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Showing posts from April, 2013

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Choose Your Own Adventure Retrospective: The Curse of Batterslea Hall by Richard Brightfield

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The Curse of Batterslea Hall  was always my favourite CYOA book – it was also, for reasons I'll get into, one of the more unusual ones. It sparked my later love of adventure games and inspired some of my sketchy early attempts at creative writing (including a thinly veiled recreation on 90s 'edutainment' program Storybook Weaver ). It also deepened my devastation when I returned home one fateful school night to discover my mum had donated my extensive CYOA collection – precious gems tremblingly unearthed from the dusty Mills and Boon-straining shelves of my local Scope – back to charity. Around twenty years later, and I took the obvious next step for a mildly lockdown-crazed 90s kid squinting down the barrel of their thirties: sourced a copy inflated by just four times the original cover price through eBay. But was it worth it, and does it still hold up? Dust off your bootcut jeans and fire up your Walkman – it's adventurin' time, 90s* style... The premise Battersl

My Toga Made of Blond, Brilliantined Biblical Hair

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This is an archival post from April 2010 migrated from my previous personal blog. On a grainy April morning my partner and I trudged into the city centre to catch a 6am Megabus from Newcastle to London. In total, the return trip lasted around 14 hours. The reason? Why, for the summer of lovin', of course. The exuberant Broadway revival of Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical  is currently showing in London's West End (at the Gielgud Theatre), and the hippie spirit was, at least on that day and for all those involved, vigorously, hip-thrustingly alive.