Holly

Summer: not as scary as I thought!

In other news, you know what's pretty great? Summer!

This is surprising to me! Summer is supposed to be a nightmare: three months of misery and rashes and sunburn, of staying up till six in the morning in order to get to the fruit and veg shop before it's too hot to breathe outside, of giving up on baking and possibly eating in favour of lying around looking pathetic and crying out for ice-cubes. But it turns out, the English climate differs significantly from the Australian climate! This shouldn't surprise me, especially as it's part of why I moved, but it's taken a while to really sink in.

This is my third year in London, and for the first two I never quite trusted summer: sure, it seemed pleasant enough, but here I was in a country without air conditioning, and who could tell when the weather might turn on me? But three summers in, and following a "heat wave" that would be known in Adelaide as "oh, thank goodness, the heat wave's over", I think I'm ready to accept that actually, I find summer here pretty enjoyable.

It's a cultivated enjoyment - I have to maintain it through the careful application of fans, summer dresses, ice-cream, water-pistols, excessive raspberries, time for lounging around in the garden, and time for wandering around at night and sitting on famous London landmarks while reading books intended for 12-year-olds. But these are sacrifices I'm willing to make.

Festivals: might they, too, be less terrifying than I think?

I am still, however, very nervous about that hallmark of an English summer, the "festival". Not the sort of festival where you go to a big mixed arts venue made out of concrete, wander along a riverbank or lakeside terrace, drink some slightly overpriced coffee, and wonder whether to go for the production of A Doll's House on motorbikes, Edward II on fire, or Coppélia on stilts. The other sort, where you go and stay in a tent in a field.

I am going to one of these, specifically Latitude, as part of my work with Hide&Seek, in order to run some games there. I'm quite scared by this prospect, because it's in a TENT, in a FIELD, for DAYS, and apparently it's going to be either muddy outside or hot in the tent (it's not clear whether this means England hot or real hot). Also I don't usually like live music, and there is no way to get back early, and it turns out there's a huge list of things I need (mattress of some description! Wellington boots! Long socks! Apparently you're supposed to take special toilet paper? I'm not sure in what way its specialness manifests).

But if summer can be nice, approached in the correct and slightly careful manner, maybe festivals can be too?

So, er, is anyone else going? If you are, you should come and play our games, or at least reassure me that it will all be very pleasant and that you will come and say hello to me! I'm told I will probably enjoy it. At the very least, I enjoy its website's dual conviction that I shouldn't bring ANYTHING MADE OF GLASS AT ALL and that it is VERY IMPORTANT TO BRING A BOTTLE OPENER.

Hey, just in case anyone's desperate for updates on movies starring members of the High School Musical cast which are not themselves part of the HSM world: don't bother with Jump In!.

It's kinda okay! And the premise, at least, is charming. High School Musical, you may remember from my previous repeated posts on the subject, features a boy whose father, a basketball coach and ex-champion, desperately wants his son to follow in his footsteps. His son, however, is torn: he loves basketball, but he also wants... to SIIIIIING.

Jump In! features a boy whose father, a boxing coach and ex-champion, desperately wants his son to follow in his footsteps. His son, however, is torn: he loves boxing, but he also wants... to jump rope competitively for a double-dutch team.

(Clearly this bespeaks a desperate attempt to keep remaking the same movie with as few changes as possible ("lead male has awfulesome hair"), which is great because it will, as joranj helped me deduce, inevitably lead to a movie starring Hat Guy from HSM, whose father, a spear-hunting coach and ex-champion, desperately wants his son to follow in his footsteps. His son, however, is torn: he loves spear-hunting, but he also wants to join his next-door-neighour's synchronised swimming team. There will be a huge swimming spears-versus-sparkles water-dance number.)

Anyway, Jump In!. Jump In!, it turns out, isn't very good, though it does deliver on its implicit promise of lengthy jump-rope dance sequences, which are mostly pretty great, except for this one move that they keep doing despite the fact that it looks very very clearly like wheelbarrow-position jump-rope sex. To be fair there are probably only so many ways for two people to jump up and down repeatedly in close contact with each other that don't involve looking a bit inappropriate for the playground.

