#30

I'm starting to get a bit edgy now. I've been on a break for too long now. I'm not talking about a break from my day job -- I've been working quite hard at that and not had much time-off at all lately. No... I'm talking about my 'post mid-life crisis' break. The break I allowed myself in which to have a chill-out without having to worry what I was going to do with the second half of my existence, but at the same time with the hope that I might just stumble into something fortuitous that I could both enjoy and profit from, something I could excel at. Last weekend I sat at my computer and tried to restart a video game project I had not touched for about a year: to get back in the saddle, so to speak. I could not believe it -- my heart was pounding like I was having a mild panic attack, and all I managed to do was to compile and run the program before having to stop and shutdown. It must be very difficult for other people to see why this could be. Well I'll try and explain. Should video games be what I spend the rest of my life doing? Writing video games has been one of my greatest loves, probably the greatest one in terms of vocation...but I'm not all that good at the overall gig of writing games yet. I can write bits of video games extremely well, and have some very imaginative ideas, but I have just missed the mark on getting the whole act together and getting a whole project out there and finished. One reason is I'm just too fickle about what kind of scale or type of place I should occupy in the video gaming world.... for starters should I be professional or should I be amateur, should I write tiny fun little games or should I make big ambitious games that might take me 3 years to do as a spare time project ... and it would indeed have to be a spare time project even if I was to do it for profession reasons since I couldn't afford to give-up the day job (again) until I had sold something. What caused me to be so stressed about looking at starting-up video game programming again was that although it's a great love of mine it has cost me dearly, it's cost me big chunks of life and big chunks of money. On just one of my over ambitious game projects I must have spent 2 solid years working 6 days a week, 10 hours a day, with no income -- I was living off savings... which is a double whammy when you think about it because not only are you using money but you're using it, no, losing it, double because you miss out on the earnings you would have had over that time had you been working. Strewth... that could easily be 50 grand down the drain, easily.... uneasily ... gulp. And there is incalculable cost due to it messing-up your CV and making you 'less employable'. So there is real pain there.... that has gotten deep into my subconscious, a bit like a bigger version of when I was young and my Dad dropped his soldering iron on the floor and I picked-it-up for him... by the hot end! And after the weeks of having my hand in bandages was over, it was many further weeks before I could even go near a soldering iron, despite electronics being one of my hobbies, and when I did manage to use one there was some considerable panic accompanying the experience I can tell ye....but... well... I got over it in the end... and even a few years later when a soldering iron exploded in my face I could not be deterred, so probably this is only one such interlude that I'll recover from, but on a bigger scale.

It's the mid life crisis jitters. How ever much you think it's not going to happen to you, don't count on it, especially if you haven't yet quite 'hit the mark' in life like me, because when you hit middle age you can not avoid your brain involuntarily and constantly posing this basic question: "Right, you're half way though Buddy, it's time to decide: is what you've been doing for the first half of your life ever going to amount to anything, or should you cut your losses now and try something new?? If you don't decide now it may be too late to make a success of what ever path you choose... and you'd better make the right decision chum because if you get it wrong you'll have wasted your whole life, your whole entire life." This is very serious, and anyone who tries to trivialize or brush aside someones mid-life crisis does not realise the gravity of the situation and may well be oblivious to their own possible impending crisis, which could make it's arrival all the more of a shock. Even if you have been successful in the first half of your life, perhaps you brain will still demand you to do a complete stock-take and might ask you something like: "Is this really what you want to be doing till you're old and grey?" or: "You're successful, but would anyone really care if you got run over by a bus tomorrow? Would you leave any kind of legacy at all?" It seems to be mainly men you hear about getting mid-life crises, and female trivializers of men's mid life crises will often be a bit Gemaine Grear-ly condescending to men going through it and accuse them of making a fuss about nothing, telling the man to pull themselves together and to stop winging just because women don't fancy them anymore ... but I don't think the 'women not fancying you anymore' bit is the real core of the mid life crisis ....it's certainly not the case with me because women stopped fancying me ages ago.... a time in my life succinctly illustrated by what my Mother said to me when I was about thirty (a decade back) : "What are you going to do now you have lost your youthful good looks?" she said... this was moderately devastating I must say -- not because I had lost my youthful good looks but because up until that very split second I'd not been aware that I had any... imagine someone saying to you: "Oh by the way y'know that lottery ticket I bought for you ages ago... that one that won the jackpot... remember? Oh didn't I tell you? Anyway I'd had it so long it expired yesterday so I chucked it." Although the 'women not fancying you anymore' issue is not the core of the crisis, I suppose if it happens to occur at the same time then that would be a considerable extra bummer which you could well end-up obsessing about (especially if people kept telling you that was what was wrong with you). "I'm not going to have a mid-life crisis because I haven't really had 'a life' to have a crisis about, ha-har"... I used to jokingly say during my thirties, but one still came and kicked my arse all the same....so be prepared, be very prepared, if you're approaching middle age.

