"Dread Nautical" is a cartoony turn-based RPG-lite set on a cruise ship where a restful cruise has turned into a battle against weird malevolent mutations. You have to battle your way up the decks of the ship to find an answer to what is going on. As RPGs go this is simpler to play than many. As you fight and scavenge you get food to keep your characters alive, scraps and tokens to mend and upgrade your weaponry and your characters. There is a fun range of weapons to be employed, and locales on the ship to do battle in. With observation the battles are not very hard, the last boss fight is the hardest. You will need to work out your enemies' vulnerabilities. Cowardly whacking a foe in the back works well. Each deck has quite a number of areas to explore but you will find there may not be time to explore them all before making your way back to the lobby each time. Spend too long on a deck and you may get swarmed by monsters appearing. The tone is very tongue in cheek, the characters make amusing comments now and then, and the bad guy behind it all has a line in suitably menacing voice overs. Not profoundly deep gameplay or story but fun.

The Dumpling Tree is a Chinese restaurant but a Chinese restaurant that serves different Chinese dishes to the normal Chinese restaurant in the UK. I like having their "dirty dozen" which is twelve varied dumplings.

In "Reset" a university student is on her way to a bookshop when the bus she is on explodes killing everyone. Unfortunately time loops back and she has to die again and again. Getting off the bus is difficult enough let alone stopping the time loop by saving everyone on the bus. I like dramas involving time loops and time travel and this is one of the best I've seen. It's a story about ordinary people in an impossible situation, trying to solve a complex problem and unravel a mystery. All the people on the bus are fleshed out real characters, not 2D stereotypes. The scenes are varied: the claustrophobia of the bus, interrogation and investigation at a police station, a secret cat lover's lair, animation fan events, down at heel neighbourhoods. The action moves along without feeling forced or repetitive. I was gripped by this drama, investing myself into the story and people in the story.

I'm moving my personal website from being hosted by Dreamhost to Hostgator. This move is for saving money alone, "Dreamhost" have been satisfactory otherwise. The only real issue I've had is with mailboxes filling up and having to be destroyed and recreated. A little fun moving to "Hostgator". At first hiccups using "ssh" - I didn't understand til now that existing public keys in ".ssh" (I'm on a Mac) can complicate things. Also "Hostgator" don't seem to have a facility for bulk editing email forwarders like "Dreamhost" do. Switching the nameservers over was stressful. My personal website started giving certificate errors and 404 errors (page not found). I think I hope it's stable now. And that I recreated all the email forwarders correctly. "Apple Mail" also behaved badly - so as not to lose emails they all had to be saved in folders on the local machine. It is also prone to crashing out afterwards. Perhaps I need to destroy and recreate the accounts.

"Milo and the Magpies" is a very charming game in which you assist poor lost cat Milo back to his home, evading the magpies which pester him. The creation of solo artist Johan Scherft (with a little help) the hand drawn scenes are delightful yet familiar. The game is not too hard (I finished it without help) though one puzzle I wasn't sure how one was meant to solve it. I also didn't find all the hidden objects which are not necessary to finish the game. You don't play Milo himself, rather you poke objects and see what happens. At times you pick up objects and use them (a different mode of gameplay). Get it right and Milo can be prodded to move from garden to garden. As Milo moves from garden to garden you get to learn a little about the people who inhabit the different houses. The ending is sweet. I found myself clicking round each scene trying to discover objects which could be poked. Some of the objects are animated which helps finding what to poke. Solving the puzzles requires careful observation.

