thebookofdave

[thebookofdave]

Let’s get quizzical (or never ask me a music question)

Someone asked me recently about how I developed a love of pub quizzes; I was mentioning that we still regularly did pub quizzes as a group over zoom and they were amazed we’d managed to keep the enthusiasm going during lockdown.

I think the honest answer is that the initial motivation when we all got into pub quizzes was financial rather than any particular interest on our part.  At 18, the opportunity to receive a handful of cash for purchasing some lime sodas and a bit of trivia on our part seemed a pretty good deal (it was the cheapest drink available).  

We all had various specialities, Tom would deal mostly with the history rounds, Tim would handle science and Nick, well Nick would mostly remain quiet on topics until things like Italian theatre in the 1920’s came up.  His knowledge is… obscure.  Kieran would cover… well just about everything else really.

I think believe there’s a view of quizzes that you have to cover traditional rounds like music, tv, general knowledge etc but what this year has demonstrated to me is that you can make a pretty decent quiz out of just about anything.  We’ve had a pirate themed quiz, questions about spiders on drugs, newspaper headline rounds, 90’s lads mags and rounds which involved far too much exercise running around the house for objects.  

I still think though the most enjoyable quizzes I’ve done over the last few years have been the ones for peoples stag parties.  Some of the rounds shouldn’t be mentioned on here but Nick’s knowledge of the FHM top 100 women is both incredible and slightly disturbing at the same time.  I put it down to us being an impressionable age around that time.  

For Kieran’s stag do we hired out a room in Edinburgh to play and it’s a testament to his abilities that despite putting him on a team on his own, he still managed to come second.

Even my family hasn’t been safe, we used to regularly log on to do the virtual quiz which went on during lockdown.  Since I was living with my mum during that time I saw firsthand the falsehood that she’s not competitive as she always claims.  To be fair, we did make a pretty good team.  ‘

I think because I used to run a pub quiz down at the Tumbledown Dick (a health violation waiting to happen that also just happened to be the best bar/ club in the area) everyone seems to expect me to be some sort of quiz master but actually I have great respect for anyone pulling one together.  A week or couple of weeks is fine but when you’re producing 80 questions a week, all of which have to be right it’s actually amazing how little of it your brain remembers, or that’s my excuse anyway.

So what’s your specialism for quizzing then David, I hear you ask.  Well I do ok in the history rounds and thanks to my love of international travel I’m usually pretty safe on geography and countries as well. However, there are two areas that you should never ask for my help in, one is anagrams, my brain doesn’t work that way and it’s always my nemesis in the harry potter scene it game as well.

The second; well strangely despite a vast cd and music collection I’m actually terrible at remembering artist and song titles.  I also seldomly listen to the radio of late which means that many popular artists have completely passed me by.  Fortunately for our pub quizzes Kieran has a musical ear that picks up any song (although not necessarily linked to musical talent) but unless you’re running a quiz on rock music you’re going to be very disappointed in my performance…

[thebookofdave]

Road Tripping Part 3

Over the last 18 months I’ve clocked up around 7000 miles of road trips, two broken Mustangs,approximately 38,000 cups of coffee and some of the most stunning scenery I’ve seen in years of travel. 

I’ve circled Ireland, driven the East and West Coasts of America and erm, driven to the Peak District. Road Trips are fast becoming my favourite kind of holiday for the flexibility that they offer and for the experiences they bring, both good and bad.

Originally I was going to drive through Europe for the first road trip, glamorous blond in the car not being available there didn’t seem to be a need to have a convertible and the Audi would do just fine.  I can’t quite recall what inspired me instead to the USA road trip, there must have been a reason behind it, I have a feeling it might have been the Blue Mountain road on Top Gear which caught my eye

.I would say that there was no chance I’d have undertaken the USA road trip without being able to do it in a Mustang, it’s far too iconic a car not to drive in the States, even if it’s got a little tubby and full of extras these days. There’s a button for cruise control, a button for drag race mode (more on that later), a rear tv camera, about a 1000 radio channels of which at least 3 don’t play country music and it projects the pony on the ground when you open the door; what more do you need? Oh and it’s convertible which is great unless you burn even with factor 50 on like I do. It’s hard to look cool when you’re a strong shade of pink behind the wheel.

There’s good and bad to roadtrips so I thought I’d outline my thoughts thus far (limited to the USA):

The good:

1. You struggle to get anywhere in the USA if you’re not driving: The Americans have clearly come across the idea of public transport and wanted no part of it. Taking Amtrak any length of distance involves handing out a small mortgage and travelling by Greyhound buses adds an excitement of local interaction combined with a shortened life expectancy.

2. You really are flexible: Mostly this is a positive; it means you can stop for as long or as little as you like at destinations, you’re not reliant on public transport to get around and you can time yourself around avoiding traffic if you’re organised. Sometimes it can be very bad when you decide to drive off the road to take pictures, get stuck in the mud and break the traction control for the rest of the trip.

3. America’s best sights are along its roads: Yes, there are things you can’t drive to but I appreciate the American determination to ensure everything in their national parks can be reached without you ever needing to leave your vehicle and your big gulp cup. There’s nothing more iconic than driving through the dawn of Yosemite with your heater on and taking pictures out of the car window.

4. You get to try out drag race mode in Death Valley: I had to have the heater on for half an hour afterwards to bleed off the spiking temperature, terrified the car was going to conk out and leave me stranded in the desert but there was no denying it was fun.

5. American roads are incredibly easy to drive along: If you ignore the potholes issue, the roads are long, straight and since they’re designed to fit things like six wheeled flatbed trucks you have a margin of about three metres either side of you. I still have no idea which is the fast lane however.

6. You get to pick your own music: Clearly some tunes work better than others for sections of the road. There is a time and place for country music, that place is about 30 seconds of driving through West Virginia. No I didn’t buy a cowboy hat.

7. The fact you can turn right at a red light: America’s greatest gift to the world of motoring.

The bad:

1. The speed limits: I don’t know what happened in the USA when they decided on speed limits but all I can assume is that with the fact the cars don’t go round corners properly they decided the safest thing to do was just to limit everyone to 50 mph. In a Mustang, this is very, very painful, particularly when you don’t see another car for an hour.

2. Motels: Whilst it’s unfair to say all American motels are bad there is definitely a slight air of shadiness to some of them them when you pull up after a long days driving. I suspect it’s not helped by an overactive imagination from too many movies but they’re the only accommodation I bolt the door for and completely clear the car out.

3. American cities: On a main road USA driving is some of the most relaxing I’ve ever done. As mentioned before, they’re long, wide and very easy for someone from the UK to drive along. Their cities however are filled with angry people in big SUV’s and since no one takes public transport; at rush hour the traffic is phenomenal. For additional terror, add being hit by an 18 wheeler just outside Vegas and having to stand by the freeway getting licence details… Also, dear god the potholes.

4. Creamer: In the UK you can get proper milk in your coffee in most service stations. In the USA this is replaced by horrific, flavoured UHT stuff. Vanilla creamer should never, ever be allowed near caffeinated goodness. I just ended up drinking it black by the end.

5. Fuel costs: In the USA petrol is dirt cheap, unfortunately this also means that things like ‘fuel efficiency’ aren’t really concepts that have made it across. The Mustang gulped it down like a cold beer after a week in the desert.

6. Trucker bars/ stops: Filled with big burly men, Harleys outside and knackered pool tables and neon lighting on the inside; they do burgers or burgers. There’s also sport on the screen whatever time of day it is and people drinking beer. They’re probably about on par with Little Chef’s before it was closed down. Fraught with danger if you have a British accent because people will want to a) buy you beer, b) tell you their lifestory c) introduce you to their wife/ girlfriend d) get introduced to said wives/ girlfriends single friend; none of which are conducive to keeping to your journey plan.

7. The distance: It’s only when you’re there that you really begin to grasp just how big a country the USA is. When your next stop is 9 hours away you come back with a new perspective about the drive to Manchester.  You haven’t followed a satnav until you hear ‘stay on for 450 miles’.

[thebookofdave]

The Lads Holiday

There is of course an immediate issue in the title of the blog, the assignation of the term ‘lads’. We certainly were many things as a group but lads probably wasn’t one of them, the only time the you’d ever see Tom in Ibiza Uncovered would be discussing property prices and you wouldn’t even get Tim onto the plane without dousing him in factor 50 and offering him unlimited rum.  I have been on ‘lads’ holidays, of which many were pretty enjoyable; the problem is that as you get older, your capacity for enjoyment versus your recovery time starts to inverse and only get worse (insert your own joke here).

The idea of a lads holiday has surfaced again with the imminent approach of the big 4-0, Vegas has been mooted, Oktoberfest has been discussed, even a narrow boat trip rental, albeit without my credit card on the deposit this time so it got me thinking a little down memory lane.

The earliest trips we did as a group of friends were down to Cornwall, mostly because Nick’s parents already had a house there and it helped with our extremely limited finances at the time. There was, I recall a lot of drinking combined with a great deal of table tennis in the downstairs garage. I was mostly drinking cider at the time so we ended up picking dubious products like ‘Cripple Cock’ scrumpy and drinks of which there was no doubt at all about their terrible nature like red aftershock. 

The house was in a quiet part of Cornwall where the only nightclub was a ramshackle shed attached to the local pub (avg age 50+) and where we persistently visited one pub every year because Nick had once seen some women he fancied drinking in there for about two hours in an afternoon.

Still we had a lot of fun with other activities, body boarding, crazy golf, croquet, these were wild times. We nearly went for a night out in Newquay but since the only two people with cars refused to spend an entire evening ferrying the rest of the group around it fell through.

The first ‘proper’ lads trip came about for hazy reasons but I recall there was a great deal of discussion about beer drinking in Germany and train adventures one evening in Fleet and then like all the best adventures we made a complete hash of booking it.

In the end we flew out to Prague and checked into a fairly adequate hostel called Apple in the middle of the town centre. I say only fairly because on our first evening there Nick managed to jump onto my bed and fall straight through it, having seen his repair jobs before I slept half expecting him to come through the top bunk towards me but it was an incident we avoided fortunately, particularly given the point below

Prague was not without its romantic encounters, or encounters certainly anyway so I guess on that basis alone it qualifies for a boys trip although quite why Tom chose to bring up the American civil war with a group of girls in a bar remains somewhat of a mystery to this day.  We did make it to Germany in the end, via Austria and the train journey from hell thanks to a mixing between the German for sleeping carriage and then German for a standard carriage. It still provides much merriment to this day but locking four six foot men in for spooning is an activity I never wish to repeat.  We only managed two days in Germany since, thanks to letting Nick book our return tickets it transpired we were returning from Prague not Berlin although in hindsight I have my suspicions there were other factors involved.

We did many other trips as well, most popular of which were the narrow boat adventures. These were holidays on my parents boat, invariably dressed as pirates and heading to Guildford along the River Wey. When you consider the journey is around 8 miles as the crow flies yet it took three days as a round journey it tells you a lot about the speed of narrow boats. The second night of these trips was always an evening out in Guildford, I’m pretty sure we only did an evening dressed as pirates the once but they were usually following on from a full day of beers and entertainment on board the boat so I can’t be sure. 

All I can say is that as Captain, my orders were clearly obeyed without question and I ran a tight ship. There were of course other officers onboard, First Mate Tim, in charge of rum, Bosun Tom, in charge of navigation (forwards or backwards) and Cabin Boy Kieran demoted to Ships Biscuit and replaced by Nick at Cabin Boy rank after the South African debacle.

The narrow boat trips were probably my favourite weekends away, they had all the constituent parts of a lads weekend, beers, nights out, endless stories but they were also fun, just a group of guys spending time together and letting the world go by which I guess is what all the lads weekends away are really.

Maybe we will end up in Vegas for the big 40, I certainly hope so but I do think the important thing of any lads weekend is not the destination but the people you travel there with.