Hey! It turns out my telephone is actually capable of making phone calls to numbers that aren't in its directory! It has taken me two and a half years to realise this: apparently it involves pressing the little button with a picture of a telephone on it. Thanks, random person who borrowed my phone and explained this to me!

The fact that I've only just realised this means I have a directory filled with two and a half years' worth of mysterious numbers belonging to people named, among the five Alexes, three Amandas and three Matthews:
6 [no idea who this is; I don't think I know any cylons, but then, I suppose the point about cylons is that I wouldn't]
Aha [no idea; I do not think I know any Norwegian pop bands]
captain [no idea]
copper [no idea]
curry! [actually I'm pretty sure this one is the local curry takeaway]
espiougog [I guess this is a predictive text malfunction?]
fictional [no idea]
ryman
ryman2
rymans [these are, I now recall, all the result of a long, boring, stationery-hunting day]
sky [no idea]
spy [no idea; I don't think I know any spies, but then, I suppose the point about spies is much the same as the point about cylons above]
swarm [no idea; I am pretty sure I do not know any swarms]

REASONS I SHOULD MOVE TO BRIGHTON

1. The sea
2. It is quite a lot cheaper than London
3. There are those bungee trampoline things, which I've never tried but they look pretty great
4. The stone beaches are still, after many visits, funny to me
5. Its scones seem generally better than London scones
6. Half-price entry for residents to museum exhibitions!
7. The turquoise metalwork near the sea goes really well with my spring coat
8. It remains willing at all times to wallow unapologetically in Brighton stereotypes, thus:



REASONS I SHOULDN'T MOVE TO BRIGHTON

1. Most of my friends are in London
2. As is my lovely job
3. I would replace my "overcome by desire to move to Brighton every time I visit" problem with a new but strangely familiar "overcome by desire to move to London every time I visit" problem

You are going to have to accept as a premise, at this point, that roz_mcclure and I are collectively required to go to any movie which combines (1) a ludicrous premise, and (2) teenagers. Otherwise this post is just going to get derailed immediately into "you went to what? You paid money to see 17 Again? You what?"

So, that premise accepted: roz_mcclure and I went to see 17 Again. We'd planned to ready ourselves by picnicking in a Chelsea park and sundresses, but as habituées of Chelsea will know, there are no parks in Chelsea: only locked private squares with signs reading POOR PEOPLE KEEP OUT. So instead we sat in the gutter outside a locked square, drinking dessert wine from plastic champagne flutes and unwrapping chocolate cake from High School Musical 3 kitchen towel ("clean up your kitchen with High School Musical 3 and Thirst Pockets!"). Inside the fence, polo-shirted families played cricket and laughed merrily.

And then 17 Again. If you've missed the side-of-a-bus advertisements, 17 Again is a movie in which Troy from High School Musical lives in the 1980s, grows up in the present day to become that guy from Friends, and then gets turned by a magical janitor into his 17-year-old self. It is... it is pretty bad. More than pretty bad, it is incredibly messed up. It is possibly the most messed-up movie I have ever watched all the way through. There are so many things wrong with it that there is no way to describe them all; but fortunately, as we sat in the pub afterwards, a magical janitor dropped the Table of Contents of a masters thesis from 2043 through a hole in time, saving us the trouble of trying:

Dissertation for a Masters of Early 21st Century Studies
University of Battersea and Kilburn
"17 Again: No, Seriously, What The Hell?"

1. Troy From HSM, Please Put Your Shirt Back On
2. Lol incest
3. When Nice Girls Put Out: it's all in the family
4. Our Journey So Far: no, wait, what?
5. What's the age of consent in America again?
6. Teen Pregnancy: let God decide
7. Avoiding Racism: it's easy when everyone's white
8. Vapid Teenage Whores
9. It's Fine As Long As You're Rich: male nerds and "no means yes"
10. This film contains every single thing that was wrong with early twenty-first century western culture

APPENDIX A: Strangely, I would have been more okay with the momflirting if he had really been 17.
APPENDIX B: The lectures on female virtue: still a no.

