On The Road
The boy and I took a road trip, a couple of weeks ago, up to Glasgow. After school we shot off to the airport. We went to see the filming of next years Robot Wars. I hadn’t realised that the show had been rebooted, but we started watching this year and quickly got hooked. After the series ended, my wife noticed you could get tickets for the show, so off we went.
It was a great experience; everyone from the taxi driver to the hotel staff was fantastic, but the programme of course was the best bit. It was really amazing to see it being filmed – watching the fights, of course, but also seeing how it’s put together and watching the team working on what is clearly an awesome project, one that attracts a great following. It was inspiring – making me want to get any number of projects off the ground, but also made me think a little about what we do in the department from a different angle.
Subcultures
In the early 2000s, I used to play quite a lot of poker, mostly online. It was a period of rapid growth in the game worldwide, and a lot of money was won (not much by me, sadly) and lost (fortunately, also not by me). One thing that was said then, and indeed continues to be said, is that this boom was the best thing and the worst thing to happen to the game – it was growing, but it was also losing something of its culture. Old hands talk about the underground feel that the game used to have, the locations, the language, and the characters that made up a subculture. In growing, the game became cleaner, more about the profit and loss, and less about the experience.
One thing that I’ve wondered in listening to this, is what other niches there are out there today that might inspire similar feelings of nostalgia in the future. I’ve not really come up with any great answers to date, but perhaps Robot Wars might be one. Watching the different teams interacting with one another, helping each other out, as well as working on their own bots, and the diehard fans, the hotel receptionist who knew why we were in town, my son’s encyclopaedic knowledge of the different robots and their results, I began to get a feel of a special world, all of its own. I was never much of anything in CDT class, and I only have a GCSE in Electronics to really show any engineering ability, but I found myself thinking about how we could start to build our own 100kg wrecking machine.
Really On The Road This Time
It wasn’t the only road trip the two of us took that week. Earlier in the week we drove up to Llandovery to look at some sheep. The sheep were a no, but the drive was beautiful, in the late afternoon sun, through the edge of the Brecon Beacons. Landing in Glasgow, too, was beautiful – the mountains just visible as a crest on the horizon. It reminds me how much to see in the uk there is, and that I have seen altogether too little of it. You bypass almost everything on the motorway and from the air you can see that even the minor roads map only a skeleton with most of the country in the gaps between.
The summer before we moved, we took a series of walks along different parts of the Thames near Oxford. We just picked a footpath, dumped the car somewhere, and went out to see what we could find. It wasn’t uniformly successful – the footpaths weren’t always as reliable as marked, and I fell in once, losing my flip flop as I did so, but there were also secret spots that we came across, and lots of good swimming. We’re starting to do similar things now in the valleys. Again the maps don’t really tell you much about the on-the-ground reality of footpaths, but there are some stunning views and a lot more to explore than you might think. But I’d also like to go further afield – see some islands in Scotland, follow some rivers across the country, generally find the time to get to know more of my own country.
Fireflies 