To bet, perchance to win

You can't always get what you want.

I can confirm that this is true. I can never get what I want. Maybe this is down in part to my fanciful nature; in an age of jet aircraft I wanted to fly a biplane. While other engineers studied the turbocharger and its application to transport I wondered if it would be possible to modify steam engines to have a small nuclear reactor in place of the firebox. I wanted to design a human-powered spaceship using the principle of ion ejection at relatively low voltages in vacuum.

But if you try sometimes, you can get what you need.

Indeed? (Raises a quizzical eyebrow). I have my doubts. If I have everything I need, why do I still want for more? Perhaps if I knew what I needed, I might be happy with what I've got. But it seems to me that you never quite get what you need. There's always that feeling at the time when you come to pay the bills and settle the accounts that some of the debt will have to be put off till next month. You rank them in order: this one will repossess the house if I don't pay, this one will take me to court, these will cut off the power. I live my life under threat of retribution.

The last few days have seen the autumn weather arrive and play havoc with my plans for getting gardening work completed on the days I had scheduled each for. I have missed out one of my regular customers for two Mondays in succession now because of heavy rain, and as I sit here tapping at the keyboard the fog outside has only just cleared away. If only those who send me bills could also be put back until the weather clears.

But back to the getting what I need thought. It is now cold and wet. I need to be able to get warm and dry at the end of each day in the damp and drizzle. I need fuel. The costs of fuel are soaring. Even coal, which at first thought you would think would not be affected by the current surge in oil and gas prices, is going up. The reason is that it is hewn from the seam, brought to the surface, and delivered to depots and doors by vehicles which will only run on oil. The bottled gas which I use in a catalytic heater for quick warmth has also gone up, and although much of it comes from the Brownsea Island field and is therefore supposedly unaffected by hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico or tense standoffs with Iran, it again is raised and delivered by energy derived from oil.

Of course, as a side effect of my garden clearance, I do get a lot of wood and bark shreddings. This would appear to fill my needs for fuel, and in a small way, it does. But what I actually get is green wood, recently cut, that cannot be burnt immediately; it has to be stacked and allowed to dry. Once again the carrot which is dangled is not quite close enough to be eaten completely, and I keep trotting on after the remaining stub, hoping it will droop just that fraction more so that I can reach it. Paranoia begins to creep in as the doubts about the carrot supply grow and rumours of who's pulling the strings abound.

"Doctor, Doctor, I think I'm a puppet."
"Why is that?"
"I have this terrible pain in my arse."

I wonder if I am an experimental subject in a psychology research program? The behavioural aspects of hope and optimism considered in the context of both negative and positive reinforcement stimuli. At what point will my cheerful optimism turn into dour pessimism? Years of being a freelance worker have lead me to believe that a maxim of "Hope for the best but plan for the worst" is the only way to live. Sitting down and reviewing the past few years has shown me, however, that when you are on the downside of life, you never quite manage to break even in the short term. The same review, though, also shows me that if you look at events with a window greater than a few days, something does always seem to turn up. The doldrums are not infinite, and the wind doesn't lie low for ever.

So I live in hope. Not, I trust, like Hitler in his bunker, waiting for the Wonder Weapons to spring their surprise, or for one of his generals to achieve the impossible victory. My mental picture of that man's last few weeks is of an evil Billy Bunter waiting for the postal order to arrive, or for his numbers to come up. It takes me back to my last spell in the slough of despond, when out of a desire to generate some hope at least, I wrote some programs to try and predict which numbers might be drawn twice a week. I didn't win, but I did get back into software contracting for one last time. I cannot hope to win the lottery. If I were to win, I am sure it would be in a time when I was not desperate for money. To those that have, shall be given, and from those that have not, shall be taken away.

If there is one thing that I have noticed emerging during the last few years that I hate, it is the rise of luck as a lifestyle. We are being persuaded to abandon the Victorian ethos of hard work and study as the path to a bright future in favour of picking a celebrity to follow and a set of numbers to hope for. We have television channels full of repeats of old shows and stories of other peoples' luck with auctions and house makeovers. The last days of the Roman Empire is the latest show in town, and of course, it's a repeat.

