A week in Bucks

Following on from our trip to Cambridge for the Lipodystrophy UK patients day (as mentioned in my blog about World Lipodystrophy Day), Cathy and I headed for Buckinghamshire for a week's holiday. We stayed in an Air BnB (first time we've done that) in the pretty village of Frieth. 

We chose Buckinghamshire because Shrewsbury were playing Wycombe on my Birthday Eve and I wanted to go to the game. We also had plans in the area for my birthday - but that merits its own blog post!

I'll admit I didn't realise Bucks was quite so rural. Literally a few hundred yards off a motorway or outside one of the towns and we were on winding country lanes surrounded by farms. I was taken aback by the seemingly massive population of red kites. They seemed to be floating and swooping around almost everywhere we went. In Hambleden there were warning signs about them in the dining area outside the Old Post Office. And I thought seagulls were bad...

I didn't get attacked by a red kites, but I did get my feet pecked by some chickens.

We visited some very pretty towns, like Marlow and Henley. High Wycombe was a bit more utilitarian, although we found some decent shops there. Marlow and Henley are both on the Thames with picturesque bridges and lots of bookshops and galleries. 

Another sign that Bucks is clearly quite a wealthy place was the cars. On the edge of one small village there was a Lamborghini dealership and we saw one parked up on the street in Henley. In Marlow, we got back to our car after eating out to find a McLaren road car parked opposite us. 

We visited Turville, which was the setting for the Vicar of Dibley and has also featured in several episodes of Midsomer Murders. On the hill above the village is the windmill that was the location of the Potts's family home in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. 

The Birthday Eve football was very one-way. With Wycombe in contention for promotion and Shrewsbury looking doomed to relegation, there could be an entire division between the two teams next season. The game ended 0-0, with a heroic defensive performance from Shrewsbury. Apparently Wycombe had 32 shots on goal, while Shrewsbury only managed two. It must have been very frustrating for the Wycombe fans but it was great fun for us in the away end, cheering every clearance. 

On our final day of the holiday we ventured outside Bucks, to the only wildlife park in Berkshire, Beale Park. We decided to have an 'animal encounter' and met Nev, the gorgeous Brazilian tapir. He's a big softy who likes having tummy rubs. 

It turns out that Nev is actually a fellow Cymro, as he was born at Folly Farm in Wales! Tapirs have natural waterproofing, which meant we ended up with oily fingers after petting Nev.

There were plenty of other animals as well and we also got to ride on a little train. It was a great day out and a lovely way to end our week's holiday. 

Weekend wanderings - March 2025

Marco the Polo has done a lot of miles this month 

I had one weekend at home in March. I started the month celebrating St David's Day in Edinburgh. Then Cathy and I had a weekend in Exeter, and two of the other three weekends I was in Shrewsbury and then in Cambridge for the Lipodystrophy UK Patients Day.

Our trip to Exeter was mainly because I wanted to see Shrewsbury Town play at Exeter City. While the game was another disappointing defeat, I did have a long chat with Will, who I was at school with. It was great to reconnect. 

It's been a bad month for Shrewsbury Town generally and by the end of the month the club had replaced their manager again, after he had walked out, and news broke that the secretive takeover that was supposed to inject some much-needed cash into the club was off. 

On the Sunday after Shrewsbury's defeat in Exeter, we took a short trip down to Torquay to visit the crematorium and have a little look around the town centre. 

We have got into a habit of buying a picnic and driving up on to Dartmoor to eat it on the way home when we visit Torquay these days. This time there was a friendly Dartmoor pony mooching around the car park hoping to cadge some grub off the people who had parked up. 

My weekend in Shrewsbury was a week early for Mother's Day, as I couldn't be there for the day itself. I went out with Mum for lunch on the Sunday. She also opened some presents with 'assistance' from Fred, who gets very excited at the prospect of presents and very disappointed when he finds out they aren't food!

I would have gone to see Shrewsbury play on the Saturday when I was up but the game was postponed due to their opponents having players called up for internationals. Instead, I took Dave, Joy and Zac to Flint to watch Flint Town v Barry Town. It wasn't a great game and Barry lost to a very late, rather harsh penalty. 

Despite barely being in Cardiff, I did manage to join in the Keep Grangetown Tidy litter-pick on the middle weekend of the month. It was the second month in a row I made it along. 

I said we had one weekend at home, but we actually spent a good chunk of it up in Merthyr, meeting Matt, Lauren and Alex and then having a little look round up there. 

