I finally have a cause.

I HATE PROTESTS. I hate protesting.

They want to close my library. Well, not my library specifically, but possibly yours or the library I might have looked in on in the future. The library I might have sheltered from the rain from. Spent 10 minutes in before catching a train. The library I might have found a gem of local history in. The library I might have stolen a cheeky kiss in. The library I might have owed a fortune in fines. To close libraries is to limit experience, to shut off opportunity and to leave people without books.

The Victorians gave us capitalism, they destroyed village communities they drove dirty railways and chimneys through every town and city. But they democratised learning. I think of Oadby Library. My Haunt. A small but cleverly thought out philantropic gift from the Victorian Ellis family. In the village where they lived they ensured the railway bypassed the village (sneaky) and built parks and gardens, swimming baths and a public library. They exploited, but it was an economy which gave access to individuals in my village to books. A fundamental improvement of Victorianism was this introduction of schooling, free education for all. In my mind, it is this which had more impact on the development of a middle class than any other. People could escape the social boundaries set in place by their class through learning, and this education came for free at libraries.

I was brighter than my classmates because I read. I may have read anyway, but the weekly visit with my parents to the library was vital, when I was young. Being able to walk to the library coloured every one of my teenage summers. Maxing out my library card was a dangerous and continuous trial and delight. Breaking my back carrying books on popular science, fantasy, psychology, history, graphic novels (dear God I remember the first manga) and fiction, is an activity I continue to pursue to this day.

It will not do to say that there is another library a few miles on. It is the poor who cannot afford the bus ticket, who haven't got the cars, who are unwilling to make the effort to go a little bit further just because their kid wants to read the latest charlie and lola. The middle classes will be outraged, of course. They will suffer less, they will miss it more, but they can afford to make the effort.

I will go to the library tomorrow. I will get my book. I'm not sure what it will be. But I'm sure just entering will give me the same feeling of excitement, of prospects. Enormous prospects, not just that I will find something fabulous, but that doing so will make me cleverer. I just hope I'm not too late, jumping on the bandwagon just before it passes.

30 days of gaming part 1 of 6

Day 1 - Very First Video Game.

Pokemon Blue:

I am sure when it comes to gamers and especially girls who were a children of the 90s pokémon stands out as the game which got people playing. I played, I conquered, I caught 'em all.

Day 2 - Your Favourite Character.

John Marston - Red Dead Redemption.

I hated all the most recent grand theft auto games for one principal reason. The protagonists were cunts. The gameplay was fun, I like thesandbox, but the characters were just idiots who let themselves get caught up in awful situations. I admit my main experience is with the ever dependable Nico Bellic. A man who comes to liberty city hoping for a new life, and instead of getting a job, tags along with and gets screwed over by his inane and equally stupid cousin. What is there to connect with. Nico was nothing like me, and I certainly didn't want to have sex with him. (The bits with girlfriends weirded me out.. because WHY? Why would anyone date the silly bastard... he didn't exactly smoulder with bad boy sexy, he was just always getting into situations where killing was the only option.

This brings me onto John Marston. I was nervous when I bought this... I'd paid £35 for it and if it didn't pay dividends it would have all been wasted. I.e. if Marston had not been someone I connected with I would have kicked myself. My fears were quickly allayed. John is surly, quiet and cowboy-like but polite to women, generally kind and always trying to do the right thing. This frustrated James who was trying to play marston as evil... the game rarely gives you that option. Marston is a fully rounded character. He tries to do the right thing, but he is occassionally vengeful. The ambiguities of the west are fed to the player through his character. The landscape is a once lawless, and yet Marston's situation is being controlled by the corrupt government boys whose appearances open and close the story. I was interested in the story in ways which other games usually fail to engage me. Plus he's sexy as!

Day 3 - An Underrated Game

Chocobo Dungeon Wii.

Admit it... you've never heard of this game. And when I bought it, neither had I. My expectations were as low as the price. It is a rogue dungeon quest game where you step onto dungeon maps and have no clue where you are going or how to complete to the next level. The protagonist is an over-friendly and very helpful chocobo. Voice acting/ cut scenes aside this was a really fun game... until I got stuck on a dungeon where I only had one hit point. Ouch.