Covid is still around two years after we all started wearing masks and social distancing and undergoing lockdowns. A lot of people have died. A lot of people have been seriously financially impacted. But Virginia and I have not caught Covid ourselves (yet), nor have we suffered like others. I can only write about our experience of the Covid years. 2020 was my last working year. I was expecting to have my work colleagues gather round my desk on the last day. There would be a few speeches, there would be a few gifts to unwrap (and I would be surprised by how generous everyone was). I would make a difficult speech about farewell and please keep in touch. Instead we all started working remotely, and coming into the office required management approval (an inconvenience as I had asked for packages to be delivered there!) I also used the office as a place for offsite backups, I've now switched to the cloud. There had been times in the office I wished I could work from home - but actually doing so was lonely. Even if they were just work colleagues I missed being with them. They did the best they could with Microsoft Teams for when I retired, but my career finished not with a bang but a whimper. Virginia carried going into work as she worked at Addenbrookes Hospital. This was one plus for the Covid years - she could park onsite again and for free. Telephone and video appointments replaced patients coming in for consultations. The Covid years accelerated this trend, a healthy trend as some patients had long journeys to and from Addenbrookes. Her work has become a lot more stressful when patients started turning up again, trying to persuade them to follow social distancing and having only patients in the waiting room. Another trend accelerated by the Covid years is the move to having stuff delivered rather than buying in the High Street. I do miss browsing in bookshops I admit, but on a more serious note this trend has led to well established chains of stores closing with job losses. Some delivery drivers check you're in when they deliver, others just dump packages on front door steps in the rain. For Amazon at least one can track one's parcel down to the street the delivery driver is in which is a big step forward. At the start of Covid getting slots for food deliveries was nigh impossible - I wrote a program to check for free slots at one stage at different times of the night. We couldn't eat out once a week as was our habit. Doing so is important as it guarantees a solid period of time we would be sitting down together and talking. So we started dining in which may not have had waiter or waitress service but was still a treat. Not dining out helped save money I have to admit. Another way Covid helped us save money was by preventing us going on holiday. I was lucky I squeezed in a halfway round the world trip just before the restrictions came, and Virginia also squeezed in a trip to Cornwall with a friend Sandra. We had been booked to go on a cruise to Denmark in July 2020. We had made arrangements to see Lego House which we were really looking forward to. Naively I had thought back in March things might have settled down in a month or two! The Denmark cruise got cancelled and replaced by a cruise to Spain for November. This too got cancelled fairly quickly. It felt like a small miracle when we did finally go on a cruise to the Canary Islands in November 2021! During the Covid restrictions people weren't supposed to travel far so they used their front gardens in lieu of beaches at the seaside. The Covid years put the NHS in the UK under intense strain. People expressed their support for (or reliance on) the NHS by pictures of rainbows in windows, or drawn in chalk on driveways. For some time people would stand in their doorways on Thursdays at 8pm and clap their hands to applaud what the overstretched doctors and nurses were doing. Unfortunately gratitude to the doctors and nurses also didn't extend to MPs thinking they deserved more than a token pay rise. It also didn't extend to people not panic buying which hurt those less able to shop. Toilet paper and other essentials became in short supply. There was a lot of pilfering of masks and toilet paper from the hospital at least. The Covid years affected people in different ways. There were good neighbours here and there looking after the less able and elderly. In Histon there were co-ordinators for different streets to try to organise support. Soft toys appeared in many windows to amuse children passing by. Some people were blase about the risks - not wearing masks in Tesco including the security guard tasked with asking people to do so. Others were perhaps overly enthusiastic in their cautiousness. Putting post away in a garage and not opening it for two weeks. Crossing over the road to avoid any contact. Getting angry if you got within 10 metres of them rather than the mandated 2 metres. For a time you had to queue outside foodshops with 2 metre gaps painted on the ground, and one-way systems for the handful of people allowed in. The Covid years introduced a lot of us to Zoom which became a vital means of staying in touch with one's nearest and dearest relatives, as well as those farthest and dearest. Indeed holding regular "Zoom" sessions meant more contact than before with my relatives. A Powerpoint quiz in one Zoom meet up with Virginia's folks inspired me to try my hand at quizzes myself, and I've done quite a number by now. It has been a learning exercise, originally I started with 10 rounds of 10 questions each, but cut that down to 7 rounds. I feel now multiple choice works best rather than my original scheme of matching up ten names to ten pictures say. The Covid years also meant vaccinations and "PCR" tests and lateral flow tests. Virginia is regularly tested at the hospital, I didn't get tested until our first cruise after lockdowns began. A lot of doctors and nurses have gone the extra mile, and deserve more recognition than what tax avoiding MPs have given them.

We had a week on the Isle of Man, seeing Manx cats and ruined abbeys. Poor Virginia had an accident on the ferry back to Heysham.

