Inside the house are my brother, his girlfriend and five (!) cats. The tale is that he used to have two cats but one died. He bought a companion kitten for the lonely cat that was left… but this kitten turned out to be pregnant. This kitten, illustrated here, is now known simply as “Mama”.

And she’s no longer a kitten, obviously, because she’s got three of her own — Milk, Chocolate and Milkshake, who are white, black and a mixture of the two colours, respectively.

Life revolves around the low table in the living room, and in drinking tea.

This is the same style of tea-drinking that my brother treated us to for my birthday when he visited Scotland last year. It involves lots of heating cups and rinsing the tea and very fast infusions (seconds). The tea is poured into tiny little cups, like espresso mugs. It was very different from British tea-drinking — and the ceremony (well, the process anyway; there was no formality) was something that became quite comforting for all its strangeness.

Near the flat there were a couple of supermarkets which gave us our first glimpse of Chinese consumerism. Oddly, many of the shops reminded me of Chinese supermarkets in the UK. I wonder if the same holds for other immigrant supermarkets? Are all the Polish convenience stores on Leith Walk just like they are in Poland?

It’s amazing how little one can determine from some packaged products. You’d think many mass-produced items would have simple pictures to let you know what you’re dealing with but that isn’t actually the case. And any English description which did appear could be suspect to say the least:

We saw many great Engrish slogans, and t-shirt watching became a full-time occupation in the crowded parts of the city. The glossy branded products were also not above some awkward or ill-advised English text:

Not really in the spirit of the One Child policy, is it?

We left Edinburgh airport at some unreasonable hour in the morning and arrived in Charles de Gaulle airport for six hours of hardcore sitting. I read my book and Helen slept for much of the time, though we took some time out from this rigorous schedule to pay through the nose for a bottle of Coke. Even €3.80 wasn’t enough to dampen the spirits:

Then we hopped on the second leg of our journey to Beijing, which was longer and less comfortable. Ten-and-something hours later we landed in an extremely foreign country. The words were not related to any words we knew, and the writing even less so. Somehow, through gesture and confused looks we got a bus to Beijing West train station and then onto the sleeper train to Xi’an.

The restaurant car was our first attempt at prolonged transaction and ordering a meal. We got some things on plates and a couple of beers, and that was all we could really ask. The staff and train crew sat and smoked underneath the no-smoking signs.

I’ll spare you the picture of my bleary-eyed face as we pulled into Xi’an the next morning. Just be assured that I had really needed that sleep and that the train could have been stationed in a steel works all night and I still wouldn’t have stirred.

Outside the train station in the bright lights of another strange and bustling city, we managed to call my brother’s mobile and get him to meet us. He lived with his girlfriend, Joy, at the edge of town (er, city) which was an hour’s ride away on the bus.

I will introduce you to his house in the next post!

The game recommended as a good example of this style was Pandemic, which I bought and I’m happy to say it’s brilliant. The rules seem very complex on initial read-through but they are very quick to internalise — everything makes sense and there were only a couple of occasions on our first game where we consulted the rules for clarification.

So what is it? The idea, contrary to most board games, is that the human players are working as one team, against “the game”. It’s still a turn-based game, but each person co-ordinates their behaviour with their fellow players. You play the game on a map of the world, showing a network of cities joined by air and road links. At the start of the game a selection of random cities are “infected” with four diseases (coloured cubes). The aim of the game is to discover a cure for these diseases before a critical proportion of the world is infected.

You discover cures by gathering resources together in one place, much like building houses and hotels in Monopoly. In order to stave off disaster you must travel the world treating disease victims until you have enough resources to find a cure — but every time you travel somewhere or treat a disease, you’re wasting time that might have been better spent on researching a cure.

And while all this is happening the diseases don’t stand still. Each time a player’s turn ends there is an infection stage where all the diseases that have taken hold will spread further. Every so often (more often if you’re playing by the difficult rules) an “epidemic” hits, which basically ramps up the danger level and reinfects all the cities you thought you’d treated.

The night after Helen’s birthday we invited Mat round for tea and then we made a valiant attempt at this game for the first time. We played three games that night with the “easy” rules and lost all three games. In the final game Helen had the resources ready for a cure, and it was my turn directly before her “winning” hand could be played. And I pulled an epidemic card which totally wiped us out. That was the closest we had come and the intensity of knowing how close we were to a cure was incredible. The feeling of co-operating against a stack of playing cards is a strange one but the rules are beautifully defined to simulate the ebb, flow and violent resurgence of infection counts so you quickly get immersed in the reality of the game.