Day 4 - Guilty Pleasure.

Plants Vs. Zombies.

I think guilty pleasures are the games you play for waaay too long, pointlessly. Games with no story, no beginning, no end. This goes for most addictive games whether they are casual or hardcore. Super Meat Boy certainly falls into this category. As do the katamari games. I'm not going to apologise, my mum certainly doesn't when she plays spider solitaire for four hours at a time.

Day 5 - Game character I think I'm like.

It was going so well. This would be so much easier if I was a man. There would be characters to aspire to, characters who I would love to be, or love to be mates with. But for girls? What games actually cater for them.I can think of one or two examples of "strong female characters" such as Lara Croft, or Bonnie from Red Dead. But the woman in video games has for so long been the princess to be rescued... or the sexy woman. I'm not saying I'm not sexy, I'm just saying that it's not my only character trait. I don't want to pretend I'm like some boring cardboard cut out of femininity. So for that reason I am choosing... Oh wait.. Kirby's male. Did you seriously have to claim that one?

I guess I'll just have to hope that one day I can be half as interesting, exciting and dangerous as:

GLaDOS I think we can put our differences aside.

Don't normally do these... but.

Let's get this straight. I like to write what I want to write about, But for the few weeks I'm gonna try and post and explain my choices for these. I won't do one update a day... this isn't fucking tumblr. But I will go through these a couple at a time and explain what's great about them.

Day 1 - Very first video game
Day 2 - Your favourite character
Day 3 - A game that is underrated
Day 4 - Your guilty pleasure game
Day 5 - Game character you feel you are most like (or wish you were)
Day 6 - Most annoying character
Day 7 - Favorite game couple
Day 8 - Best soundtrack
Day 9 - Saddest game scene
Day 10 - Best gameplay
Day 11 - Gaming system of choice
Day 12 - A game everyone should play
Day 13 - A game you’ve played more than five times
Day 14 - Current (or most recent) gaming wallpaper
Day 15 - Post a screenshot from the game you’re playing right now
Day 16 - Game with the best cut scenes
Day 17 - Favourite antagonist
Day 18 - Favourite protagonist
Day 19 - Picture of a game setting you wish you lived in
Day 20 - Favourite genre
Day 21 - Game with the best story
Day 22 - A game sequel which disappointed you
Day 23 - Game you think had the best graphics or art style
Day 24 - Favourite classic game
Day 25 - A game you plan on playing
Day 26 - Best voice acting
Day 27 - Most epic scene ever
Day 28 - Favourite game developer
Day 29 - A game you thought you wouldn’t like, but ended up loving
Day 30 - Your favourite game of all time

Painfully hard platform puzzlers.

I started playing two different indie platformers today. Both of them are spectacular but I found the differences extremely unnerving. Warning: Spoilers, nothing major, but you have been warned.

Super Meat Boy:

The game is tongue-in-cheek parody of the hyper-violence and masochism in video games. The games protagonist, meat boy, goes on a super mario quest to save his female friend, bandage girl from the grasp of doctor fetus... an evil baby. It takes the plot of super mario, and desecrates it with meaty bloody juice splodges designed to represent meat boy whenever he hits anything sharp. Hacksaws and hyperdermic needles have their wicked way with our unfortunate protagonist, but he brushes it off and respawns within seconds. (Sometimes before you realise he'd even died.) The gameplay is spectacularly fun, with just the right combination of impossible challenges, and satisfying reward. The best reward comes at the end of each level when all attempts at completing it are shown simultaneously in a live-action replay. You watch with satisfaction as a lone SMB completes the level in one fell swoop, or else, watch 40 or 50 meat boys simultaneously take on the level. Each is picked off at all the different obstacles you had to grind past, with one lone lucky guy reaching bandage girl. Pure fun.

Limbo:

In comparison Limbo, is one of the most stark, goosebump inducing, intense gaming experiences. Black and white, total quiet, and barely anything moves.