I don't want to write this page. I cry even now as I write these words. I cried Virginia and I cried on Amelia's last day and the days after. Now that we don't have Tabitha and Amelia there is a hole a void in our lives. It hurts it really hurts. We gave Amelia "Thrive" as a treat - she would scatter it over the floor and eat it off the carpet. I would clean the litter trays and then she would immediately use them again. The mats by the litter trays ended up in a tangled mess and the litter everywhere when she used the litter trays. She liked going into the enclosure after midnight, zooming up the cat tree, and refusing to descend so I could sleep. She liked walking across the board when we were playing Scrabble, and was skilled with her back legs on scattering the tiles. She could hide when we were going on holiday or wanting to take her to the vets. She could retreat inside the spare room bed and refuse to be bribed out. Once we though we had lost her and went searching round the neighbourhood only to find her hiding there. She would come downstairs whining for attention then return back upstairs when she had successfully disturbed you. Once she escaped over our back fence. Her claws were sharp and her teeth left marks. Despite all this it was a godsend to have her in our lives. She added life to our lives. She bound us to the world around us. What matters is not what other people do for us, but what we do for others. Thank you Amelia that I was able to look after you for so long.

Wagamamas is a chain of restaurants in the UK which offer up Japanese style food. Sometimes nearly all the offerings on the menu seem to be infected with chilli, and I don't need my tastebuds ignited like some do. At its best a nice change of cuisine to other restaurants. I like the "banana katsu" dessert.

"The Sound of Magic" is pure poetry, pure magic. Abandoned by her parents, assailed by debt collectors and overdue on the rent, a schoolgirl attempts to balance school and part-time jobs and looking after her younger sister. Against herself she is drawn to an abandoned theme park and the mysterious character living there who claims to be a magician. Despite the rumours about him and a missing schoolgirl. A confident and wise short series about the power of magic if we believe in it to redirect lives. The power of magic to make us believe in magic. The power of magic to help us come out the other side. In common with "The Sound of Music" there are musical numbers in this (in the middle of the final credits the cast do a little number as an encore). Creative and entrancing.

A cruise around the Western Med, seeing Gaudi's art in Barcelona and Gibraltar again, taking a land train in Nice.

"Cardpocalypse" is set in a school under attack by a mysterious purple goo. Your character Jess starts off her first day by getting the Power Pets card g Came banned, but it is by playing Power Pets that Jess will be able to save her friends and stop the purple goo taking over the world. Cartoon style visuals, simple but effective graphics as you visit various rooms in the school. There are plenty of side quests and stories to uncover. Gameplay is set over a number of days as you learn what's behind the purple goo. The various quests, and trading, helps you to build up strong decks which you will. There are optional battles you can fight but the game is well balanced. The main storyline battles are not impossible but feel good to win. The card decks themselves are inventive and colourful. As you play you can change the rules of the card battles to some extent for extra interest. Great fun.

Sooner than expected we now have another cat living with us (or we're living where he is). It is a he and I keep saying she after all those years we had "Tabitha" and "Amelia". A 7-year old male Ragdoll called "Bandit" was listed as needing rehoming on a site Virginia visits. It was too early the first time he was listed, but after he was listed for the third time we thought of offering him a home. As did other people so we had to go and be interviewed by "Bandit" to see who he chose. And he chose us. Cass who was looking after him in her cat palace was very generous and gave us some toys and a barrel cat tower. Virginia however didn't want any criminals in the house so after a little thought he was renamed "Jasper". Poor "Jasper" had an awful journey to our home, we got caught in the tailback from a burnt out car accident. "Jasper" is very energetic at times, a shock as we were used to living with elderly cats of course. "Jasper" is also more of a daredevil - jumping up to inaccessible cupboards, perching on narrow bannister rails, and even braving the noisy monster (otherwise known as the vacuum cleaner). Tabitha and Amelia ran and hid from that. When "Jasper" first arrived we could hear him mewing but not see him - he had jumped onto a kitchen counter. We ordered some new toys for him - I was disappointed large parcels that arrived before my birthday were for him not for me! Still experimenting with what food to give him, he doesn't seem to eat much of the wet food Cass told us about. We'll see. "Jasper" will see.

