Why Being Number One Ruins Mobile MMO Games For Everyone Else

I don’t need to be number one at anything, least of all a mobile MMO. I’m quite happy pottering along at my own pace, chatting away in the alliance chat, helping people out, being helped out in return. That’s the actual game, as far as I’m concerned. The leaderboard is just wallpaper.

Not everyone sees it that way. And that’s the problem.




There’s Always Someone Chasing The Top Spot

Every mobile MMO has one. Doesn’t matter if it’s a city builder, a survival game, a kingdom sim — the State of Survivals, Evonys and Rise of Kingdoms of this world all run on the same instinct. There’s always that person, sometimes several, who’s decided the entire point of the exercise is to be ranked first. Not to enjoy the building, the strategy, the daft little community that forms around an app you downloaded on a whim. Just to be top.

On its own, fair enough. Chase what you like. The trouble is that in an MMO, nothing you do happens in isolation. Someone else’s obsession with rank one becomes everyone else’s problem, whether they signed up for it or not.

The Camaraderie Is The Actual Point

The bit that keeps me coming back to these games isn’t the grind, it’s the people. There’s something genuinely nice about a group of strangers coordinating, covering for each other, having a laugh in the group chat about something utterly trivial that happened in a game about pretend policing or farming or whatever the premise happens to be that week.

That camaraderie is fragile, though. It only survives if everyone’s playing roughly the same game — the relaxed, sociable one. The moment someone decides they’re playing the competitive, must-be-first version instead, the tone shifts. Suddenly there’s pressure. Suddenly casual players who were having a nice time feel like they’re dragging the alliance down. Suddenly it’s not a hobby, it’s an obligation.

You see the same pattern whether it’s a farming sim, a tycoon game, or one of the endless “build your empire” titles that seem to be advertised on every video on the internet. The genre doesn’t matter. The leaderboard does the same job every time. I’m currently playing one myself — Police Chief, a mobile MMO about building up a station and cracking down on cartoon crime — and even in the early hours you can already spot who’s playing for the community and who’s playing for the rank.

What The Leaderboard Chase Actually Costs

Here’s what I’ve watched happen, more than once, across more than one of these games:

  • The person chasing rank one starts spending real money to keep pace, and quietly expects everyone else to match the energy.
  • Alliance chat stops being banter and starts being logistics — assignments, quotas, “why hasn’t everyone donated today.”
  • Newer or slower players get made to feel like deadweight for daring to play at a normal pace.
  • The relaxed players — the ones who made the game fun in the first place — start drifting off, because who wants a second job.
  • The chaser eventually gets near the top, or close to it, and the alliance they’ve hollowed out to get there isn’t much fun for anyone anymore, including them.

That last one’s the real sting. The chase doesn’t just spoil it for the people happy to play casually. It tends to spoil it for the chaser too, eventually. Number one is a lonely, high-maintenance spot to defend, and it turns out a leaderboard position doesn’t do banter back.

You’re Allowed To Just Play The Game

If you’re the sort who enjoys an MMO the way I do — logging on, doing your bit, having a laugh with the alliance, not losing any sleep over rank — you’re not doing it wrong. You’re doing it exactly right. These games were designed to be enjoyed at a normal human pace by normal human people with normal human amounts of money and free time.

The number one spot is designed to be unattainable for most players, precisely so a small number of them will spend a large amount of money trying anyway. That’s not a design flaw. That’s the business model. You’re not missing out by declining to take part in it.

So if you’re in an alliance with someone quietly turning the whole thing into an unpaid full-time job, it’s worth saying so. Not everyone’s playing for the crown. Some of us are just here for the company.

I’ll keep pottering along with Police Chief, keep chatting away in the alliance, and keep letting the leaderboard do whatever it wants without me. No crown, no stress, no quotas — just a decent bit of pretend policing and a group chat worth logging in for. That’s a win in my book, even if the game doesn’t have a badge for it.

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Stealing Hours: The Games That Keep Me Sane

Spare time is a funny thing. The older I get, the more it resembles a cryptid — something people claim exists, but that I rarely see for myself. Between work, life, and the thousand small obligations that seem to multiply when you’re not looking, genuinely free time has become the rarest of luxuries.

