In front of the Sovereign House offices on Vision Park in Histon that I work in (as of 2019) there is a gentle pond. It has a fountain that is sometimes spurting forth, water lilies that in their season squat on the surface, and ducks that keep on trying to rear ducklings but keep losing them to herons and other predators. Watching over the pond there is a coffee and sandwich bar d:licious which I patronise once a week. In early 2019 they (whoever they are in this case) decided that this pond needed a makeover. This was a radical makeover which involved removing the fish and terrapins, digging the pond right out, laying new liners, reseeding the surrounding green. As something to put on my website here is a photographic record of the process.

Seeing snowdrops time again at Anglesey Abbey! A wonderfully fine day for doing so! The snowdrops were out! The cream on the mixture of textures and shapes and hues on display. What problem could there be? They even had the underthrow wheel at the mill working! Well it was half-term, a wonderfully sunny day, and most of Cambridgeshire had turned up. We barely found space in the overflow car park to the overflow car park. National Trust's website had warned us. So it was our own fault. My sister had come down to Cambridge which was why we went on this Friday.

One synopsis on offer for "Lookout" is "People lose loved ones in crimes and the criminals are not punished. The daily lives of these people are completely broken. They form a group to realize justice." Or young kid traumatised by miscarriage of justice grows up to seek revenge on the corrupt prosecutor responsible. He enlists or manipulates other victims to help. Bowls along at a good pace. Villains to boo at. Plenty of traumatic experiences and traumatised people. Cast which worked well together. Did not get stuck in a rut but gave an unfolding story. Fun!

We see a lost village in Tyneham, museums in Dorchester, and an Iron Age fort at Maiden Castle when we spent a week in Dorset.

"Rilakkuma and Kaoru" is a totally adorable stop motion animation series starring perpetual loser Kaoru and the soft toys (Rilakkuma Korilakkuma and Kiiroitori) who live with her. See it or lose a magical experience! The soft toys (two bears and one bird) are Sanrio toys. There's a store at Rilakkuma World. The thirteen episodes are short, whimsical, poignant, profound.

Virginia's mother's 80th birthday

Mug. Missing. is a text based, CYOA (choose your own adventure) style game. The plot has you searching for your coffee mug across a range of locations and times, hence the name of the game! There aren't puzzles as such, the choices each player makes decides the order they experience the game in rather than affect the final outcome. I was struck by the observation that the order of episodes doesn't really matter in stories like Don Quixote, let alone TV soap operas. I think Lee Sheldon made this observation in a book he wrote. So I was tempted to do a work of interactive fiction where the player apparently has real choices, but all those choices do is drive the order they experience the episodes in. I don't claim this is an original idea, one of the laws I remember from my university days is if you think you've discovered something new then either someone's already discovered it or you're wrong. But I want to do some kind of game, and a story with multiple paths through it appeals on an aesthetic level to me. "Mug. Missing." is not remotely serious. Achieving a polymorphic story is easier if one can abandon realism or sense to start with. "Mug. Missing." is implemented in a custom DSL transcompiled to Tweego input files. Ruby code is used to do this transcompilation, it's in a Github repository. I have uploaded the game as well to itch.io at Mug. Missing. by Lailoken.

My birthday fell on a Saturday this year, during Feast Week in Histon. A Flower Festival is held in the Parish Church St Andrews Histon during Feast Week, and Virginia and I like to go and see the displays. It was an uncomfortably hot day with a boring blue sky, but looking at flowers diverted attention for a while.

We cruised to Iceland by way of Norway and Ireland on the P&O ship Arcadia which we had been on before.

My sister Laura and her husband Phillip took Virginia and me to Nevills Cafe in Medbourne, a charming old village with a stream running straight through it. By the traditional Church the stream even makes a ford! A lot of water had fallen recently and a Land Rover and trailer made a bigger splash when they rushed across the ford. There's an ancient pack horse bridge there too if one doesn't want to get one's feet wet. The cafe was interesting, but I don't know I want the cucumber and mint presse again. So colourless I thought they had brought me water by mistake! But the taste was really pungent. We then went to Foxton Locks, a picturesque marvel of canal engineering where canal boats can ascend or descend in a staircase of ten locks manned by volunteers. To save water there are side ponds and two sluices for each lock. A popular spot with a pub at the bottom, and a cafe at the top which we patronised for ice cream cones.