SCANDAL. Gosh. This may require some context, and I'm a little overexcited, so bear with me for a moment. Do any of you remember Truffle the Cat? For those of you who don't and are too lazy to follow the link, a quick summary. Somerfield, a chain of small supermarkets, puts out a monthly magazine. This magazine features a regular interview with the pet of a reader (typically a dog or a cat, but on occasion a hamster, rabbit or other more unusual animal). This monthly interview is conducted by Truffle. This is Truffle:



For several months last year, the interviews stopped, but I wrote in and complained and Truffle returned "by popular demand", which obviously was my personal triumph for 2008 and meant our household could go back to its monthly live readthroughs of Truffle's latest adventure.

Truffle—whose sex has never been revealed—is a lascivious creature who tries to seduce both dogs and cats, though (s)he is typically less taken with other animals. This has been even more distinct since Truffle's return from exile. Recent issues typify these tendencies, well past the point of deniability...

Extract from Truffle's interview with Tara, a tiny and pert-eared dog, showing Truffle's predatory side:

Tara: My mum says I am the perfect companion — friendly to a fault!
Truffle: Well, I myself am on the lookout for a new companion...
Tara: Oh dear. Well, I'm very busy being vigilant at home, so I'd better be going.

Extract from Truffle's interview with Foxie, a ferrett, showing Truffle's bias against animals that are not cats or dogs:

Foxie: But I like to play too — I love chewing on rubber.
Truffle: Can't say I see the attraction in that myself.
Foxie: Oh you really should try it some time.
Truffle: I might give it a miss, if that's all right with you.

(You'll have to trust me when I tell you that Truffle would pretty clearly have jumped on this, or any, offer if it had been extended by a cat or a dog - Truffle's tastes are wide-ranging and his/her advances are if anything only inflamed by the revelation that a young labrador is not very well house-trained, for example.)

So, right, that's got you more or less up-to-speed. The main points are:
1. Truffle is a cat who interviews pets in a national magazine handed out at supermarkets.
2. Truffle's biological sex and gender identity have never been revealed.
3. It has been increasingly impossible to argue that Truffle's lascivious ways are not present in the text.
4. These things please me, and also please various housemates, ex-housemates and tolerant visitors but particularly roz_mcclure and the_alchemist

And then this month:

( TRUFFLE THE CAT IS STARTLED BY FELINE PROSTITUTE'S ADVANCES, ARGUABLY REVEALS SEX )

Gosh, Go does better at naming its famous games than anything else ever. Chess has to make do with stuff like "Polish Immortal", "The Immortal Zugzwang Game", "Pearl of Zandvoort", maybe "Octopus Knight" on a good day. Whereas Go has:

• The Atomic Bomb Game
• The Famous Killing Game
• The Ear-Reddening Game

There's a game of Go where three of the decisive moves were suggested to the winning player by ghosts, and that's not even the most memorable thing about it. It's not called the Suggested By Ghosts Game, or the Supernatural Assistance? That's Surprising! Game: it's the Blood-Vomiting Game.

It's been a while since my last enthusiastic but slightly overambitious "you know what would be a good idea?" project - which means it must be time for Minor Delays: a very short story for every station on the London Underground and DLR, in alphabetical order, with a new story going live every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

I started last Monday with Acton Town, and if everything goes according to plan will be finishing with Woodside Park in, er, somewhere towards the end of 2010 or beginning of 2011 in fact. Predictions are currently being accepted regarding (1) when I'm first going to fall behind schedule, and (2) when the whole plan will first be messed up irrevocably by massive changes to the tube system.

There's a livejournal feed at minordelays, thanks to amuchmoreexotic.

I should really read more paper books, given that it makes me happier and more productive, with no down-side other than "will have to go the the local library and find out how much I owe them in overdue fines".

