The heavy rain this morning, usually greeted with the kind of "meh" that makes me sound like I'm still fifteen years old, was for once welcomed with open arms here as it slowly helps get rid of the four or five inches of snow that trapped me indoors for the weekend and drove me slightly stir crazy.

I think I've now read every book in the house – with the exception of those dull social work ones which I never read properly for my degree and aren't about to start now – and I'm nearly up to speed on the DVDs-to-be-watched pile, currently up to part four of ten of the last Second Doctor serial The War Games.

My absolute lifesaver over the past week, though, has been the magnificently amazing Zo, whose gift of a bumper pack of Nintendo DS games has kept me sane [whilst ruining my eyesight and giving me a "stylus wound" in the palm of my right hand].

Especially enjoyable is how I've zapped all sorts of things in Space Invaders Extreme – at least until it got to the sodding impossible level four; I've been working my way through New Super Mario Bros, which has all the fun of the original whilst being new enough to be fresh; and I've been working my way through Mario Kart DS trying not to break the buttons with furious stamping.

Along with the others she included they've been very welcome: that is, apart from the Countdown spin-off game which I beat on Champion level on first try, and I Love Horses which Z rather malevolently added to the bundle knowing that giving me a horsey game was rather like sending Fox News an I Love Socialism title. [Thanks, sweetie ]

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One of the fun things about being indoors over the past few days has been the schadenfreude of watching the news as the fanatic bigots that are the Robinsons implode over in NI.

Ang has documented this much better than I have with good insight into the moral implications for their particular microcosm of society, but one thing I particularly want to point out is how Northern Ireland has always existed in a time-warp several decades behind the "mainland". This may be no exception.

Twenty-five years ago, we [the UK in general] had a Conservative government big on "family/Victorian values", ready to enact a horrendous piece of legislation known colloquially as Section 28 to enforce its "moral" credentials. Like the Robinsons, homosexuality was an abomination outside of "normal family" life.

Then, a few years later, during a campaign which was known as "Back to Basics", the shall we say "interesting" private lives of many Government ministers – including my MP at the time, which gave the little town I worked in a week of media frenzy – were revealed in sordid [and sometimes made-up] detail which convinced them, and the subsequent Labour government, that any attempt to preach sexual morality would only show them up as hypocritical.

The issue's not completely gone away – Cameron has made noises about "tax breaks for marriage" [oh yeah, like I'm really gonna get married just to save a couple of hundred quid on my income tax bill], but has fought shy of trying to take any moral high ground [yet] – but the kind of language the Robinsons have used has been out of fashion – and out of order – here for fifteen years; Iris would have found herself immediately chucked out of any of the three major parties for her stupid rant eighteen months ago.

It may well be, then, that this is part of NI's "normalization" post-troubles; one step on the road from segregational, isolationist, extreme-religious politics to one more closely based on the values that all serious "mainland" politicians now hold.

After all, DUP etc., if you lot keep insisting how you're so sodding British, shouldn't you show it by adopting the greater tolerance and liberalism that we have?

Don't you see how being fanatical about anything, outside of caravanning, canal restoration or collecting horse brasses, is the most un-British value there is?

I'm pleased to report that, so far, the holiday season has gone smoothly; when the most pain I have is aching thumbs from playing Mario&Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story on the DS, I know I'm not in a bad place.

Xmas Day itself was peaceful, at my folks; it was the Saturday I wasn't looking forward to, what with the visit to the Evil Sister's lair house to drop off presents to the niece and nephew [cold hard cash; they're at the point where that matters more than toy giraffes].

I managed three hours, which is approaching the record for these occasions. Okay, it may not count because a lot of that was Nephew showing off his XBox [and kicking my arse at some driving game], but it at least did the trick of connecting with her kids and keeping my mother, who's always happier when her two children are talking to one another, from moaning at me. ["You'll need her one day!" - yeah, if I ever get that bad, Ma, switch the machine off.]

Let's look at the positive and give her credit though. The one time politics came into the conversation – usually a tasty proving ground for a nice contretemps – it was to discuss the upcoming Griffin candidature in near-to-our-home-ground Barking.

