Less And Less Control Over What My Computer Does

As noted last month, I was facing the deterioration of my laptop after 3.5 years.  Over the Christmas period it got worse, regularly overheating (despite cleaning out the fans) and consequently crashing.  With the sales on, it seemed like an opportune time to buy a replacement.  Knowing that this one is unlikely to make it far into 2018, I spent one third of the money I spent on the last one, so it will not be such a pain when I have to dump it.  The trouble is, now I buy a laptop and it is on Windows 8.  So much stuff is buried far deeper than in the past.  I battled even to change the wallpaper on the main screen.  Everything I do I seem to have to log in and re-log in and verify myself.  Even to play the Mah Jong matching tile game, which is free, I now have to establish an account with Xbox.  I also had to receive a code to my mobile phone, just to play a simple, free game.

What makes it worse is that it is not simply Microsoft which is asking me for verification at every turn, but because I bought a Hewlett-Packard computer, their facilities are constantly on to me to link to its provision often in contradiction to what Microsoft are peddling to me.  They have no appreciation of how I work, they want to connect everything in the way they see best.  This has long been my concern with computers, that these days, the systems patronise you rather than offer the facilities you need, they try to get you to fit to their approach.  With Windows 8, I had to disable a score of apps that I have no desire to use and had to work to put all the stuff I like, such as Word and work packages like Excel and PowerPoint into a place where I could reach them easily without having to dig through recommendations for a New Year diet or trips to places that I could never afford.  There needs to be a setting which recognises - 'this person bought a cheap computer at a sale price, thus he does not have the income to afford all this stuff we are shovelling at him'.

Back in the 2000s if I bought a computer, I bought a tool.  Now what I have bought is a billboard, constantly piling me with extra things I might want to buy and locking my identity into everything.  I got sick of this and so have established an entirely anonymous account unconnected to anything else.  This, however, then bars me from playing the Mah Jong matching game.  The trade is constantly, 'you can only have basic functions if you allow us to keep shoving advertising at you'.  In the 2000s, I paid about the same amount of money and was left alone.  Is such advertising necessary to fund the cost of these machines?  What is tiresome is that I spend more time disabling all these facilities than I actually do working on what I want to work with.  It is as if I have bought a car but on the way to work I have to go by a route chosen by someone else so that I can stop at shops along the way that I have no interest in.  Just wait until the 'updates' start and I have to switch on my computer so that it can simply play with itself for 30-60 minutes apparently 'updating' something that looks identical when it has finished.  Sometimes it deigns to allow me to focus on what I want, but that is never within the first hour of being on.

The other thing is Cloud storage.  The hacking of such facilities is well known and yet I am constantly being pummelled to put my documents and photos into Cloud storage.  Microsoft, Dropbox and Hewlett Packard have all offered me totalling around 5TB of Cloud storage.  Why on Earth would I want to us that?  I am not rich and having bought a laptop I see no reason to go out and also get a smartphone or a tablet.  I would get one not all of them.  Typing novels on a phone is a waste of time; searching for an address when on the move is something different.  However, we are encouraged to see every tool as universal, rather than seeking out the best for what we want to do.  Again, the companies feel they know better than us how to live our live - am I the only one for which that is dystopian?  I am not a teenager and so I recognise that I might be out of step with current trends and indeed have no interest in current fashions in technology.  Then again, I am not a man who would buy a car because it looks good, I buy a car which I hope will work well and is safe.  Companies seem to forget that dull people like me make up the majority and many of us do not even want to try to look cool.  For me a computer is a tool not a lifestyle choice.  If Sony can be hacked, what hope do I have that my Cloud-stored materials will be safe?  If Hollywood celebrities can end up with their photos everywhere, people could send mine around without a second thought.

Memory sticks are leaping on almost on a monthly basis.  Three years ago, I got a 4GB for £29 (US$45; €37) now I can buy a 32GB memory stick for £20,  Yes, you can have memory sticks stolen or you can lose them, but for work stuff, my fiction, even photos, even if I want to use them on different devices, why risk using the Cloud, when I can have them all on a tiny piece of metal affixed to my keys?

What I am seeking, perhaps foolishly, from computer and software companies, is to be treated like an adult.  I want a tool that does what I want it to do.  If I want extra, I can make that choice in time, I do not need to be advertised to every time I switch on.  Indeed, I think they do not recognise that how in so many people it instills hostility to the very things they are promoting.  I want tools on my computer that I can use without going online.  There seems to be a fantasy at Microsoft and Hewlett Packard as with many companies that the internet is universal and always available.  They clearly do not work in the average office let alone try to use it in a cafe.  Having to incessantly connect even to use mundane products, slows the whole process up.  We have long put aside the concept of the 'information superhighway' and know at best it is a B road.  However, these companies seem determined to fill it up with ice cream vans seeking to sell you the latest gimmick. 

Each time I buy a computer, I seem to spend a larger amount of my money on getting things I do not want and finding access to what I do want harder than ever.  Perhaps in an era when utility companies charge you in advance for energy or water you are never going to use, I should not be surprised that as a consumer, despite the apparent 'choice' it is ever harder to get the right tool for me.

Canal Boating: Running the Gauntlet of Humilation

I know I have intense bad luck with holidays. It is now six years since I wrote: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2008/03/when-holiday-is-worse-than-no-holiday.html and in that period I have only had one holiday which has lasted more than 2 days before something has led to it being terminated. The last week-long holiday was in December 2012 in a cottage 45 Km from home. The last holiday I took did not even last two days as on the morning of the second day we woke to find the electricity had been cut to the whole district by a storm; power was not restored for twelve hours, so we simply went home.

I remain the eternal optimist and having finally got some compensation, after seven months of battling, for the car which lasted me 13 days before breaking down entirely, never to move again, I decided to go on a canal boat holiday. This is a very British style of holiday. Americans and Canadians do not have this kind of holiday and fall enthusiastically in love with it. Even northern continental Europeans prefer our quaint, narrow canals to the vast still industrial/commercial ones of Belgium/Netherlands/Germany. I am part of the canal generation. Growing up living near a canal I saw it transformed during the 1970s and 1980s from a disused channel with little water in it and a lot of rubbish, into a functioning canal which attracted the growing leisure boat crowd. Yachting and power boating has always been popular among the well-off of southern England where I lived, but canals now offered a whole new opportunity with less risk of storms and less distance to travel to reach your boat. With boats on canals limited to 4mph (6.4kph) it also appears to be a relaxed way to travel. Canals were built originally to move heavy goods like coal or stone to industrial areas and for this reason they are densest in England in the industrial Black Country of the West Midlands. However, also linked to rivers, they also pass through rural and former industrial areas which are more pleasant to go through and connect historic towns which are tourist attractions in their own right such as Oxford and Bath.

Aside from the 'boating set' canals have also had an attraction for a more 'hippie' like clientele. The association with moving freely around the country, tying up mostly where you choose, obviously has an appeal for people who like a less tied-down way of life. Certainly in the 1970s canals were heavily associated with folk music and handicrafts. It has only been in recent years that the styles and decor of them has been allowed to diversify from the black, red, green colouring of 'trad', i.e. traditional, boats. More and more have been built, many these days with modern facilities such as televisions and washing machines; steps are now in place to allow wi-fi on them. Perhaps the fad is passing as the number of canal boats for sale has reached an all time high and you can pick one up for as cheap as £32,000 (€38,700; US$54,000). This may seem a great deal, but new ones cost double or more that price. You are buying something 2.1m wide (for what is called a narrowboat, i.e. one that will fit all canals in the UK) and 16m long. The longest are 24m (72 feet) long, made of steel with water and toilet tank, a cooker, etc. on board. You can live on a narrowboat and in many parts of the country you will find people doing so for part or indeed all of the year, though it can get cold. You find the entire range from modern ones with double glazing and solar panels to traditional ones with the engine visible in the middle of the boat and a coal oven on board.

All over the UK you can hire canal boats for a holiday. They typically sleep six people but you can get ones accommodating more. For £1000-2000 depending on where you start from and the quality of your boat and its facilities, you can rent one for a week. You are permitted to drive it with only one hour's training. This is one challenge, people moving vessels 72m long in channels sometimes only a couple of metres wide with other canal users, notably canoeists and people on the towpath running beside the canal, including pedestrians, anglers and increasing numbers of cyclists. The other thing is that the momentum of a canal boat even when moving at 2kph is immense and water does not provide much friction. Lock gates weigh anything from 800Kg to 2 tonnes. There is a lot of room for bumps and knocks. One woman described it to me as 'a contact sport'. However, despite this, given the attitudes of canal users outlined below, you have to move as if walking on eggshells.