Which makes it all the more important that when I do get some, I spend it badly.

By “badly,” I mean glued to a screen with a cup of tea going cold beside me, utterly absorbed in something that serves no practical purpose whatsoever. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

The PC/Mac Rabbit Holes

My go-to games on the computer tend to fall into a particular category: the kind where you sit down at nine in the evening fully intending to have a quick go, and then look up to find it’s two in the morning and you’ve achieved something either magnificent or completely inexplicable.

The Football Manager franchise has been my longest-running obsession, and my proudest achievement in it belongs to a save in FM24: I took Kings Lynn Town — yes, that Kings Lynn Town — and after fifteen years of grinding through the non-leagues, clawing up through the divisions, and surviving the kind of managerial pressure that would break lesser virtual men, I led them to Champions League glory. Fifteen years. European champions. I’d love to say it felt surreal, but honestly it felt earned.

(We never did win the Premier League. That one still stings.)

In FM26 I’ve taken a different path entirely — I’m currently managing Huddinge IF in the Swedish second tier, having earned promotion after two seasons. Less glamorous than Wembley, perhaps, but there’s something deeply satisfying about building something from scratch in a league where nobody’s expecting anything from you.

Transport Fever 2 is where my inner civil engineer goes to live his best life. I have a map that has grown over time into something that can only be described as organised chaos. The rail network in particular is a magnificent, sprawling spaghetti of tracks and junctions and overlapping lines that somehow — somehow — continues to function. Every time I add a new route I half-expect the whole thing to collapse. It never does. I take this as a sign that I’m either a genius or just very lucky.

Cities: Skylines has become something of an artistic exercise. I’m building a British city — and I mean properly British — row after row of terraced houses, each one individually placed. There are thousands of them. Actual thousands. Why would I do this to myself? Because it looks right, that’s why. Because when you zoom out and you see those long, slightly cramped Victorian streets stretching off into the distance, it looks like somewhere that could genuinely exist. It looks like home. Worth every obsessive hour.

And then there’s Civilisation. Just one more turn, you tell yourself. Just one more. It’s such a small, reasonable thing to ask. One more turn to finish that wonder. One more to see off the Aztecs. One more to find out what’s on the other side of that mountain range. But the turns keep coming, and the night keeps deepening, and somewhere around the Industrial Age you realise that the birds have started singing outside and a grey dawn is bleeding through the curtains and you are still — still — not done. Time doesn’t pass when you’re playing Civilisation. It dissolves. I have lost whole nights to it without a moment’s regret, blinking back into reality somewhere around sunrise, bleary and vaguely triumphant. It is, without question, the most dangerous game ever made.

On the PS5

My console time is split between two very different worlds. F1 scratches the racing itch — there’s something deeply satisfying about the precision of it, the incremental improvements, the perfect lap that somehow comes together.

But the game that genuinely got under my skin — especially during lockdown — is Life Is Strange. I stumbled into the franchise during those strange, suspended months when the world was standing still, and I fell completely into it. The story of Max Caulfield and Chloe Price hit me harder than I expected. It’s the kind of game that asks you to sit with your choices, that makes consequences feel real, that has actual emotional weight. For something that technically involves a teenager rewinding time, it manages to be remarkably human.

I’ve played through the franchise since, and while Max and Chloe remain the heart of it for me, every chapter in the series has something to say about loneliness and connection and the weight of small decisions. Not bad for a video game.

Why It Matters

I know some people see gaming as a waste of time. I understand the argument, even if I disagree with it. There’s something about a well-made game — the kind that pulls you in and gives you a world to inhabit, problems to solve, stories to follow — that feels genuinely restorative to me. It’s creative engagement dressed up as entertainment.

Besides, Kings Lynn Town are European champions. If that’s a waste of time, I’ll take it.

So tell me — what are you playing right now? Are you a fellow victim of Civilisation’s “just one more turn” curse, or do you have your own Kings Lynn Town story waiting to be written? Drop a comment below and let me know. And if you’ve never tried any of the games above, consider this your warning: clear your schedule first.

