Only 5 days til Christmas One!

I'm so excited, I could widdle!

Alright- maybe not that excited. But still- I think it'll be pretty darn good... Wide's friends are all really amazing, wonderful people (except for one of them*) and they seem to have untrammelled fun of the sort that is highly contagious. Some of the things that they plan to do are a little confusing to me. For example: Stair Council. What is this? Is it simply, as first appears, a council on the stairs? I hope it's not like a real council meeting. They are exceptionally boring and bureaucratic- not really PARTAY! stylee.

The other reason I am glad about the existence of Christmas One is that, for much of the run up to Christmas 'proper' (ie, the 25th), I will be completely by myself, in my giant, old, creaky, freaky, chilly, drafty, other thingy house. Not good, especially at night (I worry about situations) seeing as the one time that I did hear noises downstairs and call 999, it turned out there was actually someone down there. It is beside the point that 'the intruder' was my cousin O'Fish, who was in fact a colleague of the 12 strong police team who attempted to storm the house about five minutes later (luckily it wasn't a wasted trip as he was able to run upstairs and give back a uniform shirt the sergeant had leant him). The real point is that now, when I hear creaky, clattery noises at night, I have a much harder job convincing myself that it's just the central heating.... I was fine living in a flat- but its very big trying to fill a five bedroomed house all by yourself, unless a passing serial killer conveniently dismembered you- but I really don't like the way that train of thought is heading, so I'll put that back in the box for later, when I've finally switched off the light and persuaded myself that yes, I did lock the back door.

This all told, the invasion of my humble abode by a goodly portion of brilliantly talented, affable, vivacious human beings (not that one I mentioned earlier **) will go a long way towards pulling me back from the brink of nervous insanity. Even if it only lasts a weekend.

Happy nearly Christmas everyone!



[*joke!]
[**not a joke. ***]
[***oooo, now I'm just messin' with your mind!]

Wii like to party

Nintendo have always been one of my favourite companies and not just because it’s as mad as a bag of hammers. It’s one of the few technological giants that’s still interested in innovation, resisting the inglorious slide into the ‘my processor is bigger than yours’ one-upmanship favoured by its closest rivals. Such sentiments should be applauded in this surface glossed, focus group-addled age and surely the least I could do for my crazy Japanese friends was buy one of their lovely new consoles?

All of which goes some way to explaining why I was queuing up outside Gamestation in Birmingham at 10:30pm yesterday evening, fending off feather-sharp insults from passing drunks and accepting cold pizza from denim mini-skirted girls who clearly wanted to be somewhere else. Yes, the Nintendo Wii was launching at midnight and about 200 of us just couldn’t wait til the morning to buy one. What followed in the next two hours was a spot of wireless, hand-held gaming, some pretty impressive blagging on my part and a live satellite link-up with the Mushroom Kingdom but before we knew it Banners and I were back on the street, console in one hand and complementary Wii merchandise in the other.

And the good news is, it really is a wonder. The motion sensors in the controllers genuinely create a completely new way of playing games that feels amazingly intuitive and suitably divorced from anything that’s come before. Two of our friends had never played computer games but within minutes they were smacking digital tennis balls around with the rest of us. This morning my Mum and Dad both beat me at bowling – they’ve NEVER beaten me at a video game in their lives before.

So it seems the future is well and truly here. The gamepad is dead, long live the Wiimote.

I just wish they’d thought of a better name …

Red at work- I'm paid to cuddle

Life as a cartoon

Students in the mist

Today was a day of gentle, heart softening nostalgia. There are occasions in my job where I return to university campuses and the experience is always beatific. There was a while there where I had my suspicions that the dreamy, cobwebbed blanket that settles on me on these occasions was some toothless, low-yield iteration of envy but I’m not so sure anymore. Time is different here, place folds in on itself trailing tattered fronds of brickdust-caked sellotape and photocopied fliers at its edges. And through it all drifts the student, in all its many forms. Male, female, fashionable, scruffy, academic, nerdy, sporty, fraught, laconic, immature. Untouchable. Cocooned in a world that holds them a hair’s breadth from reality. It’s hard not to adore them, feel protective towards the fragile academic cloisters through which they move and interact. Because here everyone owns their potential. And that’s the mystery ingredient, the extra oomph that makes the hairs stand up on the back of my neck- the sheer undiluted potential of the place and its erstwhile inhabitants. Nothing here had been decided yet, it’s all still all to play for, no doors have been closed or plans made that can’t be undone. Potential, like a spur, a treasure map, a telescope, an idol.

It’s brilliant, fascinating to an observer, even one like myself who has, when all’s said and done, made very few intractable decisions myself and am immeasurably happy with the ones I have made anyway. But it’s strange because even in the 5 years that separates me from them I’ve changed to such a degree where I’m not one of them anymore. I could probably pass for one at a stretch but they are intrinsically different, fireworks that could quite simply go off in any direction whereas the showering sparks of my own trajectory are already painted magnesium-white halfway across the night sky.

This feeling I get as I walk among them, anonymous, half-smiling – it isn’t envy, a longing for blue touch paper unignited and intact. It’s something else, something better, something deeper.

I think it’s contentment.