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The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.

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12:59pm on Monday, 14th July, 2025:

Nuts

Outburst

There should be some kind of law that forces confectionary manufacturers who sprinkle their confectionary in coconut flakes to state, in big letters on the front of the packaging, that they have sprinkled coconut flakes on their confectionary.

I was really looking forward to that Turkish delight.

9:47am on Sunday, 13th July, 2025:

Palia

Anecdote

I've been playing Palia recently, and (after 74.5 hours) have reached the point where I'd decided I'd stop.

It's an interesting virtual world, in that it doesn't have combat but still has a pile of the cookie-cutter quests you find in regular MMORPGs, mainly gathering, crafting or FedEx in format. It also has a lot of home-improvement content.

The setting isn't really Fantasy or Science Fiction. The idea is that the world was once dominated by humans who mysteriously disappeared, and it's now populated by other humanoid species (who are purple). You're a human who has suddenly appeared in their world, and neither you nor they know why. The game is only in beta, so right now we don't actually find out why, but I'm sure it'll be made clear in future patches and expansions.

As such, there isn't really a main story quest. The most immediate long-term goal is to get yourself a "shepp", meaning a local who'll vouch for your good nature so you can become a fully-fledged member of the village. There are about 30 villagers, all with distinct personalities and jobs, although not all are able to be shepps (some are too young, some are mechanic beings). You have to grind reputation with one until you manage to reach a certain threshold, then they'll agree to be your shepp. You can chat with them and give them gifts to increase their opinion of you, then upon reaching a particular level you can start flirting with them. I don't know if flirting is essential to get to shepp-compatible level, but I did it anyway seeing as how I was visiting the same villager every day to grind some more rep anyway.

There are skills in the game that you can level up: gardening, cooking, hunting, fishing, mining, foraging (which includes tree-chopping), furniture-making and bug-catching. I don't know what the bug-catching is good for, other than "catch me five grasshoppers" quests, but it probably plays or will play more into fishing or hunting or something later on.

The players are friendly, but somewhat insular. I initiated conversations with several of them, but no-one ever initiated one with me. I suspect that people either play solo or with real-world friends; I didn't ask.

Anyway, Palia certainly different, and if you're not a fan of combat and like playing with no direction at your own pace, you might enjoy it. Personally, I got rather tired of the repetitive nature of the quests, even if the flavour text was fresh. I was glad when I got my shepp and felt qualified to quit.

As you can tell from the screenshot, I'm not really into gardening or home-making either.

By the way, "Mareigh" is one of the names on my roster for MMO characters. I invariably use "Richards" as a surname because "Richard's" doesn't really work.

9:47am on Saturday, 12th July, 2025:

Ever-Present Child

Weird

I'd have thought by now that every retailer would have been aware of this kind of comedy sign wordage, but apparently not.

"But one child lives 200 miles away and the other is at home with her baby!"

8:56am on Friday, 11th July, 2025:

Hot Peppers

Weird

I know peppers are supposed to be hot, but these seem rather more amorous than most.

8:56am on Thursday, 10th July, 2025:

Goal

Outburst

9:29am on Wednesday, 9th July, 2025:

Doorway

Weird

Timpson is a chain of shops that does all kinds of small walk-in jobs for you: key-cutting, shoe heel repairs, watch repairs, dry cleaning and engraving. It's one of the most progressive companies in the UK (employees have free rein to do whatever they think will deliver good service, employees get their birthdays off work, 10% of its employees are ex-convicts, ...). In general, it's one of the most admirable companies in the UK, despite its rather humble service offerings.

One of the shops in Colchester is in an old building, which has this plaque attached to it:

To save you from straining your eyes, here's what the text says:

"This Doorway Has Been Retained In The Interest Of Preserving The History Of Colchester. It Is Thought To Date From 1500 AD. And It Seems Likely That Even At That Time The Building Was Being Used As A Shop. Which Was Probably Of A Similar Size And Shape To Our Present Shop
TIMPSON
Great Service by Great People"

That use of a capital letter at the start of every word is somewhat ... unconventional. Only in the last line, which is probably corporate in origin, is it more like what would be expected in English. Also, the second and third phrases following the full stops aren't sentences. The final sentence doesn't end in a full stop, either.

Timpson may be good at engraving, but I'd want to see what the output was going to look like before I asked them to engrave me anything.

I do have a jacket with them for dry cleaning at the moment, though. They really do offer a Great Service.

8:25am on Tuesday, 8th July, 2025:

Numb

Anecdote

I went to the dentist yesterday to have some work done on a tooth that will need a crown. It only needs a crown so that I can get an implant next to it: it was at an angle, and apparently they don't make molar implants the shape of a Lego roof tile.

The dentist (who's really good — he trains other dentists) gave me an injection and told me my lip would start going numb, which it did. That is, it started to go numb, but didn't actually go numb.

The dentist started drilling, but in one particular place I could feel it. It rather hurt.

He gave me some more numbing agent, waited a couple of minutes, and carried on. My lower lip was numbish where he said it would be numb, but when he drilled the part of the tooth where it had previously hurt, it still hurt.

The dentist gave me another dose of whatever it is in the needle, and waited another minute or so, then he continued. My lower lip was still not entirely numb, and when he reached the bit that hurt, well, I could still feel it but the pain was bearable. He did whatever it was he needed to do and carried on. There was no more pain thereafter.