On paper a canal boat holiday might seem ideal. You can move at your own pace. It is like camping without having to give up all the facilities or having to queue to have a shower or use the toilet. In addition, if it rains you can retreat inside and watch television or a DVD; going through urban areas you can even use your mobile phone. The trouble is, the thing that ruins it is the British and indeed foreigners who aspire to behave like middle class Britons. You can do nothing in the UK these days without someone telling you very loudly that you are doing it wrong. They do this for two reasons: 1) to assert their social status, through having a privately owned boat or one that is 'proper' or better equipped compared to what you might be aboard; 2) to massage their egos, by showing you up to be ignorant or a fool.

Encouraged by the woman I used to live with and her son, I hired a 33-metre, 6-berth narrowboat on a canal in southern England for one week. In many ways this holiday was a 'success'. It lasted 5 days rather 2 days, though it was supposed to last 7 days. I lost a hat and a map; a watch strap was broken but no electrical items or money were lost. I had some scrapes but no serious injuries. It did not rain and the weather was fine, with some reprieve from intense sunshine. We moved very slowly, covering around 7Km per day. In part that was due to the number of locks and swing bridges along the way. A lock is a large mechanism sometimes 3 metres deep with usually four, though sometimes two, of the large gates already mentioned. They allow the lifting or dropping of the water level in an enclosed space, so permitting a boat or sometimes a pair of boats, to go up or down hills. They are marvels of 18th century engineering and can be entirely operated by a single person if required, though it is typical to use two or more. You also need someone on the boat to move it in and out of the lock. To operate the lock there is no power bar that from your arms and legs. You let water in and out of the lock by turning ratchets and you open and close the locks with the strength of your back. Thus you need to be physically healthy and fit. However, of course, the British work at two extremes, either they lay utterly passive on the beach or they insist on a holiday which in centuries passed would have been deemed labour.

I knew locks well. Probably better than almost anyone we met. When the canal behind my house was derelict friends and me would climb down the tunnels that run through the locks. They were dry then and are now literally filled with tonnes of water. I have climbed up and down lock gates that most people now only see as they pass them. I am unfit and overweight, but thought I remained strong enough to do the job. Despite some 'sticky' lock gates, this proved to be the case. Indeed the 12-year old boy (1.67m; size 42 feet) with us was able to operate them alone.

The trouble with the holiday was not the mechanics, it was the people.  It was the not so wonderful British public who cannot let anyone pass without making some jibe or instructing them about how pathetic they are or simply insulting them.  When you are in a hire boat, you are the lowest of the low.  The company you are hiring from has its logo, its name and telephone number emblazoned on the boat.  Everyone knows precisely where you have come from and that you are not a 'proper' boater despite all the exhortations in the canal associated publications that people like us are an important source of revenue for the upkeep of the canals and for restoring the many miles of canal that still remained disused.  However, the British cannot stop themselves and it even seems the hobby for people to hang around locks simply to shout advice/abuse.  Within the first hour you get used to person after person telling you exactly what you have been told in the training you have received.  You smile and nod thanks.  However, this does not seem to be enough.  The people seem to want you to bow down and kiss their boots for the wonderful enlightenment they have given across.

We had a Dutchman not even bother to talk to us, but in the middle of us operating a lock simply walk up and take over.  I stepped back trying to stay calm and not say anything.  By dropping the vent (the piece in a lock gate that lets the water in or out) early, he actually made our job harder.  We had people bellowing at us that we were not doing it the 'correct' way, even when we were in fact the right.  One man became indignant when we started to use the barge pole to move the front of the boat away from the bank, though that is its purpose.  He insisted that the 12-year old insert his foot between the side of the boat and the lock wall, even though this risked it becoming crushed.  He would not accept our rebuffs.  We had people trying to race into a lock before we had exited it, making it far harder for the pilot, only a few days into driving anything let alone a 33m boat.  We had people 'speed' (if you can call 8kph speeding) past us, and they scowling at us when their wash meant we were sucked into buffing the stern of their boat. Always we were deemed to be on the 'wrong' side or opening the lock too fast or too slowly.  We were even chided for 'not having come far today' as if there is a set distance you must cover every hour to be deemed an appropriate boater.

Every passage through a lock we made, every peg we hammered into the ground, every knot we tied was judged as having failed and we were told very vocally that that was the case.  I tried to throw one rope aboard the boat, missed and cursed.  This resulted in a woman pursuing us for 1Km down the canal, bringing with her the representative of the boat company we had hired it from to harangue us for ten minutes about appropriate language.  Clearly you are not permitted to 'swear like a bargee' (i.e. someone operating a barge, a commercial version of a canal boat) however, the locals are into 'trad' boating.  To be told off for swearing such distance from the incident made me feel like a child.  I swallowed all the abuse, all the snootiness, all the patronising behaviour, all the haranguing, all the people pushing their way in to take over my task and all of this with the expectation that I would be grateful for their intervention.  I feel utterly debased from my five days on the boat.  I feel as if I have given up all dignity, all initiative and am fit only to be ordered around by people apparently so superior to me.  As you can imagine, I snapped and abandoned the boat.  No-one else would come with me.

I returned to the yard where we had started from.  The woman on duty was surprised to see me leaving.  She has the faith that canal holidays are the very best that anyone could have and was unable to tolerate the fact that someone was having such a humiliating time that they had to go home early.  Of course, I have absolutely no interest in going nowhere near a canal ever again and will be happy if they all fade back into blocked up obscurity where they should have been left.  Dried out they could have provided decent roads between many towns.  The British (plus representatives of the Dutch, German and even Canadian populations) have to bring their egos and their suppression of people around them to everything they do.  You see it constantly when driving; you now see it if you ever dare venture out on a bicycle; I am sure you have long seen it on the golf course or the tennis/squash court.  They cannot be happy unless they are pressing someone else down and not just with a simple cutting remark but with sustained abuse, at best patronising; at worse insulting.  If you are thinking of a canal boat holiday, I would utterly advise against it unless you have skin as thick as a rhino or enjoy being made to feel small on an hour-by-hour basis.  The alternative is to go to another country where you do not speak the language and when treated this way simply plead lack of comprehension.

Your Car Has Broken Down? Then You Are An Idiot Who Must Be Lectured By Me

There are certain topics that British men, and indeed probably men across Europe and even further afield will not let anyone gainsay them on.  Football is one of them.  Immigration issues is another as is the treatment of convicted criminals.  Do-it-yourself is another topic.  These are things that the bulk of men will not be permitted to contradict them on, often even when there is clear evidence to the contrary.  The last resort is 'that doesn't sound right', 'that can't be right', and 'you must have heard it wrong'.  It is the equivalent of the 'does not compute' from a robot.  A man's dignity is so dependent on him being right in these issues that he cannot mentally cope with any challenges to this perception. Perhaps the largest area for such a mindset is in terms of cars and driving. 

The comedian Harry Enfield portrayed a character who would interrupt conversations in pubs with 'you don't want to do it like that' and would totally dismiss the individual's approach and lecture them on the correct way to do it.  He could not accept that anyone could trump his view.  Another set of characters in a similar vein were the Self-Righteous Brothers portrayed again by Enfield this time in collaboration with comedian Paul Whitehouse.  They tended to take particular celebrities and praise their attributes before drawing a particular line over which they would not let them cross.  These characters were played for comedy, but they are very well observed. As a blogger I get indignant and tell people what to think but the advantage of a blog is one click and you are away from it.  I am not pestering you any longer than you wish.  Unfortunately there are far too many people like this in Britain today who do it to your face and they make any troubles you face harder to deal with.

As I mentioned, the biggest focus for such intrusive souls is connected to cars.  I have had a lot of bad luck with cars, two in a row completely died, though fortunately I had not paid much for them.  In one case I was conned by people who appeared to be friends but clearly more wanted to offload a poor vehicle than they wanted to remain my friends.  I tend not to publicise these problems as immediately it reduces my standing in the eyes of any British man I meet.  They, of course, have perfect knowledge which means they are never conned and always get the best prices.  For them it is simple to achieve this, so I must be a real idiot not to be able to do so.

My last car was 15-year old Mitsubishi people carrier which had done 200,000 Km (125,000 miles).  It was still running but despite all the tweaking and services, it kept on losing revs at slow speeds, making it difficult to keep from stalling in the stop-start traffic that I now drive through.  I thought it had had a good run so started looking for a replacement before it died completely.  I lighted on a Kia people carrier, 8 years old and having done 115,000 Km (71,000 miles) for £3,500, about £1000 more than I could afford.  However, it was in good condition and was large enough to accommodate stock for the business I sometimes help out.  It has a diesel engine which these days means that it is less economical than it would have been about 15-20 years ago.  It has a fuel tank which is 40% larger than the Mitsubishi but the distance per litre is about 15% less than the Mitsubishi.  Apparently the advantage of diesel engines is only apparently if you cover more than 25,000 Km per year and I only do half that.  Having run for two weeks without problem, it suddenly would not start.

