– Neil Gaiman
I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You’re doing things you’ve never done before, and more importantly, you’re doing something.
Dear Polecat,
Once again it’s been An Age since my last Letter. In fact, I think it’s been the longest period between Letters, and that’s including my time in The Alps. A fair amount has happened in that time – my lack of Letter hasn’t been for want of content but for lack of time to sit and order my thoughts. Let me try to order them now.
But first, I’m going to break tradition a little and talk about that quotation. I’ve noticed there’s definitely a trend with our quotations; they’re usually Tolkien, Shakespeare, Dickens, or some other titan of literature. Pratchett, Poe, etc etc. I don’t know how much Gaiman we’ve had, but however much has been too little. The man has such a gorgeous ability to encapsulate a thought. Indulge me in a tagent.
When I lived in Edinburgh (the first time, before Wales and meeting you) I auditioned for, and got, a part in a Fringe show. It was about the role of bread in WWII – really Fringe-esque stuff. Utterly average, a sneeze away from village fete am-dram, full of eager people desperate to catch the eye of a reviewer… you know the sort well.
Anyway, this Fringe play very quickly didn’t agree with me. Or should I say the director didn’t agree with me. She was mercurial and dictatorial, over-stern and humourless. A self-avowed feminist – to the extent that she hated anyone with a penis. Which included me. Long story short, about halfway into the rehearsal stage, she took me to a cafe in the Scottish Library and told me I was out. I went home in high dudgeon, incensed and annoyed, and vented to my American friend (brief aside, this guy was solid gold, a curmudgeonly treasure who was one of my best friends). His reply was very surprising.
Me: I got dropped from that production that I was complaining about! I’m so annoyed!
Him: Oh that’s good! Good news dude!
Me: …..what?
Him: Dude, you’ve been coming home from that annoyed since Day 1, and now you don’t have to be angry. That’s a win. Just because what happened was ‘bad’ doesn’t mean it doesn’t have good effects.
Me: Huh.
I think (to give a point to my rambling story) that’s what Neil Gaiman’s quotation means. We have (certainly I have) a tendency to view the bad thing as overwhelmingly bad, awful, nothing worse, the end, ugh, why God why. Seems like sometimes the bad thing can be a good thing, if we look at it from the other way around.
Don’t ask me to see the bright side to this pandemic though. That’s beyond my skills of blind optimism.
Right, well, anyway. That piece of noisy philosophising aside, what have I been up to? Well, my last Letter was just before New Year, so this is my first Letter of 2021. Which, given it’s midway through February, is pretty dismal. But I have a lot of ground to cover, at least, so I hope your tea is full. (Honestly, I really enjoy the mental picture of you reading my Letters. I know when you smile, and I love the enjoyment I know you get out of reading about my dreary little life.)
Firstly, New Years Eve happened. We were back in Glasgow, not wanting to tempt fate any further than we had to, and it turned out a bunch of our friends were all doing very little too. Cue a large Zoom NYE party, with drinking and games throughout the evening. We all shouted down the countdown, charged and raised our glasses, and all silently but fervently hoped that the year ahead would be more forgiving than the one we were leaving behind. I think collectively across the world, most people gave a sigh of relief as 2020 receded into the distance. (A short-lived sigh, obviously, given that 6 days after that the USA embarassed itself once again).
New Years Day, we decided to splash out on ourselves and have a nice meal together. We both really enjoy cooking but it’s a very.. practical.. style of cooking. Let’s make the tasty then eat the tasty. This was pretty much the first time we’d done something a bit more ceremonial – a nice starter of crackers and cheese, a Sunday-roast-esque main course, and some delicious strudel for dessert. I love dressing up and eating food, and it was really nice to prepare it all ourselves (and so much of it too. food coma for days).