This is a New Year's Realisation rather than a Resolution, and it's one that dawns on me - briefly - every six months or so. This time round it's prompted by a December in which I've had a very persistent cold, some holiday time, and to go into a lot of bookshops for "Christmas shopping"; as a result I've read... more than I have any month since, well, since I got home internet access in fact.

It's all the fault of The Internet, yes. In 1994, when I was 13, I turned down the opportunity to see what this Internet was like; I went to the library instead. In 1998, I spent a couple of hours in my dad's office on a cold Glaswegian night, poking around online for the first time and looking for essays about words - the ones I remember best are still online - which I then printed out en masse, filed in a big folder labelled "Interesting Things", carried back to Adelaide, and kept in a cupboard for years. Then university, and computer labs everywhere, and an actual email address, and eventually home internet access in 2002, and if I've read as many books during 2003-2008 inclusive as I did in any single reading year before then, I'd be surprised.

Fight fire with fire, though; turn the internet against itself! Which is to say, I'm going to do what half of you are doing already and post monthly what-I've-been-reading lists with tiny reviews.

( Books finished during December 2008. Dragons, evolution, advertising, THE FUTURE, coffee. )

It's time to talk about High School Musical.

I know, I know - when isn't it time to talk about High School Musical? But it's time for me to talk about High School Musical, because it's been one of the defining themes of my year, and when else am I going to have even the slightest excuse for posting 2200 words arguing that HSM is basically an enormous live-action role-playing game/collaborative theatre piece, and that in experiencing it you are asked not just to watch a movie and give Disney your money, but to become an imaginary member of an imaginary high school and thereby help to create, very temporarily, the world that the movies envisage?

( The most and least important things about High School Musical. )

( Towards a critical framework for High School Musical )

( High School Musical )

( High School Musical 2 )

( High School Musical: Sing It )

( High School Musical on stage )

( High School Musical 3, with adventure! )

( High School Musical: The Ice Tour )

( The two messages of High School Musical - contains a swear word, if you're at work and have filters that might object )

Here are some great things about different systems of classifying books.

1. Their specificity: the particular strange categories that somebody has deemed important. Dewey has "phrenology" and "shorthand" on a par with "anatomy" and "Japanese history"; the Chinese Library Classification system opens its twenty-odd major classification types with "Marxism, Leninism, Maoism & Deng Xiaoping Theory". The Free Library of the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen has a classification for "chafing dish".

2. The unexpected conjunctions: the places where someone's judged "this thing and that thing are alike", and made a whole system out of their brain's unexplained metaphors. The Free Library of the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen combines "bees and silkworms", presumably on the grounds that they're both tiny critters that make useful things for people; and early Dewey does the same thing (at 638, now "insect culture").

3. This:



See also thrillers and fiction.

Ramsgate is a few miles from Broadstairs in one direction; Margate is six or seven in the other.

Broadstairs feels like it froze in 1955 and has been disintegrating slowly ever since: there's Morelli's Ice Creams in a big red 50s typeface, second-hand bookshops with closing-down sales, faded buckets in a row, people sitting with crossword puzzles in deck-chairs lined up under the narrow shelter of the promenade walk. Ramsgate, on the other hand, seems to come from the late 90s, the high street lined with big-name shops now standing half-empty; and Margate from the 80s, with Beano's Cafe, jangling amusement arcades, a shop called "Pizza Man and Mr Chips", a bright orange pillar marking out a now-empty lido. There's even a contemporary art space on the main street filled with inflatable mountains for world peace.