Since leaving London in December for a better job, having struggled to find anyone who would rent me a room in a shared house in a city for less than £650 per month, I ended up renting part of a very large house which unfortunately is in rural West Midlands. Before you write in to say that you can rent cheaper rooms, try doing it when you are a man, over 30 and working in my industry, all of these things put off potential landlords/ladies.  I have made another mistake about diesel cars.  Yes, once I saw that I might buy a diesel car, I should have run off and read everything I could about them, but when you are at the dealership you do not have such time and with this tendency for all car dealers to treat you like an imbecile if you make one mistake about the car you are looking at, you do not ask questions.  The woman accompanying me asked about the jack, something largely redundant in cars these days and it led to the dealer simply laughing out loud at here.  They do not care and you have no choice, a private seller would be even harsher.  It is all about them loving the boost to their insecure egos that such humiliation brings.  The mistake I made is that diesel engines start poorly in cold weather.  This seems ridiculous given that tractors, lorries and I imagine snowploughs use diesel engines.  However, it is to do with the fact that it runs on compressing the fuel until it ignites, rather than a spark from a spark plug igniting it.  I found I actually remembered quite a bit about diesel engines from my O Level Physics classes.  Thus, living in a rural area, on top of a hill, with few houses around put me into not an ideal position to start the car.

The day came almost two weeks ago now when it would not start.  I waited until the day warmed a little, then called Green Flag and still it would not start.  The size of it meant a larger tow truck was needed and this dragged it to the nearest mechanics I could find who had a space, the sixth I had telephoned as all the others were busy, being the time of year.  They had it for three days and could not work out what the problem was.  There seemed to be a range of problems, the heater which warms the fuel before it enters the compression process had loose wires and the battery needed replacing.  One problem with the car is almost everything in the engine is invisible, hidden below large metal boxes, a characteristic of a Kia, I have found I do not like.  It also turned out that one of the tyres was below the legal limit despite the car apparently passing its MOT just a fortnight earlier.  I had noticed this due to skidding on the road and was happy to have it replaced.  The mechanics managed to get the car running long enough to get it back to where I am living, 6.5 Km away where it proceeded to die once more.  I then discovered that the battery in the key fob was run down.  Having walked back 9.5 Km to a branch of Asda which had sold out of just that sort of battery and a further 3 Km to a pound shop that had them at half the price of Asda and got a taxi at £10 back.  I managed to start the car.  It was apparent the low battery simply kept triggering the immobiliser.  However, by now I was blocked in by the other lodger's car and satisfied that I had started it four times thought I would start again the next morning.  Of course then it would not work.  I have now had to wait seven days for the Kia specialists 25 Km away to fit me in and have to get it towed there once more.

In the meantime I have clearly been on to the people who sold me the car.  Given that they have treated me so poorly I will do something I do not often do and tell you that they are BMC Autonation based in Bournemouth in Dorset.  They are not huge but have a number of locations around the town.  They seemed to be reliable and the car came with a 12-month warranty on parts - an important qualification.  I telephoned them about the fact that they had sold me a car that had stopped working within two weeks of me buying it from them and that despite the MOT certificate had a tyre below the legal limit in terms of tread.  They simply denied vigorously that it had anything to do with them.  I had driven the car off the forecourt (though not very far given how little diesel there was in the tank) and as far as they were concerned that ended their responsibility for the car.  I guess I should have realised from the lack of diesel that much more would need replenishing from the key fob battery to the car battery to the tyres.  Basically the car was not fit to drive and I am sure thousands of men would shout at me for my inability to simply smell that these things were wrong with the car the moment I looked at it.  That has been the attitude of many men and indeed a woman, since I bought it.

For £3500 I have been left with a car which cannot move after two weeks with problems that after 3 days, an experienced mechanic could not resolve.  Being in a rural area with buses stopping in the village every 80 minutes during the rush hours, when they turn up, has meant great difficulty getting to work.  It costs £3.30 to cover the first 6 Km and then £1.70 for the next 16 Km.  The second stage is from town to town so is faster and far more regular.  A return journey costs exactly £10 or £50 per week, 20% more than the diesel I was having to buy for the journey.  If the bus does not come then it is £10 for the taxi over the first 6 Km, each way.  So not only have I wasted thousands of pounds on a car I am now paying even more for the privilege of not having a car.  If this goes on the choice is to move into the town and see my rent rise from £475 per month for a room to £650.  Of course taxi drivers will swear that you can rent a 2-bedroomed flat for that much, but it actually turns out to be impossible to find any of these places they keep telling you that you are an idiot not to be renting.

I guess this takes me to the root of the problem.  Men largely have an unshakeable perception of the world.  They will not be challenged in that viewpoint.  To be challenged somehow twists their brains so much that it is painful.  Thus, they keep pumping out the same perceptions no matter how much someone contests them.  Their own explanation for the difference between their world view and what the person is saying is that that person is an idiot, no matter how many admirable traits or how much knowledge they have demonstrated up to that point.  Throughout this car saga I have had to put up with such lecturing, very difficult as a lot of it has come from my landlord and whilst I want him to stop banging on about this stuff I do not want to upset him so he feels that I am too much of a pain and chucks me out.  Of course, when the car first broke down the landlord insisted that he got in and tried to start it, he did this repeatedly with no more success than I had had.  The other male lodger similarly insisted that he must try and did exactly the same as myself and the landlord had done with exactly the same result.  By now the engine was flooded and the battery run down anyway.  However, there was nothing that could be done to stop them turning the engine over and over again.  The landlady was determined to do the same and was only prevented by me taking the dying battery out of the spare key fob.

The landlord then insisted that being a diesel engine it must need the glow bulbs replaced.  These were the old method of warming diesel before it was compressed.  He is still insisting on this even though I have told him at least ten times that the car has no glow bulbs but a more up-to-date, though possibly less reliable, heater system.  Even when the car came back from the mechanics he has continued to say it simply needs the glow bulbs replaced.  This shows the strength of his world view, that he believes even professional mechanics who had the car for three days would not have replaced the glow bulbs if that was all that was wrong.  My refusal to accept that this reason is the correct one is now angering him.  However, there is nothing I can do about it.  Even if I get the Haines manual and show him the lack of glow bulbs it will simply stoke his anger, he would rather be angry and wrong than be corrected and so feel humiliated in this subject matter which clearly shapes a large chunk of his masculinity.  The car has been sitting passive outside the house while awaiting the tow to the Kia dealers.  I have tried to start it on the off chance but have simply ended up running the battery down again.  Yet, even today the landlord suggested I try some more and went on about if I just got new glow bulbs it would be fine.  His knowledge is clearly greater than that of the manufacturers.

Having proved myself very poor at buying cars, he has now insisted that if I get another one, which seems quite feasibly will have to be the case, he must accompany me.  He apparently can sniff out faulty cars even when they work perfectly on the test drive (and as you can imagine given my past experience I tried absolutely everything in the car to see if it worked or not before I bought it).  He along with a number of colleagues from my job have this ability and all want to come along next time, because clearly I am incapable of buying a car.  I will need quite a large vehicle to fit them all in.  Of course, they will spend the time correcting each other and pointing out how not only I am wrong, but their fellow 'advisors' are too.

Being lectured repeatedly as a man of 46 is hard.  Being told that you are an idiot unsuited to drive, is humiliating.  Having people insist that a part which does not exist is faulty, is hard to tackle politely.  This is on top of the missed trips and visits to friends and the burden on my wallet to cope with.  I feel once more as I did when living with my parents last year.  All my achievements, the fact that I have survived all the bullying and losses without going mad are nothing simply because my car has broken down.

The Life Your Parents Forgot

Back in 1992, when I was a mere 24, I attended a wedding back in my home town.  Two of my friends who had been dating since they were at school had decided to get married.  I am a big fan of weddings and went to at least one per year 1991-2002.  Anyway, it was also a good opportunity for meet up with other old friends; I was living in Oxford at the time and saw those who had remained in the town where I grew up, only occasionally.  I agreed to walk to the church which was only 3.2 Km from my parents' house with another friend of mine.  It was a bright sunny day and we intended to drink, as it was neither of us had a car anyway.  He and his brother lived with their parents, this being Surrey where rental accommodation is rare and house and rent prices are well beyond the means of young men doing ordinary jobs (he was a computer programmer; his brother worked in metallurgy).  My friend's brother, who was two years younger than us, decided that walking would take too long and he would cycle.  Whilst it is against the law to be drunk while cycling, you tend to get away with it much more and can stick to back routes where you are unlikely to encounter the police.  In addition, I am not aware of any drunken cyclists killing anyone, unlike even sober car drivers tend to do pretty regularly.  If you are that drunk you tend to fall off the bicycle and end up doing more harm to yourself than others. 

What struck me was the how alarmed my friend's mother was about us going to the wedding on foot and by bicycle.  It was in the middle of the sunny day, in suburban Surrey, not really a scenario that you feel has a high level of risk.  We were going to a wedding rather than a bare-knuckle boxing match and yet she seemed to believe that we would necessarily come to harm and tried to persuade her two sons to not attend.  They had known the groom since early childhood, yet she seemed to weigh her concern about their welfare above any thought of manners.  Both the men decided to go against their mother's wishes.  Of course, we all got there safely and had a very nice day all round.  We drank at the reception but no-one was incapacitated and we came home by taxi and bicycle.