Let's give credit where credit's due: I oppose many things my sister supports, and I'm usually left-of-centre where she's right-, but she has no truck with the extreme forms of rightwingery involving paranoia about brown people, gay people or anyonedifferent people. We share hopenothate.org.uk as a web destination

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Less pleasing was the devotion Niece showed for Man Sodding Utd, and her assertion that "Fernando Torres is a tranny", but sometimes it's easier to roll one's eyes and pretend one's not heard…

Wot, no sparkly heels?

Between her and Arse-supporting Nephew, I was pressed for my favourite Premiership team [Ipswich doesn't count, we're crap and a division below].

It took a few seconds for me to work out which it was – I don't "support" any top-flight team, but there's certainly those sides I'll have a preference for, and definitely those I have a preference for them losing, but in the end I had to concede that the biggest of these preferences at the moment is because of this guy;

Hermann Hreiðarsson, many years ago an Ipswich Town hero

and therefore, his club, Portsmouth.

The fact that Portsmouth are bottom of the league, severely broke, and are, by many pundits' reckoning, about to get relegated, didn't fit with the two young glory-hunters' perception of what football is.

I must take them to a cold January night game down at Dagenham sometime and show them what it's really about…

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My little town appears to have entirely shut down for the whole Xmas week, up to next Saturday. If any of you catch me going stir crazy before then, do poke me with a sharp stick.

I think I've enough diversions between then and now, as well as a couple of shifts including the Traditional New Year's Night "No, I'm At Work, I Can't Be Your Sodding Taxi Driver / Ambulance Driver / Pizza Delivery Boy-Girl-Thingy" stint, so I guess I'll survive.

Here's to the next decade, and hoping this one will have much more of my favourite people – including all of you lot – and much less of my unfavourite cuntulents, especially in Barking.

Not that I'm holding my breath on that last one.

Not a shitload happening continues to be the order of the day here – and a bloody good thing it is too, I may add [and indeed have just done so].

These are a few things that have passed through my consciousness over the past few days;

- C & N's wedding reception on Saturday evening. This was held in a pub right next to Sutton Hoo, and the three hours I was there now holds the record for the longest time I've spent in licensed premises without touching alcohol. The night went well apart from the very end, when I was cornered by a drunk woman who kept telling me about my "guardian angel" [apparently "a man who stands right behind me at all times, but not a relative". Who, then? Nicholas Parsons?]

The couple are wonderful, but their music choices differ somewhat, and that was reflected in that which was played over the course of the evening. Put it like this; seguing Enter Sandman with Barbie Girl is a nice trick if you can do it…

The photos have been all over FaceArse; I won't reproduce them here, but you can have this one of Paula and myself:

…and, cropped as so not to identify the person [because she's not of age and I've no permission to show her on a public bit of El Interwebz], this one to show why I was so jealous of the bridesmaids…

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- The DVD of Doctor Who – Battlefield which had disappeared under a pile for the past three months.

McCoy's Seventh Doctor is not well-regarded amongst some fans, but a careful watch shows a lot more depth than it was given credit for at the time. This story was particularly panned, and still holds the record for the lowest [first showing] audience ever for a Who episode; but it contains much that is worth it – the new Brigadier, the Who take on Arthurian legend, and Jean Marsh's much-more-subtle-than-it-looks Morgaine.

Particularly interesting is the heavily implied lesbian overtones between Ace and her new friend Shou Yuing [who should have been a co-companion] -

- although I may well just be imagining this…

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The Fish World app on FaceArse. Which is, I know, utterly useless, but in the absence of a proper fishtank here in Czech Cottage, it does a simulation pretty well.

Normally I avoid FB apps, especially those useless gift ones, but this one scores, if nothing else, for the soundtrack of bubbles and gulps, which, I've found, creates a nice background to the day's emailing, typing, blogging and CM01-02-cheating on this laptop.