Virginia and I travelled to and from London by prebooked cab. This worked fairly well. The guy who took us down was 20 minutes early, not a problem. He insisted on dropping us before the Strand outside the Savoy Tap pub, and had us tell Panther Taxis to get the one who fetched us to collect us from there. The guy who collected us still did it from outside where we were staying so looking back this just added confusion and worry. A very friendly guy, not sure of his ethnicity, we had a tour of his East London homeland. I was also unsure of his driving where there didn't always seem to be a hand on the wheel. The Strand isn't great for vehicles to stop in though it seemed coaches and taxis used the bus lane for that purpose on the North side. Our hotel Z Hotel was hidden down a missable alleyway. Friendly helpful staff who let us check in early, great location, miniscule rooms where the glass sided bathroom was most of the room. There was only one side to the bed which was a challenge. We had lunch at a Macdonalds (didn't realise one could order from downstairs and have the food brought there) then in the afternoon saw Back to the Future - The Musical at the Adelphi Theatre. A truly feel-good musical, some of the actors really looked and moved like their counterparts in the film, very effective light shows with the car (clever bit near the end), theatre strikingly adorned. Frankie and Bennys were fully booked so we were happy to be fed at Zizzis nearby, I had another pepperoni pizza which I am addicted to. In the evening we saw Mischief Theatre's "The Play That Goes Wrong" at the Duchess Theatre. This play sadly is on at our local Arts Theatre in Cambridge soon so we half wasted a trip! We thought initially the audience was very sparse but then coachloads of noisy schoolchildren arrived. Great added a certain flavour to proceedings. Very acrobatic comedy, seemingly life threatening at times. Clever pantomime satirical farce but not as brilliant as their "Peter Pan Goes Wrong" I felt.

The cake Virginia did for Noah's dedication.

My guide for my safari in Tanzania was named "Good luck", and with that good luck I saw cheetahs and lions and leopards and many things. And heard hyenas laughing at 4am.

"The Next BIG Thing" is a classic comedic Adventure game in which you play alternately as Liz and Dan, two mismatched reporters investigating mysterious goings on in the monster film industry. Allusions to spot, inventory and dialogue puzzles to solve, great range of locations. Only one puzzles caused me grief, one in which you have to click the right flowers in the right time to get an orchestra playing dance music. Not sure how I managed to blunder through that. Witty dialogue, imaginative scenes, reasonable puzzles, a fun play.

Browns is a sedate restaurant nestling in what was the old Addenbrookes outpatients department. I like as it is a nice relaxed place to eat, it feels civilised out of the hustle and bustle of the nearby streets. The service is classy, the food normal European stuff but reasonably priced on the lunch menu. And nearby there are splendid attractions like the Fitzwilliam Museum and the Botanical Gardens.

Jasper unlike Amelia and Tabitha didn't need persuading to enter his carrier as we took him to "Cozy Pets Hotel" before driving down to West Sussex for a few days. There was congestion on the M25 but apart from that an easy drive down into the lovely rolling hills of the South Downs. We stopped at South Mimms to patronise "KFC", and took a Chinese meal for two to have when we arrived at the Stable Cottage at Brookfield Farm. Inside a nice supply of biscuits and nibbles, nice high beams so no danger of banging my head, plenty of space. The hot water ceased to be hot after a minute or two for me so I didn't manage to have a shower or a bath, the "Stable Cottage" is right on the road so you have people and traffic shooting past the windows. The code for the entrance gate is the same as for the key safe and I wondered if it was the same for the other cottages on site. We started our tourism on the Tuesday, a quick shop in Barnham Co-op for essentials like milk then off to see Petworth House. "Google Maps" tried to deter us by leading us to the wrong entrance, but we won out by following the physical signs. "Petworth House" has an overabundance of Art, used not so much for edification as for wallpaper seemingly and to impress. One owner amputated the legs on some pictures just to make them fit where he wanted. Unlike some National Trust places some rooms were bare of anything but Art, the family still living there using the furniture elsewhere. On the way back we dropped into Denman Gardens which was pretty enough, I was surprised by how warm and hot it was. It would have been a great spot to sit on a bench and do a crossword or two, admiring the flowers. In the evening we ate at the splendid Black Horse in Binsted Lane, where we sat in a well designed airy area with a spacious view over the South Downs. Shame the sun went down. We both had baked camembert (a meal in itself) and the haddock. On Wednesday we went to see the Weald and Downland Open Air Museum, competing with school parties to see round the buildings of different periods on the large site. Informative staff, well laid out, and I had Welsh rarebit at the bright cafe on site. Once again I came across skirrets, perhaps one day I'll taste one. We had some difficulty finding our way into the nearby West Dean Gardens which had a good pergola and sunken garden to see. The site itself is much more than just the gardens. In the evening we ate at the Holly Tree which remains a local pub yet with a comfortable restaurant area. Here and elsewhere phone reception was bad. An eclectic range of decorations there. Thursday started with rain. We were lucky with the weather, a few days before they were forecasting wall to wall rain for while we were there. We saw the Roman mosaics and hypocausts at Bignor Roman Villa, a blast from the past. In the middle of farmland. Then we went to Arundel Castle which for my money was more impressive than "Windsor Castle". The stonework was very well maintained, castle well furnished, plenty to impress visitors with the power and importance and wealth of the owners. And plenty of exercise walking up and down stairs and corridors. The gardens were designer jobs, mazes and fountains of gold. To round out the holiday we patronised the "Black Horse" in Binsted Lane again.