And so my hopeful optimism is no different from the dreams of those who buy the lottery ticket each week. The dangling carrot changes slightly; I have noticed that when the weather deteriorates, I start to sell more classic car spares. Not enough for me to hang up the foul-weather clothes and stay inside in the nearly-warm. More promises of gardening work arrive by emails, from neighbours of customers who have watch me labour to cut down a hedge and dig up the roots, and are impressed enough to ask if I would do some work for them. I thank them for their emails and put them on the list, and look outside the window to the lowering skies that suggest it will be weeks rather than days before the promises I make can be kept.

So what difference is there between my living in hope, and my hoping for luck in games of chance? And why do I never quite get what I need? Is it because hope is engendered by the gap between what I need and what I have? Who is pulling the string on the other end of the carrot?

As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, they do up and undo us for their sport.

One-Track Mind

The first train simulator program I bought was called Microsoft Train Simulator, known as MSTS. I have always wondered where the extra S came from. It was a serious simulator, and one of the things it didn't like you doing was laying a circle of track. If you insisted on trying to build a model railway you had to get very devious with the turnouts to try and hide the fact that at some point the line was going to form a loop. And something else that didn't work in MSTS were turntables. Not only did the program object to track joining up to make a circle, it objected to track that could be broken. Was there logic behind that? I never knew.

At about the same time, I bought another train simulator program, Trainz. Don't you just stagger in admiration at the genius of someone who can replace an S with a Z? Trainz, produced by a company called Auran, is known as TRS2004, although recently they have brought out TRS2006, and going backwards in time to before I bought my version, there was something called UTC, and at this point I'm going to stop enumerating.

Trainz allowed you to lay a circle of track, in fact it seemed to expect you to want to do that. It also had working turntables, swing-bridges, lifting bridges, all the quirky things that made railways the fascinating things that they are. And you could flit from train to train like a passenger trying to use the fragmented British train operating companies to get somewhere; I discovered this almost by accident, driving one of the steam engines that pulled a train full of logs to a sawmill where the logs were magically unloaded into a heap on the ground beside the track and the other wagons filled up with woodchips as you crawled slowly through the factory complex. I passed a set of sidings where there was a second engine hissing quietly, with some carriages coupled up behind it. I thought it looked inviting, so I clicked on it with the mouse, and instantly I was in the cab of the new engine, looking out at the train full of woodchips steaming off away from me.

The initial panic of being left behind passed when I found I could operate the controls of the engine I had hopped onto. I sounded the whistle and set off along the line, wondering where I might end up. After a while I passed a mill in the woods with a train hauling trucks full of logs to be unloaded and more trucks to be filled up with woodchips. After a while longer, with the landscape starting to look familiar, I passed the same mill again, this time without the train. I could go round and round in circles, playing trains, without having to worry about the line suddenly coming to an end and my needing to bang on the emergency brakes.

The next discovery was that Trainz had 'drivers', artificial intelligence agencies to whom you could give instructions to save you doing the mundane tasks of running round the train yourself or finding the way from Upper LumberjackWoods to Lower Pansycreek. I could sit back and watch as driver one drove the train I was riding, while up in the woods driver two was circling around between logging camp and wood mill. It was all I ever wanted from the game; I didn't want to be an engine driver, I was happy being the Fat Controller, a perpetual passenger. 'Drive', I would instruct as I boarded the train. 'Copy that', would come the response from the speakers, and the train would set off, driving at the varying speed limits, while I tagged along watching the landscape flow past me.

I began to notice that the AI drivers were not infallible. Sometimes they would take a rather circuitous route between two points that I thought could have been reached by a shorter path. One of them would often come to a complete halt and sit there immobile, and I would have to intervene, taking the controls and getting the train back into motion. Sadly, there was no way to interrogate him to work out why he had come to a halt. So I searched around the net and found that someone had written an Inspector program. I downloaded it, and waited until this particular driver halted, then sent in the Inspector and awaited his report.

