Blue Prince
This is a blog post about parenting, nostalgia and change. It's also a blog post about the game Blue Prince, currently gathering very high and insanely well-deserved reviews on Steam.
When your kids get to a certain age, it becomes almost impossible to introduce them to anything new. I’m not saying this lightly - I’m saying it with a mixture of sadness and resignation - but it’s still true. I discovered the fact around the time my son went into Year 8 at secondary school: at first, I thought it was a combination of new friends, emerging interests or any variety of other outside influences that may have come along...but it simply turned out to be a case of my boy discovering that his own tastes were different from my own. A no-brainer, right?
Closing The Gap
There used to be three distinct avenues of opportunity open to the aspiring author upon finishing a novel, although to most writers one was an avenue of last resort. You either sent your precious manuscript off to an agent in the hope of snagging a traditional publisher, you waited for the few weeks every year when the major houses opened their doors to gather a slush pile from the hordes of the unsolicited (a freak occurrence, these days)…or you opted for self or indie publishing, something that - let’s face it - has always carried with it the not so faint whiff of desperation.
Then, a few short years ago, the gap began to close.
The Door To Nowhere (2008)
‘Am I still in the game?’
It’s a question asked at the end of “eXistenZ”, an insanely eerie and quite brilliant David Cronenberg movie about a game that becomes more real than actual life. This subject has been explored before, most memorably by Rob Grant and Doug Naylor in the Red Dwarf novel ‘Better Than Life’ and the episodes of the popular TV show that inspired it.
My son’s birth was quite a traumatic event. It shouldn’t have been, but we’d decided on a home birth, something I would strongly discourage all first-time parents from doing. It was a split decision: I’m vasovagal and almost pathologically phobic about hospitals, and my wife thought we would get better, more personal (1-on-1) care in the safety of our own home. The resulting disaster turned what should have been the happiest day of our lives into a situation that would have been better suited to a horror movie.
I Told You To Watch Them
I’m at Center Parcs in Woburn Forest, and I’m in Smug Parent mode.
I always get like this on those rare occasions when my kids are behaving like angels while everyone else’s are wrecking the place. Although we’ve only been on-site for an hour and they’re practically bursting with excitement about us all being on holiday in such an incredible place, Sebastian and Evie are acting like proper little grown-ups.
We’re in the play area next to the supermarket, and I’m watching two boys of Bast’s age trying to push each other off the slide while my little hero helps his tiny sister onto the wooden climbing frame. I glance over at the boys' parents – who aren’t really paying attention to them –and I shake my head sadly: this is why kids act up - a lack of attention.
Career Options
When my writing career didn’t explode as I wanted it to (that wouldn’t happen for another two years), I headed to Ramsgate town to see what work was available. My extraordinary collection of GCSEs and one-week show-ups at Thanet College afforded me the following tree of opportunity:
McDonald’s – not a chance: it looked like great fun, but I’d just lost somewhere in the region of six stone, and I didn’t want to put it all back on again in THREE hours.
Argos – another no: the staff always looked miserable, and there were rumours that one guy was SO depressed by the place that he’d wandered into the back to get a microwave for a customer, proceeded right through the rear exit and kept going. They never saw him again.
Burton’s – I thought it would be slightly wrong to work in a clothes shop when you’d never been able to afford any of the clothes: I’d have been a class traitor.
Dixon’s – I knew two guys who worked in Dixon’s at the time: one was trying to change his name legally to ‘Jonas Piemunch’ and the other would regularly pop outside for the sort of cigarettes you smoked if you wanted to run down the High Street with dragons chasing you.
Outsider
I must have been reasonably self-aware as a kid because I’m pretty sure I was in the early stages of primary school when Ifigured out that I couldn’t make friends.
When you’re a kid, you look for easy excuses to explain away anything difficult to understand. I had ginger hair, so at first this was easy: I looked different, so I WAS different. The only fly in the ointment was a slightly older ginger kid in the upper end of the same class who seemed to make friends with comparative ease: so it wasn’t the hair.
I came from a single-parent family and didn’t have a dad, so that was the first big excuse I used to explain away my lack of class popularity. I went to a primary school in Ramsgate that I have now come to understand was full of the middle-class kids of teachers, doctors and other noteworthy professions that – at the time – were considered acceptable. In my class, not having a dad was a genuinely unusual situation (though I’ve since discovered that in several neighbouring schools it wouldn’t have been anywhere near as unusual).
Once I’d cheerfully managed to ignore all the kids who I felt were judging me for this, I moved my focus to the difference in wealth. A lot of these kids had the latest Nikes; I had charity-shop Hi-Techs. They had designer backpacks and lunchboxes; I didn’t. In time, this felt like such an imbalance that I managed to persuade my incredibly hard- working mum to GET me a set of the best attire (that I didn’t really want) to help mefit in.
It didn’t work.