The reds and browns of SPM still echoed in my eyes as I sat down to play this game. It was like I'd eaten too much chocolate (insert your drug of choice here), and now was time for the come-down. Limbo has no introduction, a boy wakes up in a black and white forest and he must go forwards, (going back gives you the "wrong way achievement.") Totally alone, he trudges through the forest, jumping haphazardly over obstacles, and then gets brutally killed in a bear trap. It's a sickening feeling. You mourn a just met character. Then he respawns... but painfully slowly. Unlike in SMB there is no promise of the cathartic watch all the painful deaths, in fact there was no beginning to the level at all, no comforting tutorial. The help section of the game is like an ikea manual, a to jump, b for action, left stick to move. The developers seem to know that once a seasoned player is looking for "help", it's because they want some kind of explanation. They offer none.

Drowning is the worst. No insta-respawn here, you watch as the bubbles slow and his eyes close. At least the bear trap was quick. The kid becomes instantly more vulnerable, instantly younger. You've watched him trudge through the forest barely able to jump, and now he's never even been taught to swim. It's unbearable.

Both games are beautifully crafted and ingeniously well-thought out. They were both worth every penny I paid for them, but playing them one after another was like going on a bouncy castle and then cutting myself for ever believing I deserved to have fun.

Is it worth it?

THE PRO-CON LIST

For doing a part-time MA.

Pros:

• I love to study, and I get a lot out of the learning experience.
• I am pursuing an academic career.
• I am doing well in both aspects of my life; at work and at University
• I enjoy the work, and feel as though I am developing myself.
  

Cons:

• I have no time, and very little social life.
  
• I haven't been to salsa in months.
• The house is a total mess and will always be like this.
• I don't have enough time to support James.
  
• I have very little money.
  
• My family are having to pay for me to get through this degree.
  
• Academic life grows more terrifying and impossible by the day. Whilst I found my undergraduate contemporaries to be fashionable at best, the people around me now are bright and wonderful. I continue to wonder whether my academic interests have any merit whatsoever.
  

The cons probably would outweigh the pros if it weren't for my selfishness. If I was to quit the studying I would have more time for James, more money to support us both and more time for a social life. But I wouldn't be as happy in myself and I don't think I would be as satisfied throughout life if I didn't continue to give this a go. I would regret it. This is short-term. Two years feels like forever right now, but it will pass.

I need to write more about what it is like working in a kitchen. To talk about filling and emptying the cold counter, to explain about the red hot stove which burns me if I simply look at it. I need to explain the thrill of service, of a million things to do at once, and only rigorous and continual quickness will get them done.

Alas there is no time.

1 pot cookery.

So incredibly unfair. In the last few months the yet living fat lady of "two fat ladies" fame, stole my idea and published a book of single pot recipes... Incidentally why have I not bought it yet? These are simple, ingenious little recipes which require less kit and thus; critically less washing up. I'm talking stews, soups, warming delicious recipes. Well today I made a single pot lentil soup, and flapjack which is so ridiculously simple it might as well be one pot.

Perfect Lentil Soup:

Makes 8-10 portions:

1 Onion chopped,

3-4 cloves of garlic, crushed.

2 chicken stock cubes,

2 litres of water.

500g of lentils,

1-2 cans of chopped tomatoes ( ideally two, but I was being stingy today.)

1 can of baked beans,

oil,

salt and pepper,

spices: chilli powder, ground chilli flakes, cumin. mixed ground spice.

1. Heat the oil gently and add the spices. Fry gently, add the chopped onion and leave on a low heat till the onion softens. Add the garlic, and continue to fry.

2. Add the chopped tomatoes and make up some stock with the cubes and water.

3. Add the lentils quickly followed by the water. Bring to the boil and then allow to simmer gently until the lentils begin to soften.

4. Add the baked beans. Cook until it is a nice soupy texture, the beans are warm and the lentils are completely soft.

This is the most durable food I know. I make a big batch and then eat it for a week without getting bored. I love to eat it with lightly poached eggs, so the yolk mixes in with the soup and makes it thick and rich. It's delicious with cheese and bread, tonight I have put brie on top and it's melted in perfectly. It would be amazing with white fish, chicken and pork. It's a winter warmer. If you make it thicker you can serve it on spaghetti with butter and cheese. You can bake it in the oven and eat it with salad.