The thing is, all this poised decay feels very appropriate for English seaside resorts, and the reason it feels appropriate is that my expectations are based on a literature that likes to see them this way: for ever at the moment before shabby or glitzy decline collapses them into a row of ghost towns. So they're still like this a hundred or two hundred years later, after The Birthday Party in the 50s, and The West Pier and Brighton Rock and The Waste Land in the 20s and 30s:

On Margate Sands.
I can connect
Nothing with nothing.
The broken fingernails of dirty hands.
My people humble people who expect
Nothing.

and 1890s arguments about what to do with Brighton's decaying pier, and Dickens in the 1850s, writing from Broadstairs:

There are no visitors in the place but children, and they (my own included) have all got the hooping-cough, and go about the beach choking incessantly. A miserable wanderer lectured in a library last night about astronomy; but being in utter solitude he snuffed out the transparent planets he had brought with him in a box and fled in disgust. A white mouse and a little tinkling box of music that stops at 'come', in the melody of the Buffalo Gals, and can’t play 'out to-night', are the only amusements left.

It's performative decay: where other towns try to hide disintegration behind hoardings and optimistic architectural sketches, here they scrawl "Joke Shop Still Open! This Is No Joke! -> -> ->" on the boarded-up windows of the shops that didn't make it. The leftover title letters from Margate's closed cinema read OO YEM ARGATE 1935-2007. Whole panels of fence have been removed, turned upside-down, and put back with the graffiti inverted but otherwise undisturbed.

Take a big enough group of tubewalkers down to Margate and you'll never get them back: they'll be stuck for ever, taking just one more photo of flaking paint and fish stalls with bad spelling. It's all perhaps a bit hard on the local children, who seem have nothing to do except throw two-litre bottles of fizzy drink hard onto the lawn of the seafront's small park.

Broadstairs is a pretty great place to spend three days! It's over on the east coast somewhere, about two hours from London, and it has (1) the sea, and (2) a sense of inevitable decay, which are my top priorities in an English seaside resort. (3) is hot cinnamon doughnuts, on which score Broadstairs sadly let me down, but it did well on (4) decent chips, (5) overambitious sandcastles abandoned halfway through, and (6) ice-cream.


(7) is hubris.

I also like my seaside resorts with a weird local habit, in this case "windbreaks". Windbreaks are a bit like a beach umbrella, but rotated ninety degrees so that they keep off wind instead of sun, and also you need a mallet to put them up.

If you find yourself with time to spend in Broadstairs, why not try to come up with an exhaustive list of song titles in which one of the words has been replaced with a similar-sounding cake-related noun?

Good:
You're The Bun That I Want
Bun Of A Preacher Man
Girls Just Wanna Have Bun
Cake On Me
Achy Breaky Tart
Muffin Compares 2 U (alt: Nothing Eclairs 2 U)
This Charming Flan
I Think We're A Scone Now
Don't Go Cakin' My Tart

Bad:
Life On Marzipan?: marzipan is merely a potential ingredient of cake
If You Wanna Be Pavlova: superficially brilliant, but actual song title is merely Wannabe. Your Pavlova Is Dead is unfortunately a significantly less well-known song, plus the title doesn't appear in the lyrics so you can't sing it.
Heard It On The Crepevine: crepes are not cakelike enough, and also this is kinda strained
Pie Of The Tiger: tiger pie is probably savoury rather than sweet, and is also insufficiently cakey

Allow at least one full day for this activity.

Our printer paper has this on it:



In case your images aren't working: it's a little warning note which says "before use, keep the paper next to your machine for 24 hours". There's a little box above the note with a picture of a photocopier in it, and some not-to-scale paper next to the photocopier, and a clock above them both, and the number 24 in a big cautionary typeface.

Reasons this may be necessary:

1. The paper needs time to settle after being moved, or it gets sad.


2. The paper needs 24 hours to reach room temperature, so that you can be sure, on putting it into the machine, that it isn't (a) frozen or (b) on fire.


3. Leaving slightly heavy things lying around is part of a government health initiative aimed at encouraging spontaneous exercise.


4. Um. Marketing campaign, perhaps? I suppose if people see the paper by the machine, they might recognise the package and go "ohh, that's the paper we use!" next time they're shopping for stationery?


