Nineteen

Last year I started to write a review of Italo Calvino's "If on a Winter's Night a Traveller". I read it while we were in Germany for Christmas. We'd visited Bremen and also undergone the bizarreness of Christmas in another language - the same motifs played out in different words and different customs. I'd tried to write the review in a similar structure to the book but, in a testament to Calvino's writing I couldn't pull it off. Here's the opening paragraph:

Doves are a band from Manchester who traded dance music for rock yet never left their former genre behind. Starting out as Sub Sub, they scored a worldwide hit in 1993 with "Ain't No Love (Ain't No Use)": a timeless dance tune that immediately owns whatever room it plays in. However, subsequent releases by Sub Sub did not catch on and people started to think of the band as a one-hit wonder.

Alexander of Macedon is available in a base game DLC pack alongside Darius of Persia. He also has his own scenario “The Conquests of Alexander”, which is both fun to play and instructive in how to use the formidable benefits of his bonuses and unique units.

Civ ability

I haven't written one of my monthly album digests for over a year. The reasons mostly boil down to a lack of time and motivation but other factors include the changing way in which I listen to music. I bought more albums on vinyl and only a small proportion of those were recently released music. Meanwhile, the attractions of Spotify's release radar proved too great to resist: it is a very convenient way to consume new music.

I managed to read all of the foundation novels since I wrote about the first one. In this post, I’ll write about the next two, which covers the original trilogy of ‘novels’ created from the original short stories. I’ve tried to avoid spoilers.

Ingrid and I love playing Civ VI. It's a fine game that improves on previous versions, adding many layers and mechanics that mean you can vary your playing style. In fact, with the recent Gathering Storm expansion there's now an incredible variety of ways to play. The 39 leaders to play with both reflect and provide the game's increased complexity. Each leader has a slightly different mechanic that influences how you play the game, and of course the leaders you are up against also affect your game play. You can pick leaders to go up against that will make your game easier or harder. Some leaders can even be an existential threat if you spawn near to them and, as I've learned the hard way, it's not always the leaders you expect that cause these problems.

Back in 2012 I wrote a post listing my ambitions for the future. Well it's the future now isn't it? Almost. After all, I’m a whole new person now. Anyway it's probably time to take stock. Have I achieved any of them? Have any of my ambitions changed? What's replaced the things that I've decided not to worry about? What has come after the things I managed to do?

The A-Z of Cooking by Felicity Cloake

The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon was written in 1956 and tells of the experiences of West Indian men moving to London for work. It has been described as the definitive novel about the experiences of the Windrush settlers. The narrative centres on a man named Moses who was one of the first to come to London and finds himself the first port of call for many subsequent immigrants: