Deadbeat just got back from Buddhafield festival. It was lovely and relaxing, with loads of good people and music. Seize the Day were brilliant, as ever (www.seizetheday.org), but the highpoint for me was an extended set of chants and mantras from the Bindoo Babas. My only complaint was that, although the event was advertised widely as 'drugs and alcohol free', I still had to pay for mine.

Off to the Big Green next week, which will be much more exciting and manic (and all the worse for that). Then it's straight to Broadstairs Folk Week, one of my favourites and undoubtedly the best organised of all. If you like folk music then Broadstairs is for you. The whole town is involved, with Morris sides and child-orientated mayhem breaking out all over the place. Apart from the two main venues (a 500 seat concert marquee and 'The Pav') every pub and school-hall is pressed into service hosting world class musicians. Impromptu sessions occur in the campsites as well as programmed play-arounds. The late-night sessions are a particular hoot, but the surreal highpoint is the football match between Hooden Horses and Mollys. Pack up your instruments and head for Kent from 11th to the 18th August. Be there or be a rectilinear quadrilateral polygon.

Deadbeat Games
The original house game, for me, is hurrying to get back into bed before the toilet stops flushing. I discovered this game when i was four and the journey back from the bathroom was perilous indeed. As I got older and faster the game became more challenging. By the time I was ten (in a different house), the rules were that I had to use the downstairs toilet (through the conservatory) and be back in bed with the covers over my head before the syphon stopped. This entailed taking the stairs three at a time. By the time I was thirteen I had to do it with my eyes closed.
My parents enlightened long car journeys with a number of games-playing stratagems such as pub cricket (brilliant, but only on secondary roads), and car number-plate spotting (first to 100).
As an adult I have enjoyed parking games - having to park in Brighton with my van pointing downhill and enough space in front to enable a bump-start was such fun that I sometimes put off replacing the battery for months.
If you have a house game, let me know. I am talking here about improvised games rather than an addiction to proprietary time wasters - the Girlfriend's past includes a house with a continuous Subbuteo league, and I have lived with Backgammon, Bridge and Asteroids (anyone know who can fix an ex-pub table-top Asteroids machine?) but none of those qualify. I lived for a while in a house where, if you swung the kitchen light-pull string just right it would hook over a redundant stub of gas-pipe which protruded from the wall just an inch below the ceiling. This afforded hours - no, days - of harmless amusement, and is an ideal example.
Another example is police snooker - played, so I am unreliably informed, by numerous forces. This entails a traffic patrol team stopping and successfully busting a red car, then a car of any of the snooker colours, then a red car again etc. Scoring is as per snooker, with the prize for the highest score being (of course) rounds of drinks.
Favourite games will be listed here.

Cheers

Deadbeat

2010 Diaries. Db23 Db24