5. There used to be a different warning label there, something like DO NOT EXPOSE TO SUNLIGHT perhaps, but then the paper composition changed so that it was fine to expose it to sunlight and they took the label off and it left a space, and they needed to put something there, and
   
   Professor Paperman: We need... another warning. And we've got less than fifteen minutes to write it.
   Karen: How about KEEP NEXT TO MACHINE FOR 24 HOURS? Or STROKE GENTLY BEFORE PLACING IN MACHINE?
   Arthur: Why should they do that?
   Karen: Well, it can't hurt.
   Arthur: Come on Kaz, we can do better than that. How about DO NOT EAT?
   Karen: Actually, take a look at this report from the lab - it's surprisingly digestible.
   Arthur: Okay, well I didn't realise that, so maybe the buyers won't either. And it's a nice selling point. How about DO EAT, IS SURPRISINGLY DIGESTIBLE?
   Karen: I dunno, they shouldn't eat the whole 500 sheets. How about EAT ONLY AS PART OF A BALANCED DIET?
   Arthur: How about DO NOT FLUSH? In case they aren't sure what sort of paper it is?
   Professor Paperman: Damn it, this is getting us nowhere and we're going to press in ten minutes! Karen, what was the first thing you said? Go with that! Run it down to the printer's room right now! God, I'll be glad when this is over and we can all sit down and have a cup of tea and a nice piece of paper.

And that's me out of ideas. I suppose it's the "room temperature" thing really? Or is there something exciting and implausible I haven't thought of?

A few days ago I mentioned "Pet of the Month - with Truffle the Cat", a feature in Somerfield Magazine. I said that more details on Truffle would have to wait, because it's a bit complicated.

Nobody asked for elaboration, but I'm going to give it anyway. And it's not actually that complicated. It's just... difficult to get a grasp on the fundamentals, so I'll break it down into three steps:

1. Each month, Somerfield magazine shows a photo of a pet belonging to one of its readers.

2. Along with this photo, there's an interview. With the pet.

3. This interview is conducted exclusively by Truffle the Cat. Who is a cat.

This is Truffle:



Truffle is, despite that austere gaze, a shameless flirt with both dogs and cats alike. One month, (s)he declares Scooby the golden labrador to be "very elegant"; a couple of months later, (s)he's telling the young dog Merlin that "as a cat, I am not naturally drawn towards dogs. However, even I am inspired to declare what a handsome chap you are". This blatant exploitation of a puppy's innocence is, sure, not the sort of behaviour we would condone in a human being, but it's not coming from a human: it's coming from a talking journalist cat.

If you look at recent appearances of Truffle, you'll notice a change:



The "back by popular demand!" banner refers to the Somerfield magazine issues of May and June this year, when Truffle the Cat disappeared, apparently because the advertiser who used to fill almost a whole page with dogfood adverts had pulled out.

I wrote to request the reinstatement of Truffle, and it was a pretty moving letter: telling of how my housemates and I like to read the interviews aloud, taking it in turns to take the part of Truffle and the interviewed pet; how we sometimes perform the pieces when guests come around for dinner; how we can no longer read Somerfield magazine without a twinge of regret for what is lost. But I can hardly have been "popular demand" on my own.

What this indicates to me is that enjoyment of Truffle the Cat is not localised to a very specific area of Battersea, as has been previously suggested (primarily by dinner guests). In fact, enjoyment of Truffle the Cat may hide within us all, just waiting to be activated by, say, actually finding out about Truffle the Cat. In which case — race you to an appearance in Pet of the Month? I don't actually have a pet, so anybody who does is way ahead already.

Does anyone want to come to Kensington or Chelsea on Sunday 10 August at 1:30pm, wear a blue or white hat (which I will provide), look menacing and maybe chase people a bit, and then have a picnic?

I'm running a game called Kensington versus Chelsea, which goes from Holland Park down to the river, and need some defenders for both sides - the more the merrier, and also, more to the point, the more the menacinger. Being a defender will mostly involve wandering around the area, looming at anyone you see trailing the ribbons or balloons of the other team, and then - optionally - reuniting with your team for some celebratory cake and biscuits at the end of the game (around 3:30 to 4pm). Depending on what side you're on, you may also get to see the_alchemist give a rousing five-minute speech to call Chelsea to arms.