However, while he was working with his drill, all three jabs kicked in at once and my lower lip on the right-hand side turned to rubber. My tongue was numb at the same side, and everywhere on my cheek from my chin to my cheekbone was also numb. It took four hours before it all came back, and when it did my jaw muscle where the jabs had gone in was so stiff I could barely open my mouth enough to shovel food in. It's still a bit stiff this morning.

That's not the weird thing, though. That was when my cheek was completely numb and started to itch. I don't know how something I couldn't feel could itch, but it did. Scratching it did nothing, and was a bizarre experience in itself because I could feel where I was scratching with my finger but not with what was being scratched. As a result, I got a glimpse of how people with phantom limb syndrome must feel; they have my complete sympathy.

Anyway, the exercise was a success and I'll be getting my implant and new crown at the end of next week.

I rather hope they fit, as I'll be going to my elder daughter's wedding the week after, and don't want to be unable to eat cake.

8:38am on Monday, 7th July, 2025:

Racing Trees

Weird

When I was in the beautiful village of Nerja last year, I spotted these trees racing to be first to jump into a swimming pool.

I bet one of them has reached it by now.

9:56am on Sunday, 6th July, 2025:

82

Weird

This is the sign for an "espresso lounge" in Colchester:

It seems to have expanded its remit to include non-espresso items such as cakes, sandwiches and something that might be teas, might be coffees.

What I like about this sign, though, is the apostrophe in "Panini's". None of the other plurals have spurious apostrophes, so it gives the impression that it's a genuine, possessive apostrophe, and therefore the jacket potatoes belong to the panini in some way.

I've never eaten there, but given that this particular espresso lounge also serves a full English breakfast all day, perhaps I shall.

If only the espresso lounges in Italy did that, Italians wouldn't be such healthy people.

10:31am on Saturday, 5th July, 2025:

1834 to 1853

Weird

From the front of the Baptist church in the middle of Colchester:

I thought Victorian builders were supposed to be good at their jobs, yet here they are, constructing a church that has to be fixed up less than fifty years later.

You're not as good as you make out you are, Victorian builders.

10:55am on Friday, 4th July, 2025:

Old Panics

Weird

In case you throught that social media were entirely responsible for menacing conspiracy theories, here's an article from the Daily Mirror, dated 9th July, 1990.

I happen to have a copy because I bought a copy of every newspaper on 9th July, 1990.

12:02pm on Thursday, 3rd July, 2025:

Red

Anecdote

We went strawberry-picking this morning.

Fortunately, I anticipated that I would kneel on some, so I put on my gardening trousers.

I hope those are strawberry stains, anyway, and not wounds from shrapnel.

9:27am on Wednesday, 2nd July, 2025:

Master Barber

Weird

There's a barber's in Colchester called The Master Barber. The barber has expertise in some quite specific areas:

Turkish, English, Romanian and Persion seems quite an eclectic mix. There can't be many people who have that experience.

Well so you might have thought:

This is one of their other places in Colchester. They have six barbershops altogether.

I hadn't realised that Turkish, English, Romanian and Persion hairstyles were so in demand.

I still get my hair cut at Rodney's. He used to train people to cut hair, having himself been trained by Vidal Sassoon. OK, so Rodney died a few years back so now I get it cut by one of his former trainees, but if I ever need it done in a Turkish, Romanian or Persian style I'm spoilt for choice.

9:48am on Tuesday, 1st July, 2025:

Barriers

Weird

I'm sure there's a reason for these barriers, but I don't know what it is.

If they were in a game, you still wouldn't be able to get through the gap.

8:48am on Monday, 30th June, 2025:

Bites

Anecdote

There's a country lane a couple of miles from where I live that's used by agricultural vehicles. It's tarmacked, but there are no kerbstones. Every so often, a tractor or something goes too close to the edge and breaks a chunk off. These individual bites add up, and in time the edge of the road is worn away.

This is how coastal erosion works in Holderness, the part of the country where I grew up. It averages about two metres of loss every year, but it doesn't lose it two metres at a time. For any given part of the coastline, nothing will happen for maybe five years then suddenly the sea will take a ten-metre bite out of it.

The obvious way to stop this is to build the equivalent of kerbstones. The larger towns do have these — breakwaters and boulders — but elsewhere the cliffs are exposed and they're gnawed away at. Some thirty towns have been taken by the sea since Roman times, four of them off the coast of my home town, Hornsea: Northorpe, Southorpe, Hornsea Beck and Hornsea Burton. In Hornsea itself (which used to be the second-largest of the five villages, behind Hornsea Beck) there's a Hornsea Burton Road that runs perpendicular to the sea: if you carried on in a straight line, you'd end up where Hornsea Burton used to be.

As for why we're not protecting the coastline by dumping huge rocks from Norway along its length, well there are two answers. The first is money: coastal defences are expensive, and although the larger settlements are protected, arable land is not regarded highly from a cost-benefit perspective. The second is that defending against longshore drift tends to move the problem elsewhere: Holderness suffers so that Lincolnshire doesn't. This is somewhat controversial, and came out of a Hull University study in the 1970s or 1980s that basically said to let it happen, the Netherlands needs the extra soil that makes its way there over time.

Oh well. If Hornsea becomes an island surrounded by concrete walls and chunks of rock, that might increase tourism.

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Copyright © 2025 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).