1 star: it failed to properly cleanse me when I used it for an enema.

01 811 8055

If you know, you know.

My dog’s a fucking idiot. I wouldn’t trust him to carry a nerf bullet.

Sure, no shade from me here. This was a game for 14-year olds who knew nothing. Given that I don’t think it’s too surprising we ended up with a deck of 200+ cards and… calculating… calculating… 50 wild cards. Or so. It was complete fucking chaos.

The childish fun police are now en route to your location. Your crime: seriosity! Your punishment: 260 card pickup. Drop and give me 260!

The kind of nonsense poker that 14-year olds play with a deck made of four or five different (and not necessarily complete) packs of cards. That’s what kind. It was mostly for pennies and therefore silly fun. This game was different.

The people who can least afford it are the ones with the most ‘hope’. Gambling companies prey on hope.

In a side note, I love playing the 2p pushy machines you find in arcades in seaside towns. But I don’t ever think I’m going to win anything.

In a side, side note, my five year old once really, really, wanted a particular toy from one of those claw machines you get in the same seaside arcades. I told him it probably wasn’t going to happen but I landed the toy he wanted first time. I was a god to that boy for the rest of the day!

Early 1980s. LPs from Woolies, video games from Boots or WH Smiths (I think mostly Mastertronic titles for £2).

More than once I swapped the £1.99 price sticker on a budget game for the £9.99 price sticker on a premium game, mostly in Boots or WH Smiths in Dumfries. Fun bonus fact. This was in the days before EPOS systems and barcode readers at the checkout. Only a bored teenager on the till between me and illicit Commodore 64 glory. I do still wonder if anyone ever bought any of the cheap games for the full ten quid though.

Note: not all Mastertronic games were bad. I loved Kikstart, Finders Keepers, KP Skips Action Biker with Clumsy Colin (I had to look that one up), and The Last V8 - though I think maybe the Last V8 was in their premium £2.99 range.

I was in Chess Club at school (I know, I know, quite the jock!). We played chess. Then we got bored of chess and played backgammon. And backgammon without a bet is dull, so we started gambling. Then gambling became the point of playing. So we moved on to poker.

I remember one poker hand. The deck was made up of about five different packs of cards. Jokers, black twos, one-eyed jacks, bedside queens, and suicide kings were all wild.

I ended up with a hand of five aces. Two were real aces, three were wild cards. I had to raise. I mean, how can you not raise with five aces? What is the point of playing poker if you don’t raise with five aces? Sadly, two other people also had five aces and one of them had three real aces and only two wild cards so they won the hand.

I lost £20 on that single hand and absolutely hated every single moment of playing it because somehow I knew, deep down, that I was going to lose. That was a lot of money for me back then and there were other, far better things I could have dropped it on - LPs were about £5 back then, video games £10.

But, it was a great early lesson on the ‘gotta keep going’ mindset of the gambler combined with the certainty that I was going to lose my money. I’m glad it happened, despite the short term remorse I felt immediately afterwards. I’m just not a gambler. One of the other kids from that same game went on to owe someone else £300 by the time we left school.

I’ve been to casinos a couple of times but took some good advice with me. Think about how much you’d be happy to spend on a night out. If you were going to an arena concert, or the theatre, or a flash sit-down meal, how much would you pay for the night? Think about a casino in the same way. You take a set amount of money which you’re going to ‘spend’ on entertainment. Once you’ve lost all of that, you leave the casino. If you find youself up on the night, hurrah.

“… and that’s why I need you to take the power plant offline.”

We’re posher. We ‘pop the kettle on’.

Given how much it seems to matter to you that fish head soup is a thing because you found it in a book, I retract my entire ‘point and argument’. It’s clearly as British as red double decker buses, fish and chips, self-deprecation, a vague sense of unease at our politicians behaving as if our country is in some way still important, kilts, Cornish pasties, lava bread and cockles, and an Ulster fry. You obviously know more about British food than I do, and are expert in all things and definitely not. to. be. trifled with. whereas I have probably never eaten food in my entire life. You’ve won a disagreement on the internet and will be able to feel powerful and vital for the rest of your day.

I grew up in Scotland.

Also doesn’t mean it’s a common British dish just because it appears in a cook book.

Peas are a shit vegetable and only get used a lot because they’re easy to freeze and just throw into a meal at the last moment. But they pollute the whole dish with their noxious flavor.

Oklahoma onion burgers absolutely are delicious and have become one of my favourites.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Wm-rPBkW2o

I’ve never once eaten fish head soup, or been offered fish head soup, or seen fish head soup on a menu, or heard of any of my friends eating fish head soup. I’m, therefore, not convinced it’s ‘British food’. Does it come with gaslight sauce?

She were lucky!

I scrunch down in the shower tray like a spatchcock chicken.

Pfft. Beginner.

Rotate like a rotisserie chicken.