[thebookofdave]

Road Trippin’ Part 2

As discussed before I don’t have the best history with road trips. The first I undertook was in my poor Peugeot 205 to France for a combination of a booze cruise and taking in the local French culture. The later was far more successful than the former. The French had not taken into account the weight of four six foot guys and the ascociated weight of the beer into account when designing the suspension and handling, speed humps moved from an annoyance to potentially crippling.  Only Tom’s stomach, fueled by unknown service station cuisine proved anywhere near as dangerous for the successful completion of the journey.  

What struck me recently however following the completion of a road trip in the USA was the difference in doing long drives on your own compared to someone in the car with you.  I like both but in very different ways.

Road trips were a little shorter for a while after France, mostly limited to adventures down to Cornwall, the cars evolving from the Citreon Saxo to the RX8 but journey comfort didn’t unduly increase. The Saxo lost its exhaust on the way down on one occasion, nearly gassing Kieran and I with fumes, whilst the RX8 required refuelling to even make it to Cornwall in the first place. 17mpg takes its toll on the wallet not to mention its equally thirsty oil guzzling consumption.  It was only when Nick and I bought our £150 Volvo off ebay that I really did a true ‘road trip’ for the first time in a long time.  

The strange thing about road trips is how quickly you get used to the silence, Nick and I have known each other thirty-three years so there’s plenty to chat about but you settle into a quiet rhythm when you drive, trees flash by, forests roll on and the mountains rise in front of you, it’s tranquil and perhaps slightly unsettling when you look back down and see another hundred miles have just ticked by.

There also starts to become an unspoken relaxation about pulling over to take in the views; when we were first joking about covering five hundred miles in a day it seemed an age but really, with two of you to share the driving and swap over it’s not at all, the days just drift on by.  You can get a long way if you’re prepared to drive eight hours.

Europe is connected by a web of motorways and as driving goes; they’re fairly relaxing, the most stressful parts of the journey were Croatia, Poland and the Stelvio pass, not because there’s anything inherently wrong with their motoring in those countries (Italy excepted) but because they’re narrow windy roads which require far higher levels of concentration for a greatly reduced reward in distance. 

In the end, most of the issues Nick and I had on the road trip were self inflicted, setting the brakes on fire on the Stelvio was simply due to driving a big, heavy car down a very steep windy set of hills.  Going the wrong way in Croatia was simply due to falling asleep and leaving Nick unattended.  

Strangely enough a few years later when I did a road trip through Spain with an ex-gf the driving was more stressful because of both the nature of the roads and because the locations were so much more remote.  Driving a hire car along a motorway is easy, winding through a tiny Spanish village without stripping all your paintwork from the car door is a little tricker.  Sat Nav’s also appear to have issues with the Spanish postal code system which also raises the need to ask locals for directions, despite my excellent grasp of foreign languages I was deemed to not be trusted for this bit.  Still we did survive, although the car was more dust than machine by the end of it.

The USA road trip was a very different one, in no small part due to me driving solo which adds a very different dimension when you need to cover five hundred plus miles in a day. The most I did was Yosemite up to Portland, a long drive although also a stunning one, seeing the coastline roll by outside my window and the vivid blue sea crashing down below.  I favoured the  ‘extreme’ coffee at truck stops and I have to say it never let me down.

Equally however, undertaking it in a Mustang rather than a 1980’s mobile steelworks was a lot more fun for the driving, anything that has a ‘drag race’ mode can’t help to raise a smile to your face.  Manually dropping a gear and hearing the engine snarl, particularly in the quieter areas like Death Valley was great, the fuel consumption, not so much.

There are downsides, driving in a convertible Mustang means every woman looking at you thinks you’re compensating for something but at least you can claim it’s only a rental. It also requires a constant application of sunscreen to avoid look like there’s been a heavy dosage of windburn but on the whole, these are minor downsides.

I really enjoyed the roads in the USA, I’m aware they have a terrible reputation but the width, easy curves and constant truck stops means they’re never really very stressful to drive along. I liked the speed limits a lot less, when there’s nothing around for miles and you’re limited to 55mph it becomes a tad on the frustrating side. That’s not true for all areas, Nevada and California were fairly normal for their restrictions but the situation is only made worse by the prevalence of Winnebagos.

They’re everywhere in the USA, driven by people whose spatial awareness is limited to a square foot in front of their windscreen and who’ve had their right foot artificially restricted to 45 mph.  Truck drivers however suffer from the opposite issue, most seem to have watched too many episodes of Smokey and the Bandit, some of the speeds they achieved driving round the winding bends of Oregan were both impressive and also immensely terrifying being alongside in a car that doesn’t even have a solid roof. Observation of their surroundings is also not one of their strong points as the side of my somewhat less pretty car testified to after an incident in Vegas.

Still, on the whole I loved driving through the USA, particularly Yosemite and Yellowstone which were noth beautiful as the sun came up and the mists rolled away but Death Valley had its own unique  beauty as well. There’s a reason next year I want to do it all again but the East Coast this time; just not in a Winnebago.

[thebookofdave]

Why I’m not to be trusted buying cars

Recently I’m starting to finally accept that I will have to replace my Audi A3.  After 140,000 miles it’s starting to creak a bit around the edges and it’s not quite running as smoothly as it used to (insert your own analogy here). Once again however, I find myself looking at things like the Lotus Elise, Honda Civic Type R’s and erm, Mustangs.  In a world where we’re all moving to electric I don’t seem to have moved along very much at all.

I blame my parents for starting this trend, they had a Vauxhall Cavalier when I was young which was pretty punchy in its day.  My first car in fact was a Peugeot 205; whilst actual modifications where beyond my budget, I did have a large No-Fear sticker in the back which I’m sure helped performance.  It was a pretty good first car at the time, unlike some it didn’t require push starting, frequent battery jumps or the need to try and ignore the strong smell of petrol.  It also wasn’t covered in massive pink splodges of anti rust paint which was a fate that had befallen my friend Nick’s car so it looked like he was trying Mr Blobby around.

It did however, suffer rather crucially from radiator blockages which on a hot summer’s day to Reading festival meant that it exploded on the side of a road, necessitating its temporary abandonment and a five mile hike with a shopping trolley and all the gear.  My friend Tim had to sleep the first day of the festival from all the unaccustomed physical exertion.  Whilst the 205 was welded, repaired and restored a form of semi – undead life I knew it wasn’t to be trusted anymore so my thoughts turned to a replacement vehicle.  At the time I was working for CSC and many of my colleagues were going down the saloon route, practical diesel cars with good milage and the ability to get down the M1 with the minimum of fuss and the least amount of possible distance between the car in front’s bumper and their own.  

I instead settled for the king of chav cars at the time, the Citreon Saxo VTS, genuinely quick and exciting to drive it also came with an eyewatering increase on my insurance premiums and a stereo system so large from the previous owner that the shocks were permanently compressed in the rear.  As a driving car I loved it, I disliked somewhat more the regular pull overs from the police, the fuel consumption and its mysteriously later day habit of all its electrics dying and refusing to start.  Most of all however, I disliked when it attempted to shorten Kieran and I’s lives when the exhaust fell off and I had to drive it four hours back from Cornwall with the windows down in an attempt not to be gassed by fumes.

That incident spelled the end for the Saxo, unfortunately the practicality didn’t get any better from that point on, I replaced the Saxo with a Mazda RX8. Strangely enough it had actually been registered under the motability scheme and I can imagine few vehicles less suited.  It had a wankel engine which meant it had a few interesting quirks; firstly it absolutely guzzled oil and fuel, to the extent I’d always be the last to arrive in Cornwall because I’d have to fill up half way down.  Secondly it had an unusually feature where the whole car could flood if you drove it under thirty feet.  I once forgot this on the top of a multi story car park to my cost.  In essence the car keeps pouring more petrol vapour into the engine which hasn’t got enough oxygen to spark.  It’s certainly very exciting seeing your car surrounded by explosive fumes as the AA try to clear it but probably not really worth it.  

The outcome of that incident was that the catalytic converter failed along with a number of other useful features like power cores, I could have probably bought a new car and it would have been cheaper than the repairs.

Whilst the RX8 was causing issues, myself and Nick made a separate purchase on ebay for the ramshackle rally.  For one hundred and fifty of the finest English pounds we bought a 1989 Volvo V70 with 160,000 miles on the clock and propshaft imminently near death.  In fairness to the Volvo it completed another 5000 miles under Nick and I’s less than gentle stewardship before being sold to two guys at 2am in a bar in Poland.  Other than the brakes catching fire on the Stelvio pass and Nick’s attempts to ram another car off the road with it in Croatia it was one of the more sensible purchases I made, getting us through the whole trip without requiring a drop of technical expertise applied.

Despite my love of the Volvo I didn’t fully learn my lesson when I returned.  The RX8 was clearly on its last legs, a quick last hurrah as a wedding car for some friends necessitated another visit to the garage and the final realisation of trading it in.  I liked the space, the reliability and the sheer bulk of the Volvo so I ended up getting… an Audi A3 sportsback.  

Audi do a vast array of luxury extras for their cars, navigation systems, leather upholstery, entertainment systems.  My car has none of those but it does have a very, very nice engine which is really what I care about most.  Oh and you can also use the boot which was a novelty to me after the RX8.  

On the downsides the electronics are pretty shot, it had to have a new stereo off ebay because it fried the original one and the windows are somewhat temperamental.  It develops leaks in the winter which means the inside of the car gets a little moist and the passenger side door never, ever closes first time but it’s reliable, quietish once you get over it sounding like a tractor and to the best of my knowledge, the brakes have never caught fire.  Still it’s getting on in years; come September time I’m renting a Mustang for a couple of weeks in the States and if I like that… well I feel another impractical car swap coming on.  

[thebookofdave]

Weddings and the best man speech conundrum

This year will mark the fifth time I’ve been a best man although only the second time I’ve done it solo.  On August the 18th, my friend of thirty-three years will finally be tying the knot. 

Nick popped the question to me over a romantic, candlelit meal for two in Sofia which on the whole probably led to a lot of the restaurant clientele getting the wrong idea.  It is always flattering to be asked to be someone’s best man; it represents both friendship and a confidence in your abilities to produce a half decent speech and to organise a weekend away in some insalubrious part of Eastern Europe (well not in my Uncle’s case but a gliding holiday in NZ was out of budget).  Most of all they’re putting into your hands the possibility of you saying something really, really inappropriate...

When I was naïve and young I thought that weddings were a joint effort from both couples, increasingly however, I’m noticing that really the man’s influence is limited to a few key areas:

A)  The choice of food; mostly because this involves a lot of tasting and since there’s a wedding diet going on, both parties can feel equally guilty.

B)  The drinks; although truthfully if this was 100% the case Tim and Alex’s wedding would have consisted of nothing but strong rum cocktails.

C)  The wedding car; given this is just the mode of transportation to and from the wedding its presumably considered to be of low overall danger and therefore suitable to be entrusted to the man.

Pretty much everything else seems to be the bride’s area of responsibility or perhaps I should say, sphere of influence.  In some ways this makes a lot of sense to me; as the best man if I get them to the wedding, dressed, with the ring; I consider us most of the way there.  I doubt my sister would have quite the same view of what constitutes a successful wedding.  

There are of course wedding details which also require precision, like the aesthetics of the room.  I would happily hold up my hands and say it’s not a talent I’m ever likely to possess.  On the other hand my friend Tim has an insatiable, nay inexhaustible eye for detail; unfortunately it’s so bottomless they would probably still be planning the wedding now if they left it to him; he’s taken procrastination to an art form.  In his particular case it’s best for all of us his wife to be took over.  Additionally there are other important questions I’m not sure all of my male friends could be trusted with; how to fit all the guests in, where to do the toasts, is there easy access to the toilet for small children, these require consideration and foresight, perhaps they are not best left to a man who forgot to confirm his plane flight for a lads holiday (Nick). 

Where brides have no control is over the content and delivery of the best man’s speech and it’s here you feel the possibility of disaster, the groundswell of tension that initiates whenever one starts.  I suspect it’s equally as worrying for the groom as well although clearly some people are more likely to suffer than others.  Nick is an endless goldmine of excellent stories, Tim was more of the background orchestrator and therefore required a lot more planning and consideration to extract the best bits for his speeches.