That incident was a minor if peculiar one.  What I did not really take on at the time was what it signalled about how parents handle their adult children.  At 24, I have been a writer with a growing reputation; I could have been the ticket man at Fulham Broadway Station; I could have been in the Army, being shot at in Iraq; I could have been in prison; I could have had a wife and children of my own; I could have been running a business; I could have owned a house.  Okay, so I had not done any of these things.  I was, however, training to be a teacher, which suggested that the state, a school and numerous parents saw me as sufficiently adult to teach a class of pupils, up to 18 years of age.  I was fortunate that after I started the course, I only had to spend another few weeks when looking for a flat in London, living with my parents, so, perhaps I escaped being treated like my friend and his brother, somehow as if we were frozen at the age of 15 forever more. 

Part of the problem in the UK is that accommodation is so expensive.  When you have businesspeople looking for rooms to rent as lodgers in houses, how can a young person working in a shop or a call centre able to get even space in a shared house.  The only answer is parents.  This is why the average age for people leaving home in the UK is now 36, an age when back in the 1960s you would have been expected not only to have your own place (rented or otherwise) but also a wife and children, and be on the verge of middle age.

I think the attitude of parents to their adult children is not only shaped by the economic necessities of trying to live in the UK.  We live in a far more juvenilised society than even the 1990s, let alone the 1960s.  People seem unwilling to take responsibility for any of their actions and baulk against anyone limiting what they do; the speeding issue is a case in point, huge credit card bills is another.  Thus, parents who grew up in an earlier era (and remember someone born in 1981 is now 30), when people had to take more responsibility for their actions see their children ill-equipped.  However, ironically, that is because we have all been hammered by media pressure to protect our children for the apparently ominpresent threats out there.  By fearing all that might happen to our children we actually make them unable to cope when anything out of the ordinary, let alone genuinely dangerous occurs to them.  In addition, by padding them from the hazards of the world, we give them a false illusion that they face no risks and that driving dangerously or spending without thought will never have any serious consequences, or certainly not ones that the parents cannot resolve.

Naturally, I am sure, many children like the extension of the adult safety net.  This approach can be condemned as being a middle class attitude, but you only have to meet with families in poor parts of London or any other city to see, in fact, even among those on the minimum wage and on benefits this attitude of trying to insulate adult children from the world persists.  I have seen parents divide up their own bedrooms so their grown up children can continue to live in the house.  I have seen women go round to the houses of their daughters' boyfriends and shout at them from the street to stay away, often as a result of cross-racial relationships.  You might argue that the motive here is that the poorer population know how really hard life can be; the middle classes just want to protect their children against the potential of having a hard life.  The motives may vary, but the outcome is pretty much the same: treating adult children as if they were frozen in their teenaged years.

I suppose it is natural to perceive family members at a certain fixed position.  You do not see your parents as they age.  You see them everyday when they are growing up and these days when middle age seems to start when you are sixty, and people in their forties wear teenage fashions, your parents look much the same from 30 to 50 and sometimes beyond; my parents in their 70s look better than they did 20 years ago, the pressures of work having been shed from them.  It is the same with your grandparents you tend to fix them at a certain age and forever remember them as that and it can be a shock to realise as an adult that they are 25 years older than when you first knew them.  The trouble comes when we associate certain modes of behaviour with the age we have fixed our family member at.  It can be hard as your parents' faculties begin to fade as they age because you probably still default to thinking of them how they were at 45 rather than 75.  You are usually quickly brought back to reality when you see them again; it can be sad, but you generally adapt and begin quite easily to treat your parents the way you used to treat your grandparents.

The problem is that they too have frozen you in time.  In my experience they tend to think you are somewhere between 15-17.  You look like an adult to them, but they know that in fact you are very inexperienced of the world and are likely to make mistakes.  You have to be warned about these things.  Whilst you may resemble an adult, in their eyes, in fact you lack the ability to make adult judgements and you will make lots of mistakes.  You can be talked to as if you have no knowledge or expertise or experience of the world, no matter how high-flying a post you might hold (especially if it is an industry your parents disapprove of or never felt was right for you) or how many lovers you might have.  I must say, that in fact, this perception is not limited to parents.  Back in 2002, my brother and I got into an argument in a Belgian street.  He started bellowing at me about incidents that had occurred when I was 15 and he was 13, i.e. back in 1982.  Since then the Cold War has ended, AIDS has been a global problem, apartheid has ended in South Africa, home computers had grown from 48k to many Mb capacity, we had been through years of Thatcher and Blair, and yet, he still saw the tensions between us as they had been as teenagers.

Maybe I am unlucky, I do seem to meet people who whilst not having shining careers themselves are surprised that everyone else is not more successful and again blame laziness.  I had one friend who could not understand why I was not studying Korean (he would allow me to learn Japanese at a pinch) and was not making thousands of pounds writing history articles for magazines.  He had no understanding that these things do not happen.  The number of Britons who can understand Korean must be very limited and even those who are successful at article writing (and they are a select band who get lucky breaks) never earn the sums he assumed.  He took his assumptions to be the truth, so any argument against him just showed up how cunningly lazy you were, trying to get out of easy ways to make money.  It is people like this who must have been the witchfinders of previous centuries.

As you can guess, at 43, I am still facing the 'frozen in time' kind of attitude from both my brother and my parents.  It has been exacerbated by me being unemployed for 12 months.  Despite decades of mass unemployment, the default attitude for British people is that being unemployed is the fault of the jobless person; the economy and the attitudes of employers have nothing to do with it.  If only the jobless person applies him/herself, then they will not be without work. 

Being unemployed seems to give everyone a licence to tell you how to live your life, not least your parents.  However, the advice is not restricted to job hunting.  I have a girlfriend, she is the same race as me and the same religion.  She is aged 5 years younger than me.  She has a child that is not mine.  She is not an alcoholic, she is not a drug addict, she is not involved in any criminal activity, she is not violent, she runs her own retail business.  However, the attitudes of my father and brother towards her are as if she was stealing from me on a daily basis or plunging me in crime.  I cannot stand people who stop members of their family linking up with people of a different race or religion, though I can understand the basis of their disapproval.  Yet, in my case, there is not even this excuse.  I could understand even if she was 20 years younger than me or 20 years older, but we seem to be very well matched, and vitally, makes me happy. 

What gives parents and other family members the right to police the relationships that other adults in their family have?  I would be frustrated if I had been 16 or 18 and was told I should not be seeing someone I was attracted to, let alone one I loved and who loves me back, and treats me incredibly well.  How come, in our 30s and 40s, we cannot be left alone to form the relationships we want and maintain them, especially when they are as positive as the one I am in at present?  I am now old enough to have potentially had grandchildren myself and yet I am treated by my family as if I am still not mature enough to run my life.  I think it is somewhat an issue of discrimination against particular members of the family.  As it took me many years before I had sex and did not keep my family informed about every short-term relationship I had; because my girlfriend had a child by a man who fled the country once it was conceived, both of us have been branded by our families as feckless and incapable of making our own decisions.  This seems ironic considering that I have managed offices controlling thousands of pounds and my girlfriend runs her own business.  Yet, clearly this is not enough to warrant us being treated like adults. 

If these people were not family members I would have told them to back off very harshly and in fact, as it is, the persistence of my father and brother in trying to keep running my life has led me to break ties with them both.  The picking on one member of a family seems common.  My girlfriend has two sisters, one of whom is also a single parent.  I have my brother who does not get treated the way I do, despite the fact for many years he settled to no career and spent months travelling, getting drunk and stoned, but now somehow is allowed to be an adult when I am not. 

One friend of mine when living at home in his 20s was compelled to do the ironing and other domestic chores that his brother, only two years younger, was not compelled to do.  His brother, having attended university was deemed to be above those things, yet has flitted from job to job, entered a marriage in which the woman two-timed him even moving her lover into their house and drained him of money before emigrating with yet another lover.  It appears that some of us are marked out as 'black sheep' for our entire lives, on criteria which, objectively, would not suggest such labelling.  It means that no matter how old we become we are never free of being treated as if we are incapable of running our lives without active family intervention.  If I was an alcoholic, a drug addict, regularly in prison, then I could understand it.  My own crimes have been being unemployed and falling in love with a single mother.

I had a friend who married in the late 1990s to a stunningly intelligent and beautiful woman.  He was well-educated and had movie star looks.  They shared a love of travelling to remote places and living adventurously.  However, both had very good university jobs, were healthy, of the same age and were not involved in crime or addicted to drugs or alcohol.  They seemed very well suited.  Yet, from the start her parents disapproved of him and hounded the couple so much that they fled the UK for Belgium.  Ultimately the pressure was such that they divorced.  To me, given how rare happiness is in this world, to drive a couple that way seemed evil.  Alright, there may have been a personality clash, but once your child is an adult you have to accept their choices.  Destroying something that brings them happiness without harm, is perverse.  However, I guess that these parents are not only frozen in time but also cannot see beyond their own petty concerns.

