Fiendish Games

Went out with a gaggle of my closest friends from school last Wednesday and had a great time. Every time I meet up with those guys, I feel like a 16-year-old again ... but unfortunately I couldn't find one.

Boom, boom!

It's odd. I was at senior school for just 7 years, albeit with the same group of people (pretty much) throughout that time; I worked for the same company for more than 30 years, alongside many other "lifers" I consider good friends. Yet it is the school friends I still feel closest to, even the ones I only see once a year.


Back in the day



Beer guts to the fore

My fellow Fiendish Games owner, Mike "Mikey" Woodhouse (known universally as "Woody" but full marks to him for continuing to punt the Mikey nickname) hates Lotus Notes with a passion for reasons I can no longer recall. I think the primary one was that it wasn't whatever mail system he was extremely well versed in - probably Outlook.

I, too, work for a company that uses Lotus Notes and it does not bug me except for one feature which relates to the reminders or alarms feature.

When you set an alarm in the calendar, a message pops up on screen at the appropriate time to alert you that you wanted to be reminded of something. So far, so regular.

The pop-up interrupts whatever you are doing, which is fine and dandy.

It also offers a "snooze" option.

Now, to me, when you hit the snooze button, you are telling Lotus Notes: "Naff off, I am busy, working in Word, Excel, Opera, Spotify or whatever."

What actually happens when you hit the snooze button is that Lotus takes control of your PC and takes you out of whatever programme you were in the middle of using (Remote Brain Surgery 2.1, perhaps) into Lotus Notes.

My mental response is always "I have just told you to feck off, why have you grabbed me and taken me somewhere I don't want to go right now?"

Crazy piece of design and one that has completely coloured my view of the entire software suite.

On the subject of software, I finally seem to be getting to grips with Linux as an operating system. I doubt this is because I have become considerably more knowledgeable about Linux; largely it is because the Ubuntu iteration of Linux is a fantastic piece of work, that is pretty much as easy to use as Windows. In fact, the little bit of jiggery pokery required to make things work is just enough to appeal to my love of poking around under the bonnet and totally fecking up the system.

What's more, it's free! You can also run it from a CD without installing it, so you can try before you ... er ... don't buy.

Colour me impressed.

I don't know, as parents you spend an inordinate amount of time shouting at your kids about their shortcomings, and in the end it turns out the old "I blame the parents" judgement was correct all along.


Number one son, who will be 20 next month, was tested recently for dyslexia. A bit late now he has finished school, though he has hopes to go to Uni.

To our only moderate surprise, he does indeed have dyslexia. The woman who tested him said it was a wonder he had survived this long - presumably in education, rather than life itself. He also has very poor short term memory. What's more, he has very poor short term memory. I have no idea where he gets it from.

Joking aside, the short term memory thing is definitely not a surprise. It takes hime five attempts to get out the door most days.

Attempt 1. "I forgot my car keys."

2: "I forgot my fags."

3. "Where did I put those car keys?"

4. "Forgot my study books."

5. "I have got the wrong study books. Have you seen my car keys? I think I put them down with my fags."

On the subject of where he gets it from, I have no shame in pointing the finger at Mrs. Fiendish, who reckons she is dyslexic too, though not to the degree of number one son.

Meanwhile, number two son, who long term readers of this blog will know as the one who has been to a number of special schools because of behavioural difficulties, has finally succumbed and is taking medication for his ADHD. He says it makes an immense difference to his concentration levels, most notably when he is taking driving lessons.

He'd always avoided taking the drugs in the past because, as an artist he was concerned that doing so would dampen his creativity. The way he describes it, his mind is like a radio that's always on where the station keeps changing every couple of minutes. It leads to some very weird juxtapositions that are reflected in his artwork.

One day I will get around to scanning some of his artwork - though he is very touchy about what material he likes to make public - and you can judge his talent for yourself, but even taking into account I am a proud father, he definitely has something going on, and it's not just fantastic skill with a spray can.

He definitely does not get it from me. Not the artistic talent bit. The ADHD bit, I am not so sure about.

I had an interesting experience when I took number one son along to his first board games convention a few years back and he was constantly burbling, coming up with non sequiturs, obscure references, bits of songs and so on and he was constantly fidgeting. In short, he was behaving like me. I only realised because he was filling up the spaces in the coversation I would normally fill with my witless burblings.

So, maybe there is a bit of ADD on my end of the gene pool, though I don't think anyone could call me hyperactive.

Of course, back when I was young, we would not have attached these labels to anyone. Number one son woukd have been a chirpy bugger who fidgets a lot. Number two son a stubborn sort with a bad temper.

Which brings us on to number three son and his mystery illness, what one consultant called "old man's body" syndrome. He's 16 and can't touch his knees, never mind his toes. He's in constant pain from his back and legs, which means he rarely sleeps well, which means he is always tired. This led to his infamous poor attendance and punctuality at school which nearly resulted in me and Mrs. Fiendish being prosecuted for aiding and abetting truancy.

He's had two or possibly threee days at Great Ormond Street hospital undergoing exhaustive and exhausting tests, and they still have no idea what's wrong with him.