Bryan and I completed a Blood Bowl fixture for the third month in a row as well. Here's the full write up, if you're interested. 

In addition to the Shrewsbury and Barry away games, I went to Spartans v Bonnyrigg in Edinburgh, Barry's home match against Aberystwyth, and went to Marlow v Havant & Waterlooville on the Saturday after the Lipodystrophy UK day. Marlow are the only football club to have applied to play in the FA Cup for every season since its inception in 1871! It was a small, friendly ground with its own resident flock of red kites swooping low over the pitch. Apparently the red kites will steal unguarded chips if they can. 

I wasn't the only first-time visitor. Former Manchester United and England defender Rio Ferdinand was also there, as his son Lorenz was making his debut in goal for Havant. Rio was swamped by kids (and a few sheepish looking adults) at half time and happily signed lots of autographs. 

The game at Marlow was my 45th match of the season. My season total so far - at the end of March - looks like this:

World Lipodystrophy Day

March 31 is World Lipodystrophy Day. This year there is an awareness video about it. I'm very proud of Cathy for stepping well out of her comfort zone and recording a clip for the film. You can watch it on YouTube.

We saw the premiere of the video a couple of days ago at the Lipodystrophy UK Patients Day held at the Hinxton Hall Conference Centre just outside Cambridge. It's the third patients day we have been to, and the second held at the lovely Hinxton Hall venue. 

Lipodystrophy is a medical condition where people have an abnormal lack of adipose tissue under their skin - this is the part of the body where fat cells are stored. Some people have no capacity to store fat at all, and for others it means fat is stored in unusual places, usually around the torso while legs and arms are comparatively thin. Most types of lipodystrophy are caused by genetics, but sometimes the condition is 'acquired', for example, after illness. 

The Lipodystrophy UK day was the usual mix of medical and research presentations, and people living with lipodystrophy sharing their experiences. I find the scientific presentations fascinating, and there is some hope that damaged or absent adipose could be replaced at some point. They are working out how to do it in mice, but we are a long way off from seeing it tried in humans.

But the highest points of the day are the lived experiences. Meeting other people with this rare condition is really helpful - this year we even met some other people from Wales!

I always feel there are so many parallels in the stories of living undiagnosed and being a mystery to the medical experts for years. We were attending endocrinology appointments for 20 years and had to wait for the incumbent professor to retire (or die) before we finally saw a doctor who had an inkling what this basket of weird problems might be. 

Getting a diagnosis after 20 years felt like a triumph. But diagnosis is one thing - living beyond the diagnosis, quite the other. That's one of the points former paralympian Tom Staniford made in his speech. He also compared living with a rare disease to being an elite athlete. The similarities are uncanny. 

As inspiring as Tom was, the most powerful stories on the day were two kids - Louis (15) and Rosie (10) who both live with a particularly aggressive form of lipodsytrophy. Neither of them are letting it boss their lives and I felt immensely humbled listening to their determined optimism about how they want to achieve all they can in life.

You can find out more about Lipodystrophy UK on their website

A safety helmet by any other name...

I think this is charming. And definitely the term I will now use.

Using Antarctica as a location for science-fiction

In the conclusion of my Book of the Month review this month, I mentioned how HP Lovecraft pioneered several ideas in his story-telling. One that really struck me was his use of Antarctica as a location for a relict alien presence on Earth. (Please note, spoilers follow.)

Antarctica was still relatively unexplored when Lovecraft was writing his stories in the 1930s. A couple of decades earlier there was the much-publicised race to the South Pole but the rest of the continent was still mysterious and unsurveyed, making it the perfect place to set a story of scientists discovering a former home of the 'Great Old Ones'. 

In his story called At the Mountains of Madness, an Antarctic expedition discovers a range of almost impossibly high mountains that would rival the Himalayas in height. Beyond the mountains is a secluded plateau. On the coastal side of the mountains, some of expedition encounter ancient beings frozen in the ice. They thaw them out and then contact is lost with the explorers. The rest of the expedition arrive and discover carnage and non-human tracks leading over the mountain to the plateau. 

On the plateau they discover the massive ruins of a truly ancient city. The revived aliens they are tracking have gone inside, so they follow them. There are even worse things lurking inside the city, though. And there the story ends with the usual Lovecraft approach of dire warnings not to go exploring in the mountains of madness.

The notes on this story included how devastated Lovecraft felt when his story was rejected by the magazine where he normally submitted stories. He apparently felt this rejection marked the end of his writing career. However, another friend was able to sell the story on his behalf to a new magazine called Astounding Stories. 