The style of the speech is tricky and requires consideration; what the stag do lads might find a highly enjoyable ribald story of excess might not go down quite so well with the bride’s grandmother.   That said, in my view embarrassing the groom a little is essential, particularly in my case since I know revenge could still be awaiting in wings so I might as well get the low blows in now.

  In the past I’ve done best man’s speeches where we each took different aspects of the person’s life, a section at school, at college; how the happy couple met.  I feel with a suitably enforced stopwatch this works well but it requires discipline and a little bit of practice to help with the flow from one person to another.  Timing is a tricky thing for the best man’s speech.  Too short and it looks like you don’t care, too long and everyone starts to glaze over.  I think ten to twelve minutes is probably the sweet spot but I’m pretty sure as a group we were closer to twenty minutes for Kieran’s wedding and everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves.  

There are certain topics which both common sense and common knowledge says you should steer away from, ex-girlfriends, financial issues and religion for example. Conversely there certain topics which are always a rich source of stories, school days, the university years, drinking experiences, travel cockups, invariably there’s always something helpful there.  

In the case of Nick’s upcoming best man speech it’s a question of filtering out the content down from the several hours of good material available and remembering the audience to avoid some of his less family friendly moments. I have no doubt it will be an excellent wedding and I’m looking forward to seeing all the stag do guys again.  We’re also well sorted if there’s ever a cry of ‘Is there a doctor in the house’ although I’m hoping someone other than Nick answers the call.

On the downside I’m sure revenge will be sweet for those I’ve already inflicted best man speeches upon if I ever get married; my one saving plan at the moment is to limit them to a minute each and for an extensive amount of bribery.

 On the plus side they can’t do any worse than this guy.

[thebookofdave]

The weird dating world of Plenty of Fish

Plenty of Fish, for those unfamiliar; is the haystack of online dating. Unlike Tinder which claims (with some justification) to simplify dating to its simplest form, POF requires some words alongside the pictures although unfortunately it doesn’t really stipulate what those pictures or words might be.

Often these words consist of adehfhsdasoifdsgzz$$ until the requisite number of spaces have been filled, sometimes they’re full of deep and interesting insights into the character flaws of the persons ex partner, occasionally there’s even a snippet of personal information.

I used POF a while back but I’ve recently been lulled back in by the most evil of all inducements, the free trial.  

The site appears to be directly wired into Instagram and snapchat filters, I thought Tinder was bad but POF has a wide array of ladies disguised as dogs, cats, wearing giant glasses, unicorn horns on their head and the occasional artful pic looking meaningfully out to sea.  Also the trout pout which is just... well, probably best left unsaid.

I don’t know what the guys selection is like but guessing by the number of ‘no naked torso and d**k pic’ comments I suspect we’re a lot worse.

Women with their horses also feature frequently. Generally they’re jumping or doing something sporty, I’ve contemplated borrowing one of my sister’s but knowing how much they spend on them I think I’m probably just setting myself up for bankruptcy. There’s also the danger that the person in question might think I can still jump which given the last time I rode anything more bumpy than a cobbled road, is likely to result in severe pelvic damage or if I’m very lucky, falling off.

Like all sites where you have to write something, Plenty of Fish has its fair share of challenges for creating your profile. Too many ‘prefer not to say’ choices makes you seem a little secretive. Too much honesty about my geekier hobbies is probably an unnecessary amount of transparency.

The revival of tough mudder and running competitions brings with it additional danger. I play football three times a week more or less, therefore in theory I could write sporty. On the other hand this opens you up to people who are looking for a ‘running partner’ which won’t go well for either of us. Whilst gym buddy in theory is doable, I don’t really find the idea of doing crossfit every morning all that appealing, I’m just not a morning person; so again some slight economies with the truth are necessary otherwise it’s probably going to mean finding a lot of excuses for early starts.

Of course the argument goes that what you really need to stand out is a great profile picture.  Thanks to travelling, Facebook and the wonders of Instagram I have lots of pictures of me from around the world. Unfortunately they normally fail the selection criteria due to three important factors.

a) The somewhat hobo like beard because I couldn’t be bothered to shave for duration of the trip  

b) The unhealthy sweaty sheen and soaked clothing of a man who’s just walked up a mountain

c) The fact that I’m wearing walking boots, a rain coat and I’ve got a rucksack on with every eventuality planned for inside it which makes me look straight off the pages of countryfile.

Of course the good thing about travelling photos is I tend to have done lots of walking so whilst I may look like a middle aged rambler who’s got lost on the Yorkshire dales at least I’ve done so with a reduced waistline.

Once the photo is then selected you need to punch in a few of your interests, preferably ones that collaborate with what you wrote in your profile otherwise it gets awkward. Second languages (I wasn’t even allowed to take French GCSE so this is probably one best to be left as blank) and of course the most vital statistic of all because women aren’t shallow in any way… height.

Then it’s onto the site itself, this is very exciting initially because you receive a message about every thirty seconds. Unfortunately these are mostly directing you to other sites which have interestingly looking young ladies desperate to chat to you for just a few of your credit card details.  Since I unfortunately deleted Nick’s whatsapp message where he sent me his VISA I have to avoid these.

Finally you’ve navigated past the wave of cunningly placed adverts and then you’re onto ‘how much Instagram filter is on this photo’ or even trickier, ‘what does the person look like when they’re not snapchatted as a rabbit’. This far from easy task completed it’s then onto reading the profiles themselves and that’s before you’ve even thought of a witty chat up line.

On the whole, maybe chatting people up at bars isn’t that bad a plan after all…

[thebookofdave]

On Group Travel

Technically speaking the whole of our Australia trip when we were nineteen was group travel.  The company was called something like Oz Experience and mostly consisted of transporting fifty twenty year olds around the country via famous landmarks, bars, sexual experiences (not a lot of that for us sadly, I blame the haircuts from the sheep shearing farm) and in one memorable incident, a crashed 4x4.

In practice because there were so many people and because it was step on and step off there was seldom much of a group vibe.  There were exceptions to this, 4x4 driving on Fraser Island (including wrecking the car) was a lot of fun, we had to cook our own food and camp each night so we all got to know each other pretty well and since we had an unexpected extra night we ended up quite close by the end of it.   In the main however, we tended to meet people in the stopovers rather than on the bus journey's, the loss of 24 hours of our lives in Cheeky Monkey's in Byron Bay for example was a combination of random people in our hostel, extremely attractive bar staff, party games and Bundaburg Overproof rum.  

Still, I didn't do any group travel for a long time after that, I'd enjoyed traveling alone for all the reasons outlined in the last blog and I strongly disliked the concept of being on a routine.  I did short trips here and there as a way to see places, Canada for instance is a pain to get to some areas unless you undertake an organised tour but in the main I avoided it.

I ended up on a proper group tour the first time around because I couldn't really work out how to get to see everything I wanted to in the time period I had.  I'd always fancied seeing Morocco, it had had a certain feeling of mystery to it but it was also clear with my innate sense of direction and navigation combined with a really poor public transport system I was asking to end up in all the wrong places.  

The company I picked was called something like Explore Adventure travel, it doesn't exist anymore but it was catered towards 18-39 year olds who wanted a more cultured experience and who were in reasonably good shape.  The trip itself was only for a couple of weeks but it remains one of the best travel experiences of my life.  We saw a huge amount of the country including the Sahara and we had an excellent local tour guide.  I think it also benefited greatly from only having us staying in many of the locales, so we all ended up bonding quite quickly.  We even managed a local night club for an evening out which was... interesting.

The follow up trip to that was South America which I chose because languages are not really my forte.  I was for instance; the only man not allowed to take French GCSE as I'd bring the average school mark down.  South America was fantastic as a trip although slightly less successful as a group experience, it was three tours welded into one so some people had already been on a tour when we joined them and some people had to leave early, I particularly gelled well with an English couple so when they left it was me, one other guy in a couple and seventeen girls which sounds good on paper but in reality...  Later on however we were joined by a couple of Aussie guys who were great to hang out with and things returned to some normality but it has left me with the view that some balance in numbers is helpful.  

It was also my first experience (sadly not my last) of group illness which rocketed in Bolivia and meant a lot of people missed out on some parts of the trip.  Still the positives far outweighed the negatives and the experiences I remember were things that will stay with me, playing football with the locals in Lake Titicaca; albeit at high altitude so my pace was even worse than usual, the Inca trail and playing around on the Salt Flats.  

Interestingly when I did Central America with a group, apart from some food poisoning most people were fine.  I got ill for the first time in my life but I suspect that was due to swallowing half the water in El Salvador during the gravity falls, I should have stuck with the Irish plan of killing anything via the local rum.  

Since then I've done plenty of further travel in groups but in the vein of the previous blog here's a few things I enjoy about it and a couple of things I don't.

It's easy:

You have an itinerary, you get instructions every day of where you have to be, what time and there's little stress about missing a bus or being in the wrong place.  It also means you don't need to plan, everything is taken care of for you so it's pretty relaxing as an experience, you can just watch the world go by (or realistically read a book in my case).

You see a lot:

It's easy to mock being on a routine but tours are planned around the main sights of a country, if you're on a short time scale it's a really good way to view the highlights of a country.  You can always decide you want to come back at a later point.  They really cram the activities in; the downside is this means early starts and a lot of driving but I would struggle to argue I'd have seen more in the same timescales if I'd done it myself.

It's sociable:

You have a group of people, mostly around the mid twenties to mid thirties age and you'll be spending a lot of time together.  When it clicks, it really works and most of the time I've had some awesome groups of people on my tours.  It's particularly important if you're doing a long group tour and I'm fortunate that the last long tour I did, Central America, had a great group of people but NZ South Island was also excellent.  It makes evenings much more enjoyable when you have a group of people to sit around, share drinks with and play games.  Oh and people hook up of course which is always entertaining, alcohol plus spending a lot of time sharing rooms tends to mean there's a fair bit tension.  

There's a safety net:

I luckily very rarely get ill aside from coughs and colds, I suspect a lifetime of adventurous and questionable food choices abroad has helped my constitution somewhat but I've certainly seen people get pretty sick, parasites, fevers, complete collapse.  Having someone who knows the country well, has access to a group doctor and can speak the language is always a reassuring thing to have.  

It's *generally* cheaper than doing the same stuff yourself:

If the route looks to take in most of the things you wanted to see anyway at the same standard, chances are it's cheaper to do it as part of a group.  You'll have all your transport and accommodation included with the addition of a guide. There are two massive caveats with this, firstly it's all based on sharing a room so there's a premium if you're not and the second is there are always a ton of add on extras.  They're always optional but honestly, for some of the evening activities you're going to feel pretty bored if you don't go.  The backup free option for daytime is usually a hike or walk or some sort though so I guess you'd get pretty fit?

On the downsides...

When the plague hits the group...:

When I did Egypt seventeen out of twenty-one people got sick, Bolivia was about roughly the same number, China had something nasty going around which everyone got to a lesser or greater extent.  You're all in close proximity to each other so there'll probably be a bit of freshers flu anyway but any kind of illness gets exacerbated.  

There's not a lot of flexibility:

If there's anything you want to see that's not on the list it's highly unlikely you'll get a chance to see it unless it coincides with a free day.  The problem with the tight timetables is that there's rarely time to head off the beaten path:

There will be a falling out:

Most of the time it's because someone got drunk and was a bit of arse.  They're usually over the quickest and you've only got half a day or so of awkward bus ride to wait it out.  Relationship arguments are pretty bad depending how feisty the couple is but they're also mostly limited to frosty stares and stony silence.  The worst ones tend to be when someone's slept with someone else they shouldn't have, particularly if their bf/gf is also in the group and then you just need to turn up the headphones and take an interest in a book for the next few days until it all blows over.

Timekeeping can get annoying:

I appreciate the hypocrisy of saying this as a man who was an hour and a half late returning from Petra but consistently missing the return time for trips creates two issues.  Firstly, everyone will start coming back later on the basis they don't want to sit on the bus for the guilty party, secondly it starts to throw the whole timetable out of sync which means other visits get curtailed or cancelled altogether.  Most of the time in my experience people are pretty good about coming back at the appointed hour but there are some people who just seem to consistently be late for everything.