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Why I Write About Grimsby (and Apparently Wales) When I Live in Kent

I live in Dover. Have done for a few years now, after nine years in Folkestone before that. Sadie’s here, Reggie the three-legged cat is here, work’s here, half of my adult life is built on this particular stretch of coastline. And yet if you read enough of what I write — the screenplays, the novels — you’d be forgiven for thinking I’d never actually left Grimsby. Or possibly that I’d quietly relocated to Pontypridd without telling anyone, including myself.

Neither is true. I’ve lived in Kent for thirteen years. I’ve spent a grand total of two weeks in Wales, ever. And yet my imagination appears to have filed a permanent change-of-address form with both places without consulting me first.

I find this mildly ridiculous, so naturally I’m writing a blog post about it.




Grimsby: Explainable, At Least

Let’s deal with the sensible one first. A novel called Small Fish, set in a fictionalised version of the town I called Grimhaven, twenty-four chapters deep, seven of them actually written, which for a writer is basically a personal best. A chunk of my zombie novel, End of the Line, is set in Grimsby too, because apparently even the apocalypse has to start somewhere familiar. Ideas that keep wandering back up the A180 whether I’ve invited them to or not.

This one I can explain. I grew up there. The better part of thirty years, give or take, versus just over a decade in Kent — so when my hands go back to Grimsby on the page, that’s not nostalgia, that’s just basic arithmetic. Kent is where I live. Grimsby is apparently where my subconscious still has a season ticket.

Small Fish became Grimhaven rather than literal Grimsby, mostly because I wasn’t trying to write a documentary about a real place that’s continued existing without my permission since I left it. I wanted the feeling of the place — the grit, the football, the very specific grey of a sky over the docks — without having to be accurate about, say, whether a particular chip shop is still open. (It’s probably not. They never are.) End of the Line, on the other hand, just goes ahead and uses the real place, possibly on the basis that if the dead are going to rise anywhere, it might as well be somewhere I know the geography of well enough to write a decent chase scene.

So: Grimsby makes sense. Moving on.

Wales: Does Not Make Sense, At All

Here’s the bit where I lose the plot slightly, so bear with me.

I’ve been to Wales twice in my entire life. A week each time — once in 1992, when I was a child and had approximately zero say in the itinerary, and again in 2025, as a fully grown adult who really should know better by now. Of that second trip, exactly one hour was spent in Pontypridd, the town where my grandmother was born. One hour. I’ve spent longer than that queuing for a gig.

And somehow, that one hour appears to have rewired something. Not the two weeks of general, perfectly pleasant Welsh holidaying. Not the scenery, not the castles, or the Blaenau Festiniog Light Railway, not whatever I had for lunch on either trip, which I genuinely cannot recall. Just the hour. In Pontypridd. Specifically.

I have no rational explanation for this, and I want to be clear that I’ve tried. My grandmother was from there, which is the only actual evidence I’ve got, and on paper it’s not much to build an entire emotional attachment on. People meet their actual living relatives for longer than an hour and feel less moved by it. I’m half convinced my own ancestors are mildly embarrassed on my behalf — “he was here for sixty minutes and now he wants to retire here, bless him.”

Because that’s the other thing. Sadie has mentioned, more than once, that when we eventually retire, Wales might be the answer. And the genuinely baffling part is that I don’t immediately laugh this off. Some small, currently unsupervised part of my brain goes “yeah, alright then,” based entirely on an hour I spent there once, in a town I couldn’t confidently find again without a satnav.

I have, if I’m honest, more feeling toward Wales as a concept than I have toward England, despite having lived in England my entire life and visited Wales for a combined total of roughly two weeks. This is not a sensible ratio. I am aware it is not a sensible ratio. I have made my peace with the fact that my sense of belonging apparently does not consult a spreadsheet before making decisions.

So What’s Actually Going On Here

I think — and this is very much a working theory, subject to change without notice — that creative work, and maybe identity generally, doesn’t care all that much about how long you’ve spent somewhere. It cares about whatever’s load-bearing. Kent is where my actual life happens: the bills, the cat, the theatre, the back pain, the whole functioning-adult operation. Grimsby is the thirty-year foundation underneath it, fully explicable, no mystery required. And Wales is just… in there. Uninvited. Unexplained. Possibly ancestral, possibly just a really good hour, possibly both.