And this is where we enter a game of connections. A later editor of Astounding Stories was John W Campbell, who wrote a story that feels inspired by Lovecraft's tale, called Who Goes There? It was published in 1938, seven years after Lovecraft wrote At the Mountains of Madness. I read Campell's story a few years ago in an anthology of science-fiction short novels. 

In Who Goes There?, members of an Antarctic expedition find an alien spaceship buried and frozen in the ice. They retrieve a frozen occupant and proceed to thaw it out. However, the alien turns out to be a shape-changing being that can absorb and replicate other biological life-forms on the research base. This is a similar ability to the entities that Lovecraft calls shoggoths, one of which is implied to be lurking in the foundational depths of the ruined city.

If Campbell's story sounds familiar, it's because it formed the basis for the 1982 film directed by John Carpenter and starring Kurt Russell, called The Thing. The movie is a fairly faithful representation of the novella's story and the basic premise of an alien that absorbs other creatures and then extrudes replicas of them. The Thing is also notable for gory special effects which bring to life the horror element of Campbell's story.  

But The Thing wasn't the first film based on Who Goes There? In 1951 a film called The Thing From Another World was released, based loosely on the story. I haven't seen this, but apparently there were some major divergences from the story. Firstly, it was sent in the Arctic, not the Antarctic. Secondly, the alien wasn't a shape-shifter, but a blood-drinking plant-creature that is the only survivor from a crashed flying saucer. 

This version of Campbell's story seems to have influenced the Doctor Who story, The Seeds of Doom, filmed in 1976. This returns the action to Antarctica, where scientific researchers discover alien seeds buried in the ice that sprout tendrils which attack humans and turn people into plant-creatures called krynoids. In a weird coincidence I watched The Seeds of Doom a few months back as I have been working my through classic Doctor Who on the BBC iPlayer. 

And the story doesn't finish with The Thing. There was a remake released in 2011, and a sequel in the form of a video game in 2002. Meanwhile, the discovery of a prehistoric pyramid in Antarctica is the opening sequence for Alien Versus Predator released in 2004. One aspect of AvP that mirrors At the Mountains of Madness is the interpretation of carved hieroglyphics to explain the history of the pyramid, which is similar to how the explorers of the ruined city learn about its history from large carved wall friezes. 

So, while HP Lovecraft felt that the rejection of his story probably marked the end of his career, he had no way of knowing that he was sparking what would become a long science-fiction tradition of hostile alien beings frozen in the ice of Antarctica. 

Book of the Month: making a foray into the Cthulhu mythos

I have wanted to read some of HP Lovecraft's stories for some time. Last year I noticed several different collections from different publishers appearing on the shelves in TK Maxx. I didn't buy any of them, but I did add this collection to my wish-list and received it as a Christmas present. 

This collection is by Oxford University Press, published in their 'World Classics' series. There are nine stories included along with an introduction and detailed footnotes for each tale. All nine stories have been selected for their connection with the 'Cthulhu mythos', the wider world constructed across multiple stories relating to ancient creatures and races that live in more remote parts of the world. 

The term 'Cthulhu mythos' was coined after Lovecraft's death and takes its name from The Call of Cthulhu, wherein various people around the world dream of a horrific ancient entity called Cthulhu that 'sleeps' at the bottom of the ocean in a drowned city. It is probably the most famous of Lovecraft's creations with role-playing games and other activities drawing on the character.

But Cthulhu isn't the only lurking evil being in these stories, nor is it the most powerful or sinister. In fact, across the stories there are three or four different races, some older than Cthulhu, some at war with Cthulhu's kin. All of them come from other planets, galaxies or even universes, and all are much, much older than the human race. 

The introduction begins with a warning that is contains spoilers, so I skipped it and read the stories first before going back to it. (Does that make it an outroduction?) I didn't look up all the footnotes as I read the stories because doing that was time-consuming. However, I did read many of them and learned plenty of interesting details. 

Two big things about Lovecraft's writing relate to his use of 'sources'. He frequently lists obscure books full or arcane and occult lore, and name-checks those books created by contemporary authors of 'weird fiction' in their stories. At other times his protagonists consult lists of actual, real books, which are usually just a list of key writings that were listed in his encyclopaedia. Meanwhile, some of his stories were inspired by events that were happening at the time - the discovery of Pluto, for example, which becomes a home for one of his alien races.