The snoring:

If you are unlucky enough to share a room with an Irishman with a broken nose, just bump him off, don't do the polite thing of believing that it's his allergies, just kill him at the start of the trip, it'll make the rest of your time so much happier.  The sole reason I now always pay the premium to have my own room.  

The sex:  

You're not paying for the Hilton, these are thin walls most of the time; headphones/ earplugs are your friend.  Unless it's you of course, in which case, just try and keep it down and hope you have a roommate who enjoys late night strolls.  

[thebookofdave]

On Solo Travel

I didn’t mean to travel on my own the first time I did it.  Three years prior I’d been to Australia (as had pretty much every British person around that time) with two friends of mine.  Like any situation where you spend long periods of time together there had been moments of friction but on the whole, the positives far outweighed the negatives and we’d agreed to go again as a group to the USA.

The plan was to spend two months travelling together.  Tom had a great deal of extended family in the States and our friend Nick, thanks to his time out in Spain at an international language school also had many friends we could call upon.  I’m not convinced in fact that Nick’s Spanish improved much during that time period but he certainly developed a cultural love for cigars, cheap sangria and women with South American accents.

We started with Tom’s immediate family connections, the Coffey’s, who having soundly destroyed our ego’s in sports (All of us being roundly thrashed by a priest and Tom’s twelve year old cousin will remain a lowlight in my sporting career, although I would say, with a man who’s 6'6 on the team you’d hope to have the basketball competition sewn up); agreed to show us some of the highlights of the area.

Indeed things were going rather well, we rented a car under somewhat dubious circumstances since we were under 25, a visit to Washington took in some cultural sights and we even fitted in Gettysburg.  There was of course the obligatory college parties, ice luges and keg stands, the later I managed to avoid since downing beer has never been a talent of mine, the mud wrestling on the other hand… Unfortunately Tom was then called back by the Army and Ed discovered he had exams which left me with the choice of either continuing the rest of the trip by myself or flying back home.  

I chose the later and the luxurious comfort of Greyhound bus to do my sightseeing.   Someone once memorably told me that the only people who take Greyhound in  the States are people who’ve just got out of jail, people on the run and people who can’t afford anything else, I definitely met some colourful characters on the trips between States.  

However, aside from a memorable brush with near death in a truckstop in Alabama and an incident with an armed security guard in New Orleans I survived solo travel relatively unscathed.  I met friendly, welcoming people, went to a lot of college parties and I got to see a little slice of Americana.

Other trips have subsequently followed, Canada, South East Asia, swathes of Europe.  I have of course done travels with groups as well which bring their own benefits but the below are a few things I enjoy about travelling alone and a couple of the drawbacks.

Sightseeing:

I’m not a beach person, I’ll tolerate it if there’s shade, good cocktails or cold beers and a hammock to read my book.  At a push I’ll admit I like beach volleyball and a good evening party but lying in the sun has never been my thing. Conversely I’ve always liked the historical areas, museums, archeological ruins, all of that appeals to me.  The advantage of being on your own is that you never have to worry about spending too long or too little time in the places you want to, it’s all up to you.

Budget:

I’ve always been pretty good with budgeting for a trip ever since I blew the planned expenses for Australia back when were nineteen.  From that point I’ve known more or less what I’m prepared to spend over the course of the trip.  On your own it’s entirely up to you for the standard of food you want to eat (I suspect most of my friends would say I can survive on fairly low quality…), the type of accommodation you want to sleep in and the class of travel you want.  

Navigation:

I’m a bad navigator, I’ve read many times about the supposed differences between men and women, particularly on map reading.  I generally turn the map in the direction I’m walking so it gives you an indication it’s not one of my core skills.  Now there’s an argument to be said that it would be useful to have someone else along but I actually find it more stressful if someone else is relying on me.  At least if I get lost it’s my own cock up and I’ve not taken anyone else to the middle of no-where.  In fact in Petra I got lost coming down the wrong side of the mountain with an English couple and whilst the whole experience was pretty stressful I was more happy that I wasn’t the one who’d led us down the wrong path for once!

Spontaneity:

My friend Tim always says I’m naturally gregarious but I’m also very comfortable with my own company.  That said, many of the best adventures I’ve had travelling have been when something has come up and I’ve just taken the opportunity.  Random house parties at 2am in Estonia, sailing trips in Asia, partying with Norwegian oil workers and visiting exclusive clubs in Miami.  Some of these probably weren’t a sensible plan (missing the ferry back from Estonia the next day for instance wasn’t too clever) but they did create some great memories.  There are people who I’d travel with who are pretty spontaneous, Nick for instance has a similar philosophy and Tom, Tim and KD, when fuelled by beers can also be persuaded depending on the circumstances but it is definitely easier on your own.  

Flexibility:

It’s just easier planning a trip for yourself.  The plan is your own so if you want to spend a few extra days in one location, no problem.  If you find Bucharest to have been a terrible choice of destination (from personal experience) it’s easy to move on to somewhere else.  With two or three people you start to need to book travel and accommodation in advance so you can all travel together and that limits your options.

Meeting people:

You have no choice but to meet people when traveling alone.  Sometimes that’s romantically but often it’s sitting in a hostel bar chatting to a few people from around the world.  Viewpoints you take for granted that other people share can be changed in an instant.  Occasionally it’s wisest not to share your views, discussing Donald Trump in a whisky bar in Stuttgart with American soldiers for instance requires tact but it’s interesting all the same.  Of course there are times you just want to be left alone to relax with your book but again, some of the best experiences I’ve had have been with random people I’ve met around the world.  In Golden Gai in Tokyo they have bars that only hold eight people so you have to all get to know each other.

It can get a bit quiet:

Once in a while you just end up in a place where there’s not a lot going on when you’re travelling alone. Personally I’ve often enjoyed the downtime but you don’t want to spend more than a couple of days without talking to people, otherwise you’ll find a beachball and start calling it Wilson.

You’re more limited in exploration:

This would seem to contradict by earlier points but for some areas you need a car, public transport just doesn’t cut it and unless you’ve budgeted for hiring one on your own it’s difficult to get to these places.  Although that said, that’s what notice boards in hostels were made for and air bnb hosts can be pretty helpful as well.

You’re on your own if s**t happens

I’ve always been lucky, despite a lifetime of sometimes questionable decisions, I’ve always made it home from travels with just some lost property and worsening of various existing injuries.  Of course having a friend as backup is always useful but ultimately I think the good outweighs the bad, although I would say the amount I’m prepared to pay for travel insurance has risen the older I get!

[thebookofdave]

The Lure of a Festival

Recently I’ve been persuaded to once again brave the mud, deprivation and dubious alcoholic beverages of a British Festival, Download in fact.

For the unitiated Download is a rock festival based out of Donnington. Somehow I’ve never previously been, even during my rock/ metal heyday which I can only put down to the close proximity of Reading festival which had the benefit of being near enough for rescue in the likely event of my car failing and having my Gran living nearby for the well needed shower.

Reading was in fact the first festival that I went to, initially only on a day ticket. It wasn’t until a couple of years later that I finally made the transition to the full camping experience. Back then it was perfectly acceptable to have a blazing fire around the tents. Tim put me in charge of firelighting (almost certainly a terrible mistake) and I remember happy evenings spent drinking around various peoples campfires and a less happy occasion where I set fire to my walking boots.

The second memory I have of Reading were how good the bands seemed to be, there was Rage Against the Machine, Red Hot Chilli Peppers, System of a Down, bands that could really perform live when the pressure was on them. It was perfectly feasible to spend the whole day at the main stage and enjoy virtually all the acts that came on.

The third memory I have of Reading is Tim’s horrified face at my attempt at shaving with a 25p bic razor at the festival site. I was, in my defence, hampered by the lack of shaving foam but all the same there were an extremely impressive number of cuts and a fair amount of blood loss.

In fact slightly horrified moments feature quite strongly at Reading, the portaloos, our friend Bethan ordering a cup of fat from the Hog Roast café, the colour of my underpants once we’d dragged the bag through the mud.

Reading is not what you’d really describe as a ‘nice festival’ in, this it stands very much in opposition to Secret Garden party which I went to and certainly in its first year, was a very nice festival indeed.

The Secret Garden Party is on its last ever year this year and I think sadly its expansion was definitely for the worse but the first time I went it was an incredible experience. It was actually a festival that was very little to do with the bands, instead it was all about the entertainments which for me ranged from riding a childs unicycle off a ramp to mud wrestling in a pit and dancing in a horsebox. It was definitely on the quirkier side, there are few places for instance than you can stroke grown adults dressed up as animals without getting concerned looks or enter a competition only for people called Dave (I didn’t win). It’s as if someone wanted to transplant a sort of hippy Woodstock crossed with Camden to the UK.

Festivals all tend to feature some sort of deprevation, normally the toilets, almost always sleep and frequently weather. In fact the only time I’ve not had to worry about any of these things was when I went to End of the Road festival with some friends. It’s basically the Guardian newspaper of festivals, everything is very nice and extremely safe. It is, for example the only time I’ve ever seen Mum’s pushing babies around near a festival dance stage in the woods. It’s definitely the only time I’ve ever been to a festival and everything was shut down by 11pm, earplugs were entirely surplus to requirements.

Download is going to not be a nice festival, nor do I expect it to be that quiet despite the old man in me ordering the ‘quiet camping’ ticket but I do think it’s going to be a lot of fun. Partly this is because of the company I’m going with, Tim, is my veteran festival companion, a grumpy instigator of me getting myself in trouble who is an excellent conversationalist on important issues like the lack of decent rums, the terribleness of all bands other than the ones he likes and why he definitely won’t be joining me in the fancy dress. He also has sense of geography which makes him invaluable for finding my tent again.

Alex, his wife has also done a few festivals with me and is the quieter, darker horse out of the two. Once she’s spotted a cocktail bar, trouble normally follows and usually the latest nights, dancing in random places like the absinthe club or jumping off haystacks are from her instigation. She’s also responsible for the difficult task of prying Tim away from the bar and to the main stages which she performs admirably at.

Cousin Iain, our newcomer leaves me in no doubt he’ll be an excellent festival companion. Gregarious and cheerful, Iain could make friends with just about anyone and with his bushy beard and laid back stance he’ll easily slip into the Download festival scene. Iain unleashed after a few beers is a sight to behold and he and I will both be dressed in the below outfits which I can only see going well…

There will of course need to be someone fractionally more sensible than Iain and I combined at a festival, someone who asks the important questions like ‘What should I actually bring, how long will it take to get there’. I’m not fooled however by these statements from Helen who I’ve seen partying after a few drinks and I suspect Iain and I will look positively tame once she and Alex locate a cocktail bar. As a former party goer at the Agincourt, Helen can also provide some actual rhythm to the dancing in the late night club that I will sorely lack.

This year at Download there’s medieval combat, wrestling, comedy clubs and just the small matter of some of the headline bands I’ve been most excited to see for a long time, I’m really looking forward to it and it reminds me again of why I can’t resist the lure of a festival. I wish I’d got that damn portaloo upgrade though…

[thebookofdave]

Confessions of a kindle convert

I had a revelation when I was travelling in New Zealand.  Since I don't get car sick I was reading on the back on the bus and someone asked me how many books I had on my kindle. Apparently I've downloaded nearly 800 books.  

1st Edition Kindles weren't available in the UK but a glance at my Amazon account tells me I picked up a second Edition kindle in December 2009 (I'm assuming as an Xmas present).  Roughly speaking therefore, I would have read a book around every four days since I got that kindle.

I doubt very much I've read all 800 books that I've downloaded, certainly at the start I don't recall most of my favourite authors being on the store and instead Amazon had a big push on the 'classics'.  

I've never been that keen on the classics to be honest, there's a hefty selection of them on the kindle because they were all free and I doubt I've opened more than a couple.  I have for instance, the complete works of Shakespeare, Plato, Aristotle and so on.  I can just about handle Henry V because Lawrence Olivier's rousing rendition always comes to my mind, 1984 is genuinely a good read but all of Dickens remains at 0% and whilst for instance I've read all of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, I'd argue there's far more interesting fantasy books out there.