I have no idea who sets the rules.  I have had one male friend who has been physically abused by one girlfriend and robbed from by another; I have one female friend who is always publicly disparaged by her husband, and yet no-one ever seems to speak out or criticise what is going on with them.  Clearly myself and my girlfriend are in some category which allows people to tell us how to live our lives.  Before coming to visit us, her father told her bluntly that she had to leave me.  There was no reason given.  I accept I am unemployed, but then are hundreds of thousands of men in the UK.  I worked hard to try to get a job and having been to 28 interviews in 12 months, I finally secured work.  It may not be the greatest job I could have got, it pays £7000 per year less than I received in my last post, but it is permanent, it uses my skills and those things are not to be ignored in the current economic climate.

I have never attacked my girlfriend (I have never attacked anyone) and am like a father to her child.  We argue far less than is the apparent national average despite me spending the bulk of the day with her.  I am not a drug addict, an alcoholic or a criminal.  I do all that I can to make her and her child happy.  Yet, it is not enough, she has been told repeatedly to leave me as I have been told repeatedly to leave her.  There is no sense that I am an adult, that I can make my own decisions, make my own mistakes indeed, and live with the consequences.  I cannot predict the future.  Looking back there was little I could have done to spare myself from redundancy.  Yet, somehow, I am expected to have prescient powers that would have allowed me in the 1980s to know what careers and which employers within those careers would be safe bets in the 2000s.

Remaining with my girlfriend then opens me up to further charges (and she has experienced very similar on her side from her father), that I am naive, that I have no idea what I am doing and need to be guided.  Mistakes dating back decades are raked up for both of us.  For me it is joblessness, for her it is having a child as a single parent, that seem to be the clinchers, the things that rule out us being able to shape our lives properly or to make decisions.  I am not even permitted to say I am going for a test for Asperger's (let alone doing it) without being ridiculed at length by my father. 

I am a man, I have run offices, I have made financial decisions, I am trusted by the state to drive on the roads, to vote, to pay taxes, to obey the law, yet I am not deemed capable of taking decisions on my own health and above all on my own relationships.  My girlfriend and I have been utterly loyal to each other, we have had no other sexual partners since being together and yet our parents see the other as being reckless and bad for their child.  If they knew how hard it is to find someone who you are compatible with, I would hope that they would be pleased for us that we have managed to find someone who makes us happy.  Even if my girlfriend had all those bad characteristics, it would be up to me and her to decide whether the relationship should continue. 

We have been facing so much anyway, that I would just beg for her and my family members, if they cannot tolerate the partner we have chosen, just to stay quiet.  If you cannot say something nice, say nothing at all is what I would say.  However, any attempt to get them to back off elicits even more patronising criticism from both sides that even at ages 43 and 38, we are not capable of making our own choices and have to have parental intervention to show us where we have gone so wrong.

Parenting is not about ensuring that your children live their lives very precisely the way you have set out, even if that was possible (and, of course, parents, whatever they might think, are fallible; my father lent me money so I did not have to pull out of the house purchase and now says, three years on, that that was a big mistake on his part and I should have continued renting).  Parenting is about equipping your children to deal with the world out there and what it might throw at them.  Yes, you will act as a fall back, a safety net as far as you can, for many years.  However, once your child is an adult you have to recognise that the state views them sufficiently mature to do all the things like vote, have sex, die for their country, go to prison, whatever and live with the consequences.  You may disagree with how they live their lives, but if they are happy and are not making other people unhappy, it is not your place to intervene. 

You can never control another person's life, even your partner's and to try to do so ends in bitterness and failure.  As a result of my brother and father and my girlfriend's father constantly haranguing us to end the relationship, we feel large chunks of our families have turned their back on us. 

Men take it harder than women which is why I have ceased contact with my brother and father over their repeated criticism of my relationship.  Ironically, my girlfriend keeps trying to get me to make it up with them.  However, being an Asperger's sufferer (however much my father denies it), I remember all the insults and shouting as if it occurred hours rather than weeks and months ago, so it makes it that much harder to move beyond.  In addition, all the signs are any attempt to re-establish contact from my side will be seen as me admitting I was wrong and apparently giving them the green light to harangue me further in an attempt to direct my life in every aspect.  To accept that is to give up any standing as an adult and to accept the view that I am incapable of living my own life and making my own decisions.  I do not know what their motives are but clearly they seem to be very far from any kind of love.  For practical reasons, I have to maintain contact with my father, but unfortunately it comes at a high price. However, I have no such connection with my brother and I anticipate that the last time I will see him is at my father's funeral.  

How 'World Of Warcraft' Ruined My Life

Back in 2009 I wrote about how I had started to play the so-called Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game, 'World of Warcraft'.  My early views of the hazards of playing the game were posted back in July 2009: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2009/07/online-behaviour-world-of-warcraft.html   I am still playing it, probably even more because with me being long-term unemployed, losing my house and having no clear idea of where I am going to end up, escapism is vital.  During the Depression of the 1930s and the mass unemployment of the 1980s, consumption of alcohol and tobacco increased and funerals became more elaborate (if you have had a grim life people feel they need to give you a good send off, just witness any funeral in Mile End or Poplar in East London).  People seek escape and I am not exempt from that.

Of course, computer games of any kind have the danger of becoming addictive and you finding the hours passing by quickly.  Rather than doing the housework or the shopping, instead you keep playing even into the early hours of the morning.  With a game like 'World of Warcraft' in which there is not just a single character progressing down a chain of missions, but you can go and produce things like weapons or clothing and market them or go on quests for rewards or duel with other players or take part in the regular seasonal events, such as around the Solstice or Valentine's Day, there is even more to keep you engaged.  You can have up to 50 different characters so even if you tire of running around as a troll hunter you can log on and be a werewolf druid in a different location.  To stop players tiring of the settings and quests, periodically those running the game, a US company called Blizzard, recreate their world.  In December 2010 they launched 'Cataclysm' which saw regions of their world flooded, some split apart by earthquakes or volcanoes and new areas appear from the sea; new races were introduced and players could now rise up to level 85 rather than 80.  There were numerous new missions and even new skills that players could train in.  The game is always evolving and sometimes this is for gameplay reasons (such as no longer needing to buy ammunition for bows and guns or putting more mail boxes in certain cities) and sometimes to develop new storylines.  In such a fantasy continent there has to be lots of drama, invasions and betrayals.

This is all great.  Though I do not always agree with the changes made, and smaller updates and alterations come between the big relaunches like Cataclysm, it certainly keeps my interest which is why I am still playing it 20 months after I started.  The key problem for me and what makes me keep thinking I should turn away from the whole thing, is the people.  Of course, many of them are teenagers, you expect that with any computer-based game.  However, there are also older people with partners and children and work to go to.  Certain 'guilds' only permit people over 18 to participate in their group.  The range of nationalities is diverse.  There are different servers for the main language groups of Europe (and others for China and many for the USA), so being located in the UK I do not mix with French or German or Italian speakers.  However, the British server does have players from many minor states across Europe especially the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark, but also Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey and Greece.  I quite enjoy playing with people from such diverse backgrounds.  Though English is the language for the server once in a while people go off into Dutch or Danish and some guilds intentionally recruit people of a specific nationality.  Of course, in this age of semi-literacy among English speakers, a lot of the online discussion is in fact in a hybrid of text speak and simply bad spelling.  'LFG' - Looking for Group, 'JC' - Jewel crafter; one of the professions you can study and the whole range of smilies; 'OMFG' for 'Oh My Fucking God' seems unnecessarily hyperbolic in its anger/condemnation.  However, new terms develop simply because so few people seem to be able to spell, 'Rogue' (a character class) is always rendered as 'Rouge' and now 'give' has been replaced when it is a demand by 'geif' which seems to be turning into some form of German.  Again, being a man in his forties, I recognise that with the English language changing far more sharply between my generation and the one that is following than between my generation and that of my parents or even my grandparents, I am happy to accept that when online I need to use a different language.  I can type far faster than the bulk of the gamers, so accept the need for abbreviations.

What is more of a challenge is not really how discussion is had but what is said and beyond that, the behaviour of the people it betrays.  Someone said that the 'World of Warcraft' was like a Gold Rush town in California of the 1840s.  This is unsurprising, people are doing missions and fighting monsters to win magic items and gain gold.  With such funds they become better fighters or magic users and get access to higher level areas and so on.  This is the basic dynamics of numerous fantasy fighting computer games.  The problem is that many of the people gamers are interacting with are not computer generated they are people with feelings.  In the game two warriors with the same equipment will be equally matched and in combat it comes down to luck and which combination of buttons you press.  A well-equipped person playing for 3 months could beat someone who has been playing the game for 5 years, though the latter generally pretends his/her knowledge somehow makes them stronger.  In fact people who have that attitude often lose because they have no flexibility in their thinking.  So, how do you show you are 'better' than the derided 'newbies' or 'noobs' as it is typically abbreviated to?