Virginia and I have spent three nights in Norfolk, staying at a 'cottage' in Caston. To get the downside out of the way first this was the worst 'cottage' we've stayed in. It was really a grungy annexe facing what could have been a gipsy encampment of cars and caravans and vans and dilapidated sheds. I kept hitting my head on the light fittings. There was a door marked private leading to owner's house, we could see and hear the family as if they were sharing the space with us. The doors are all open with wedges, my bedroom has a glass panel in it Poor Wi-Fi, dirty tea towels. Very few tea bags and no coffee. No folder of local information like shops and doctors (Caston seemed to be economising on village shops and streetlights). We found our way on the Thursday to Grime's Graves where I had last been over 50 years ago. Grime's Graves is a field of neolithic pits where they mined flint, the name Grime comes from Anglo-Saxon Grim which was another name for Odin or Wotan. There was a large party there so I dashed down the pit open to the public to avoid being crowded. Not too bad descending the metal ladder with a protective helmet on (you had to sign a form saying you were fit enough to go down) but arduous climbing back up the 9 metres. You got an impression of just how potholer-ish and dangerous it must have been mining for the treasured black flint nodules, which in their day were much more valuable than gold would have been? There was a small gift shop and exhibition there, the unreliable Satnav took us down into MOD land with barred roads. We then went to Peter Beales Roses where we spent a long time catching up with my cousin Pat and husband, so long I felt for the staff trying to clean in the Rosarium Cafe. It's a very nice place, the gardens seem designed for taking wedding photographs in. There were roses out to see and admire, we weren't buying plants but Virginia found a tartan handbag in the shop which is now a Christmas present, I was tempted by the peculiar snake like hot water bottles yet resisted spending money. by We made our way to a wild garden (not by the signposted route which indicated a sealed gate) which had with it signs on being bird and hedgehog and fairy friendly. On the Friday first went to the very relaxing and blissful Gooderstone Water Gardens, happily not inconvenienced by a nearby road closure. The water gardens are a series of ponds with linking bridges, they have benches for to spend a happy summer afternoon's on snoozing. We tried the kingfisher hideout but that faced a dried up river bed or pool. We then did Oxburgh Hall seeing the Priests Hole but not venturing into it - had tea and an apple cinnamon scone in the tea room hampered by the restoration work going on. Spoke to one of the restorers working on ivory objects including a Chinese spheres inside spheres. Oxburgh Hall is a moated stately home still lived in the family, has plenty of pictures and upper class prejudices like the symmetry in the library. This requires a concealed door of sham fake books with titles expressing family contempt and disdain at money-grubbing sons-in-law and Kings who fail to reward. Really tipped down that Friday, including as we took in Banham Zoo. Packed with young adults in the cafe when we went to have a bite to eat to wait for the rain to relent. Banham Zoo is a zoo. The animals (apart from the human animals) are in enclosures. You could see a tiger and meerkats and sea lions. On the Saturday on the way home we dropped in to see Dads Army Museum in Thetford. A tribute to how much loved the BBC TV series was and is, there is a lot of material there. We didn't stay long enough to patronise the cafe.

Our soft toys have been with us to numerous places, sometimes in person but more often in spirit. Their view of the world and the places in the world are different to ours, and deserve to be heard. So I have interviewed them, and gathered together their comments into a few web pages using Twine to organise them. Go to Toy trips to read what they have to say! I did a version of these pages as a virtual treasure hunt for Virginia - so she could find where her presents and cards were hidden on her birthday in 2020.

A lunatic version of "Peter Pan" from the "Cornley Drama Society", Mischief Theatre's fictional amateur dramatic group famed for their ineptitude. Utterly glorious and inventive. Peter Pan Goes Wrong follows the source material quite faithfully, that is as faithfully as cast conflicts and lack of acting ability and technical blunders and serious accidents allow. The whole Tinkerbell episode was transcendental joy.