If you get bored or need to leave after an hour then that's fine; if you don't want to chase anyone but will be in the area and are willing to wear a hat to potentially scare anyone who runs into you, that's fine too and you can demand your cake the next time you see me.

Comment or email holly@severalbees.com if you can - I'll send you details, a complete ruleset, and slightly embarrassingly effusive thanks within the next day or two.

Edit: "Catching" someone consists of tagging them, at which point you get to confiscate one of the ribbons or balloons or similar that they're carrying.

Some of you, particularly those whose local supermarket is located on a council estate or a small suburban high street, will be familiar with Somerfield magazine. It's a free monthly magazine from Somerfield, a chain of small supermarkets, and in some ways it's kind of awful. There's a feature called something like "Judge My Fridge" (edit: it's "What's In My Fridge"), for example, where you send in a picture of your fridge in order to be told you need to eat less meat, more vegetables and to replace salt with lemon juice and herbs at every opportunity.

However, the magazine has four genuinely pleasing elements.

One is its matter-of-fact enthusiasm: its recipes are perfectly acceptable and include the cost per serving; its exclamation marks come across as the result of someone who genuinely feels like exclaiming.

Another is the Star Letter, where people send in photographs of themselves in an attempt to win £20. Past winners have included someone who was pretending to read Somerfield magazine while camping; someone who was pretending to read Somerfield magazine while standing on a mountain in skiing gear; someone's tiny baby propped on top of Somerfield magazine with a "gosh my tiny baby sure does love this magazine" caption; and someone's dog propped on top of Somerfield magazine ditto. The increasing ingenuity with which Somerfield magazine is worked into inappropriate situations is consistently pleasing, and I like to try to think of advances: one copy of the magazine made into Christmas decorations; another rolled up on a shelf in a Soho sex shop; another fashioned into a boat and sailed down the Thames while an alert squirrel in pirate costume perches on top.

The third redeeming feature is Pet of the Month - with Truffle the Cat!, which I'll have to go into another time because it gets kind-of complicated.

And the fourth is — or was — the horoscopes. These were always, a little pink star on the page proclaimed, "the only food-based horoscope in the UK!". They were also, quite possibly, the only accurate horoscopes in the UK. They said things like "this month, you may well encounter a sale in the fruit and veg section", and they were fantastic.

Looking at the February 2008 edition (yes, we do indeed keep back-issues of Somerfield Magazine), we see:

Virgo: It might hit you this month that you've become stuck in a rut when shopping, rarely adding anything new to your shopping list. Be willing to try different brands.

Scorpio: If you don't usually try organic products, check them out this month. New lines currently in the chilled aisles are also worth your investigation.

Cancer: Plan a party or invite friends around for a meal. Herbal teas are worth adding to your shopping basket this February while a daily vitamin C boost may help reduce the likelihood of catching a cold.

But suddenly, in the August edition, there's no little pink star. There's no shopping advice. There's no hints about what food will be on sale. It's just "blah blah pleasant surprises blah blah watch out for blah good relations with the people around you". There is not one single mention of food, special offers, the chilled produce aisle, or whether I should or should not stock up on my favourite dairy products. Not one! Not one.



Edit: Yes, well, now that I've typed this all out, I realise I may have oversold its importance with the "DISASTER" subject line. "OPPORTUNITY", perhaps? There are now presumably no food-based horoscopes in the UK, and a few of you have been looking for new jobs lately...

Are you sick of those guided tours where people tell you lots of so-called "facts" and "figures"? Then come along to True/False, a game-and-tour I'm running later in the month. At True/False we are unconstrained by the reputability of our sources and the plausibility of our tales, mixing "verified fact" with "stuff Holly made up on the bus last week" and challenging you, yes you, to work out which is which. It's free, running from Sloane Square at 7pm on the 17th and 23rd of July, and if you're coming you'll need to phone and book with Kensington and Chelsea's arts branch (020 7361 3003). If you really hate phones but want to come anyway then tell me - I'm allowed to bring a few unbooked extras, but not many.