Anyway, I've since been able to look at the video game I was doing, in more detail, without panicking too much. But now I've reviewed it I find I have simply gone-off it... because I'm not so sure if it will make a good game after all, despite it being a very interesting ( and possibly even totally new ) concept.... maybe it was even a bit too avaunt guard and up its own arse to be much fun to play. So maybe I'll think of a new game to write. Starting projects are always the most interesting and enjoyable bit, filled with hope and new ideas, so it's not surprising that me or anyone else is tempted to start a new project before finishing their current one (at least when it's a project your doing as a hobby i.e. for enjoyment). So, there's another quarter-finished project to add to my pile...and, as ever, I convince myself I will renew efforts to actually get some projects finished in the next few months. Even Hermit has a good array of part finished projects, but ... he does also have an impressive array of completed ones too, it has to be said. Perhaps I just haven't thought of the 'killer project' yet and when I do I'll become addicted to it and get carried away by it to it's ultimate completion and success...so I'd better get thinking.

#28

Amongst the usual road bastards encountered on my week daily commute (along the A452) to and from work, like the manic under-takers and the evil-diesel belchers, I encountered a new and oblivious type of road bastard today ... this is a new breed that drives-across a set of traffic lights where the tarmac is hatched in yellow road paint (a box junction I think they are called, where you can get fined if you stop on the yellow hatched area) but he stops as soon as he's driven-off the hatched area, even though there are two or three car lengths of unoccupied road infront of him, leaving you, in the car behind, stranded on the hatched area whilst he's in the I'm-alright-Jack-no-fear-of-prosicution zone. Now I've mentioned the manic under-takers I guess I ought to have a moan about them as well.... I can only hope the perpetrators of this crime are foreigners and hence don't know any better, it would be a national disgrace if any of these people turned-out to be British. Any British person found to be manically under-taking (in other words over-taking on the left hand side instead of on the right and at at an alarming rate) should be disowned by Britain, stripped of their citizenship, and deported along with all the other disgraced people like those who don't know how to queue and all the people who pronounce the letter 'Z' as 'zee' instead of 'zed'.. (yes especially those ones -- it's bloody 'zebra' not bloody 'zeebra'-- what bloody school did you go to?). I'm not talking about the sort of under-taking people do on the motorway where they slowly and safely go past any idiots that have permanently occupied the overtaking lanes when there are perfectly good vacant lanes to their left, oh no, I'm talking about the bastards who razz past you on the inside on urban streets just as you are trying to pull back into the left lane after passing some parked cars. Indicating left when ever you're changing to the lane on your left has now become a necessity on British roads if you don't want to be rear-end shunted. Bastards. Well at least my exposure to road bastards has reduced of late because I don't have to drive clean across town, in addition to my commute, to visit my Mum in hospital in the evening because I'm very happy to say she is now back home and doing quite well. She's getting about very well considering she had a hip replacement only 2 weeks ago. In fact on the surface, apart from walking slowly with sticks, she does a very good impression of being well and normal, but upon questioning she insists she still has much recovery to go, and of course it would be absurd to expect she was A-OK after such a short space of time. The drive across Birmingham and out the other side (from Sutton Coldfield to the Royal Orthopedic Hospital) along the A38 was quite amusing. The part after the city centre towards the hospital is generally quite an amusing stretch of road -- it is one of those two lane roads that has had the white lines repainted to make it into a 4 lane road where you are practically touching wing mirrors with the car on your right and on the other side you are practically rubbing your tyre along the curb. I don't know if it's just me that finds driving down it quite stressful, but once by the time I had reached the hospital I found that I had temporarily lost all feeling in my right hand through gripping the steering wheel so tightly. Of course the whole lane system is made a mockery of since buses and lorries take-up one and a half lanes making for a kind-of vehicular Tetris (but hopefully without the rotations). My hat goes-off to anyone who commutes down there every day, month on end, especially with all the speed cameras-- I'm not a speed camera hater generally but that stretch of the A38 changes from 30 to 40mph and back again so many times that it's easy to miss one of the changes when distracted by doing frivolous things like minding pedestrians crossing in front of you whilst keeping rigidly to your narrow lane (daring not to steer more than a tenth of a degree too far either way). And the stretch of the A38 through the city centre itself I've always thought to be an amusing concept ever since I was little. It is a dual carriage-way (lanes of proper width on this stretch) going through a few tunnels and over an overpass which all runs parallel right alongside vernacular ground-level two-lane roads either side. There are no slip roads or traffic lights or roundabouts to join these roads, no, instead in between the tunnels and over-pass, where the roads are briefly on the same level, there are are short gaps in the barrier where two lanes become four and people wanting to change from one parallel road to the other must engage in a (hopefully) ballet-like movement: converging, merging then diverging: swapping with cars on the parallel road wanting to change to the road they are now leaving. Considering that the traffic on both roads are sometimes moving at different speeds (due to traffic jams etc) and that, in any case, the slow lane of the inner two-lane road has to merge with the fast lane of the outer two-lane road, it is quite impressive how well the system seems to work... it does benefit from a lot of give-and-take on the part of drivers and perhaps simply may not have been viable in other parts of the world with different driving ethics, but even these British driving ethics don't always save the day as I found when stuck in a snarl-up at one of these merge points last week where the system had broken-down and there was dead-lock with cars at all sorts of angles in an untidy herring-bone pattern unable to progress until one vital car at the front moved unKaplunking the whole thing. There was much unBritish honking of horns.