Even so that's a fair amount of books I've managed to burn my way through over the years.  A brief glance through tells me the Wheel of Time series accounts for 25 of them, once I started I couldn't stop although the quality of the books took a nosedive about midway through.  He also unfortunately died before finishing them (a fate I'm a little worried about with George RR Martin, he doesn't look a healthy man).  David Eddings is in there as well and shares the fact that I own all his books in physical and virtual form with Terry Pratchett, they must easily account for 50-60 entries between them.  I've lost track of how many Bernard Cornwall are on there, I am however, eagerly awaiting 'Sharpe the OAP'.

I also get a lot of pleasure from re-reading books.  Some of them also depend upon the circumstances you first read them.  I would argue all day that American Gods is still a fantastic book but I would struggle to objectively justify that David Eddings is a better fantasy author than Joe Abercrombie for instance.  However, his series of books (24 in total) were some of the first books I read and therefore bring back fond memories to me when I re-read them.  The rose tinted lenses don't apply to anything he wrote after the Tamuli series though which are all garbage and even I can't bring myself to like them.  

In some respects I do wish kindles had come out earlier, I was hugely skeptical when they first emerged, what could replace the delight and pleasure of touching a physical book.  When we used to go on holiday as a family I used to take around 10-15 books with me in my case and skimp on clothes and shoes to make the weight.  My mum, normally rigorous in her enforcement of packing discipline and holiday organisation used to let it slip and besides I blame her for the book addiction anyway (and let's be honest here, owning 800 books on kindle is a bit of an addiction).

It also doesn't feel particularly strange to me to own both the physical and virtual books, when I look at my bookshelf I probably have around 150 physical copies of my favourites, books that I would re-read again or books that the sequel has taken so long to come out I need to re read the series to catchup again (George RR I'm looking at you).  There's also books that are guilty pleasures, Bernard Cornwall follows a formula to a tee (rebellious figure, outcast in some way, saves England in a battle they seemed doomed to lose), yet I still read each one of his new books as they come out.  I have most of Tom Holland's history books, random entries on philosophy, string theory, psychology and sport. Yet even so there's a limited space for me to work with.  The only set I think that are likely to join them any time soon are the Rivers of London series which I'll probably re-read at my leisure when I get the opportunity.  

With the kindle there are no such restrictions and my net of interests gets cast much wider, I'm much more inclined to take a risk.  I have the Expanse series recommended from my friend Tim, the Malazan series on the basis of his wife slowly working her way through the books.  Via Tom I have the poor man's Bernard Cornwall, Simon Scarrow and his Roman legion books, they're interesting all the same due to the time period.  There's the O J Simpson autobiography courtesy of Helen and erm, Alex Ferguson's autobiography courtesy of someone at work but it was actually quite good!

In the nine years since I first got a kindle I have had five more, they've been broken, stolen and in one memorable incident, bounced out of a moving truck but I keep coming back to them.  They will never replace physical books for me but when I realised that I'd read twenty one books on my New Zealand travels I knew that they have their uses.

My favourite books to re-read:

American Gods – Neil Gaiman

Great book about the beliefs of the new world  matched against the old, one of my all time favourites.

Red Storm Rising – Tom Clancy

World War 3 essentially but written with a huge amount of research before he got lazy and just outsourced everything.  There's more than a whiff of 'America, **** yeah' about it but still a good read.

First Law series – Joe Abercrombie

Brutal fantasy series which is superbly written and is set in a pretty interesting world to boot.

Rubicon – Tom Holland

His finest work in my view, a sweeping narrative history of the Roman Empire

Elenium/ Tamuli – David Eddings

Classic fantasy with a more light hearted twist, the First Law series is objectively better but they still hold up reasonably well and will always have a warm place in my heart.

[thebookofdave]

Speed Dating MK II: The Coq Au Vin Incident

I recently found myself ‘persuaded’ by a friend of mine to accompany her to a different kind of speed dating.  The event in question pretends to be an elegant sophisticated evening of drinking wine, chatting and flirting amongst singletons and following up with eating your hard earned efforts whilst perhaps with a knowing wink indicating that you found it all a little too easy.

My evening didn’t really develop like that.

I should have been more suspicious from the start because I know Sarah* can cook and does it well.  I on the other hand, whilst certainly graduating from ready meals and the Cous Cous Special (trademark outstanding) remain strictly in the amateur category.  It was also extremely expensive, retail price of £60 although it did include your ingredients and tuition.  Fortunately Sarah had somehow managed to get them half price and thanks to a combination of guilt tripping and my inability to claim it was a school night I came along.  

So it was that we rocked up to a French Café/ Bar in central London as part of L’atelier des Chefs (I should have clocked the name) to begin our cooking initiation post a dutch courage glass of wine in a nearby pub.  Essentially at the start you’re given a glass of vino, a briefing and reasonably detailed instructions from the chef (French of course), then unleashed to try it yourself under supervision.  It’s a full kitchen but even so it’s a little crowded for cooking space with 20 people all trying to prepare the recipe.  You’re meant to work in pairs dividing up the tasks as appropriate whilst presumably chatting and flirting at the same time.  Sarah and I went with the safe option and joined up on the basis that if we cocked it up at least we could just blame each other. 

The ingredients are all laid out for you and just require trimming for the chicken and chopping for the veg.  Sarah looked slightly alarmed at me being handed the knife by the Chef, doubtless remembering some of the accidents involving me in the past.  The Frenchman’s eyebrows certainly raised several notches when he saw my cutting method but presumably he thought an Englishman missing a few fingers was no bad thing. Sarah was put in charge of making the red wine sauce which I felt was rather unfair particularly as she sampled it regularly. 

Coq Au Vin is in theory relatively easy to cook which is why I suspect they chose it for the evening.   I’m extrapolating here but really it’s chicken pieces and veg, then the sauce and then a bit of garnish when you serve it.  Since I was still chopping veg and chicken Sarah declared that the sauce prep was done which at that stage appeared to just be pouring into a saucepan to boil so she wandered off to socialise with a suspiciously large glass of red.  

I took a somewhat irrational dislike at this point to the couple on our right, a hipster with a topknot and French girl who breezed through the prep and appeared to have earned the chef’s undying admiration whilst, when he wandered over to check on me, he appeared less than enamoured with my slightly more ‘rustic’ look.  

I finished the chicken and veg and put them in a casserole dish to brown as per instructions and also felt some socialising was in order.  At this point quite a few people were wandering around and all seemed well, I should have known better.  Returning for stage 2 I discovered Sarah had boiled the red as per instructions but there was considerably less of it in the pan than there ought to be.  My suggestion that we top it up from her wine glass wasn’t met with much enthusiasm so we made do with what we had. 

  We added the veg and some of the casserole to the red wine marinade which was to be put onto (I think) medium heat.  It was at this point I blame Sarah as she wandered off again.  I still maintain she was in charge of the sauce and that it was all her fault but unfortunately I also became distracted whilst she was gone, exchanging pleasantries an American girl on my left who was rather talkative. 

I was alerted sometime later to the danger by a French accent declaring ‘somefing is burning… I suggest you find out what’.

Strolling over he looked deep into the now extremely thick and somewhat blackened sauce and gave a sigh that suggested that it was now only fit for animal consumption.  Sarah kindly immediately fostered the blame upon me whilst I attempted to indicated visually where all our missing wine had gone.   Clearly however something needed to be done and fortunately being French he simply returned with more vino, I suspect much to the jealously of the rest of the group who having seen the bar prices, were sensibly sticking to the free glass.  We were quite behind time by now so we voted for the executive decision of sticking everything in the casserole including the additional wine, whacking up the heat and hoping for the best.

Plating was done by waiter service so you were required to label your work so they knew whose was whose.  I managed to restrain Sarah from swapping our labels with some poor unfortunates and we sat down with some trepidation.  I have no idea why they have the ‘speed dating’ label for the event as there’s no speed dating involved really unless you count wandering around the kitchen to nosey at people’s cooking.  You’re sitting down to eat so really you’re limited to the people directly in front and to the sides of you and since Sarah was to my right that only left a couple of people to chat to so there’s very little socialising involved.  There certainly wasn’t any flirting unless you count a fair amount of post analysis cooking chat and I was pleasantly gratified that we weren’t the only pair to struggle.

Strangely once we’d had the breads and were all ready for our main course I started to feel a tinge of fear, what if they served up a horrible burned slop, maybe they had an emergency Coq au Vin out the back for people who’d completely messed it up.  I wasn’t sure we could cope with the shame,    the tension rose, the waiters came round and then…

It actually looked ok, the sauce came out more of the consistency of gravy rather than smoother sauce of others and I’m pretty sure I caught a slight smile on the waiters face but it made it onto our plates without visibly looking like a complete disaster.  I tasted it and… it was actually edible, not amazing, the chicken did taste a little like it had been boiled to an inch of its life and back again but thanks to the sauce it was consumable.  Sarah clearly struggled a little, having a rather more refined palate but we both manfully ate it without issue.  

Even better, one pair couldn’t even finish theirs thanks to being rather too generous with the salt during preparations so we at least didn’t finish last in the unspoken competition.  Following the Coq au Vin the Chef had prepared pudding for us, a cream Chantilly with some sort of strawberry biscuit cake thing.  I’m the wrong person to ask, it was definitely a tougher task to eat than the Coq au Vin but he did at least talk us through how to make it which was quite interesting.

We were welcome to stay at the bar afterwards but after 3.5 hours of cooking and chatting, not to mention Sarah being surprisingly merry for a girl who’d only supposedly drunk two free glasses of wine we made our excuses and fled into the night.

I don’t plan to make Coq au Vin again for a while.

*Sarah isn’t her real name but she does occasionally read this and violent threats were made to my life unless I changed it

[thebookofdave]

My Five Least Favourite Countries

Even more subjective and unfair than my top ten favourite places, I’m always right though, as any number of highly reliable people will tell you.  There’s a combination of factors with this list, people, culture, things to do and see, anything on here is definitely lacking in one of these categories, maybe even a couple. So without further ado…

France

It’s not just the usual Anglo-French relations at work here, I can’t even bring myself to be excited at the prospect of travelling via the Eurotunnel. Nor is it the fact that I was so bad at the language that I was politely asked by my school not to take the exams as I’d bring the average mark down. There’s simply a combination of factors about France that always dampens my mood. 

Partially I think it’s because unless you’re in Normandy, everyone looks gloomy and depressed, particularly in Paris.  Then there’s the food, undoubtedly there are some excellent restaurants in France but I would suggest that’s the same in many places these days and the French are no longer justified in their view that the British can’t cook (well I can’t cook that well so maybe they have a point but still).  There’s also the fact that there’s always a level of uncertainty travelling over there, will there be strikes, civil unrest, the prospect of your luggage never leaving the airport?

Perhaps what I should really do is avoid the cities, my friend Tom has a holiday home in a small French town and I remember fondly purchasing food at the market (probably not the food I ordered but still) and games on the beaches. I often also went to Eurocamp there as a family as well so I feel I should like France more than I do, but every time it comes up I just think I’d rather be somewhere else… good cheese though.

USA

Also a country that makes it into my favourite places, a contradiction you might say and yet simply as casting the USA as a single homogeneous country is doing it a disservice, I would be lying if I didn’t also admit that there’s a number of things I dislike about travelling to America.

To start, every country of course has its dubious cuisine but deep fried butter, the corn dog?  Outside of the cities you’re a heart attack waiting to happen and salad is basically an accompaniment for caesar dressing.

On a rather more serious note I dislike the raw deprivation you encounter. The worlds richest nation with a military budget that spends more than the next six countries combined cannot even look after its own and staying in backpackers lodgings and travelling via Greyhound bus means I’ve seen a fair chunk of that. I remember it most vividly along the five mile stretch of Miami beach walking from the multi million pound houses all the way down to the trailer parks but it’s more or less in every state.  