Status is clearly important.  People aim to reach that level 85.  However, this can take weeks and months and while your character is rising through the ranks, how do you show you are better than the others around you?  It is by making divisions.  In many ways whilst 'World of Warcraft' is like California of the 1840s it is also like London society of the 1840s, snobbery is rife.  People put out a call to get a group of assorted characters together in order to attack a castle or run through some caves, fighting monsters.  Now, of course, the opponents are of differing levels depending on the location and so a level 10 warrior would die quickly if fighting level 20 dragons.  However, the person soliciting recruits does not stop there in separating out the volunteers, s/he insists that they have equipment of a certain rating, their 'gear score' has to be so high or they are 'kicked' from the group.  They are commanded to go to a location for inspection, i.e. a player looks at all the equipment the character has.  Many players simply preen around the centres of the big cities showing off what they have like so many peacocks or prostitutes.   Those volunteering rather than preening are grilled about their 'dps', from damage per second, how much damage their weapons or spells can inflict.  If it falls below some arbitrarily set figure then the person is refused.  Now that level 85 is the peak, recruitment advertisements in the game often say 'level 85s only' even when going off to a level 70 dungeon.  At level 83 I asked if I could join in as my damage and spells were only a little lower than the level 85 set and, of course, I was refused. 

Once you have got through the equipment inspection, you have to have your 'achievements' checked.  This is the list of successful missions and quests that you have already completed.  If you have not been felt to have achieved enough already, again you are refused.  This is a chicken-and-egg situation, because people often volunteer so that they can win an achievement, and yet because they do not have it, they are refused.  A lot of this reflects the lack of maturity of thinking on the part of the recruiters, no matter what age they actually are.  Even if you recruit a group yourself you are quite likely to find a member leaving mid-way through some battle because s/he feels the rest of the group is not up to scratch.  Even more criteria are piled on to segregate and demean other players.  One is speed.  There are no benefits for charging through a castle quickly.  In fact you often find if you do this then some monsters appear out of a room behind you that you have rushed by and start attacking you from behind.  However, warriors, paladins, death knights, the physical attack people, are very impatient and charge on.  If they upset a whole room of monsters and die due to rushing through it, then, of course, they blame everyone else for being pathetic.  These people should be compelled to play games such as the paper-based 'Dungeons and Dragons' role-playing game and know that to succeed in such fantasy settings bravado has to be tempered with caution and forward planning.

This brings us to 'tactics'.  'Must know tactics' is another criteria often set for volunteers to groups.  This does not mean how best to use your character's particular weapons or spells, but precisely where to stand in a castle room when a specific monster attacks.  Again, of course, if you have never done that mission before then how are you supposed to know that.  If you are even a little wrong then you get a long lecture about how wrong and stupid you are.  In addition, everyone thinks their tactics are the only feasible ones and any alternatives are derided.  This is often how arguments start out in groups.  I have done the same missions with differing groups all insisting that their tactics are the only correct ones and if you do anything different then you are kicked out.  There is a sense of a single truth.  It is not surprising that numerous wiki pages and websites have been created to provide players with very precise details about what to buy and where to stand in a particular room of a particular castle or cave.  Like most computer game players I use walkthroughs and other resources that are not part of the game.  However, because specific knowledge is used to denigrate other players, you end up having to read as much as if you were doing an Open University course, just so you do not 'blunder' when you go on a mission.  You ask for help in the game and are told you must be an idiot for even asking, because, of course, to any intelligent person, the answer is obvious or are told to go off and open up numerous webpages outside the system.  The reason for this is supposed superior knowledge is the only real way that one player can make themselves seem superior to another.

Pride in your achievements is a fair trait.  However, the sense that anything you have achieved or know (however wrongly in fact that information might be) should be constantly used to put down others as vocally as it is in the game is unnecessarily nasty, but seems to be a constant behaviour in the game.  I suppose this is a reflection of our contemporary society, especially in the UK: you can only get on in life if you not only eliminate potential rivals but you humiliate them too.

If assistance is offered it is never in a constructive way, it is patronising.  I might expect too much of the average 'World of Warcraft' player to know the difference.  It is great to share knowledge, tell people about bargains in the auction house or how to get through a new mission or quest.  However, that is never enough.  The bulk of players who share information (and they in themselves are a small minority) want you to abase yourself before their greatness and acknowledge that you were stupid until they decided to pity you and shower you with their grace.  Trying to find a specific trainer I asked for help and one player decided to advise me.  Initially I was grateful.  However, he felt he had to lead me through the city and if I said something which disagreed with how he saw the world he went 'WRONG' at me in the text.  The one useful function is 'Ignore' which blocks communication from certain characters if you choose.  Unfortunately it does not block it from specific players and I have had some switching from character to character, pursuing me across the continents of the game repeatedly telling me how wrong or stupid I am until I have blocked every character they can spring on me.  Then they send me messages in the in-game postal system continuing their diatribe.

Interestingly, Blizzard tries to engineer the game so as to promote a better level of co-operation between the players.  You can block swear words to eliminate the harshest abuse, interestingly 'Nazi' counts as a swearword but 'wanker' does not, probably due to the game originating in the USA.  Racism does sometimes break through.  Periodically people condemn non-English speakers struggling to phrase things correctly, which is laughable given how many errors they put in their own writing.  However, it is mob rule and if the bulk of players spell 'rogue' as 'rouge' that is acceptable in a way errors from someone using English as their second or third language is not permitted.  A lot of general public dialogue seems to be as if it was between a group of drunken football supporters watching a match in a pub.  The rules can shift quickly, but always to their advantage in denigrating other players not deemed to be part of the mob. 

The sense that it 'that's the way it is, you cannot question it' is all pervasive.  I have seen that phrase or variations of it banded around.  Once I saw a discussion about so-called 'twinking' when people with characters who have a lot of money send it to their lower level ones to raise them quickly through the levels without much effort (sounds familiar behaviour to anyone who lives or works in the UK).  Someone questioned if this was the right way to behave and whether it was fair on other players.  Rather than put forward a reasoned argument for continuing the practice, the response was, 'it happens, live with it' and the player was condemned even for questioning it.  I know it is a game, but these basic assumptions are carried out into the real world and you do wonder if the regimes in Tunisia or Egypt had changed if the bulk of the population had had that attitude.  Perhaps British complacency and pervasive self-righteousness is what makes us behave this way.  It does not seem healthy in a game, let alone real life.  The worst case was a discussion about Hitler.  I have no idea why it came up in the game.  Some realms of the game insist you only speak about in-game things others start debating the football match or the weather or Michael Jackson's death.  What alarmed me was the view that 'well he sorted out the Jewish problem' which seemed accepted without question.  I started pointing out that any 'Jewish problem' had simply been an invention of the Nazis anyway, and yet was being taken here as something that everyone knew and accepted.  I was barred from the game for three days for participating in an off-topic political discussion, but I was proud to be for challenging lazy, dangerous, Fascist assumptions.

To earn money in the game many players auction off unwanted items through one of the auction houses.  This is a bit like eBay fantasy style.  When fighting monsters you are quite likely to pick up armour or weapons or food or even scraps of fur or rock that you have no use for.  Someone else might just need that item to improve their armour or make something using a profession skill like blacksmithing or leatherworking.  You are not supposed to make a loss but the prices many people set are ridiculous.  I remember having a level 20 character, who was recovering tens of pieces of silver from his quests.  I looked to buy a pair of boots from the auction house.  The best pair for my level was a level 19 pair of boots, but the cost was 799 gold pieces.  There are 10 copper pieces in 1 silver piece and 10 silver pieces in 1 gold piece.  I would be unable to afford them until I was many levels higher and by then their strength and certainly any magic on them would be too feeble for the kind of monster I would then be fighting.  Hyperinflation is a real problem in the game which makes it very discouraging when bringing on a new character.  It is exacerbated by 'gold sellers' criminals who sell gold in the game for real pounds or euros.  This allows some players to simply buy their characters everything they need rather than having to earn it the way most players do.  The gold sellers put software into the sysem which creates 'mining robots' or 'collecting robots' which go round scooping up the raw materials in the game, faster than any players can and then they auction it to raise game gold to sell to players.  Of course, this is illegal, but because status-hungry players indulge in it, it helps upset the balance of the game play.

Hyperinflation always generates excessive behaviour.  A key problem is even if the collection 'bots are not around high level characters go into low level areas, able to move around on mounts far faster than anyone of the appropriate level can do, and mines or collects all the raw materials to then take them back to sell them at incredibly high prices leaving the poor low level characters with nothing to practice their skills working on or to make any money themselves.  Very quickly you have an elite of very high level characters whether migrated from another realm or who have bought their standing, simply selling to each other at very high prices, leaving poor lower level characters without a high level character to supply them, struggling to advance.  Guilds are supposed to help lower level characters advance, but as I consider below, this does not really work either.

