Come with me now, dear Reader, into the depths of my very consciousness. To a place of darkness and true horror. And discarded Peperami packets.

A Dark Place

This week we stepped into a particularly dark place. A place so dark, in fact, that it is difficult to even begin to explain exactly how dark it is. And that’s precisely why I am not going to attempt it. In fact, I am going to cease to begin to describe my inability to describe exactly how dark that place may be. Period. But if you are genuinely curious, then think Vantablack. Yes. That dark.

Garth Marenghi, of “Darkplace” fame, has embarked upon a horrifying UK tour to promote his newest creation, Incarcerat. His last book, Terrortome, featured an ilicit affair with an evil typewriter and a bride of bone. I am yet to read Incarcerat, but during the show Garth (the creation of Matthew Holness) shared a few abridged stories from the book while elucidating some much needed context. Most of the evening consisted of book readings, although there was a shorter segment where two audience members were called upon to act out a scene under Garth’s direction (to hilarious effect), and the night concluded with a question and answer session. I managed to squeeze in a question about his favourite viscera, mine being the lung, of course.

Take an Àclèaf out of this book…

In a departure from the normal routine, we found ourselves at Boringdon Hall for dinner this week, celebrating the culmination of fourteen years of work. We had a delicious four (plus) course meal at Àclèaf showcasing excellent local produce. It’s definitely up there in quality, although Fletchers remains at the top of our list, closely followed by the Fig Tree @ 36. The Artillery Tower was a nice experience, but a little lacking in ambience and the food wasn’t quite up to the high bar set by Fletchers. I’ll leave you with some pictures from our meal.

Clean-up Efforts are Underway

In a rather freak occurence, one of the inner panes of glass in our conservatory roof shattered this week. My first thought was that something must have struck the glass, but there was no obvious damage to the outside, and there was nothing that looked like it had bounced off the glass onto the patio below. All I can think of is that the wind blowing over the structure must have caused undue stress, leading the normally robust glass to shatter. The roof is quite high which meant that the glass shards have done considerable damage to the floor and some other objects stored in the conservatory. Glass was still falling after a few days until I spent some time removing most of the remaining loose shards. It was slightly disconcerting that I could have been standing under it doing yoga at the time.

This isn’t something I had even considered worrying about. The last time we had a near miss of similar proportions, my laptop battery spontaneously combusted and attempted to ignite the sofa (just over a year ago, in fact). Now we are only ever a windy day away from a Final Destination-esque scenario of falling glass shards. The tiny dust-like pieces are the trickiest, and the shards range from tiny specks up to 3cm shivs. Anyone know a use for thousands of pieces of broken glass?

The Games

Following on from my completion of Deathloop, I’ve gotten stuck in to Resident Evil 4. It’s just as hard as I remembered, and the Remake is remarkably faithful to the original. That’s in no small part due to Resident Evil 4 being the most modern of the series to have the regenerative treatment, and other than the clunky controls, it felt like a fairly functional, modern game. If you really want clunky, try and play one of the original PC ports from the Gamecube. Lets just say I was squished by several boulders during my attempts to find out what keys on the keyboard mapped to “L” and “R”.