Secondly it’s the lack of public transport, with the exception of the big cities getting from state to state is a painful exercise, even in places like California which claims to have environmental credentials, again Greyhound buses are the only option (unless you pay obscene money for Amtrak) and whilst you can meet some pretty interesting characters on them they wouldn’t be my first choice…

Aside from the difficulties on getting into the country in the first place (finger prints, ESTA, four hour queues, if you’re lucky) my final issue with the USA is simply the absurd debates you find yourself getting into outside of the large cities. It took me some painful trial and error to learn that in some places, suggesting Fox News may not be the complete bastion of truth and justice is asking for trouble.   I remember also having a conversation with someone about travelling and they were genuinely bewildered why they would ever leave their home state, in their mind they had everything they needed right there.  Oh and people who are genuinely confused if we’re some sort of dependency/ extra state of America, that’s probably mostly Tony Blair’s fault though. 

There are also of course lots of things to love about America; it wouldn’t be in my top ten otherwise but I certainly couldn’t deny I have a love-hate relationship with it as a country.

Finland

Ah Finland, you have nice people, some quite picturesque scenery in places but you’re a bit, well dull. I remember foolishly booking four days of sightseeing in Helsinki and seeing virtually all the city had to offer in two. Instead I hopped on a ferry to Talinn which was a much better plan.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with Finland as a place but I’ve been there a few times for work and travels and there’s really nothing I would go back for.

Romania

Romania has welcoming people, awesome scenery in Transylvania and some fascinating historical places to visit. However, it is crucially let down in one key area, Bucharest. In fairness to Romania, with its historical past it’s amazing they have much of a capital city at all but what was there doesn’t fill you with a desire to spend any additional time. 

The palace, the central attraction of the city is a huge concrete monstrosity surrounded by an urban sprawl that’s crumbling from the Soviet Era construction. I’m sure in ten or fifteen years time the city has been restored it’ll be worth a visit again but I look across to a place like Hungary with Budapest as its capital and I know where I’d rather be.

China

China was a strange country to visit, in many ways its end position is an unfair reflection that it came before Japan, my favourite country and therefore it suffers comparatively. However, it’s still one of the places I’ve least enjoyed travelling to.

The pollution is what starts to really affect you after a few days. It’ll start with a dry throat and sore eyes and a few days after that you’ll have a racking cough. We may think London is bad but it’s nothing compared to Beijing or Shanghai.

Assuming you get over feeling rough as hell the next thing you’ll notice is how grey everything looks.  Because the pollution covers everything there’s a lot of murky skies around and the buildings have a dark tinge to them, it was such a relief when I finally got into the countryside and breathed some (fresher) air.

The other curiosity is how little interest there seems to be in their own heritage, I visited many of the museums available but I came away with more detail about the rest of the world than I did about China itself. Partly I assume this is because many of the older artefacts were either looted by the European nations during the opium wars or by the Japanese but it was still a surprise to me.  There’s a huge amount about the Chairman Mao period so I suppose a lot of it is political reasons but it seems a shame that a country with such a rich heritage focuses on so narrow a period.

Ultimately however China just didn’t feel a very friendly country to visit, in comparison to somewhere like Japan which felt warm and welcoming, despite a similar language barrier there just didn’t seem to be the same level of engagement.

I feel there’s still plenty of interest to see there, the Great Wall, Teracotta Warriors and Shanghai markets were all great and I enjoyed my walks through the countryside (the Forbidden Palace was actually a slight disappointment although the gardens in the very centre felt somewhat more like an opulent palace).  

I certainly wouldn’t mark it as a terrible experience, I’ve been lucky enough not to have had one of those in a country yet but overall, perhaps because it felt so short of my expectations it’s my number one on my least favourite countries..

[thebookofdave]

Wrapping a one year old’s teeter totter - a guide for men

First of all check your tools, it’s important to be prepared.

Next, look at the size of the box, it’s bloody massive, this is going to be no ordinary present to wrap. Crack open a beer, it’ll help steady your hands and help with the planning phase.  Extracting the teeter totter from the box is a rookie error, now not only do you have to wrap a strange u-shaped object but you’ve also got to dispose of a cardboard box a small family could live in. Take stock of the situation, the box can possibly be used as multi-purpose storage for that stuff you haven’t cleared off the floor in the man cave yet. The teeter totter is going to require careful planning and execution, if you haven’t got a bad feeling about this you soon will do.

Recommended inspirational film man clip – A Bridge Too Far, pretty much any of it

You’ve cleared the box and prepared the teeter totter for wrapping, well done, cut yourself approximately 356 pieces of sellotape, you’ll need all of them. Divide the wrapping paper into six pieces, unequally shaped. Open another beer, you’ve earned it.  

Recommended inspirational man clip – Gladiator, Russell Crowe’s speech to the Emperor in the arena.

Begin wrapping the teeter totter. Delicately place one foot on the bottom piece of paper whilst avoiding getting stray pieces of sellotape stuck to your armhair, fuse together with precise even squeezing using no less than 30, but no more than 55 of the pieces you’ve laid out earlier. Repeat the process on the far side of the teeter totter, ensure you’ve left a suitably wide gap so the front sticks out.

Recommended inspirational man clip – Apollo 13, Huston we have a problem.

Use the shortest and most uneven piece of the wrapping paper you carefully divided up earlier and apply it to the front, attaching the panel securely and welding it shut using at least 70 pieces of sellotape for safety. You should now have two halves of the teeter totter wrapped but not yet joined. Now comes the most difficult part of the whole operation.

Recommended inspirational man clip – The Rock, the bit where Nicholas Cage has to extract the VX agent.

Finish that beer, you’re going to need all the help you can get. Gently grasp both wrapped sides of the teeter totter paper and seize a piece of the remaining sellotape in your teeth. If you are unshaven avoid the dangerous situation of it sticking to your beard by blowing gently so it hovers away from you.

If you have not finished the beer, release of the can is advised at this point.

Gently bring together the two halves of the teeter totter paper and allow the sellotape to rest gently on the join, press rigorously to complete the weld and apply all remaining tape with extreme urgency. Test the weld by dragging teeter totter on the floor to your front door, if the weld holds you have completed the task and may reward yourself with another beer. If the weld fails you probably should hold off whilst you have another go.

Success!

[thebookofdave]

My ten favourite (board) games to play (and likely to lose at)

So continuing my theme of lists for the blog this week are my favourite games, I hesitate to use board games as most of them don’t require the use of anything resembling a rectangular piece of cardboard but I suppose they more or less fall under such a category.  These aren’t necessarily the best board games but they are the ones I really enjoy playing so without further ado…

  10.  Cranium

Considering the wide variety of games I own and play, it’s a testament to the appeal of Cranium that I’m usually quite happy to get a game in.  These have now turned into the legendary ‘Girls’ vs ‘Boys’ sessions amongst my friends and I think the boys losing streak now stands at an impressive six in a row.  At least with Cranium there’s a bit of everything so regardless of your strengths there’s bound to be something you’ll enjoy having a go at.  The categories cover words, charades and drawing so it’s helpful for people who don’t like things like Trivial Pursuit.

Most likely to result in:

The boys never, ever, winning it

9.  Dixit

It’s French, wait, come back!  It’s also good, Dixit is a tricky game to explain.  Players have a number of cards with some fairly obscure themes on them, the aim is to get some of the people to guess your card through a word or phrase but not all of the people or none of the people.

The situation is complicated by the fact that the other players are also adding their cards to your own in the hope that people will become confused and guess wrongly which card the phrase referred to, therebye also earning themselves points. 

Dixit certainly rewards creative types for clever thinking but it also occasionally trips them up for being too clever.  I enjoy it as it’s an unusual game and theme without much in the way of player conflict, plus it’s reasonably family friendly to teach… *

*Your family may vary, mine took a while

Most likely to result in:

Clever types, incandescent that no one spots their extremely obscure Game of Thrones reference.

  8.  The Resistance

Also reasonably easy to teach and it squeezes out Werewolf on the basis that people need to be sober, at least when they start which also aides with imparting the rules.  The Resistance involves a small group of players trying to undermine the rest from completing an objective.  That group of players (the spies) all know each other whilst of the rest of their group needs to try and isolate them so they can successfully complete the objective.  Because it’s a social deduction game rather than a board game, people like the opportunity to shout, point and make wild, unfounded accusations (which a surprising percentage of the time turn out to be true). 

Most likely to result in:

That quiet member of the group making the best spy.

  7.  Cards Against Humanity

Not really a game per se but highly entertaining all the same.  Cards Against Humanity involves one player reading out a statement whilst the other players pick the card they best feel matches it from their hand.  Sounds simple enough, this was one where picking a screenshot was very, very difficult, it’s a little bit rude and very very funny.  It’s certainly not one for shy and retiring types however.

Most likely to result in:

Never being played with your Mother.

  6.  Codenames

Now so battered the bottom has fallen out of the box, Codenames takes a simple word association concept and makes it more interesting by forcing players to link words on a hidden grid, competing in two teams.  Not only could you accidentally get your team to guess an opponents word, there’s the even more devastating possibility of cocking things up badly and getting your team to guess the word under the black square which results in immediate failure.  I always thought being a native speaker would give me an edge in this but I was recently roundly trounced by a German girl who got her team to guess FIVE!!! In one go.

Most likely to result in:

Futile, futile attempts to link things like ‘Banana, Unicorn, belt’ with a single word.

  5.  King of Tokyo

Yahtzee crossed with the theme of big monsters smashing things, it’s very hard to go wrong with King of Tokyo as a concept, fortunately it doesn’t fail.  Fun with any number of players King of Tokyo can be taught in under five minutes and I have yet to meet anyone who dislikes it.  The basic concept is rolling a set of dice together, then picking the best combinations like Yahtzee but those combinations allow you to either smash other players or simply aim for a points win.   Smart players go for the points win, I am not that player. 

Most likely to result in:

Scenes of undignified glee when someone gets pummeled inches away from a victory.

  4.  Pandemic

Pandemic involves saving the world, one epidemic at a time.  It’s more of a puzzle game than anything else, players have to work together to stop the disease from spreading across the map, the more it spreads, the worse things get until eventually all you can do is desperately cross your fingers that the next epidemic card is in far flung Moscow rather than the dangerously overburdened Chicago.  Spoiler alert, it never is.  Pandemic has a very clever team game design of everyone needing to work together to reduce the spread of these infections whilst looking for a cure. 

The downside of it is twofold, one it can be a little too puzzle like, sometimes it can be all too clear what needs to be done.  Secondly experienced players tend to dominate so new players can feel a little like all they’re doing is following the marching orders.  With the right team though it’s a great game and it feels incredibly tense at times as events threaten to overwhelm you.

Most likely to result in:

The world succumbing to the terrible disease of ‘YOLO Syndrome’

  3.  Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective

Want to solve a murder, have a desire to feel grossly incompetent and probably completely flummoxed?  Then this is the game for you.  This is also the only game from the list that you can play on your own or with other people, numbers don’t really make a huge difference.  There’s maps to be poured over, newspapers to be read, clues to be deduced.  None of this will probably get you any closer to your suspect but you’ll have a lot of fun doing so.  The game comes with ten cases, each starts with Sherlock sending you off to explore and you pick the location you think will have a clue.  You then turn to the corresponding page in the book whilst someone reads it out in their best amateur dramatics voice.  The more locations you visit to solve the murder, the worse your score is at the end.

The fact that you’re highly unlikely to solve the murder won’t actually matter all that much.  Your team will be too busy pouring over the clues, contradicting each other and jotting down wild speculations.  It’s also a very good game to play as a couple.

Most likely to result in:

‘Why was the victim at the casino a day before the murder?  ‘Errr they were at the casino, did we know that?’

2.  Twilight Imperium

You thought Monopoly was long, you’ve seen nothing until you’ve played Twilight Imperium.  Epic was a word that was practically made for this game.  It has negotiation, strategy, tech trees, multiple paths of victory and a lot of player interaction.  In essence you’re aiming to be the first player to score ten points through a series of objectives, some public and available to everyone, some hidden and just available to you. 