(Yes I'm running something with a forward slash in its title, yes I promise never to mock any pretentiously-titled arts event ever again, yes I will break that promise by early next week at the latest.)

Do guided tours, even deceptive guided tours with games and possibly cake, bore you? Do they seem inefficient - all that walking around and stopping? Then consider Kensington versus Chelsea on 10 August at 2pm - a borough-wide chase/scavenger hunt/"thing where people run around with ribbons or balloons, or maybe they sneak" in which we find out once and for all whether Kensington or Chelsea is the best. Kensingtonians start in Holland Park near the tennis courts, Chelseates in Ropers Garden (just east of Albert Bridge), and again it's free and requires you to call 020 7361 3003 to book. Alternatively if you'd rather be a chaser than a player, let me know: I need quite a few people to dress up in blue or white and look ominous.

Over the last day or two I've been having the same conversation with pretty much everyone I talk to, so to save time should I run into you within the next week, here it is:

Me: Hide and Seek is over! It was great!
You: Oh, fantastic!
Me: Did I tell you that we were on BBC Radio London and I explained my game Bees and we played the kazoo, and then I was called “weird” and “properly obsessed with bees” by the continuity woman?
You: Yes, you sure did tell me that! You mentioned it twice and also it's your current facebook status.
Me: And someone made a tiny felt Battersea Power Station for my collaborative map of lies!
You: Mmm.
Me: Oh, and guess what - the Southbank Centre keeps bees on its rooftop! They read them poetry every week! They are the most educated bees in London.
You: That's great.
Me: And there was a game with balloons that had a hundred balloons left over, so during clean-up roz_mcclure and I got to run up and down the South Bank trying to find small children to give balloons to, and it was legitimate work!
You: I'm going away now.
Me: Hey, take a copy of the programme! Look at my photos!

It's all very exciting! Also, tiring. Also, anyone who says you can't live healthily for a week on pizza and Southbank Centre muffins is probably right, but it's too late now.

Y'know, I remember when I used to use this space as somewhere to be annoyed or to link to interesting things, but no longer, apparently. Now it's all very-intermittent updates focusing on things I've done that you're not interested in. On which note, I'm currently involved with this, which is associated with Hide and Seek, a festival of social games and playful experiences running at the Southbank Centre from June 26 to 29. The Sandpit involves monthly playing and playtesting meetings wherein we make up games, play games, and (hopefully) polish games to reappear at the festival itself.

I'm curating the games for the next one, which is taking place at Shunt, in the tunnels under London Bridge, on Wednesday 16 April. It's themed around "Spying and Lying", so come along if you feel like passing secret messages, smuggling objects, being assigned numbers and possibly having an excuse to wear a fedora. And if there's a game that you'd like to run (or just a ruleset you'd like to send in in case someone else wants to run it), let me know. They don't need to be big running-around games with actors and fireworks; low-key sit-in-a-corner games, and hidden play-secretly-through-the-night games, are just as good.

Related: Iglab, the Bristol equivalent of the Sandpit events; Come Out and Play, the New York equivalent of the festival; some photos from the last (listening-themed) event, though unfortunately Shunt's whole "being a maze of dimly-lit underground tunnels" thing doesn't really lend itself to action photography so there's very little documentation of the games themselves.

Coming next week, I tell you about how I seem to have more bags of rice in the kitchen cupboard than I remember buying or can ever possibly eat, and point you to a new blog wherein I will document the life of each individual grain of rice as I attempt to find a new home for it.

Edit: bateleur reminds me to mention thesandpit, the livejournal feed of the Sandpit blog, essays and ruleset. The blog part is kinda London-centric; if anyone would like to keep up with the essays and rulesets but doesn't want to sit through all the overexcited London events stuff, kick me and maybe I'll finally get around to sorting out separate feeds for different categories.