Talking of background sound; ages ago I came across this site – which simulates the effect of walking into one of those seaside video game arcades, circa 1981, 1983, 1986 or 1992. The 1986 one particularly took me back to a misspent youth in Southend pushing 10p pieces into electronic money-sucking machines…

…I must dig out MAME. [Legal Note: Fish does not have any ROMS  for this application for games still protected by copyright.]

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World Champion Undergoes Gender Testing.

I have never really followed athletics at all, apart from a fleeting early-teenage fancy of Fatima Whitbread; but this story is interesting not just because of its politics, but because of the science.

As hurtful and invasive as the process has been to Caster Semenya, one of its effects is that it has highlighted the innate problems with determining gender in a small number of people.

Decades ago, they used to do a humiliating "physical examination" on athletes suspected of hiding gender reassignment; now, the process is complicated, and the IAAF's own criteria for determining gender go through a swathe of medical and psychological specialists in order to come up with a decision on whether a person is enjoying the metabolic "advantages" that come with male testosterone production, whatever their chromosomes say or whether they've got inny or outy joy-parts.

Several people I've been talked to have been genuinely surprised by this process, as they've only ever thought of gender in binary terms. Certainly it gives the lie to those who insist that God makes only Man and Woman unambiguously, fearful of what a proper rounded view of gender would do to their world views and to their control of people via their sexual identities.

To borrow the utterly wonderful Ben Goldacre's phrase; "it's a bit more complicated than that…"

I hope that Semenya's case is instrumental in helping awaken people to the complications of gender identity; certainly her heroine's welcome in South Africa will have very much heightened awareness in her own country. Reports have been that she has been reluctant to take the spotlight since the story broke, which I understand perfectly; but [however unwittingly] she could, if everything went well, be the face of a new understanding…

Not much of a weekend – especially if you consider that for various stupid reasons I found myself on Saturday in Southend-On-Sea.

This "resort" featured heavily in my late teens as a drinking hole – as it did for many young East London residents – and it's not quite the same now I've seen it cold sober. For example, what seemed in my [hazy] memory like a twenty-mile hike from the seafront to Victoria station actually only takes about ten minutes if you're not stopping every two minutes to wee, be sick or pick up all the stuff you've dropped.

If I remember correctly, post-11pm closing time there were only two trains back towards London each evening. The first, about 11:40, was the loudest, rowdiest train in the whole of British Rail. The second, about 1:30am, was the quietest, most passed-out-zombiefied train in the whole of British Rail…

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The modus operandi of our Southend trips was to alternate our time between imbibing ethyl alcohol and pushing 10p pieces into the various old pinball machines in various establishments on the seafront: a somewhat rickety Space Invaders table was our favourite.

These were the good old days when 10p would get you something towards half an hour's entertainment; flipping was, in those more innocent days when such things were allowed indoors, interspersed with beer and cigarettes, and competition was fierce.

Of course, nothing like that ever lasts. In 1993 they changed the size of the 10p coin, and many arcade owners decided it wasn't worth their time or money altering the old machines to accept the new coins. Southend's Space Invaders machine was "retired" – gawd knows where it is these days – along with several other prized dusty corner finds, such as the Rolling Stones table in an unloved corner of Clacton.

So all the pinballs you see in the semi-scuzzy seafront arcades now are post-'93 – the presentation has improved dramatically, but the gaming definitely hasn't. Although some, like the newer Star Wars table which replaced many of the old tables, are entertaining to play, they're all now specifically designed to only allow you a few minutes' play for your 20p/30p/50p/upwards before the ball is programmed to disappear in a way you completely didn't expect.

If I were an eccentric millionaire – and I've been in training for the "eccentric" bit for over twenty years, all I need is the "millionaire" aspect – I'd have a Museum Of Pre-'93 Pinballs, and very occasionally I'd open it to the public.

So long as they didn't beat me at Space Invaders, or they can piss off.

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Today's Big Question: "The Museum Of… what?" would you open in your enormous stately home and be sole curator of?

Tightropes. You'll remember some weeks ago I blogged about rediscovering an old Nintendo 64 console, and re-enjoying the games that were with it.