I should have known it right from the start; why would a slim young driver like that wander on board with such an enormous lunch satchel? It wasn't food he carried around with him to while away the boredom in the cab. His bag was stuffed full of porn. "He was reading 'Rubber Nurses Enema Revenge' while he waited for the signal to go to green", the Inspector reported, "and he seemed to have become engrossed in the plot and hadn't noticed the signal wasn't for his line at all."

I'm sure there ought to be an apostrophe in that title somewhere.

The Late Fish

I have noticed that I never get anything right first time; I never breeze through things; I'm always fighting till the last moment to get something completed, or waiting until it almost seems to late before I finally achieve what I want to.

I haven't always been like this. I was one of those hateful people at school who finished the exam paper with half an hour to spare, got up and left while others were still furiously re-working their answers or resting their head in their hands on the desk, and still got good marks. But exams were a simple set of rules to learn and follow, and life is quite the opposite. All sorts of strange fish swim in the rivers of life, and I still have to learn all of their names and what tempts them out.

I went fishing again, on a wild and blustery day that owls begin their stories with. The last time, earlier this year, I caught nothing. In fact, I found that I couldn't remember when I had had a successful fishing trip. I know it was about fifteen years ago, when I moved into the station, and my one vivid memory of the time was of casting out the carp bait and having the rod snap halfway along. My old wooden fishing gear just wasn't up to the task of handling modern baits, it seemed.

My youngest brother took pity on me after I showed him a couple of old fishing rods I had acquired, a split-cane salmon rod and another glass-fibre rod. He bought me an ultra-modern carbon-fibre fly-rod that packs up into six sections in a storage tube less than 2 feet long. It will be perfect for strapping to the crossbar of the bicycle.

We went out today to fly-fish for pike on the Stour; not at the stretch of water where I had unsuccessfully tried for trout earlier in the year, but higher up, at a stretch near Hindon St Mary. I was reading the local free paper the evening before, and came across an article stating that they had only just re-stocked that stretch of the river following a pollution incident earlier in the year, when effluent from an unidentified source killed large quantities of the fish. I mentioned this to my brother in the morning as we loaded his gear into the car. He rushed off to telephone the shop from where he had purchased the day tickets, and came back looking a bit concerned.

I thought it shouldn't be a problem; there would be loads of new fish wandering around like new kids on the first day at school, too uncertain to know what was right and what was wrong, all hungry for food, all raring to chase those brightly-coloured feather toys we were going to dangle over their noses. "But I think they should have told me before selling me the tickets," said brother.

We parked beside an old roofless mill, derelict long before the unknown vandals had torched it one night and left nothing but charred timbers scattered amongst the blackened stones. There was a catwalk that lead out over the weir to a halfway point, from where you could cast either upstream into the slow-moving mill pond, or downstream into the more turbulent but less weeded stretch of water beneath the foaming weir. I opted for the cleared water in order to learn how to cast with the new rod. Brother put on a bright pink feather on his line, while I went for a more subdued tawny-coloured affair with a hint of sparkling silver in the tail. I felt it looked more natural.

Pike are like fussy cats, (but with scales instead of fur). They have vicious teeth, and will chase something if it is dangled in their vicinity. Or not. Sometimes they will lie sulking on the bottom and you could actually brush the lure past their scales and they wouldn't even blink. Note to self: do fish blink? I think not, but it would need researching. What sort of person would devote a large portion of their life to determining whether or not fish ever blink? How many hours of painstaking observation would it take to be able to state definitively that fish do not blink? Supposing they only do it once in their lifetime, as a sort of rite-of-passage? How could you be sure you had carried out sufficient observations to be certain that fish never blink? Shut up.

I soon got control of the line and the feather, and only got it comprehensively snarled in a tree once. Brother had used his chest-waders to explore the sill of the weir thoroughly, as well as the banks of the upper stretch, and I had thrashed the lower water into a foaming mess, but neither of us had seen a flash or felt a twitch. We decided to go downstream through the field and see what lay in the weedy stretches.