I don’t know how much other co-operative games hit the mark but this one certainly does and I am really looking forward to getting another crack at it. It seems like there are a million games out there which don’t get the publicity of Monopoly, Risk and Cluedo but which are maybe more fun. I remember with great fondness the games of Settlers of Catan we used to have in the flat when I was in university. Then there is Mille Bornes, the 1000-mile imaginary race which is like a card-based version of Mario Kart. What crazy games have you come across that should be more widely known?

PS. I just came across this board game recommendation site which lets you enter games you like and one you dislike, and matches you up to user preferences on BoardGameGeek.com to select some likely interesting titles. I found out about it through this post by the developer, telling its history.

PPS. The line of the game for me was when Helen turned to Mat and said: “Are you Green? I’ll meet you in Cairo!”. It’s like being a jet-setting heroic scientist in your own living room.

She was too busy studying so I made the cakes (this was okay, as in recent years she has ended up making cakes for me to take to work on my birthday, so this was repaying the favour), and had a bit of fun with them.

I had been following one person’s escapades with baking cakes inside cakes, such as brownie inside muffins (really) and thought I would take a first foray in that direction. I made some fairly plain cupcakes but buried some chocolate balls (slightly larger than a malteser) inside each one. The chocolate balls were Hallowe’en treats that each came individually wrapped in “eyeball” tin foil. Then when I was trying to work out how to ice them Helen suggested using icing pens to write on them. Then she went to bed and I sat down to work some words out.

My first thought was to take Word of the Day for Helen’s birthday for the last ten years (I had ten cakes to decorate) but I couldn’t easily find a list going back that far. The easily-searched sites (like wiktionary) weren’t established long enough to have ten years of archives!

My second thought was nonsense words, and this was even harder. I would have to look through the published works of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear in order to find some really good ones. Good nonsense words, ones with a nice feel and pleasing sound, are harder to find than you might think.

In the end I settled on cake words. What I actually did was search the installed dictionary for some nice cake words, and then fill in a few more from memory. (I didn’t like griddlecake or coffeecake and thought the latter should probably be two words.)

$ grep cake$ /usr/share/dict/words
cake
cheesecake
coffeecake
cupcake
fruitcake
griddlecake
hotcake
pancake
shortcake

Once I had my words I removed the cake part and iced the remaining prefix/suffix onto each bun. So I had a bunch of cakes with the words “pan”, “beef”, “short” and so on.

Now Helen tells me that when she opened the tin on the following day no-one could understand what these words meant. They sat and thought and came to no good conclusions, until someone finally said:

Well, I’m going to have the “beef” cake — oh

I was glad to have provided a little bit of mystery. :-)

H: No! Did he say something about being hacked by 2012…

(About leaving first thing in the morning before I am awake.)

H: I see you there all asleep and not even moving and I worry that there’s something wrong with you and then you open your can of Coke…

D: Buahahaha!

H: What? Oh. There wasn’t a security barrier either, was there? :-(

H: I see what you’re doing there. I see what you’re gathering.

D: What?

H: You’re going around gathering … recipes …

Unusually I was the only person there in a kilt, which was strange but quite enjoyable. I assumed there would be at least one other Scotsman there but apparently not. Stranger, though, was how unusual it seemed — it’s like the other guests had never seen anyone in a kilt before. Lots of people asked us “so are you Scottish?”.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. We flew down on Friday night from Glasgow because Helen was in class until 5pm. The train from Gatwick was easy though I couldn’t help being alarmed at the names of places we passed — are Lancing and Goring-by-Sea quaint villages or ways to die in battle? Pamela picked us up from the station and we stayed in their spare room for the duration of our visit.

On Saturday morning the house was transformed for the post-wedding reception. My mum and her other sisters and brother came in and everybody swept and mopped and made sandwiches and so on.

The ceremony at Worthing Registrar was in a fairly small modern room. The readings were lovely and the couple looked incredibly happy. Back at their house we drank champagne and the weather blessed us with a warm sunny afternoon. Stood in the garden talking nonsense to various people who wanted to know why I was wearing a kilt…

After the best man speech and the cutting of the cake and consumption of more sandwiches we all trooped out to a cafe on the beach front for a meal and live jazz and dancing. The food was excellent and the band really good too, and I think everyone really enjoyed themselves.

We left at the same time as my mum who was driving back to the cottage they had hired in Arundel. I don’t know why we departed at that point but realised when we got back to the house we were staying at that the people with the keys were still chatting back at the party. We sat on a bench near the front door in the darkness, drinking whisky from a hipflask and enjoying the silence. It’s such a strange quiet place: no traffic, no street lights. Just darkness and silence.

