Archive for July, 2026

Venla plays drums in a school band and this week, they did their first gig. She did amazing. Her band leader says she has “natural rhythm” which leads me to believe Elina and I may not be her real parents.

We recently said goodbye to Auntie Emily and Auntie Christine. They were both much loved and will be missed. I have fond memories of our family boxing day parties. The physics of how we managed to fit such a large family into a small terraced houses doesn’t really stack up. Maybe it was bigger on the inside. The funerals were very moving and there is a bittersweet nature of saying goodbye, celebrating a life, and reconnecting with family you haven’t seen in a while.

I’m delighted to announce that following school sports day, Venla is now a champion bean bag thrower.

The Castle is a novel by Franz Kafka. It tells of a surveyor known as K. who arrives in a village and finds he was summoned by accident. He finds it impossible to navigate the bureaucracy of the castle’s systems, trying in vein to reach the castle authorities.

I was intrieged to see how Kafka could fill 200,000 words on this, but he does and he does it very well. Unfortunately, the novel was unfinished at the time of Kafka’s death. Usually, I would expect either the editor to add a note at the end or someone else to finish it off. This one just ends mid-sentence without any conclusion.

TOEM is a photo adventure game on the Nintendo Switch. Set in a beautiful black-and-white world, you go around taking photos of different things. It’s very chill. I didn’t get very far into it because it’s a puzzle game and not obvious what you need to take photos of, which still wasn’t chill enough for me. But I might come back to it at some point.

Another fun video game. You play a small yellow man who is sent to the fictional Yorkshire town of Barnsworth. You run around the town helping the locals who keep exclaiming “thank goodness you’re ‘ere” and asking for assistance with a variety of different problems. These typically involve jumping and kicking because these are the only controls.

The game is written in a northern dialect. When you start the game it asks you “A’ tha from Tarn?” You can then select “Dead Reyt” in which case the game continues in Yorkshire, or “Sorry What?” in which case I assume it switches back to English. If you want to play about with the settings you need to pause the game and go to “faffin'”.

I completed it over two evenings. There were some bits where I found myself having to loop back and kick everything to work out what was going on next. But mostly the game seamlessly guides you through where to go and there was very little frustration that I often experience with other games.

The storylines are a good comedic take on northern culture, although the town was perhaps a little more run down and dirty than I would like. The voice acting is excellent.

Dredge is a fishing simulator horror game I played on the Nintendo Switch. You take on a fishing captain whose boat is destroyed. You are loaned a new boat by the local mayor and must fish to earn money and dredge supplies so you can expand your boat and explore the world.

Also it’s somehow a horror game at the same time and at night you begin to panic and hallucinate.

This is probably a great game. But the whole panic thing made it way to stressful. It was always a desperate rush to get back to port before nightfall which made it difficult to explore the world and left me feeling the paranoia the character was experencing. I stuck with it for 4-5 days and then gave up.