I’ve stopped trying to force a tidy answer out of the Wales thing, mostly because I don’t think there is one, and partly because demanding logic from your own feelings is a famously losing battle. Some places just get under your skin regardless of how much actual time you’ve clocked there, like a song you’ve heard once and now can’t stop humming, except the song is a Welsh valley town and the humming is a vague but persistent desire to live there one day.

So if you ever read something of mine set in a windswept fictional fishing town, you’ll know where that’s from. And if, decades from now, you hear I’ve retired to a small house somewhere near Pontypridd having visited the place for a cumulative total of sixty minutes, please don’t act surprised. Some of us were always going to end up exactly where we couldn’t logically explain.

Does anyone else feel inexplicably tied to somewhere they’ve barely been? Or is it just me, romanticising a single hour like it owes me a mortgage? Let me know in the comments — I could use the company.

If you enjoy what I do, consider supporting me! Every little bit means the world!

Gary grew up in Grimsby, lives in Dover, Kent, and has a worrying amount of feelings about a Welsh town he’s visited once, for sixty minutes.

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My Website Is Now Fully Pirate-Themed and I Cannot Fully Explain Why

UPDATE: I’ve finally seen sense and reverted back to the normal design. It was fun while it lasted.

So. The website’s gone full pirate.

Not “a small nautical flourish in the footer” pirate. Not “tasteful rope-border in the header” pirate. Full pirate. Skull and crossbones somewhere in the navigation, a colour palette that’s basically just every shade of “weathered wood” and “treasure chest,” and I’m fairly sure there’s a font in there now that I can only describe as Ransom Note’s slightly more seafaring cousin.

I’ve spent two decades building websites professionally. I know what good, restrained, on-brand design looks like. I have opinions about whitespace. And despite all of that, I sat down a few weeks ago and apparently decided that what my personal site — the one with my actual name on it, the one prospective clients might visit — really needed was to look like it was being run out of a beach hut by a man who recently lost an argument with a parrot.




The Honest Answer Is: I Don’t Fully Know

I’d love to give you a clean, sensible origin story here. Something like “it ties into a creative project” or “it’s a clever metaphor for charting your own course,” delivered with a knowing wink, the kind of thing that sounds great in a portfolio case study.

It isn’t that. I genuinely don’t have a tidy explanation. One day I was looking at the site thinking it needed a refresh, and somewhere between “needs a refresh” and “actually opening the design files,” my brain quietly filed a motion for pirates, the motion passed unopposed because nobody else was in the room to object, and that was that. There was no committee meeting. There was no mood board. There was just me, a laptop, and an alarming amount of confidence in galleon iconography.

If this is starting to sound familiar, it’s because it is — I’ve written before about how my best ideas arrive at 2am and don’t survive breakfast. This was very much one of those. Whether it was the heat — British people, as a species, are simply not built for warm weather, our internal thermostats are calibrated for “drizzle” and nothing else — or the four custard doughnuts and a Toblerone I’d apparently decided constituted a balanced evening meal, something sent me doollally enough to greenlight an entire pirate rebrand without consulting anyone, including, crucially, myself at a more sensible hour. Normally these ideas don’t make it past the morning read-back. This one, against all precedent, just… stuck.

This is, if I’m honest, a known pattern by now. 2am-Gary has form. He’s the same one who once tried to give Small Fish a secret underground tunnel system and convinced End of the Line’s zombies needed an entire chemical-spill backstory, complete with a name he’d apparently already settled on. Normally Daytime-Gary catches these at the door — reads them back over breakfast, winces, quietly deletes them, no harm done. This time Daytime-Gary just… didn’t. He looked at the pirate idea, shrugged, and let it through. I’d love to tell you why this one got past the bouncer when the tunnel system and the chemical spill didn’t. I don’t have an answer. Maybe a website doesn’t have the same structural consequences as a 24-chapter outline, so there was simply less for sensible-hours-me to object to. Maybe the doughnuts were just that good. Either way, this is, as far as I can tell, the first 2am idea to survive all the way to a full site overhaul, which feels like it should mean something, even if I can’t say what.

