Offline life got interesting

[liv]

I've had visitors here for most of the last couple of weeks, mostly jack but also forestofglory for a few days. So that gave me a good excuse to be a tourist in my own locality, but also meant that I wanted to spend time talking to the people actually present in the room, which led to being fairly quiet online.

jack and I had made tentative plans with mathcathy to go to the beach the first weekend he was here, and lo and behold the weather was the best it's been so far for our expedition. mathcathy suggested Formby and drove us there. We were a bit discouraged at first because it was incredibly busy and we spent about 40 minutes just trying to get in to the carpark, but once we'd given up and parked a little way down the road, it was perfect. We walked through a pine forest (which is a red squirrel nature reserve) to the dunes, where the sand was almost painfully hot to cross. It turned out that most people had just gone straight through the carpark and stayed in a huddle as soon as they got to the sand, so just a little way further down the beach it was almost empty.

It was pretty much the platonic ideal of a day at the beach, made real. Formby has miles of golden sand, and the sea and sky were bright blue in the hot sun. We made a sandcastle, and sunbathed a lot (the factor 30 sunscreen did a very good job apart from in a few spots where we missed), and swam in the sea and ate a picnic lunch and people-watched and chatted. The sea was absolutely chock full of jellyfish near the shoreline, which was a bit scary, but we looked them up online later and they were the harmless, non-stinging moon jelly kind.

During the week, jack took forestofglory to see the monkey forest, which is an odd tourist attraction. There are literally just a bunch of monkeys (Barbary macaques, specifically), in a park, that just kind of live there. People observe them, and keep the area safe for them, but they aren't exactly in captivity or on display as in a typical wildlife park. I haven't seen them myself yet, but I very much intend to. I did manage to flex my working hours a bit in order to join them wandering around Maer, which is a pretty little village notable for the church where Charles Darwin married Emma Wedgwood. And we finally made it to the ancient bluebell wood just outside Keele, just at the tail end of the flowering. (It's a bit awkward to get into the wood from the road, so we had to explore a bit, but it's incredibly lovely inside!)

jack and I also made minor side-trips to Apedale park and Mow Cop village. mathcathy introduced me to Apedale a while back. It used to be a mining site, and there's still an industrial heritage museum there, which I'm saving up for a rainy day; while the sun's shining it's a lovely place just to go for a walk and admire the views of Staffordshire. Mow Cop is mainly famous for some Christian history, as it was a big centre for charismatic Christian worship in the early 19^th century. It also has an impressive high hill with a folly at the top, and really quite incredible views of the countryside; it's sort of at the edge of the Peak District.

I should have taken some photos to convince people that Stoke is not all dull, ugly post-industrial horribleness, but I didn't take a camera with me on any of these trips. I'll get to that, at some point. The bluebell woods, Maer, Apedale and Mow Cop are all within a few miles of my house, I should note.

There was also quite a lot of playing of board games, and some purchasing of same. I used the excuse of having visitors to finally make it to the game shop in Hanley. I succumbed and bought my own copy of Agricola, plus some Dominion expansions to share between us. And the tea-based game, Darjeeling was on special offer, so I bought that too. It's quite a simple game, though with some original mechanics, and the components are just satisfyingly solid. Even aside from the tea theme, I'm pleased I bought it, though I strongly suspect it would be better with three or four players than with two.

We discovered again that it is absolutely impossible to find a decent meal in Hanley, even though it's supposed to be the "city centre"; we ended up in a Wetherspoons which is about the best we could manage. That allowed us to return to the shop for an evening of actually playing games. I ended up playing two small-ish games, Speicherstadt and Finca. I liked Speicherstadt a lot; it's a fairly straightforward resource collecting game, but with a Dutch auction mechanic that is both original and delightfully vicious. It's high up on my want list, along with Tobago. Finca is exceptionally pretty, and it has a cute mechanic for determining how many resources you get, which more or less eliminates randomness altogether. However, it's not terribly strategic. I think it would make a good present for older kids, because it's just so lovely to handle, and somewhat competitive but doesn't demand a lot of attention to planning a strategy several turns in advance. I may also have designed and purchased a Magic deck.

Other than that, I've been writing grants and marking exams. Life is good.

Comments

[oursin]

I know about Mow Cop! - at least, what I actually know is based on a play about the local charismatic Methodists of the early C19th produced at the Vic in Newcastle sometime in the late 60s called The Burning Mountain (as I recall).

[liv]

It's a very cool place. The internet seems to think that the name is a combination of a Welsh origin word for hill (it rhymes with pow and not with snow) with a Saxon origin word for high place, which I rather like. I can also quite see why the charismatic folk got into outdoor worship there, too.

[nanaya]

The monkey forest looks like a really awesome tourist attraction, I have to say.

[nanaya]

Also: hurrah for the first Dragonette album! The second one is not nearly as good :-(