Then it was sort of back to life as usual – walks when we could, taking in the coldening weather. Except while this was happening there was a couple of fairly important things looming on the horizon. Or rather, one important thing that had two paths to it. I had a couple of job… interviews? processes? tests? on the go, one here in Glasgow and the other, much more exotically, in Dubai. The Dubai job was a real head-spinner; a high salary, re-locating, the works. It seemed a little much honestly – and without spilling too much fresh goss, it was. I was offered the Glasgow job, accepted it, and I’m starting next Monday. I’m really excited – it’s working alongside someone I used to work with at Frame, I got along very well with the people in the interview process (spent most of one call talking about the three latest Star Wars films, and I thought several times how much you’d enjoy the conversation) and I’ll be doing work that I can really engage in again. Not to shit on the place I just left, but it was a little hard to enthuse myself about some of the work I had to do there.
So yeah, I start a new job here in Glasgow in a week! And with that sorted, with the question ‘Dubai or Glasgow’ answered, that means that my mindset has become more resolved as well. Now that I know I’m staying in Glasgow (at least for a while), Ash and I have both started thinking about how to make our flat a bit better too. It’s a really nice flat, we’ve populated it with cool furniture, geeky art, and the like, but there’s more we can do. At the risk of delving too deep, too greedily, there’s still riches to be found in these metaphorical Mines.
Brief aside, because thinking about LotR makes me think about fantasy makes me think about DnD. I’m really glad you liked the avatars I made for you and B and T and Marten and Badger. I’ve made them for loads of people, fictional and otherwise, and they keep adding stuff to the app so I imagine I’ll make a bunch more before I get bored of the app.
A few more avatars I did. The first 7 are from a DnD livestream I watch, the last 5 are me, Ash, Marten, Badger & you respectively.
I think, to an extent, its my fault you don’t like DnD so much. That pseudo-game I ran for you was a very cobbled-together, quickly-created affair, and I’d like to show you a proper game at some point. I’ve still got a lot to learn when it comes to running and making a game – I’m nearly at the end of this campaign and I’m starting to think about Campaign 2 – so there’s definitely ways I can improve. And maybe when I’ve gotten better, you’ll feel up for another shot at it and I can do a better job showing you the game.
To answer your question (that you wrote nearly a month ago. I am a bad friend) I’m at most 2 sessions away from the end of this current campaign. The Shadow of Dubrenin has been such a cool learning curve for me, there’s so much that I’ve discovered about the game that I like. For some in-game knowledge; the party, having arrived back in the present, have travelled to The Stone Reef, a collection of shattered rocks that once made up an archipelago in the Lethward Sea. They were attacked by Dubrenin’s forces en route, led by a once-friend of the party’s who betrayed them and stole the Kohora Stone, the activation artifact (that you named) which allowed them to use the portals which sent them back in time. After some adventures on The Stone Reef, they arrived at a set of ruins called Arfellion, upon the apex of which Dubrenin was summoning Grom, The Dark Anger – A Great Being whose evil nearly destroyed the world centuries before, and who was locked away in the Void.
Now, they stand before a dying Dubrenin who, having completed the ritual, bleeds out on the plateau while a column of flame bursts forth, and a giant demonic clawed hand reaches out into the world beyond….
It’s all very exciting, and I’m frantically crafting the boss battle to give my players a proper funeral challenge.
Other than my new job, trying to kill my friends in a roleplaying game, and prettying up our flat, I also got a new laptop! It was definitely an indulgence, far too much money and justified by telling myself how much I’ve used my old one. It’s very nice and shiny, I’m using it now to write to you and it’s very crisp and clear. I know this is getting into full nerd territory, but I took the hard drive and SSD out of my old one and put them in this one, which gives it about 1TB of SSD space and the same of hard drive. If your eyes are going glassy, I don’t blame you. 😛
Along with the new laptop we’ve each gotten a new gaming chair too. It seems like a lot of what’s happening at the moment is ‘buy new things’ but I feel like, now that our immediate future is settled in this place, I want to put a little bit of time into a hobby I’ve had for the longest time. I love playing video games and that warrants a little TLC in the form of new things.
In terms of life events, I think I’ve covered mine from the past month-and-a-bit. A new job, new laptop, new year, lots of snow, occassional inter-building drama (landlord hates next door neighbours, and we’re in the middle like a Glasgow-based Switzerland) and the like.