If you’re after deep psychological insight into why a man in his forties with a bad back and a strong professional design background has chosen this particular hill to die on, I can’t help you. I’ve asked myself the same question. The honest answer, every time, is something close to a shrug.

In My Defence (Such As It Is)

I do live on the Kent coast. There’s a sea nearby. There’s a long and genuinely storied history of smuggling, shipping and general seafaring nonsense around these parts, so it’s not a complete non-sequitur. I could, if pressed by a sufficiently patient interviewer, construct a reasonably convincing argument that this is “coastal heritage-inspired branding” rather than “bloke gets the urge to add a skull to his website and simply does not stop himself.”

But if I’m honest with you, and I try to be honest with you on this blog even when it’s mildly humiliating, the coastal heritage thing is a justification I built afterwards. It’s the kind of explanation you give a client when really the truth is “I just wanted to.”

What This Says About Me As a Designer

Probably nothing good, professionally speaking. If a client came to me and said “I’d like my entire web presence themed around 18th century maritime criminals, no particular reason,” I would, as a responsible designer, ask several follow-up questions before reaching for the cutlass clip art. I would want to understand the audience. The brand strategy. Whether this serves the user journey or simply serves my own desire to use the word “plunder” in a call-to-action button.

For myself, apparently, none of that scrutiny applies. I am both the client and the designer in this scenario, and it turns out I am an extremely easy client to please. I pitched myself one idea. I said yes immediately. There was no negotiation. I didn’t even ask myself for a deposit.

Full Site Overhaul, No Half Measures

And this isn’t a “just the homepage” situation either, for anyone hoping I’ll come to my senses on the inner pages. This is a full overhaul. Every corner of the site is getting the treatment. If you land on a contact form on my website in the near future and it doesn’t at least gesture vaguely toward “message in a bottle,” I will personally consider that a missed opportunity, and so, increasingly, will the site itself.

I’ve made my peace with the fact that some people who land on it will think “ah, coastal branding, lovely, very on-brand for a man in Kent.” And others will think “has he been at sea for several months without proper supervision.” Both reactions are valid. I am prepared to stand behind this decision with the same unwavering confidence with which I apparently made it, which is to say: very little actual reasoning, but enormous commitment.

So that’s the story, such as it is. No deep meaning. No grand rebrand strategy document. Just a man, a laptop, and an unsupervised impulse that nobody was around to talk him out of.

Oh, and yes I am aware my hand in the picture has five fingers and a thumb. You can’t expect AI to get everything right!

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When the Dream Job Stops Feeling Like a Dream

EDIT: I’ve had a few messages and a phone call from family and friends asking how I am as a result of this blog post. Let me say that I’m talking about filmmaking, not my day job which I thoroughly enjoy.

There was a time when I couldn’t switch my brain off from filmmaking. A shot would catch my eye on a walk and I’d be reverse-engineering the lighting before I’d finished crossing the road. A line of dialogue would land wrong in something I was watching and I’d be rewriting it in my head, half paying attention to whatever I was actually meant to be doing. It wasn’t a job I was working towards. It was just how my brain worked, all the time, whether I wanted it to or not.

I’m not sure exactly when that stopped. That’s part of what makes this hard to write about. There’s no single morning I can point to and say “that’s the day it left.” It was more of a slow leak than a puncture. One day I looked up and the tank was just… lower than I remembered, and I genuinely couldn’t tell you which mile it happened on.

I want to be honest about this, because I think a lot of people carry some version of it quietly, and the quiet is the worst part.




It’s Not One Thing. That’s What Makes It Hard.

If I could point to a single cause, this would almost be an easier post to write. A bad experience, a project that fell apart, a person who knocked the wind out of me. Something with an edge to it, a villain, a clean narrative.

It’s not that. It’s everything, a little bit, all at once.