At the start of your turn you’ll take one of eight cards which also dictate turn order.  These cards each have a different theme for you to use as an action whenever you need to.  Some of them allow you to build, others allow a general council to be called to vote on things, additional movement, trade with other players or get more resources. 

Where Twilight is a clever game is the approach is very much up to you, albeit dictated to some extent by the traits of your nation.  Some of the objectives are military, a large number aren’t but many of the most effective players I’ve seen ignore attacking other people entirely or even more sneakily, bribe other players to do their dirty work for them. 

I also really like the fact that players take part in creating the board, everyone adds a selection of tiles from their hand so each game plays very differently and there’s tiles that let you move from one side of the map to another so it’s seldom the case that you’re entirely isolated.  The tech trees further allow customisation, fancy being a trading nation, you simply can start to buy the tech that allows you to do that.  Want to seize planets early on, you’ll want the exploration techs.

So why isn’t it my favourite, well it takes six to eight hours for a start so it’s certainly an all day affair (although recently I finished it in four so it can be done!).  It can also bog down for the wrong reasons.  Player negotiation and strategy is entertaining to watch, someone pouring over what diplomatic card they want to play, less so.  Despite the long game time however people always seem to be converted to it once they’ve played it, I’ve never had a problem getting a game if I offer one.  Ultimately however, it’s a lot easier to persuade people to play the game Game of Thrones, it’s more streamlined and it offers many of the things I like Twilight Imperium and there’s less of the fear factor for people playing it for the first time.

I haven’t even mentioned the expansions but they add a further wealth of options with things like diplomats, mercenaries, nation specific ships, new order cards and plenty of new tiles but just carrying the base game can result in a dislocated shoulder!

Most likely to result in:

Sheer disbelief that the makers created a ‘longer’ version for those who didn’t find the base game long enough and a lot of post game analysis from everyone who didn’t win

1.  Game of Thrones

Betrayal, deaths, comebacks, alliances.  Game of Thrones has all of these.  The aim is very simple, take seven castles in Westeros and you win the game.  There’s a few complications to that, firstly five other people are aiming to do the same thing and the board is designed in such a way that they’re not going to be very happy about you taking their castles and they will probably let you know early on.  Secondly there’s very tight supply system which means there’s nothing of the boring stuff that Risk has of just steamrollering people.

Actually mostly Game of Thrones is about alliances, desperate temporary alliances which you have every intention of betraying as soon as you feel you’re close enough to a win to do so safely… except your new best friend is probably thinking exactly the same thing. 

The game itself is split into two parts, a hidden phase where you place your orders and try and guess what your opponents are doing and then an action phase where everyone takes turns.  At the end of all of this there’s then a set of cards that come up that will dictate how the next round will play out including things like the Wildlings attacking. 

What’s very clever about Game of Thrones is that regardless of where your house starts in the rankings, you will, at some point have the opportunity to bid on the three different traits of power.  Each of these is rewarding in its own way and you’ll never have enough money to get a decent position on all three so sacrifices need to be made.  However, it gives canny players the opportunity to invest in exactly what they need, assuming they’ve kept enough cash to outbid other people, appropriately, where the bids are drawn, the holder of the Iron Throne decides, bribery and flattery are a must at this point!

The second interesting thing the game does is around combat, there’s no dice involved at all.  Instead each house has a set of thematic cards (Greyjoy are good at sea for example) which they can use, these vary from 1-4 and are played face down and added to the combat value of your units.  The problem being is that there’s no way to the cards back again until you’ve played through your entire hand, go aggressive too early and you paint a big target on your back when you’ve run out of your best cards.  Players can also (if they’ve played the appropriate token in the planning round) offer their support and once combat is initiated you can’t withdraw which can leave to some nasty reversals if your ally turns on you. 

Mostly though Game of Thrones is about people and once the rules are understood (they’re not actually that complicated) I’ve never had someone not enjoy it, in fact most people start to immediately request being invited for a rematch!  There’s also various expansions which bring the houses up to date with the tv show (House Bolton replaces House Stark for example) but they’re not necessary, the base game plays just fine.  It’s a game where reading people, making alliances and angling for position are often much more important than what’s happening on the board, probably why I rarely win it!

There is however, one major downside with Game of Thrones, you really, really need to play with six people, less than that and it’s just never quite as good.

 Most likely to result in:

A divorce or certainly a Red Wedding style incident, there will be a betrayal at some point!

  So that’s my list of favourites, however, there’s a few additional games that I love playing that don’t quite make the list, either because they’re not really board games per se (Netrunner, Imperial Assault) or they just came fractionally short.

  Honorable mentions:

  Netrunner

Netrunner is a card game and initially looks about as friendly to play with as a hungry Doberman approaching his local postie.  It’s a two player game and for a start, both players have entirely different objectives to win and decks to do so with.  It has ridiculous unnecessary futuristic names and the tutorial videos are… interesting.  It is also undoubtedly a superbly tense game of bluffing, strategy and deck creation.  I’ve played it now many, many times and probably have lost a lot more than I’ve won but if the person you want to play a two player game with  has a devious cunning mind (Polish also helps) then they will almost certainly enjoy this.  Just be prepared for your first few practice games to feel a bit strange!  In essence one player is trying to steal cards and the other player is trying to score those cards and fend off those grubby approaches.  There are now hundreds of cards available for it but the starter decks will do just fine for a while and it’s one of those games you constantly kick yourself for not doing something or sit there desperately hoping they don’t call your bluff.

Most likely to result in:

Grudging appreciation of someone’s nasty little trap

Imperial Assault:

A four vs one Star Wars game where one player takes control of the Empire and the others seek to thwart them.  It’s a partial co-operative game where player actions can carry through to subsequent rounds.  A love of Star Wars isn’t really required but it obviously helps as games play out.  Incidentally there’s also an identical game based on the same system called Descent but fantasy themed.  It has expansions galore however so if you start playing it with friends and then become unable to resist buying them don’t come crying to me.  There’s even two different modes of play.  Mostly though I like it because it’s the kind of game where everyone talks about what happened after and the fact that things carry over means everyone gets more invested as time goes on.

Most likely to result in:

An entirely unjustified Rebel winning streak (not that I’m bitter since I’m the Empire at all…)

 Pass the Bomb:

Only on the list because I enjoy the fact it nearly gives my sister heart failure every time we play it.

  Eldritch Horror:

Based on the works of HP Lovecraft, it’s a fully co-operative game of trying to save the world (and failing).  Again I like it because it tells amusing stories, the time Kieran’s sailor went down to the docks and picked up a mysterious back injury for instance.  Pandemic is still my go-to co-operative game but this is a lot of fun to play with a group.  A particular highlight are the encounter cards, there are multiple variants for each location so you’ll never know what’s about to happen to you, it might even be something good (again spoiler, it never is).

  Most likely to result in:

The world ending, or wild celebrations when for once we actually win the damn thing.

Should any of the above pique your interest, Shut up and Sit Down do reviews in a pretty amusing style so they’re certainly worth checking out.

[thebookofdave]

The Entirely Scientific Top Ten List of my Favourite Countries

Unsurprisingly, my ten favourite places that I’ve been to is rather subjective.  I’ve not been to any of these countries for more than a couple of months which of course isn’t sufficient time to really get to know them but I’ve certainly gleaned enough from my travels and comparator countries to know that I loved them more than their counterparts and a subsequent blog will cover, even more unfairly, my five least favourite but for now, in order of lowest to highest…

But wait!  I’m going to cheat, there are two honorary mentions I’d have as my favourite places because, although they don’t have quite enough on their own to make the list, under certain conditions they’d be up there.

 For when I get old (er)

Grenada

Or the Spice Islands as they’re also known as.  A curious choice for me in many respects as I don’t like beaches much except for beach cricket and football and I definitely don’t like the sun (I burn in factor 50, there's a dark hint of ginger somewhere in my genetics). 

Perhaps it was the generous quantities of strong rum, the unusually green scenery or simply the gentle sleepiness of the place but Grenada has a place in my heart amongst the Caribbean islands.  It is certainly very green compared to its counterparts, helped by particular localised weather conditions which means it receives higher levels of rainfall. 

The Spice Islands isn’t just a name either, they have a wide and varied selection of spices that they produce and some of it ends up in the aforementioned rum as well.  I particularly enjoyed the ones they made with dried bananas but certainly by the second or third cocktail, they all start to taste excellent. 

I think it’s the peaceful nature of Grenada I enjoy the most, I could see myself having a small sailing boat moored up near a house and just spending the days under a palm tree watching the world go by.  Not a bad place to start planning a retirement to.

  For sheer damn variety

USA

The USA could also happily feature on my five least favourite places.  The passport control is horrendous, the food, certainly away from the coast is dubious and the New York accent sounds like someone scratching nails down a blackboard.  That’s without even mentioning the elephant in the room, Trum…. the fact that everyone will practice their British accent on you, oh and Alabama.

Yet it’s hard to argue that as a country America has a lot to offer, yes there isn’t the depth of history that the UK has but what there is comes steeped in blood and intrigue.  The museums are huge and stuffed with artefacts that many UK institutions would give their right arms to own and then of course there’s the national parks.

America has such a variety in landscapes and features, I’ve rafted down the Colorado river, wilted in Death Valley and shivered in the crisp air of Yosemite and yet there’s so much still I haven’t seen.  Even their beer is finally improving… slowly.

Oh and outside of the coastal cities where they pretend they’re too cool to care, they really do love the British accent.

The Top Ten.

10. Australia

Australia has certainly slipped down my list from when I first went travelling.  Partly I think it’s because I was 19 so I’ve simply seen a lot more places but also I think that, whilst the scenery is fantastic; there’s an awful lot of travel involved to get around the country and many places aren’t actually all that interesting outside of Sidney, Melbourne and Cairns. 

That all said, the Whitsunday Islands and Fraser Island will always have a special place in my heart.  Fraser Island particularly was the source of many adventures for me, crashing a 4x4, setting myself on fire, knocking myself out on a tree branch, it all happened there.  Climbing Ayres rock as well and camping out in the desert was also something that will remain with me, if only for how damn cold it was!

9. Morocco

Speaking of cold, nothing compares to camping out in the Sahara desert under the stars.  Morocco is a surprise entry in some ways.  Part of me wonders slightly if it was because I was with such a great group (and also an excellent guide) but I think back to the sheer variety of places that we saw and stayed at and I know it’s also because I genuinely loved the country.  The Sahara desert was of course a highlight but I also remember sitting out in a Kasbah under the stars, musing about the world, the mud brick towns and the craggy mountains and I start to think about how I’d like to go back.

Just avoid Casablanca, or at least bury any romantic notions you have of it before you get there.

8. Laos

Laos is on this list solely based on its scenery.  It’s often referred to as Vietnam, twenty years before tourism came along and its capital city wouldn’t even constitute a town in the UK.  It is also absolutely beautiful, heading up the river in a boat or travelling through its narrow dirt roads it feels like you’ve stepped back in time to a cleaner, quieter place.  There’s absolutely nothing to do but with the scenery drifting by and a beer in hand I found that I couldn’t care less.

7. Croatia

Croatia has three key attractions in my view, Split, Dubrovnik and its collection of beautiful islands.  The islands alone might be enough to put it on the list, travelling around them by boat is easy to do and each one is slightly unique in its own way.  Of course being on a boat means that you can also enjoy stopping off for a swim near the beautiful beaches or climb the rocks to explore the many ruined castles.

Split is a little more curious, outside of its beautiful harbour there’s not a lot to see but the harbour and the old town are worth a visit on their own merits.  It’s a strange, yet effective hybrid of modernisation and restoration which comes together to create a very unique experience.

Dubrovnik is where they filmed a number of scenes from Game of Thrones and the old city wall still runs the circumference.  It still feels very medieval in places and if you step into the right areas you can envisage a moment in time several hundred years ago.

With all three combined it makes it very easy to put it on my top ten list.

On an additional scientific note, when I drove through Croatia, my friend Nick nearly crashed the car into the harbour, it has in his esteemed view ‘Definitely the hottest women I’ve ever seen’.

6. Peru

Slightly more wild than its more staid brothers, Argentina and Chile but without the exciting dangers of food poisoning and spine readjustment due to Bolivia’s roads. 

