Had my new bike stolen last week. I’d had dinner with KB at House of Momo off Kingsland High Road (good, though service was kind of hipster and was a bit chilly sitting near the door) and as we were coming out the restaurant I was talking about how much I was liking my new bike, having just had a particularly nice ride through the back streets from Farringdon to get to said venue and then there is wasn’t. Luckily our insurance covered it so I was able to get a new bike by the end of the week. It was delivered without pedals. Irritations aside, the process of reporting it and getting the insurance sorted out made me feel quite grown up and organised, I mean I am 42 so feel like I should get this feeling atleast occasionally, a silver lining.

We played Mysterium on Friday. It’s a co-op game, we had six players; one ghost (me, the person who’d read the rules), five psychics. The ghost has to communicate the classic Cluedo dimensions of a murder (perpetrator, location, weapon) by silently passing the players cards with surreal painted imagery representing their haunted dreams. The psychics have to solve the mystery(um). It’s interesting because it’s a highly asymetric co-op game. Usually in a co-op game e.g. Pandemic or Shadows Over Camelot or something, all players essentially follow the same rules with some small adjustments representing their character’s unique place in the team, they’re all playing against the game. In Mysterium the ghost is playing a completely different game and the rest of the players are playing against the ghosts shortcomings as a communicator (both structuraly induced and individual). I enjoyed it, as the ghost there’s a good amount of thinking and decision making to be done and it’s pleasantly stressfull and occasionally quite agonising to hear everyone else missing the visual cues that you thought would be crystal clear. I’ve played twice now both times as the ghost and I don’t really have any sense of how the game plays for investigators. Everyone professed to have enjoyed themselves but it’s possible they were just being polite.

I read a couple of books.

The War of the Worlds which was good ( I heard Amor Towles on a podcast saying (from memory) that “the canon” is not necessarily good at selecting the best stuff but time is good at shedding mediocrity – which sounds about right. It’s rare to read something over 70 yrs old that’s not atleast interesting). It’s interesting to read the original source having seen so many adaptations, the BBC adaptaion at xmas, Steven Spielberg’s early-aughts rendition, Jeff Wayne’s prog rendition, Independence Day etc. etc. etc. An unexpected point of interest in reading the original was the logistical information about London at the turn of the century, how trains worked and so on. Also there’s quite a few instances of people ‘ejaculating’ when they have something urgent to say which, I’m sorry to say, never fails to amuse me.

Broadsword Calling Danny Boy by Geoff Dyer was also good. Short and sweet. It’s basically Dyer recounting the plot and action of Where Eagles Dare decorated with a lifetimes-worth of entertaining observations. I don’t think I’ve seen that film since I was 10 or so. Apropos of nothing, Dyer also has a book called Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It.