It’s the back injury and the bone spurs that mean a full day on set, on my feet, lugging kit, isn’t the straightforward thing it used to be. It’s the fatigue that comes with managing a chronic illness I’ll be carrying for the rest of my life, even in remission, even on a “good” day. It’s running front of house at the Tower Theatre, which I genuinely love, but which also takes a great deal of the same creative and organisational energy that filmmaking demands — there’s only so much of that particular fuel in the tank on any given week, and theatre has, fairly, been getting most of it. It’s the writing projects, the wiki work, the music, Sadie’s care, the general business of staying upright. Filmmaking didn’t get pushed out by one thing. It got quietly outcompeted by a dozen things, none of which were its fault, and none of which I particularly regret choosing in the moment.

And then there’s the industry itself, which I won’t pretend hasn’t played its part. The gap between the dream version of filmmaking — the one I had in my head as a younger man, scripts and sets and a clear path forward — and the actual mechanics of trying to make anything happen as an independent creator with limited time and limited budget, is a genuinely difficult gap to keep staring across. I’ve written things I’m proud of. Story bibles, scripts formatted properly, projects with real bones to them. And then they sit there, because the next step requires a kind of relentless self-promotion and networking energy that I simply don’t have spare most weeks. That’s not the industry’s fault either, particularly. It’s just true.

So: a mixture. Health, time, energy, the industry, life. All of it, a little bit, pulling in the same direction.

The Guilt Bit (You Knew There’d Be a Guilt Bit)

Here’s the part I find hardest to admit. There’s a specific kind of guilt that comes with losing interest in the thing you always said was your dream. Other people remember you talking about it. They ask how the latest script is going, with genuine warmth, and you have to decide in that moment whether to give the easy answer or the true one.

The easy answer is “yeah, ticking along.” The true answer is closer to “I haven’t opened that file in three months and I’m not entirely sure why, and when I think about opening it I feel something closer to tired than excited, and I don’t know what to do with that feeling.”

I don’t think losing passion for something makes it less real that you once loved it, or that you might love it again. But it took me a long time to separate “I’m not currently excited about this” from “I’ve failed at the thing that mattered most to me,” and I’m still not sure I’ve fully managed it. Those two sentences feel identical at 11pm. They are not, in fact, the same sentence.

What I’m Not Going to Do

I’m not going to wrap this up with a neat resolution, because I don’t have one. This isn’t the part of the post where I tell you I rediscovered my spark on a long walk and everything’s back to how it was. That would be a nicer ending. It would also not be true, and I promised myself a while ago that this blog is the place I tell the truth rather than the highlight reel.

What I will say is that I don’t think the passion is gone. I think it’s buried under quite a lot of other, currently louder things — pain, fatigue, caring responsibilities, a job I love that takes more than it gives back some weeks, and an industry that asks for energy I don’t reliably have. I don’t think that’s the same as it being dead. Dead feels permanent. This feels more like a fire that’s gone quiet under the ash, still warm somewhere underneath, waiting for slightly better conditions than the ones I’m currently in.

I don’t know when those conditions arrive. Maybe when the back settles into something more manageable. Maybe when there’s a stretch of life that isn’t quite so determined to throw things at me, on the evidence of my last blog post, which — if you’ve read it — you’ll know is a fairly long list. Maybe it just happens gradually, the way it left, and I won’t notice the exact day it comes back either.

For now, I’m trying to let that be okay. Trying not to force a passion that isn’t currently there, because forcing it has never once worked and has only ever made me feel worse about both the not-wanting-to and the guilt about the not-wanting-to. Trying to trust that the bit of me that used to rewrite dialogue on the walk home is still in there somewhere, just resting.

If You’re In This Too

If any of this sounds familiar — if there’s a version of you that used to light up about something and currently just feels tired when you think about it — I don’t have a fix for you. I’m not sure there is one, or at least not a fast one. But I don’t think you’ve failed, and I don’t think it’s gone for good. I think you’re just carrying a lot, and the thing that needs the most energy is, unfairly, often the first thing that gets quietly put down when the energy runs low.

I’d genuinely like to know if this resonates. Has your relationship with a dream changed shape over the years? Did it come back? What did that look like? Drop it in the comments — I think there’s more comfort in knowing this is common than there is in pretending it isn’t happening at all.

Gary is a designer, developer, theatre manager, songwriter, and — somewhere under the ash — a filmmaker, based in Kent.

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Did I Do Something Very Bad In a Past Life?

