh! More weddings should have these (although it’s the first time I’ve ever seen a “first dance” where the bride and groom were given
instructions on what steps to do right before the music started).
For the last few years, though, the population of Aberystwyth has been dwindling, and Adam’s parties have turned from an immense hard-to-squeeze-everybody-in ordeal to a far more
civilised affair. While simultaneously, groups of ex-Aberystwyth people (like those of us down in Oxford, and those who are up in the North) have been having their own splinter
satellite parties.
And you know what? I miss doing Eurovision Night with you guys. So this year, we’re going to try to bring Eurovision Night back to its roots… with technology!
Google+ Hangouts. One of the technologies that will bring us closer this Eurovision Night.
Here’s where the parties are at, this year:
Adam’s house, in Aberystwyth – mission control
New Earth, in Oxford (hosted by Ruth, JTA, and I) – technical operations
…and… anybody else having one this year? One of you up in the North, perhaps?
If you’re one of the usual crew, or one of our newer friends, come on over and join the party! Or if you’re going to be watching from further North (Liz? Simon? Gareth? Penny? Matt? Matt? Kit? Fi?), let me know so that I can bring you in on my proposals for “sharing the experience”, drawing together our votes, and whatnot.
And regardless of whether you’ll be joining one of these parties in person, or not, I hope you’ll be joining The Party at Adam’s and The Party on New
Earth digitally. If you’re among the 17 people who are actually on Google+, come and join us in our Hangout! Dust
off that old webcam and point it at you or your little party, make sure you’re in Adam or I’s “circles”, and then log in on Eurovision Night and join us via the power of the Internet!
You’ll have to provide your own crisps and beer, and (unless you’re at Adam’s) you’ll need to bake your own cupcakes with adorable European-flag icing, too, but at least you can be part
of the moment with the rest of us.
Friday was the day of my dad’s funeral. If you’ve just tuned in, you might like to see my blog post about his death, and a second article about the things that have been hardest, so far, in
its aftermath. I’m not inclined to say too much, so I’ll be brief and let pictures, and a video, tell the story. As usual, you’ll find that you can click on the pictures to enlarge
them.
A convoy of buses arrive to deliver attendees to the funeral.
A remarkable number of people turned up to mark my dad’s passing on this sad occasion. I was genuinely surprised to see how many lives he’d touched (and to hear about a great many more
from people who couldn’t make it). About 350 people struggled to fit in to the cramped crematorium, and many had to stand outside where – thankfully – there were repeater speakers.
The buses with digital display boards, provided by Stagecoach, had been reprogrammed to show my dad’s name and years of life.
My sisters and I were determined that this event would be a celebration of our father’s life. So rather than focusing on his tragic and premature death, we made every effort
to commemorate his achievements and reinforce the lessons that we can all learn from his time with us. In a similar vein, we’d told everybody that we had the chance to that there was no
need to wear black for this funeral: that people should wear what’s appropriate to them for their personal act of mourning and remembrance.
In memory of my dad, I wore his old-style bus driver’s license badge, as well as wearing both socks and sandals together, as he often would.
We’d hired a former minister, Ken Howles, to provide a (thoroughly secular, under threat of non-payment!) framework for the service, but we “rolled our own” so far as possible. Seven
individual tributes and eulogies were given by people representing different aspects of my dad’s life: from my mother, from his partner, from the friend with whom he was walking on the
day he died, from the managing directors of the company he founded and the company he last worked for, from the chief executive of the charity he was fundraising for, and – finally –
from me.
(if you can’t view the YouTube video above, or if you want to share it with others, you can also view it on YouTube)
The contrast between the different tributes was stark and staggering, reflecting the huge variety in the different facets of my father’s life. From guerrilla gardening to
trainspotting, lessons learned to tyres pulled, we collectively painted a picture of the spectrum of my dad’s life. The tributes given were, in order:
My mother, Doreen (watch), who talked about their adventures together as
young adults and the roots of his career in transport
His partner, Jenny (watch), who shared the experiences they’d had together, and
mourned for those that they would not
His friend, John (watch), who let us in on the things that they’d talked about
during my dad’s final hours
Adrian, the managing director of the company my dad founded (watch), on his success in the world of transport consultancy, and working with him
A picture of the “Celebration of Life” order of service that we distributed at the funeral. Click on the picture to download the original (which includes a list of some of the
charities my dad supported) as a PDF.
Kevin, the managing director of Go North-East (watch), on the subject of my dad’s recent career and influence on British transport
Gary, chief executive of TransAid (watch), announced the future creation of the Peter Huntley Fundraising Award, and thanked my dad and his supporters on behalf of
the dozens of charities my dad helped
And finally, me (watch), contrasting all of the above by talking about what
my dad was like as a father and a friend, and the lessons we can learn from him
JTA serves butter pie, mushy peas, and hotpot – classic Lancashire comfort foods – to guests at the wake.
Afterwards, we held a wake at Grimsargh Village Hall which, on account of the sheer number of bus industry attendees,
rapidly became a micro-conference for the public transport sector! It was great to have the chance to chat to so many people who’d worked with my dad in so many different contexts.
Mourners gather near the (convenient!) bar at Grimsargh Village Hall. I’ve decided: all wakes should have a bar.
Between hot food provided by a local caterer, cold savories courtesy of
Jenny’s daugher Eppie, and a copious quantity of cakes baked by Ruth, there was an incredible superfluity
of food. These two, plus JTA, Paul, and Eppie’s
boyfriend James, provided a spectacular level of “behind-the-scenes” magic, keeping everything running smoothly and ensuring that everything happened as and when it was supposed to.
Among other things, Ruth baked biscuits in the shape of buses, decorated in the colours of the different routes that my dad rebranded during his time at Go North-East.
We set up a “memory book”, in which people could write their recollections of my dad. I haven’t had time to read much of it yet, but one of them stands out already to me as a concise
and simple explanation of what we achieved at the crematorium that day. It reads:
“Great funeral, Peter. Sorry that you missed it.”
It was certainly a great send-off for a man who did so much for so many people. Thank you so much to everybody who made it such a success, and to everybody who, in the meantime, has
donated to TransAid via my dad’s
JustGiving page (or by giving us cash or cheques at or after the funeral). You’re helping his memory live on, for everybody: thank you.
My dad didn’t teach me to drive. But he did teach me to read a bus timetable. Thanks, dad. I love you.