Next day we sat round the kitchen table in the conservatory while the rain lashed the windows. Mid-afternoon it had died down a bit so a bunch of us trooped out to a restored 18th century windmill which was really good if you’re a bit of a nerd like me, though the weather was crap for it. They didn’t have any wind-milled flour in the visitor centre shop because it had all sold out. They only mill once or twice a year but clearly we arrived at just the wrong point.

In the evening Helen and I took the train into Brighton to see some friends who were also in the area for a few days. We forgot/left behind our phones so had to wait around in the cold at the arranged meeting point wondering “is this how things were done before mobile phones?” and being a bit miserable. The rain had stopped but the wind was bitter. Some guy was skinny-dipping in the sea beside the pier and quickly turned from pink to blue when he came back out. Then his friends — loose term — proceeded to slap him with his leather belt while he tried to get dressed again with numb hands. I don’t think I’d be sticking my neck out to suggest alcohol was involved.

There was a restaurant that came recommended (“English’s”) but was full so went next door. I think this place was called The Gallery. Food was quite nice though we did end up with a green-dye-swirled meringue as the base of the Pavlova. We later discovered that there is a Brighton shop which sells meringues swirled with a variety of dyes, though why they chose the St Patrick’s Day meringue to build a Pavlova around is anyone’s guess. Eating was made difficult through laughing at the colour.

We spent Monday back in Brighton again with our baggage this time. Absurdly enough, Brighton, tourist town that it is, has decided that left luggage is the work of the devil and they’ve removed every trace of it from the public facilities. We know this for certain because we asked at the bus station, the train station and the travel centre. This curtailed our day as we couldn’t really wander comfortably around with several bags of luggage. We cut our losses and went to Gatwick early. Checked everything in and had a nice meal at Cafe Rouge in the secure area while watching the board for our gate to open.

We got back to Edinburgh on time but sat on the runway for a while because our berth was being occupied by an EasyJet flight that wasn’t moving. Don’t know why. We got in eventually, though I didn’t mind because I had my book with me. Aeroplanes are much more comfortable on the ground, without the noise and the juddering and the earache. It helped that the plane was mostly empty.

There should be some photos of all this to come but they’ve not been sifted and cropped yet. I’ll put up a post later on with photos when they’re ready.

• Press and hold the ctrl-alt-cmd keys (the three left-most keys on the bottom row)
• Then repeatedly tap the full stop key

You may stop when your display looks a bit stupid. To reverse the process hold down the three modifiers and tap the comma key instead.

Now, tell me how you would manage all that by accident. Twice. And not notice that you were doing it either time until it was already done.

Once you’ve managed that, try dragging Mail.app from /Applications onto your desktop and doing a system update in a multi-user system. It is possible (though how, I am still unsure) to update the copy on your desktop while leaving an old copy elsewhere which other users will still try to use. The old version will cease to work if the OS update leaves it incompatible with the rest of the system.

All this is possible! All this can be yours!

We ate at Blue, the restaurant attached to the Traverse. I met Helen’s cousin, cousin’s husband and baby girl. Also Helen’s aunt, who I dimly recall meeting before, but that would be about eight years ago.

We saw Hoors at the Traverse Theatre, written by the same guy who did Black Watch. It’s a bit more low-key than the military play but still wickedly funny. The ending seemed a bit abrupt though. I’m still not sure what it was supposed to be. Helen thought that was a break for the interval because it was such a non-ending.

• The plot was almost non-existent. In fact, I’m not even sure there was one.
• That doesn’t matter, because whatever could have happened in the story would have been irrelevant, because I didn’t care in the least for any of the characters.
• The songs were indistinct so I couldn’t really tell what they were singing about anyway. Even the one song I did know — that would be the title song — was pretty mumbled.

Oh well, I knew I didn’t like musicals. I did see something horrifying, something that completely blew my mind. A woman sitting in the row in front had a Cliff Richard diary. Will horrors never cease?

Anyway, here’s Cabaret, the song,in BSL.

It turns out he’d managed to — somehow — turn the screen contrast up from Normal to Maximum. (Those playing along at home can look in System Preferences then Universal Access for the relevant setting.) This renders much of the text invisible, and what’s left wispy and hard to read. I really don’t know what this option was supposed to accomplish, given that it’s presumably meant as a accessibility feature.

I also don’t know how it was accidentally enabled. The effect is very obvious, so I don’t know how it could be turned on without it being very obvious what happened. The hotkey (why the hell does this thing need a hotkey?!) is Ctrl-Alt-Cmd-. to increase contrast and Ctrl-Alt-Cmd-, to decrease it. It’s conceivable that the hotkey could be leaned on, but I tried it on Helen’s machine and it doesn’t seem possible to enable it without going in to the System Preferences first.

The conclusion was happy — I disabled the stupid option so reading email and watching iPlayer is now unimpeded. But how it happened in the first place is completely beyond me.