Having spent the past month or so ensconced in Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, the fact that it's got to a bit I can't do is so froggin' annoying that if I hadn't already promised to pass the console onto Bonnie I'd smash it into a thousand pieces, wee on the remains, then post them to Douglas Hurd.

All the puzzles in the game so far – and previous games in the series – have been solved by creative thinking and experimentation rather than any particular controller skill. But not this one bit, where you have to run across a really narrow zig-zaggy strip at full speed, and if you fall off the ledge on either side you have to spend ten minutes getting back to the start of the strip. Not using normal push-button controls, but the N64's mushroom-head "wander about all over the sodding place" control stick. Sodding impossible.

Nintendo, I'm sorry, but in this one case: You Suck.

Milly: it's in the post tomorrow.

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Twenty-20 Cricket World Cup. Regular readers of the Surgery will know that I'm not exactly a fan of cricket, but I do follow it: though because of the Tebbit Test, I've always supported India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka rather than any "home" teams.

Kumar Sangakkara, yesterday.

I find the radio commentary very conducive to restful naps [upper-class English voices, talking about stuff I have very little no idea about, but unlike, say, Radio 4's output, also stuff that need not concern me unduly and start my brain going].

For those of us for whom the sport is a long, drawn-out recreational drug, the five-day form of the game, Test cricket, is the apogee; on the surface not a lot happens, but there's enough underlying tension to stop my brain wandering elsewhere whilst it's happening.

Twenty-20 cricket utterly fails at that narcosis, because it packs the whole event into three hours, 120 balls; too much happens too fast. I don't want cricket to be an exciting, thunderously fast sport, I want it to reflect what I regard as the best of English culture – a gentleness and eccentricity on a warm summer's day with lots of cake.

It's kind of like turning up to the Champions League final, and finding that the teams have foregone the ninety minutes plus extra time and decided to go straight to the penalty shoot-out.

Or, to use an alternative simile, like a ten-minute shag with a cheap hooker who's faking it, compared to a long weekend in Ljubljana with someone you love.

It may be better than nothing at all or spending the whole time twiddling your thumbs [or twiddling something else], but it's still somehow not quite…

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Today's Big Question: Relate something you looked forward to that turned out to be really sodding disappointing.

[No points will be awarded for the following far-too-obvious answers: the Red Dwarf comeback, any film or TV remake, any David Bowie album since 1979.]

Retro On Speed. My folks had a mini-clearout at their place last weekend; nothing too serious, just a few bits that they hadn't used in ages.

I was given several boxes of things to donate to the Cats Protection League shop; one of them was a Nintendo 64 game console and eight cartridges.

This feels like it only came out a couple of years ago, but a quick look through the cartridges confirmed its actual age, since one of the games is called Fifa Road To The World Cup '98. It's eleven years old. Yikes, how time's sped up.

Since it also came with the two N64 Zelda games, I decided I wouldn't take it to the charity shop immediately, but have one quick blast on them before they go.

Several days later, I'm suffering N64 Joypad Left Thumb Syndrome – an outbreak of blisters caused by its little mushroom control stick – and I'm remembering why I didn't buy one myself.

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1) everything that's already in the world when you're born is just normal;

2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;

3) anything that gets invented after you're thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it's been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

[Douglas Adams]

…which applies to culture and games as much as inventions, since with the later [three-dimensional] Zelda games my brain says "hey, this was much better when it was in 2D…"

Mr Adams should, of course, have added that anything invented after your twentieth birthday seems like it only appeared yesterday, even though I'm about to turn 38.

I have a whole category of things which still have a marker of "new" in my brain despite being utterly old hat, from Oyster cards to the Teletubbies.

I can only see this getting worse as the aging process continues. Gawd knows what it'll be like in thirty years' time, when I'm sitting in a nursing home with drool running out the side of my mouth, and asking my teenage grandchildren "ooh, are you kids into Snow Patrol? I hear they're the new big thing now…"

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Today's Big Question: What to you seems like it only appeared yesterday, even though it's actually years old and completely passe or obsolete by now?