Nothing lay in the weedy stretches, we decided after another two hours and a chicken sandwich each. In my earlier lifetime, I would have used some of the chicken as bait to see if the river really was as dead as it appeared to be, but like Father William, I have grown older, and no wiser; I have, however, become greedier. All the chicken went in me, in case I needed the energy to balance an eel on the end of my nose. Above us wheeled a pair of Buzzards, waiting hopefully for one or both of us to collapse from boredom or frustration and give them the meal of a lifetime.

"We could go to Hamoon, to the free stretch," brother suggested. And so we set off again, half-collapsing the rods and stowing them in the back of the car. Hamoon is another weir, but without the mill, and is one of the last places I have a vivid recollection of fishing. I used to work at Southampton, before I set out on my long bike ride, and was living in Marnhull. I used to stop off at Hamoon on the way back from work. In the back of my car would be the enormous and archaic 3-piece Spanish Reed rod, the one which I subsequently broke while casting. I would park and walk out onto the bridge, staring out over the downstream railing at the foaming and weed-riddled water. Upstream, in the calm section, there were always a few fisherman sitting on chairs and stools by the bank side, firing handfuls of groundbait and maggots out with catapults to pepper the water around their floats, their rods laid carefully in rests beside them. I would put a large piece of crusty bread onto a hook, and float it carefully through the tumbling waters to a spot beyond the weeds about fifty feet below the bridge. I usually caught two large chub, sometimes even a smaller yearling, carefully steering them back up through the rippling channels between the weeds to a spot beside the bridge per where I could just reach down with the landing net and lift the fish up out of the water. I did this no more than once a week, so that the fish didn't start to remember me, and the upstream fishermen didn't notice what was going on not quite under their noses.

We walked down a few hundred yards from the bridge this time, because brother admitted that he had never managed to catch a pike in the bridge pool, and started working the flies around a bend in the river. He had almost instant success; I heard an exited grunt, and scrambled up the crumbling bank to see him bringing a small jack pike into the side. I reached for the landing net, but he decided it was light enough to just swing in, small boy style. He unhooked it easily, one of the benefits of using barbless hooks, and I went back to my casting with a lighter heart, knowing that it was possible to catch pike in this stretch of the river, on flies, in the autumn. The wind began to skitter across the surface of the water, making Vee-shaped ripples that hinted at darting fish. A magpie swooped down across the weeds as though it were a kingfisher. An autumn bonfire's smoky scent wafted through the field and lingered in the scrubby bushes where the wind couldn't quite get a grip on it. I forgot about time while the daylight lasted.

Two hours, two dozen pools, and two miles later, I was still optimistic, but in a deflated way. I had become reasonably comfortable with the rod and line, and could loft the fly across the water almost to the other side of the river. For those of you who aren't fisherman, fly-fishing is rather like flexing an old-fashioned coaching whip, but in slow motion, waving the line through the air in a swirling curve that settles gently on the water and lets the bushy lure on the very end plop down like an exhausted insect. We were using wet-fly method, where the lure then sinks beneath the water and you tug it back to you with a series of random jerks to simulate the movement of a small fish swimming erratically; something that is supposed to cause pike and trout and other predatory fish to lunge for it in a cat-like frenzy. Only, I wasn't being lunged at. Nor was I being nudged, or tugged, or even twitched. For all I knew, there had been one solitary pike in the river, which my brother had caught and which was now sulking on the riverbed with a sore lip. Doubt and uncertainty grew as the afternoon ran out.

At the farthest point downstream, we stopped and debated what to do. The light was beginning to fade. I had caught nothing, but brother had caught another couple, and had lost several. One of them had been in a large pool which I had definitely tried. I looked at the rather dull lure on my line, and decided I should try the gaudy ones. When subdued sophistication doesn't work, disco is a viable option. This is a typical fishing syndrome, using the wrong bait, fishing too deep, fishing too shallow, whatever you are doing seems to be the wrong thing, particularly when someone else is catching fish in the same water. It is, of course, partly psychological, as I well knew, and the real secret to fishing was to be quietly persistent, in a bloody-minded sort of way. But it didn't hurt to try something different once in a while. A herd of frisky bullocks watched and jeered as I strung on a fluorescent pink lure and went back to whip the water once again.