I found the stories a bit of a mixed bag. They all follow a similar formula, with a build up by the protagonist who tells you that he has witnessed a terrible horror, so terrible he's not sure if he can tell you anything about it, but he may as well tell you because it's so horribly terrible and terribly horrible you won't believe him anyway. Then the story starts and sometimes it rattles along to a conclusion and sometimes it doesn't. The Dunwich Horror has a spectacularly poor non-ending.

But there are a couple of stories that do end well. The Whisperer in Darkness made me go 'ugh' and shudder at the end. The Shadow Over Innsmouth took an unexpected turn and ended in a way I really didn't expect. Shadow also included a tense escape for the protagonist, which was one of the few scenes that properly drew me in to the story. 

Another formulaic aspect is the way characters always seem to luckily find a talkative shop clerk or town drunk, or crazy coot from up in the hills, who will reel off several pages of exposition. Or someone will write a letter outlining several important plot points. Or, in the most contrived sequence, the Great Old Ones themselves will leave behind a series of gigantic wall friezes that provide a full history of their culture and the life-cycle of the abandoned city the characters are exploring. 

Locations vary with action taking place Antarctica and Australia, as well as places Lovecraft knew well on the east coast of the USA. Several stories take place in Massachusetts, with the fictional town of Arkham, loosely based on Salem, featuring prominently. Lovecraft paints Massachusetts as an antiquarian place, steeped in history and secrets. 

Another feature of Lovecraft's stories is his love of adjectives. Almost every description of what the protagonists are discovering is weighed down by adjectives, and he uses the same ones repeatedly. He really loved the word 'Cyclopean' to describe the temples and cities his characters discover; large dressed stones are 'Cyclopean blocks' in every story where there is a ruin. 

While Lovecraft was good at building tension and describing mysterious events with a suitable amount of dread, I've already mentioned how he often failed to stick the landing. Several of his stories end with mere hints of monsters sort of off-screen. In the introduction there is a funny comment by a critic who was very dismissive of Lovecraft's stories, saying that after wading through all the adjectives, you wanted something better than people running away from "an invisible whistling octopus". It's a fair comment and it really made me laugh.

Overall, reading this collection made me realise why HP Lovecraft is considered so important as one of the pioneers of the genre of 'weird fiction'. His Cthulhu mythos has taken on a life of its own, elevating his status as a writer and ensuring he has left a mark on popular culture. It's a huge legacy. Cyclopean, even. 

March mayhem - Blood Bowl match report

So far in 2025, Bryan and I have managed to keep our Blood Bowl schedule going. Tonight I decided my team would be the classic orc team with a borrowed star player, Varag Ghoulchewer, who was on the black orc (blorc) roster last time out.

Bryan was coaching the Lizard-men team again, with a borrowed "big guy", the 'kroxigor' we've nicknamed Roxy.

We kicked off. Halfway through the first half the orcs broke through the lizards' defensive line and scored what would prove to be the decisive touchdown.

Bryan was having a fun time with his injury rolls, racking up significant injuries and killing one of the orc players.

"Dis guy... he ded"

However, Bryan had less luck with his dice rolls when he was trying to pick the ball up, with fumble upon fumble. His team also fluffed their passes. 

At the very end of the game, on my final turn, I had the opportunity to pick up the ball and maybe run in a heroic second down to double the score and provide a thrilling finale. I needed to bash an opponent out of the way but my guy was stronger so I could roll two dice.

I rolled double skulls.

Even if you know nothing about Blood Bowl, you can guess double skulls is bad. It became the final roll of the game and felt just absolutely typical!

Moomin confectionery

Courtesy of "Nordic" week at Lidl (which is far more accurate than Scandinavian week given the Moomins are from Finland!) come these little jelly sweets. My sister excitedly tipped me off about them this morning and so, when I went past Lidl later, I popped in and bought a packet.

They are made by the same company that made the chocolate biscuits I blogged about last year (when apparently it was 'Scandinavian week', not Nordic week). The flag on the back confirms their Finnish origins. 

There are four fruity flavours. Pomegranate is an unusual choice to include. Helpfully the flavours are listed in multiple languages so you can learn the Finnish names for the four fruit too.

And there are five characters to munch on - Moomintroll, Moominpapa, Moominmamma, Sunfkin and Little My. 

The fruit taste is subtle. They don't taste like actual fruit, but they taste more natural than a lot of sweets, and even the orange is very mild.

So, yeah, happy Nordic week everyone!