Blizzard's steps mean that you need groups to run through 'instances' and 'raids' specific missions in castles or caves or wherever that gives good rewards.  Generally you cannot do it alone.  However, as seen above this actually promotes division rather than collaboration.  They encourage 'guilds', collectives of players focused on one or two activities in the game.  You get a guild 'tabard' showing the logo of the guild and access to a guild bank where items can easily be shared between players.  With Cataclysm Blizzard added other features, cheaper repairs to armour and weapons, access to greater funds, specific items, available to guilds that were thriving and successful.  The basic idea is that players help each other and more experienced players and higher level characters help lower-level characters.  Of course, you can be very experienced and yet be starting a new character among the 50 you are permitted to have, though you still seem to be treated as if you are new to the game as a whole.  The guild system does not really work.  There are some decent guilds.  The woman in my house is a member of one, but I have not been able to find one that is like that.

On any given server there are tens of versions of the world, each with a specific name, so that you do not get tens of thousands of people trying to move through the same area mining for ore or picking specific herbs.  When a 'realm' has too many players, people are offered free 'migration' to a new less populated realm.  This does mean you can have hundreds of people in the same 'place' who cannot see each other as they are on different versions.  Nowadays, random groups can be assembled automatically from across realms on the same server and it can be interesting to talk to people who generally play on an alternative version of the world to the one you are on.  Factors such as the cost of items sold by other players, how crowded certain locations get and even the tone of discussion in the realm can vary greatly.

The other element Blizzard introduced to guilds with Cataclysm was that they could attain levels by their members completing missions and other achievements.  I think the idea was to encourage people to become guild members, but it has completely back-fired and has simply added a new aspect to snobbery.  As in real history, large guilds that can offer their members lots of facilities prosper.  There is the snobbery 'I am in a level 10 guild, oh, but you are only in a level 5 guild, you must be a poor player, no-one else clearly wants you'.  As in our society exclusive clubs are yet another way to segregate players.  They have strict entrance criteria and anyone who does not fit with their arbitrary rules or does not carry out their designate tasks in time or simply is no longer liked, is excluded.  Some US companies take into consideration if prospective employees have run guilds on 'World of Warcraft', but from how most are run, the only kind of organisation such experience would really suit you for is working in the mafia.

Blizzard tries hard to encourage players not to behave in the cut-throat way so many do.  The 'hints' when you log on often advise players to be polite when playing with others and encourage them not simply to open a trade with a player or try to duel with them before actually talking with them.  However, walking through a city my character is quite liable to be repeatedly challenged or offered some trade with absolutely no dialogue.  You can see why many of us become 'backwoodsmen' keeping our characters in the less populated areas of the world.  Generally the whole feel from the players I encounter is that somehow conservative if not Nazi values have become the norm.  A lot of discussion is misogynistic.  I suppose you would expect this in a game about battling monsters, but there are female characters and female opponents.  Yet, a female character is often dismissed, even though a level 10 female warrior is no weaker than a level 10 male warrior in the game.  Of course, just because a character is female or male does not mean the player is too; yet that is the assumption so patronising of female characters is quickly translated into patronising of female players.  Some of the races are very glamourous, especially the elves and their accentuated femininity for the females, with tight fitting clothes, large breasts, slender waists, long hair and often large earrings, does not help.  However, saying this, troll and even orc females have a certain elegance but certainly a strength about them.  When you come across male characters named things like 'Hymenripper' then you have a sense that misogynism is not really challenged.

How 'World of Warcraft' ruined my life was not because I spent so long playing it and neglected other hobbies such as writing fiction or swimming.  What it has alarmingly shown me is that the norms of the next generation are focused on segregation of society by status.  That status has to be maintained rigidly by codes and that those outside have to be regularly humiliated.  The best the ordinary person can hope for is to give up their dignity and be told patronisingly how wrong they are and try to ape their 'betters' in the vain hope of being accepted.  It is a society in which people grab all the resources they can and shut out those coming on after them out of the opportunity of advancing themselves unless they can pay.  It is a society which is discriminatory to women who are assumed to be weak and interestingly that it is demeaning to accept assistance from a woman, no matter what your own gender.  It is a society in which bad language is used to show your level of anger at the 'stupidity' of people who have views different to your own.  It is a society in which you always believe you not have the correct answer but the only possible answer.  It is a society in which things should not be challenged and to even dare to question them opens you up to attack.  What I have seen in 'World of Warcraft' players is the very worst of British society distilled.  The government with all its plans for a very stratified society with opportunities for the few and people all 'knowing their place' should look to 'World of Warcraft' players for their footsoldiers.  These people have the perfect attitude to fill the ranks of the 'little Hitlers' that any authoritarian regime thrives on.  'World of Warcraft' ruined my life by not offering me the escape that I yearned for, but rather shoving the worst of everything I encounter in real life forcefully into my face every time I log on.

Rooksmoor's Guide to Attending Weddings

As regular readers will know, this blog is very much about downloading things from my brain into a more reliable storage space than my memory. To some degree, I have realised it is part of maintaining my identity in the way that I keep a diary and photos of people I have known. As my memory worsens, if you took those things away from me, it would be like erasing me as I am. I could start again but I would be a different person. To some degree this betrays an arrogance, that the identity of me at the moment is worthwhile maintaining in any form, given that many people and identities are wiped out forever on a second-by-second basis. All I can claim in defence is that I am rather attached to my current self and would be rather lost without it.

So, anyway, this brought me to the realisation that one topic I had not covered that was at the centre of every summer for me 1991-2001 is going to weddings. In that period I attended 16 weddings and was invited to 4 more, if I remember correctly, that I could not make it to, one each in Scotland (I was living in London), Germany, Malta and South Africa among them, and given, as I outline below, my income was low, I could not afford the flights to any of these, let alone the accommodation. In terms of presents I set a limit of £30 (€40.20; US$58.50 - the £ is currently sliding against the € and US$ despite financial difficulties especially in the USA) per each one but as much on travelling there as it took (I had no car), which meant I could spend £250+ per summer, at a time when my rent was £300 per month and I earnt £792 (€1069; US1544) per month before tax. The amount I spent on presents did not rise but of course the travel costs did.

In most cultures weddings are big events. A friend of mine attended one in Korea where there was a hall holding about 400 people and the bride changed clothes into 7 different costumes and the groom into 4; the wedding lasted all day. They had traditional Korean and more typically Western rituals as part of the whole process. A French wedding friends of mine attended similarly went on for 12 hours by the time they left. There was a procession around a local lake and lots of bad singing, plus at least two meals. The British tend to do a lot less at weddings, though one I went to had 14 pages to the order of service, two priests and holy communion for Catholics and Anglicans, prayers in English and Latin, lots of hand shaking and the service lasted 90 minutes, wearying for the nine under-5s there, two of whom only spoke German. They do spend a lot of money but it does not really go on anything that obvious to the guests. In the UK like the USA weddings have become an industry (this seems less the case elsewhere in Europe, but if I am wrong let me know) and in my town there seem to be regular wedding fairs advertising the whole range of things from the venue (things took off when in the early 2000s, I think, places like stately homes began to be licenced to have the actual ceremonies at them rather than just the reception), to catering, flowers, dresses, catering, table settings, thank-you scrolls, petals to be spread, hot air balloon to leave in, band/DJ and so on. When I started this long run of wedding attendance (and I had been to a few before, but just family ones) in the UK it was on average £8000 that was spent on weddings, ten years later it was £14,000 (€18,900; US$27,300), now some of that was due to inflation, though that had been a few percent in that time, but a lot of it was the increasing range of items to include. The scale in some cases has grown, the largest one I attended had 143 guests and I was so far from where the speeches were being given that I could not hear what was being said, and the laughter rippled back along the three huge tables of guests as we realised we were supposed to be laughing.

So that is the shape of weddings in the UK today, big unwieldy things which are a minefield in terms of social behaviour. One wedding in Essex and one in Hampshire, I was only invited to the reception as at the time I had the shortest distance to come of all the guests many of whom were coming from abroad. However, it turned out I was the only guest not invited to the ceremony (being single I am often an odd number to fit in) and so on both occasions it looked like I had either deliberately avoided the ceremony or was just negligent and turned up late. If you are going to have some guests only coming for one part, make it a decent number. Us poor guests will have enough to face without such further embarrassment.