While I think about, following the huge interest (not) from featuring the last one of my ad-hoc cooking aids (at the bottom of #16) I proudly present my 'sausage regimentor device'. I made it from a strip of stainless steel, bending it back and forward. If you have ever been annoyed by disobedient sausages (which when being grilled and turned to an unbrowned part promptly roll back again) then this is the device for you. You simply put this device in your grill pan and place a sausages in each corrugation. This cradles each sausage and so to whatever precise position you turn them they stay like that and don't roll-about of their own accord -- so you are finally in control and don't have to put up with those mutinous sausages that insist on being blackened down one side by rolling themselves to the same position every time. This device has proven very effective indeed.

#27

The best custard tarts I've yet tried are from Marks & Spencer, as far as tast goes they have it spot on, but their custards do have structural problems -- they are very moist which weakens the pastry case-- you have to eat them very quickly to avoid them collapsing in your hand so the sad fact about them is that you can't really savor the taste ... you can't even put the remainder of your custard back on the plate in-between bites to eek-out it's consumption because as soon as you have taken a bite out of it what structural strength it does have is totally compromised so there is no way you can pick it back-up from the plate in one piece (the above bitten M&S custard in the photo required extremely careful handling to maintain it in the observed good condition). So the lack of being able to savour your custard means that to elongate the experience in some way one is forced, forced, to have two in one sitting. Mmm. So to avoid me getting fat this tart needs strengthening please Mr Mark and Mr Spencer. Now there is a job I would like: 'Cake Engineer'.... generally I'm sure that the field of cakes is very well served by people striving for better taste and texture, but it is very lacking in the engineering department.... I'm not a qualified engineer, and so I could not sign-off the plans of a sky scraper as being safe and be able to sleep at nights, but I think I could quite confidently corrugate and rib the pastry of an M&S custard tart to improve its structural properties without significant increase in its outer dimensions or volume of pastry used, or cause any reduction in custard carrying capacity. Hmm, 'Cake Engineer'... maybe I'll make myself some phoney business cards with that on and when people ask me what I do at parties....

#26

My Mum had a hip replacement a few days ago and is doing quite well, although it will still take her a long time to recover. It's on the NHS and it's only about 8 weeks since she first approached her GP about getting the operation... a time-span that came as quite a shock to her considering that last time she had to wait 9 months to have her other hip replaced... even more of a shock when they phoned her-up after about 4 weeks and offered her a cancellation. You see she was expecting to go to the doc's and mention she wanted the op and be able to put it at the back of her mind for many months. I suppose it is like, but on a much bigger scale of feeling, when you go to your dentist for a check-up -- you're only going for a check-up so if you happen to be afraid of injections or having your teeth drilled then you need fear not on that particular occasion -- he's just going to look... but then he says something like: "Hmm, yes you need a small filling there...my next patient has cancelled so I may as well do it now." Drill, drill. Of course not all waiting lists have reduced so dramatically, and the NHS does go through bad patches over the years but no matter how good or bad it is there is one thing I like about it regardless, it is something that seems a bit of a wet sentimental thing to think, but none the less it's something that figures quit large in my psyche... it's something that's hard to put into words but basically it's this: 'Britain, my country, cares about me', no matter how rich or poor, if I'm ill it will try and do something for me.......sometimes what it does might be woefully inadequate, sometimes it might be very effective, it just depends... but that's not the issue I'm on-about here... it's like: some children may have effective parents or guardians, some children have hopeless ones, but in either case if they loved you and, whether successful or not, tried to do good for you, then that is a huge plus in your psyche that you would not want to be with-out at any cost.