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2025-03-18

Week 219: Exploding head

We finally visited Phantom Peak on Friday evening. It’s all of ten minutes’ walk from our house, and we’ve both been past it enough times to be aware of it, but I had always been quite cynical. It was the recommendations from our next-door-but-one neighbours, who have been a few times (via discounted NHS staff tickets), and from Terence, who attended a play test, that prompted us to look into it. We managed to pick up tickets for less than full price, although they probably made it up on the 2 vegan hotdogs and 4 pints of beer we had between us.

It was very enjoyable. People have compared it to an escape room, but I’ve never done one so I can’t say anything about that. It’s busy, with a large set full of the cast and other members of the public. The quests aren’t particularly difficult, but the world and the set and especially the interactive artefacts are delightfully detailed and internally coherent.

You do have to give yourself over to the absurdity of the scenario, but it’s worth it. I’d recommend it.

It was nostalgic because it was also the same building that, back when it was Hawker House, (before that business was killed by pandemic restrictions) was one of the first places L— and I went on a date. I could still recognise a few features from its previous incarnation.

(Before that, the same building was a huge shop called What!!! that sold housewares, gardening supplies, and ugly yet inexplicably pricey furniture. I don’t miss that.)

I was woken by a loud explosion in the early hours of Sunday morning. But after realising that L— had slept through it, and that no one in any of the neighbouring houses was in the least bit perturbed, I was forced to conclude that I had imagined it.

I looked up the phenomenon. Whilst it’s not well understood, it has been recorded since the 19th century. It’s not much more than a curiosity, and doesn’t seem to portend ill-health or imminent death.

What is fun is the recently (1988) coined name: Exploding Head Syndrome.

I finally got a refund for my boat journey a month ago, when I couldn’t tap out because there was no power at the pier, and they charged me the maximum possible journey because technical problems are always in their favour by default. It might have taken a while, but I did get it back in the end.

There are two weeks left of this month and thus two weeks left on my current contract. I’ve been offered an extension, but that’s still going through various levels of bureaucracy and approvals. The question I have to answer is, do I want to? Working across three different projects and being responsible for things that I don’t have the power to change seems like a recipe for burnout. Conditions that are tolerable on a six-month contract with an end in sight aren’t necessarily so in the indeterminately longer term. The idea of just walking away and never having to touch Microsoft Azure again for the rest of my life is so, so appealing.

Capitalism makes sell-outs of us all, but only up to a point.

A few links this week:

• Modern handwriting: a historical survey.
• Sarah Small: Viola da gamba pedalare. A 2,500-mile 69-day tour by bicycle, with a viola da gamba, as far north as Shetland and as far south as Southampton. I want to find out how she is taking the instrument on her bike.
• How to learn a language like a baby. Listen, don’t try to read and write. This is how I approached Japanese, and it worked for me.
• Kyrgyzstan to allow kidney transplants for foreigners in order to promote medical tourism. Seems like a bad thing to promote, no?