I was not particularly supple or limber as a child and am less so now, so I will hold my hand up for this one.

(Number one son has just knocked on the bedroom door and asked "Have you seen my wallet anywhere?". He's off to the Benegessim festival in Spain, lucky sod. Fortunately, he's going with friends otherwise he'd probably not make it back.)

Before Charles Darwin starts spinning in his grave, the good news is that there is no chance of Mrs. Fiendish and I having any more children.

Not that the lads have turned out so bad. They've all turned out to be people I am happy to spend time with, and they generally seem to make a favourable impression on my friends on the limited exposure they have had to them. You can't ask much more than that.

Oddly enough, the one genetic inheritance the boys seem most bugged about is the height gene. I'm 5'4", and that's with my shoes on, and Mrs. F. is about 5', and none of our sons is going to reach average height. Number one son, the smoker, must have finished growing by now and is about 5'6". Number two son is nearly 18 and is about 5'8", while number three son is just a bit taller than me, having been an inch smaller just a month ago, so there's hope for him yet.

Mrs. Fiendish, lying beside me while I write this blog post but unaware of its contents, has just suggested that we'd have to do an arranged marriage for number one son to a tremendously well organised woman with significant earning potential.

Well, it worked for me ...

Saw Britpop funsters Supergrass in their final UK gig last night. It was a curiously subdued affair. I may well do a review later on (probably won't!) but my nephew Luke, who was also there, pretty much hit the nail on the head.

"Shame that's it for them but they weren't getting any better."

So, here I am blogging again after a longish interregnum. Is it because of the hoo-hah surrounding the election result​? Is it because of Fabio Capello's World Cup squad?


Nope, it is because I am on holiday, on the island of Santorini, a Greek island off the coast of Turkey.

Initial impressions are good, but that may be because I am sitting on the balcony outside my room, overlooking a pool, with a particularly fine lamb kleftiko in my stomach and a glass of sambuca on the table.

In the room I can hear the French 24 channel – an English language 24-hour news channel – broadcasting David Cameron making all the right noises outside 10 Downing Street. Putting political preferences aside, let's hope he is the centrist politician he claims to be.

As the French correspondent has just implied, Cameron and Clegg should get on well because they are both upper class toffs, though she did not quite put it that way.

Anyway, on to the important subject of the day, my holiday.

The flight left Gatwick at six in the morning, which meant checking in at some ungodly hour. We spent the night in a nearby hotel which cleverly also offers long term parking and a bus service to the airport. The earliest bus – the one we took – arrived at 4:35am to a surprisingly crowded airport.

We'd booked with Thomson so we queued up at the exceedingly long check-in queue that was conspicuously populated by numerous children of school age. The LCD screen at the desk said “All flights” in big letters then something else flashing underneath that we could not read from the back of the incredibly long queue.

Once we reached the front of the queue we finally read what the smaller message flashing below the big message said. In effect the full message said “Checking in for all flights – except your one, mate.”

Having wasted our time queueing at the wrong check-in desk we rushed to the correct desk and mercifully it had no queue. That was because the plane was already boarding by this stage.

We rushed through customs as quick as we could to find, of course, that our departure gate was the second furthest gate away from where we were. Mrs. Fiendish, who gets out of breath climbing up the stairs when carrying a laundry basket, did very well hurtling along half the distance carrying a frikking heavy lap-top (just in case we get stranded and have to work from the poolside) before it dawned on her I should be carrying the heavy bag.

Long story short, we made it with about 5 mins to spare. The flight was spent catching up on our sleep though it is doubtful that anyone would have slept through the landing, which was more like a fairground thrill ride than a smooth descent.

From there it was on to the Thomson coach and the old “God, I hope they are not staying at our hotel” game. The first two candidates were two middle aged people hovering near the coach dragging furiously on their fags. Next up was a lad, aged about 20, sitting next to his girlfriend. Outside of the albino Finnish community he may well be the whitest man on the planet, with his pasty skin, ginger-blond hair and freckles. Luckily he had made himself look more presentable by wearing ridiculous Eugene Reynolds plastic sunglasses, rancid tattoos on his forearms and enough ironmongery in his ears to melt down and forge into a broadsword.

Santorini is not exactly s raver's paradise so it was a bit perturbing to see anyone under the age of 40 on the coach but Mrs. Fiendish had gone the extra step to ensure we'd be somewhere peaceful by booking a 5-star hotel.

Oh, didn't I mention we've left the kids behind? Yeah, they are all grown up now so there is no need to drag them with us on holiday, Number one son is going to a Spanish music festival this summer, number three son is going to Reading festival and number two son has a girlfriend, so may well be going away with her family.

Anyway, the hotel is really nice, even if it does look like it has been designed by Prince – lots of purple, lilac and pink – and the island looks suitably Greek and thus far riot free.

At some point we may check out the nearby volcano and the legend of Atlantis, and maybe visit some Greek ruins, or we may just sunbathe, drink beer and sambuca, stuff our faces and read our books.

Bliss.

Hope it's pissing down where you are.