Peru of course is famous for Machu Pichu and the Inca trail and both were among the all time highlights of the many activities I’ve done.  Machu Pichu doesn’t disappoint, even after three days of squat toilets and long hard climbs, it takes your breath away, it’s certainly no surprise to me the Spanish couldn’t be bothered to climb up to find it though. 

There’s also the Nazca lines which are also fascinating to view by plane (you can see them on the ground but it’s not the same).  Feel free to make your own explanation why they exist since everyone seems to have one.  There’s a good variety of scenery to see, the towns and cities are fun and there’s some interesting museums with fairly good English translations, particularly in Cusco. 

Additionally if you happen to know the right enthusiastic guide, there’s a pool table pretty much everywhere!

5. Botswana

Probably slightly unfair as it’s one of the most luxurious holidays I’ve done, kindly paid for at my mums instance but in terms of scenery on this list, nothing comes close to Africa at sunset.  Botswana was a safari trip and whilst I normally look for a varied balance between cities, countryside and the odd random adventure it’s very hard to compete with a herd of elephants by the watering hole as the sun goes down and you’re having a beer on the veranda.

So why Botswana and not South Africa.  Firstly it feels a lot safer, perhaps it’s the lack of natural resources but Botswana is an unusual island of stability in the middle of Africa.  Secondly whilst I liked South Africa, it’s a big country, with long drives and the drink and drive culture is very prevalent which makes night time driving in particular unusually exciting.  As a place to live it probably wouldn’t be on this list but as a place to see the teeming wildlife Africa has to offer it was absolutely superb.

4. Cambodia

Angkor Wat.  Well ok, there’s a bit more to Cambodia to that but it would certainly compete with Machu Pichu in Peru for me as one of the most stunning sites I’ve ever seen.  Given the horrific actitives during the war, it’s also amazing it’s survived with so little damage. 

Cambodia is very much about its collection of superb temples, particularly the forested ones where you feel like you’re on the set of Tomb Raider (actually you probably are since it was filmed there) but it also has some magnificent scenery to view.  It’s certainly more of a visual country, there’s not a huge amount to do unless you count pub street.  Here OAP’s and backpackers alike mix post their Angkor Wat viewing since it’s the nearby town and there’s plenty of entertainment to watch them both coming together, particularly since they sell gin and tonics by the childrens sandcastle buckets... 

That said there are some very interesting museums to visit, the monuments to the war, including the tower of skulls is made even more somber by the guides being survivors who lived through the events and Tuol Seng prison in Phnom Penh. 

One minor irritation however is that it’s actually quite expensive since everything is paid for via dollars rather than the local currency.

3. New Zealand

The most recent and not quite the best for me although it does come close.  More laid back and friendly than Australia and controversially, in my view better wine.  New Zealand reminds me a lot of Scotland, even the weather in certain areas (Doubtful Sounds I’m looking at you and your 200 days of rainfall).  The landscape is simply stunning in places, great rolling hills and mountains stretching into the distance with snow topped peaks. 

Any activity you can possibly dream of (clean ones, whatever other stuff you want to get up to is your domain), can take place in Queenstown, apparently there were over 200 extreme sports on sale when I was there and the number rises all the time.  Want some peace and quiet?  There’s plenty of hikes available and I spent a happy day just fishing by a lake in the sun. 

Why isn’t it my favourite then?  Well the sun is a constant annoyance, the thin ozone layer means it’s incredibly easy to get burned and since I normally enjoy being unshaven on holiday, gunky suncream and a beard don’t mix that well.  It’s also a little quiet, Wellington is a lovely place but it feels more like a big town than a city and I’m not sure it would last me for a substantial period of time.  Auckland just doesn’t feel like it has much character at all, still great people and a fun place to be but it’s a curious beast of unstructured planning and development.  Perhaps with the new metro linking other areas it’ll start to feel more like a joined up city.   

If you go, regardless of your views on Lord of the Rings, Hobbiton really is a special place.

2. Canada

Yes it’s absurdly cold and they should just annex Quebec and get it over with but the scenery is great, the people are friendly and it’s got the best of big city and country living combined with vistas that simply take your breath away. 

I spent two months going around Canada and loved every moment of it, the Rockies are of course one of best known sights but Vancouver is a great city to spend time in and unlike Toronto, it doesn’t drop to temperatures which require underground tunnels in the winter.  You can even pretend you’re in France if you really want to without the attitude (at least in Montreal, not so much Quebec City!) and they do unspeakably good things with chips and cheese.

The downside of Canada, undeniably it’s a serious one, is the sheer distance between everything, get used to 24 hour bus rides and forgetting what your legs used to feel like.  On the other hand, once you arrive at your destination it’s invariably worth it, there’s also a surprisingly amount of activities on offer, everyones aware of the skiing but there’s a thriving downhill mountain biking scene and of course, a huge amount of kayaking and canoeing, just remember your coat.  One word of caution though, really don’t bother with Calgary unless cattle are your thing.

1. Japan

If I could simply live there without ever having to work again, Japan would be the place I’d chose in a heartbeat.  It’s still the country I was most excited about going to see and it didn’t disappoint.   The scenery itself can’t compete with Canada and NZ but the castles, temples, gateways and architecture are so different from their Western counterparts and in many respects, so much more beautiful. 

Then there are the people, polite, helpful and incapable of walking past a Karaoke bar after a few drinks.  Everyone seems to be smiling and happy which is surprising when you consider the working hours culture there. 

Most surprising of all was the food, I didn’t have a single bad meal whilst I was there which, considering some of the places I was eating in was extremely surprising.  Actually that’s not entirely true, a vegetarian meal eaten in a buddist temple was an experience that I probably wouldn’t look to repeat anytime soon but that was a one off.

Japanese cities were also an unexpected highlight of the trip, I was always expecting to enjoy the sojourns to the more remote parts of the country but Kyoto and Tokyo particularly stood out for their museums, quirky markets, streets and architecture.  Hiroshima also left a lasting impression, albeit of course for very different reasons.

Tokyo is the strangest city of them all, a seething mass of people with districts covering every possible taste and a red light district that’s very, very different to its Western counterparts.  A particular highlight for me was the Golden Gai area, tiny, tiny bars seating no more than five to eight people, forcing you to interact with your neighbours and some of my fondest memories of Japan are meeting new backpackers and helping the Japanese practice their English in these dimly lit establishments!

If you do go, make sure you go to an Onsen, these Japanese hot springs are fantastic for easing away all the aches and pains.  Slightly disconcertingly you step in entirely naked which as a man who prefers to evoke the Sean Connery era was an experience, it certainly came as a shock to the rather more hairless Japanese men.  I'm reliably informed however it's vice versa in the Japanese ladies section!

 Japan is the winner therefore and it would take something very special I think for it to be knocked off it’s top spot for me.  On the list also this year is Israel and Jordan, I’ve heard amazing things about Petra so we’ll see whether the list changes after that… 

[thebookofdave]

Japan you were crazy but...

I’ve been to many, many countries by now but it’s hard to shake the feeling that Japan will remain high on my list for many years to come. Partly that’s because it’s so different, partly it’s due to the people but mostly I suspect it’s because I like the fact it’s a little bit weird.

So in no particular order, here are my top ten things I liked about Japan.

1. The food:

Japanese cuisine is extremely good but what I also admired about it is the wide variety of dishes and styles that are available. You can have anything from an egg omelette (actually more of a huge stuffed omelette), right up to exquisitely created sushi at a similarly eye watering price.  There’s wide variety of curries, meats, tofu and various veggie options as well (pretty disgusting veggie options in my view but there you go).

I also like the speed and efficiency of food service; you can actually order food from vending machine dispensers in some places which issue you a ticket which you trade in for your meal, freshly cooked on the spot. It’s consistently good as well; I didn’t have a bad meal in Japan, despite ordering from locations which would be highly likely to result in food poisoning in the UK. That said they’re a little too into their dry meats and rice for my liking which is a shame because their Katsu curry sauce particularly is amazing.

2. The bars:

Japan has of course its famous karaoke bars; however, that’s not the sole extent of its contribution to drinking culture. One of the places I really liked in Tokyo was a small group of bars in an area called Golden Gai. These bars are tiny, so small in fact that you rent a seat for the evening due to a shortage of space. As a result you spend your time chatting to only five or six other people, quite a few of the Japanese like going in them to practice their English but the bar owners themselves are an amusing array of characters. Quirky and frequently fairly merry on their own merchandise, given half a chance they’ll keep you in their bar the rest of the night.

It’s not just the Golden Gai area; Japan also has some interesting quirky enclosed bars. There’s undoubtedly an official name for them but I like the sliding doors and the fact that they shut you into an enclosed room. They’re wooden and feel like stepping two hundred odd years back into the past, almost like a tavern from the Seven Samurai. To order food and drink you have to ring a bell and it’s bought out to you, I really liked it, they’re small intimate spaces where groups can gather but you can still hear enough ambient noise to feel like you’re still in a social area.

3. This on the top of my hotel:

4. People in costumes:

Unlike the rest of the world where dressing up in confined to comic con, Japan appears to have made peace with its inner geek. It’s mainly confined to certain areas but it still made me chuckle to walk along the street and see otherwise quite serious looking people in some crazy getups. There’s a lot of picture taking that goes on as well, although I guess if I’d spent that much time making something I’d want plenty of pics as well. There’s a huge amount of effort and creativity that goes into making their costumes and it’s a whole subculture by itself. As for whom they’re all meant to be though…

5. Politeness:

Considering the population sizes of their cities and their density, it’s amazing how little Japan suffers from the issues we commonly associate with large cities in the West. That’s not to say the seedy aspects of crime and other activities don’t go on but they’re well hidden unless you specifically go looking for them. Any country where they can physically ram you into train carriages without people complaining earns my respect. It’s also the simple things, the culture of bowing and respect, the green tea ceremonies and their love of traditional costumes and their heritage. It’s very easy to be swept along and start bowing to everyone yourself!

6. Schizophrenia

Japan is on one hand, very polite and well-mannered and on the other hand, is a country where you can legitimately buy ladies underwear from a vending machine, used. Japan appears to be a little confused about its red light district. For instance, you have places like ‘Host/ Hostess bars’ where upon arrival you select your drinks server from an array of attractive individuals and for an hour they sit and chat to you. This appears to be pretty much it, it’s very expensive but also a very popular ‘prestige’ type of activity.

Conversely you have places like ‘Love Hotels’ where you rent a room by the hour and the streets are filled with furtive looking couples trying to escape from their parents or at least people pretending to be couples. These hotels are something else, filled with waterbeds, themed rooms, swings and all plenty of neon. Frankly renting it for just an hour seems a waste…

The red light district also features a lot of sharp suited Yakuza, the Japanese equivalent of the mafia but they don’t bother tourists unless they do something stupid. They’re apparently in decline now from their heyday due to government laws but it was still pretty interesting to see what’s essentially a crime syndicate wandering around the streets so conspicuously.

7. Bullet Trains:

South West Trains take note. Comfortable, fast and with the JR pass you can travel around the entire country for less than the price of a week’s ticket up to London.

8. Temples:

Japan has temples everywhere, literally everywhere. They’re beautiful pieces of architecture, all sloped ceilings and intricately carved decorations. The Torri gates are a particular highlight, especially in Kyoto where there’s a circular ring of them that stretch right around back into each other. They’re so popular in fact that there’s a 40 year waiting list to have yourself added to them. On Miyajima there’s a stunning water Torri gate, I was sadly mostly focusing on the waterproofing that my 40 yuan Chinese special jacket didn’t have, since by this point it was essentially porous. It was still a stunning sight however.

9. Toilets:

Seriously once you’ve sat on a heated seat you’ll never want to return to the barbarism of the West.

10. Onsens:

Yes you have to get completely naked to get into the Japanese equivalent of the sauna but it’s well worth it. Hot springs ease the worries of your day away to be replaced by new ones like ‘God I need to go to the gym’ as you look around and see quite how ripped the Buddhist monks are.

And finally becauseJapan had a robot restaurant...