Culture can be a big challenge and I have seen this handled well and have seen it handled badly. At a wedding in Coventry there was an Indian and a German getting married and the bulk of their friends were British. In most cases the three groups of guests had no common language. However, the groups were of equal size and large enough that they could function without difficulty or with people sitting on their own with no-one to talk to. The worst handling of cultural issues was at a Scottish wedding in Surrey. The bride's family were Scottish and the groom's English. The whole theme was very Scottish with Scottish music and dancing and all the bride's guests in traditional Scottish garb. The English were not permitted to dress this way as it was seen as fake and so we came in usual wedding clothes, smart suits and dresses. This, however, prevented us from taking part in the Scottish activities, we were not permitted to dance and so on. This even included the groom's family, who embarrassingly were forced to sit on the side. The whole event looked like simply the bride's family absorbing the groom (who was in Scottish clothing) rather than two families coming together. It really soured the event. I went with some other (English) men and gatecrashed another wedding in the same hotel and ironically we actually got a warmer welcome there than we had at the wedding we had been invited to. The organisers (and the bride and groom are usually too busy, so the family members) should really work hard to ensure that no guests feel isolated. People are being thrown together from different backgrounds, so you should at least try to have a reasonable sized group of each.

This element links to another thing, which is, I wish the bride and groom would actually discuss their wedding arrangements. I know that often it is organised by the bride and her mother and female relatives and simply imposed on the groom and the men, but it can be terribly embarrassing when one side does not know what the other side is going to do. I think in the Scottish case this was deliberate spurning, but at a Wiltshire wedding, the bride launched into a speech outlining the wonderful characteristics of the groom in her speech (it is unusual in the UK to have the bride speak, but she had been in amateur dramatics) and then he came up and he had just formal things to say (the groom usually thanks all the people who organised things) and tried to add impromptu compliments to his wife and it came off very badly because he is not good at improvisation and you could feel the whole hall squirming in embarrassment. Not a good situation to put your husband in. They should have talked it over in advance, especially given how well organised the rest of the event was.

Food. Now, weddings can be tiring and hot, sometimes boring. However, people do not get that hungry. They expect food as part of the process (they usually expect free drinks and one of the biggest complaints is when they have to pay at the bar), but people hosting the wedding go far too far. People do not want to sit down to the equivalent of a Christmas dinner in June. However, the caterers advise them (not surprisingly, they are trying to make a profit) to have so many alternatives and so many courses that you get overloaded and it seems a waste. When I was earning only £792 per month, my intention was always to eat at least as much in value as I had spent on the present (which meant occasionally sneaking out chunks of Stilton cheese wrapped in tissues). Generally it is not difficult to do. At a Kent wedding I attended, we had snacks and then sat down to the lunch at 3pm. This lasted over 90 minutes, so we rose from a three-course meal, plus cake, at around 5.30pm. At 7pm the buffet dinner was wheeled in, with mounds of drumsticks as deep as my forearm. No-one could face it. It is not the done thing to run off with food even from a buffet, women are in a better position as they can put it in their handbags but for men you just have to keep going back and eating as much as you can. Wedding organisers (and in the UK, it is still not typical to employ someone to do this, it is usually family members) should realise people cannot eat loads more than usual and in fact often less than they normally would. Have a nice show, but do not overdo it. Have a cake people actually like to eat (a white iced sponge cake was the best wedding cake I ever ate) rather than the heavy fruit, marzipan and icing fortress that is traditional and that few people want more than a nibble of. The most extreme case was a wedding cake topped with a icing replica of the church which the couple kept in their house for years afterwards.

Picking up people at weddings. In my period of greatest wedding attendance I was on the look out for a girlfriend and thought that weddings would be a good place. However, they were just a source of humiliation on that front. Do not believe the movies about getting to kiss the bride's sisters or friends or whoever, it just does not happen, and it is only years later that I realise I was working under an entirely false assumption. Those women who are looking for a partner do not come to weddings alone. Even if they just get a blind date or a friend they come with a man. This does not mean they are not single before or after the wedding, but for the wedding they are with someone. Thus, the women who are on their own at weddings either want to be single (often very aggressively as their backs are put up by the uber-romance of their friend's/relative's wedding) or lack the social skills to find a partner. The number of women I met at weddings that it was clear that even in their 20s and 30s they had no intention of leaving the parental home, was quite surprising. Weddings tend to bring such women out. So, do not bother trying to find dates at a wedding (now funerals are somewhat different, but you should not go beyond 'can I call you?' stage otherwise it seems offensive, but it can be a good starting point). Instead if you are a man, get drunk (or stoned or both; at the Kent wedding I had to load four stoned people into a taxi, having extricated them from various bushes around the hotel so they could catch the last train. Most left at least one item of clothing or their wallet/purse behind), dance madly and eat as much as you can stomach.

Bores at weddings. I have probably now become one of these so it is good I no longer get invited. Partly this goes back to the point about getting groups of guests to interact. Generally people are grouped by age or profession. I tended to get put on tables with other business people and then when I did that volunteering at a primary school sometimes got moved to the table for teachers. In both cases I was patronised by people far more successful than me. I generally in response came out with outrageous suggestions (my favourite one is to suggest that the state starts giving hard drugs police have seized to elderly people for free to make them happy and reduce the burden on the health service; back in the 1990s when there was a glut of butter in Europe the government began dishing it out to old people). A common attitude that people told me at length was that because I was not some wealthy businessman with a huge car that I was somehow a burden on the state. Another common one was that because I was single I had no idea how to wash and clean things (my flat was always immaculate as I do not want to live in squalor and had no-one else bar me messing it up) and must live in a pile of disused pizza boxes. Someone in Kent actually said to me 'oh, you can't know anything about cleaning'.

The worst one of all for patronising attitudes, though came at a wedding in Worcestershire. I had had to travel from London by train at great expense, changing twice and using three different railway companies to get there. I had to leave the wedding before the speeches had even started so that I could catch a bus cross-country to Birmingham (about 35 miles; 56km away) because no train would get me back there to get my connection to get home (I could not afford the hotel charges to stay). A man at my table who had driven from Surrey in his huge car was interested that I had come by train and lectured me throughout the afternoon about how much better it must be now that British Rail had been privatised and broken into separate companies. I told him how complex the journey had been and how much cheaper and easier it would have been with a single company (the connections did not match up, a train would arrive 20 minutes before I arrived to catch it and then there would be no other for 2 hours) and it did not penetrate his brain at all, he so believed in the wonders of Thatcherist privatisation that he literally did not hear anything contrary to that even when I had to leave mid-way through dessert to ever stand a chance of getting home.

I suppose one key issue here is that there is an assumption that you advance in life roughly at the same speed as your friends. By the mid-1990s it was clear that I was well out of step and this is why other guests had so much trouble with me. My income was a third or a quarter of what theirs was. I had no wife not even a partner and I had no young children. I did not work in a profession and I never went on holiday even. They envisaged me as a reckless young (rapidly ageing man) who in some undetermined way was using up their taxes and lived in squalor and so they felt they had to tell me the error of my ways. Of course, I did not like how I was living and constantly tried to change my standing (once I almost got one woman to come to a wedding with me, but at the last moment she changed her mind) and get a better job (applying for on average 125 per year). I might have mixed with an odd crowd as by the 21st century, 95% of my friends were married and I have now only had the second divorce out of that lot in 2007. I mixed increasingly with my brother's friends who for some reason were less attracted to marriage, settling down and getting on, though none of them was starving or doing badly.

Having been 'promoted' to the teachers' table, where the discussion was just alien to me, and my knowledge on general education issues was scoffed at as irrelevant, I tended simply to get ignored. The best guest I was ever put next to, was at a wedding in Berkshire. For some reason I was on a table of gays (who stereotypically were great dancers and loved the disco, demanding 80s stuff the DJ had not played in years) and one lone father. The father was constantly busy talking to people especially the bride's sister who he had been brought by, but who had already moved on to someone else. His daughter who was three sat next to me and proceeded to count everyone's buttons. For her it was a novel experience as she never wore dresses and she enjoyed spinning around in the one she had on. We had fun rhyming things like 'ham' and 'lamb' and she would disappear off to appear between the bride and groom and then back under the tables. I almost choked when she picked up a roll in one hand and a circular pat of butter in the other and proceeded to bite from each in turn, feeling herself looking very grown up. She went back for more butter. It was the first time I had not felt patronised at a wedding.

One final thing before I go, this depends on your own status, but generally, if you are single, the wedding will be the last time you ever see the couple. This has happened to me on so many occasions. The last view I remember of my school friend at his wedding was him standing to speak in a small village in Worcestershire as I rushed out the door (profiteroles in hand) to catch the bus, 11 years ago.

To summarise, weddings seem no less common than in the past, no matter what social class you inhabit. I generally enjoy them because they are usually happy events. However, these days I think I would be more careful, the potential for expense and humiliation are very high as a guest. It is almost like going back to a school reunion, unless you match or have exceeded the achievements of not only the hosts but the other guests, then it is going to be embarrassing. Go to get drunk, go for free food but do not go to find a date. Try to ensure there is at least a small group roughly like yourself (you will band together in defence against the rest) and that you are on the same table as them. So much planning goes into weddings, but little thought seems to be given to the people dragged along to attend it. I guess they are not the focus of the event, but at least people could give some thought to not putting them in awkward situations and the fact that they cannot consume vast quantities of food. Fortunately most people I know (including the gays) are now married, so this will not be a challenge I have to face. However, I hope that some of my pretty extensive experience in this field may help you out.