Apocalypse Now (ish)

I was a teenager in the early 80s, so all of my nightmares (apart from the ones about going to school without any trousers on) were about the imminent threat of nuclear war. The iron curtain was firmly drawn, Thatcher and Reagan were rattling their various atomic sabres and showings of ‘Threads’ and ‘The War Game’ were grist to the mill of my fevered imagination.

Looking back though, I now realise that all of my dreams stopped at the moment the missiles launched. I would run through the streets, the air attack warning sirens wailing, looking for shelter, but as soon as the first bomb landed that was it. The aftermath of the apocalypse just seemed to be too unthinkable a prospect to even dream about. The other night, I had a fevered dream with a vivid view of the missiles launching from their silos, leaving vapour trails curving upwards into the sky. My viewpoint moved closer and I saw the warheads splinter and separate from the missiles, heading towards their individual targets scattered across the United Kingdom. I then remember opening a door and seeing a landscape glowing red, like looking into a furnace, before waking up in a sweat.

The reason for the dreams is not hard to fathom. Apart from reading The Road, I have been mostly playing Fallout 3. It’s a superbly atmospheric game, but walking through the ruins listening to the eerie sounds of the 1950s music playing on a radio is haunting to say the least. I may need to go back to Albion in Fable II for a bit of light relief from the blasted remains of Washington DC, but I just keep wondering what is lurking inside the next flooded subway or behind a collapsed freeway. Maybe I’ll just try to get to Rivet City, if I don’t get sidetracked by another community of inbred cannibals with refrigerators full of ‘strange meat’ to deal with first ... Poppa, I’m scared ...

What else? We’ve been looking at getting a new kitchen to replace the current units which are getting a bit tatty, and also to make better use of the space, but the quoted price comes out at a $hilariouslylargemadeupnumber of your Earth pounds, so it may be a case of either putting it off or biting the proverbial bullet and going for it. Watch this space.

In DVD news, we finally got around to watching the Collins and Herring video podcast (Vidicast? Vodcast?) from off of Richard Herrings’ new dvd, which was an excellent way to spend an hour. These two have turned aimless rambling conversation into an artform, and it was fun to finally see the attic where most of the podcasts are recorded. It amused me that you could choose between a good soundtrack and the traditional lo-fi recorded off of the internal microphone on Andrew Collins’ macbook version.