I was struck by something the other day, when looking over my Instagram page. I’ve been posting much fewer pictures of late. On the one hand, is that surprsing – given that my scope of available subjects is dramatically reduced. Gone are the days when I see something out-and-about, or even have an event to post about. And I guess that’s quite sad – it is sad, no doubt. I long for the days when we can wander about collecting memories. That, I think, is a large part of what I’ve struggled with in this whole pandemic. The notion that we’re not really making memories from this. It was nearly a year ago that we went into Lockdown 1, and although there’s a lot of things happened in that time, there also really hasn’t.
Scenic walks ft. this cow.
I kind of sort the past year into phases. ‘Oh this time was our boardgame phase, then my DnD phase, then my gaming phase, then back into boardgames a bit.’ Of course, it’s not that simple, by any stretch, because DnD happened every week and the games were a constant. But it’s pretty much the only way to sort the past year into any semblance of a memorable time. Oh, the year as a whole will be pretty unforgettable – that time the entire world just became apocalypse dwellers, only emerging to forage for food and cough at each other. But individual events are hard to fix into our head.
I’m so incredibly, incredibly glad that you could get up halfway through when you did. I think I’d properly despair if I hadn’t seen you since last April. Really I would.
I miss you a lot. I can’t wait for you to come up – yours is the room with the swords hanging on the wall, which I know you’ll appreciate!
I feel like I don’t have a lot left to say, but I don’t want to stop writing. I haven’t sat and written anything for quite a while, and whenever I do (usually these Letters) it feels awfully nice. I have slow quiet Bon Jovi songs playing, Ash is lying on the bed next to me (not feeling too well poor thing – I’m standing by with tea and commiserating noises) and the lighting is diffused and chill. So what can I tell you about?
Of course! Valentine’s Day! Which was yesterday, as all the November babies can readily attest.
We decided we didn’t really want to do anything big. I think, what with all the aforementioned upgrades to the flat, my bank account was already sad enough, so we just planned a nice meal and a fun escape room in a box for afterwards. But then Ash woke up with a headache – or rather didn’t, sleeping till about 1pm to offset her less-than-restful night, so I spent the first part of the day by myself playing games and watching Inside No.9. (Have you seen it? So good – an anthology of episodes all unconnected, but that they happen in a No.9 – either a flat, or train car, or storage unit, office block, hotel floor, etc. They’re incredibly inventive.)
As a brief aside, you’ve just told me I have a parcel coming tomorrow and now I’m very excited to get it. I’d convinced myself that it was just my new work laptop arriving, which isn’t all that exciting, but now I shall be up at the crack so I can make sure not to miss the postie. Thank you, you spectacular woman.
After Ash got up, we played some more games together (are you sensing a trend? :P) then ate a frankly delicious (if a bit overpriced; we splurged on the good stuff and honestly you couldn’t tell) meal then escaped a deserted cabin.
We did an escape room in York, and then this at-home escape room kit, and I feel like I’m really good at them. When Things Are Normal(tm) and you visit, we shall have to do an escape room here in Glasgow. I think there are some really good ones not too far from our flat. We’ll blast through it and escape in no time. Can one be a professional escaper? We’ll damn well try it!
You mentioned something in a message a few days ago, maybe a week ago. About watching Phantom of the Opera together. I’m incredibly up for that – I know we keep saying that we’ll start a TV show together, but it never materialises. I think a combination of schedules and other things get in the way. But lets do Phantom – neither of us will mind the other singing along with the words, and we can both discuss and disseminate after the fact. Maybe resurrect our sequel idea which trumps Love Never Dies into the absolute floor.
Okay, my eyes are going a bit wonky on the screen, and I feel like I’m just writing for the sake of filling the Letter now. So I’ll stop while I’m (ahead?) and call it a day. I still have some DnD prep to do – the maps are all prepared, ready with some unexpected twists for the party, but the monsters need stat blocks and health and whatnot. So I’ll repair to do that and sign off.
I know you’re feeling down right now, and I wish there was more I could do. You know what thought regularly pops into my head? We’re great friends, we both know that. Go together like shama-lamma-ding-dong or whatever. And you messaged me first, years ago when I posted something about being sad. Your character is so incredible that you started this friendship. Think on that when you’re down. That’s how fucking great you are.
Mink x
Letters to a Ferret 