We were almost out of daylight, and almost back to the car, when I felt a sharp series of tugs, and knew it wasn't just another underwater reed. I struggled to get both hands doing their independent jobs, one clutching both the rod and the taut end of the line, the other reeling in the slack coils I had been retrieving so that I could finally get the fish onto the reel with the controllable brake. I felt the momentary fear that it would get off the hook before I had full control, and had to fight my own panic almost as much as the fish was fighting me. Brother appeared with the landing net as I steered the fish away from the tangled mass of weed it had been trying for, and it shot away towards the opposite bank. I still hadn't caught a glimpse of it, but knew from the feeling that it wasn't a minnow. After another two anxious minutes I drew it over the landing net and brother hoisted it up onto the grass.

I could have killed it and taken it home to eat; it was a four or five pound fish, a predator that lives mainly on the fish that other anglers love to catch, and they would have thanked me for removing it from the river. But I found I didn't have any desire to kill it. I would put it back, because it was lucky; it had been the first fish I had caught in something like fifteen years, and that had spared it from the cosh.

Instead, I did something I have never done before. I have caught fish since I was four, since before I went to school. I have caught river fish, pond fish, lake fish, sea fish, even fish in grass-marshes only ankle-deep in water, but I have never had my photograph taken holding one of my catches.

So here, after half a lifetime, is my first fish shot.

OK, drop the sax and eat the soap

I've been spending a lot of my spare time immersed in a virtual world set fifty years ago, and just a few miles from where I live. The new rail simulation program from EA Games arrived by post a couple of weeks ago. After getting to know the quirks and foibles I've found myself wandering around the landscape looking at the trees and bushes, the people on the platforms, the flowers in bloom in the meadows and along the trackside, even plants gently swaying from side to side in the virtual breeze. The level of detail that the creators have put into the game is amazing. But then, unlike driving sims and shoot-the-monsters, some of the players of this game are going to be out for a stroll. Once I get the content-creation toolpack I shall be adding some of my own details, such as people walking through the streets, and swans swimming serenely in the river.

It isn't the only train simulation software around, there are earlier simulators, some of which are cab-driving viewpoint only, but others also allow you to roam the landscape almost as you please, but these earlier simulations are showing their age in quite a few areas. Not everyone has been as taken by the simulation, blandly entitled 'Rail Simulator', as I, and if you want to read through the war of words between the extremes of users, go to this site and head for the forums. I've taken to the new release because it offers the promise of trying to model some of the past in much more realistic detail than the two earlier simulations I have used for a couple of years.

I haven't been an avid games-player before these railway simulations came along, or at least, I haven't been attracted to the graphics games as much as I was to the adventure games a quarter of a century ago. That long?

I walked into a video rental shop back in the eighties, saw that they were selling of stocks of a small personal computer quite cheaply, and bought one for myself. After a short while, I went back and bought a couple more, for two other members of the family who trusted my judgment on computing matters. The machine was the Dragon32, a rather quirky piece of hardware in a creamy plastic box with a rattly keyboard. It had a reasonable selection of games available for it on cassette tapes, although not as many as the Commodore 64. I didn't bother with the graphics games, I didn't find them realistic enough to make me overlook the cartoon-like representation of reality; I played the text-based adventure games.

One of the first titles I picked up for the Dragon32 was called El Diablero, and I realised, within a few minutes, that it was based on the Carlos Castenada books. I roamed happily around a magical landscape, dreaming, flying, changing realities, and finally solving the puzzle after several weeks. And that, of course, was the whole problem with adventure games. They were a linear sequence of experiences, flashes of enlightenment as you found your way past obstacles, and once known, the flashes of enlightenment couldn't be repeated. The game couldn't be replayed in quite the same way, but because of the linear structure, it couldn't be replayed in any other way.

Rail Simulation is a game. Not everyone agrees with me on that, in fact, a large number of the forum members that you will meet should you follow the earlier link would disagree quite strongly with me, and if the game was a shooter, I would probably end up being turned into one of the legions of gun-fodder that seem to come out of doorways and round the corner as though there was never going to be an end to it. Games players, though, need to believe strongly in the reality of what they are playing. The difference between the modern simulations and the old text-based games is that you are no longer being challenged to use your imagination to bring the game to life, you are instead presented with a set of visual and aural events and invited to either accept or reject them. It reminds me of some of the older films, where the special effects just didn't live up to the rest of the standards; Marlon Brando cradling a blowup sex doll meant to be a drowned Stephanie Beacham in 'The Nightcomers' being a prime example.