Flapjacks:

I seem incapable of making food in small amounts. I tripled these quantities and put the mix in a rectangular baking tray (usually used for roast potatoes). This recipe is from the ladybird cookery book of my childhood.

3oz of butter,

3oz of sugar,

30z of golden syrup

6oz of oats.

1. Preheat oven to 160 C. Grease a tray and line with greaseproof paper. The tray needs to be big enough to hold the amount of flapjack you want to make. Inexact, but true!

2. Melt the butter on a low heat in a pan, add the sugar and golden syrup. Stir it altogether don't let it so much as bubble. If it boils the pan will never, ever, ever come clean. Pour the oats in. Mix it altogether gently.

3. Put it in the tray. Put the saucepan in the sink, and fill it with hot water. (You'll thank me later). Bake the mix for 20-25 minutes. It will still be soft when it comes out the oven. If it's hard when it leaves the oven it will be like trying to eat rocks.

4. Let it cool a bit then remove it from the tray.

5. I'm gonna drizzle some dark chocolate on these bad boys.

They smell amazing. I freaking love cooking!

It's official, I'm a pervert...

But then, so are you. And so is your best friend, your mum, your neighbour. In fact it's getting so fucking crowded in here that I'm wondering why I ever aspired to being a pervert in the first place.

I went to a seminar today run by Dr Adam Phillips, a psychologist so renowned he has a proper wikipedia page which might have been written by someone other than him. It was the use of the word "perversion" in clinical practice. For swathes of the 20th Century perversion has been a term designed to separate people in categories. Specifically "normal people" and "perverts" and these categories have been created based on the normative values of particular groups. Psychoanalysts and Christians being just two. Oh what company the scientists are keeping.

However more recent study of psychoanalysis has veered away from seeing people in these categories and has begun to look at the tendencies. Perverse activities vs. perverts. These activities are defined as actions which excite people because they are explicitly or implicitly forbidden by parents. Perversions are activities you believe you shouldn't be indulging in.

They are a way of dealing with and controlling your own sexuality. So if your particular fetish happens to be feet, in my opinion that is no different to being coprophiliac or having a perverse interest in heterosexual penetrative sex with a significant other. Pic related.

It was also fascinating to gain a grounding in psychoanalytic theory. Which perhaps will not help me particularly with my Renaissance Literature MA but continues to fascinate me in ways which probably aren't healthy. The most perfect and simple example of the issues presented by Freud were quoted to me today. "To the child the mother is everything, but to the mother the child is not everything." All those times our needs went unfulfilled, are what drives us to treat our partners the way we do. The way we with-hold sex. Because we can and because we couldn't always get food when we wanted it as a child. It's a fascinating topic, but needs to be taken with a pinch of salt.

As Phillips today informed me, psychoanalysts are the ultimate sadists. They categorise people as perverts in order to have the false sensation that they control the "norms" of sexual behaviour. They do this because sexuality is unnerving. We wonder why people choose to have sex with people of the same sex, why on earth they enjoy pain, or fetishize feet because we are afraid of these different sexualities.

Plus the heavy reliance on Freud leads to some weird conclusions. Men we are told are more perverse than women because they fear castration, so they must find things which arouse them in case they lose their penises. This bullshit has never really flown with me. Women are just as perverse as men, but why on earth would they show it. I am inclined to believe (alongside the unnamed woman in stoller's article: "The Term Perversion") that once women's liberation is fully realised that women will be able to be as open about their own sexuality. They will stop pretending to be content to be the object, (if they still are? This is weird territory for me,) and be more able to talk about what interests them. Having spoken to women about masturbation and most of the time, hit a brick wall, I feel that openness about sexuality will continue to be limited to the bedroom. Or worse cosmo magazine. (Try Scarlet, it got a bit tiring after a while, but it is actually attempting to explore sex, as opposed to normalise.)