"Return to Monkey Island" is a blast from the classic past of Adventure games. But a modernised blast at that. The plot sees the blundering Guybrush Threepwood, would-be mighty pirate, once again facing off against the demon ghost pirate LeChuck in a quest for the Secret of Monkey Island. It is a better sequel to the first two games in the Monkey Island series than the next two games so labelled. The great humour returns as do many of the old characters like Stan the Salesman and Murray the talking skull. The game is very referential and allusive, not just to the Monkey Island games but also back to the dawn of Adventure games. The puzzles are fair I felt, and there is a good hint system built in. There is also built in a checklist of what you should be trying to do, and you can optionally collect trivia cards about the Monkey Island games. I tend to avoid such achievements when playing games. The game is in four chapters, the most open and biggest chapter being the last one. A great game, a great return to Monkey Island. The thing I liked least were the graphics.

I've done an advent calendar for Virginia as an amusement, both for her and for myself in the doing of. All the boxes can be opened apart from in December when they have to be opened one after each other, and only when you've reached that day. Clicking an opened box gives a larger image, clicking the penguin closes all the boxes, clicking the polar bear opens them all if it's not December, clicking the Arctic fox gets to this webpage. There's a YAML file specifying the layout and images and dimensions. A Sinatra app enables editing the layout in a HTML page. More Ruby generates the deployable HTML and images and Javascript code to make the show work. HTML web storage is used to locally record what boxes have been opened in a browser.

"Armikrog" is a spiritual successor to the famed "The Neverhood Chronicles" (1996) game. The big winner in "Armikrog" is the world itself, a plasticene masterpiece with a logic all its own, dripping with whimsy and idiosyncrasy. The game is worth playing just to experience that world. The plot has Tommynaut and his doggy sidekick Beak-Beak crash landing on a strange new world, and needing to escape. Tommynaut does collect items but automatically uses them when needed. You also need to play as Beak-Beak who can get to places Tommynaut can not. The puzzles I thought were fair, requiring observation of the environment and pulling and poking. A beautiful game.

Back to the Thursford Christmas Spectacular after a 2-year hiatus. We were worried we would get there too early, glad when we were held up by farm vehicles, but when we got there the joint was already heaving! Virginia had to locate a table we could share while I joined a slow moving queue for food in the marquee. Coaches had already arrived, and plenty of cars. The show was pretty much the same as before, the comedian who said he was Armenian was cleaner, there were jugglers and circus performers as a diversion, the doves still flew across the theatre at the end. Impressive but not the shock of the new for me. Santa's Magical Journey was the same pretty much, what was new and welcome was a light display outside which Virginia wisely had us tour again in the dark after the show. The jacket potatoes we had for lunch were fine, but the pie efforts we had for dinner didn't agree with me. Google Maps led us both astray going (wanted us to turn too soon into Thursford) and coming back the route out of Thursford was suboptimal.

We went to see the Christmas illuminations at the National Trust Wimpole Hall site, along with quite a few others. Happily the weather was warmer than it was a week ago when we were first supposed to go. They had done a lot of work to Wimpole since we had last been. Where we parked was new. A good variety of illuminations on the circular walk from the Stables at Wimpole Hall, including a 'laser' walk which was spooky. And there were plenty of stalls to help the famished traveller. We had hotdogs to show willing.