Some of the earliest computer games, things like Space Invaders and Asteroids, worked because they made no attempt to try and depict reality with any degree of realism, they simply flung the situation in your face and let you either dive straight in or walk away, in much the same way, I suppose, as cartoons did. A step beyond the acceptance of cartoons lead you into the area of the Gerry Andersen puppet series like Stingray and Captain Scarlett, where reality was treated as a cartoon subject, but an attempt was made to add realism to a few chosen objects. In a similar way, the earlier generation of train simulation programs also tried to animate certain features of their virtual world.

Rail Simulator hasn't moved from the cartoon theatre to the Hollywood set. It does offer a promise of modeling the world with a greater degree of realism, both present and past. And it does offer a new direction for gaming to head off in, or several, possibly. There is the open-ended scenario where you can roam as you please without finding that the game stops as soon as you stray from the storyline, and there is the possibility to recreate the past. This opens up a whole new range of activities investigating some of history's mysteries.

There are already games where you can hunt Jack the Ripper, or try to solve the Black Dahlia riddle, with the limitation that the creation team have already written the script and scattered the clues. Like the earlier adventure games, they tend to be linear. Rail Simulator allows the addition of user-created content, in fact, the whole ethos of railway simulation seems to be one of adding to the game. Sadly, and this is probably the biggest incendiary source that has been found in the forums, the Rail Simulator program was released several weeks in advance of the tools which allowed user-created content to be added to the game. Perhaps the marketing part of the game creation process didn't look closely enough at the players whom they expected to embrace the new product within a few days of release. The game is certainly marred by a scattering of bugs, but this is to be expected in any new release. But the inability to change the world to how you wanted to see it appears to me to be the biggest block towards universal acceptance. It is like stepping back several years into one of the old linear adventure games. Adding user-created content to a game removes the limitations imposed by a single author or directed team, and allows the game to evolve according to a multitude of whims.

It has, though, reminded me of how quirky and at the same time, appealing, some of those old games where. As well as the sorcerer game, I have fond memories of an adventure set in a castle. I can no longer remember the exact title, 'The Castle of Adventure' is actually an Enid Blyton book, so it can't be that, and I think the author was called Conrad Jacobsen, but again, it's all a blur to me now. He played some cunning tricks in the game, for example, setting a maze challenge in underground tunnels and caves, where everybody kept the torch alight. Well, you must, mustn't you? Even my old tricks of dropping selected objects and moving in each direction in turn, recording those ones which lead back to the dropped objects, didn't seem to help. But, if you turned off the torch, you saw, glowing faintly in the darkness, luminous arrows which you then followed and eventually emerged into the garden to find a hot air balloon. If you had remembered to bring the bow and arrow with you that had resolutely failed to kill any of the earlier hazards you had encountered, you could enter the basket, wait until the balloon had risen some distance, and then puncture it by shooting the arrow to allow a descent into the final area of the game.

I was playing it once, with my youngest brother giving suggestions. There was a saxophone that you could, and should, pick up. You could also play it, and in a certain situation it would spell instant doom to a fat greasy white blob that otherwise spelt instant doom to you. There was a bar of soap that you had to pick up, because otherwise you would immediately slip on it and fall to your death. Anytime you put it down and then moved meant instant end of game. As with most games, you had a limit to how many items you could carry at any one time, and we found ourselves overloaded at the point where we needed to have the saxophone, plus everything else we had speculatively picked up, and there was that damned bar of soap in the way.

"Drop Saxophone", instructed brother.

There is a saxophone here. There is a bar of soap here.

"Get soap", instructed brother.

You pick up the soap.

"Eat soap", suggested brother. I baulked at that, but he was insistent.

You choke to death trying to swallow a bar of soap.

Of course you do, doesn't everyone know that?