Roleplaying. Starting playing RPGs while still at school, so that’s about 30 years ago. Best reaction I ever got to a game I was running was one that was both set in and took place in a small cottage on the Co Down coast. No electricity or running water, I'd gone down the week before and mapped out the location real location. Playing by the light of oil lamps and with a roaring fire we were lucky enough to get a bit of a storm outside to add to the atmosphere. The game was a modern day horror story, complete with ghosts and supernatural forces vaporising non-player characters as we went. A number of players kept stepping outside to partake of odd-smelling, paranoia inducing, roll-up cigarettes. By the time we reached midnight two of the players were, in their own parlance, OFF THEIR FACES.

The finale of the game, a particularly gruesome one, took place in the Hay store which was at the back of the cottage. The two guys who had been trying to recreate Withneil & I's Cumberland Carrott, were so shaken up that we had to go outside with them several times to prove that there were no bodies which had been turned to bloody red stains in the hay shed before anyone was allowed to sleep. I was quite pleased with that...

(Note comedy Irishness)

Comics. My favourite comic of all time was probably POW! A British weekly which ran for 86 issues from 1967 to 1968. It was bought for me by my father most Sundays - unless I had misbehaved in Church (in which case my Grandmother bought it for me on the sly and I got it the next day). Not only did it introduce the seven-year old me to Steve Ditko's Spider-Man and Kirby on Nick Fury but it also featured some of the greatest British cartoonists. Leo Baxendale on The Dolls of St Dominics, Ken Reid with his excellent Dare-A-Day Davy and Mike Higgs on my favourite British strip, The Cloak, stand out.

More anarchic that the Beano or any of the traditional humour comics these strips were , (and sometimes still are), able to make me laugh out loud. Part of the reason I abandoned British humour comics after the age of nine was that nothing ever seemed to stack up against Pow! and its sister titles Wham and Smash. Sadly POW! Was printed on dreadful newsprint paper and my copies now smell of faded old.

 

The art of talking bollocks. And it is an art, is closely related to RPGing. You'll be well aware of the surreal twists some of our conversations have taken during games and Scriblix is a mistress of the art herself.   Closely related to Philosophy, it involves minute dissection of the most trivial  of comments.  Especially where someone has said something dumb.

But the undoubted grand-master of Talking Bollocks is comedian, Kevin McAleer. It is probably not a coincidence that Kevin comes from my home town of Omagh where conversation often descends into free-form word-association and metaphors must be mixed and strained to the point whre they become that dirty brown colour your get instead of black when you mix all the colours on your watercolour palette together.

His 2008 show, Chalk and Cheese, is a one hour monologue delivered by a delusional character who "In every situation or personal encounter, inevitably grabs the wrong end of the stick and holds onto it for dear life". Sounds like every conversation I ever had in Omagh rugby club on a saturday night, but not quite as incomprehensible as the strange wordless communication that takes places between farmers in Omagh livestock mart each Friday. Their dialect, incomprehensible to outsiders, consists of grunts, head gestures and the occasional "yer' man" or "aye" thrown in to make observers think they are speaking english. The realisation that there is a huge difference between "aye!", "aye", "aye?" and "ayyye" (Inuits may not have 16 different words for snow, but the rural Norn' Irish have at least 16 different meanings for "aye" and its derrivatives) in both meaning and emotional baggage is one of the things you learn very quickly when trying to get served in Donnegan's Pub in Omagh Mart, especially when you are 16 and wearing your school unifrorm. (most pubs in Omagh would make you take off your Blazer and tie in those days).

Dr Kevin Who

Dr. Who? Me? Dr Who? Favourite doctor was Patrick Troughton and I was terrified by the Cybermen. First Doctor Who episodes I remember seeing was a William Hartnell story involving giant bees, or rather people dressed up as giant bees. Apparantly I was so scared that Icried, but I don’t remember that and insisted in watching the show after that. Now it’s a show that I enjoy because I watch it with my daughter, sadly she hates the old episodes that I like. Actually Kevin McAleer would make a good Doctor Who, a sort of anti-Tom Baker.  Just as barking, but slow and deliberate. Although the broad Omagh accent might put a few people off.

Ice Hockey, its like Hockey, on ice.  And I've been to far too few games this year.  There is the second leg of a cup final coming up next week.  Now if only I can get out of the School interviews early.