Let me paint you a picture.

It’s morning. I’m sitting on the edge of the bed, sock in hand, preparing for what has become the daily ritual that most accurately summarises my relationship with my own body. My foot needs to reach the sock. The sock is approximately thirty centimetres away. This should not be a problem. It is, nonetheless, a significant problem.

What follows can only be described as a man attempting to kickstart a motorbike with his foot while simultaneously being electrocuted. There is lunging. There is twisting. There is a level of grim determination usually reserved for people attempting Everest. Eventually — eventually — the sock goes on. Victory.

This is my life now. And honestly? It’s the funniest part of my morning, right up until it isn’t.



I’ve been thinking lately about the accumulation of it all. The full inventory of what my body has put me through over the years, laid out plainly. Not for sympathy — I’m not built that way — but because I think there’s something worth saying about how you carry it. How you keep going. How you find the dark laugh in it when the alternative is just sitting with it, and sitting with it is no fun at all.

So here it is. The full list. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

In 2012 I had surgery for pectus excavatum — a congenital chest wall deformity where the breastbone sinks inward, asymmetrically in my case. The surgery to correct it is called the Ravitch procedure, and it is not, to put it mildly, a minor operation. My surgeon broke ten ribs and my sternum, repositioned everything, and held it all together with titanium bars. I was out of action for a year. A full year. I joke that I’m part robot now, which is true. That was the opening act.

Then there are the knees. Brittle cartilage, both of them, a gift I’m fairly confident I earned by jumping twelve to fifteen feet off Cleethorpes Pier onto the sand in my younger and considerably more stupid days. At the time it felt brilliant. My knees have been filing a formal complaint about it ever since.

Then, in 2019, came the diagnosis nobody wants: stage 4 SMZL — Splenic Marginal Zone Lymphoma. Cancer. I’ll let that land for a second. Six months of chemotherapy followed, ending in March 2020. Two weeks later, the country went into lockdown. I’d like to say the timing was darkly poetic. It was, in fact, just dark. The world shutting down precisely as I emerged from the other side of chemo — when you’re supposed to start rebuilding, seeing people, feeling human again — is something I don’t talk about much. But it happened, and it cost something.

It cost more than I realised at the time. Because my immune system had taken such a battering from the chemo, I had to shield for the entire first year of lockdown. I did not leave the four walls of my home for twelve months, other than a couple of hospital follow-up appointments. Twelve months. No fresh air, no wandering, no pub, no people. Just the walls, the silence, and a body I was still learning to live in after everything it had been through. I don’t say this to make anyone feel sorry for me. I say it because it happened, and it shaped things, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

The cancer is currently in remission. The less good news is that it’s incurable — I’ll carry it for the rest of my life, managing it, monitoring it, living alongside it like an uninvited lodger who won’t leave but has at least learned to keep the noise down. I’ve made my peace with it. You have to.

In February 2024, I tore a muscle in my back hauling ten-stone beer barrels at work. The tear itself was bad enough. What followed was worse: bone spurs developing along my spine, my body attempting to repair itself and making a fairly poor job of it. Now I live with constant pain. Some days it’s manageable — background noise, a dull ache I’ve learned to work around. Other days I can barely stand. The socks, as you now know, are every day regardless.

Four months later, in June 2024, I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. Of course I was. At this point my body was clearly just working through a list.

And then there’s the ADHD. Not yet officially confirmed, but we’re heading there — the pieces fit too well to pretend otherwise. Here’s the thing about having ADHD when you also have a back injury that’s stripped most of the hyperactivity out of you: the H has largely gone quiet. My body isn’t bouncing off walls anymore. My brain, however, absolutely is. It will pick a song — usually, inexplicably, a McFly song — and play it on a loop for weeks. When I wake up. When I go to sleep. In my dreams, sometimes. Full production. No fade out. No mercy. Thank fuck I like McFly, genuinely, because I think a Coldplay phase would finish me off entirely.

And then there’s Sadie.

My wife lives with her own long-term chronic health conditions — I won’t share the details here because they’re hers to share, not mine — but what I will say is that managing my own health while also being her carer is something I carry with a lot of love and, occasionally, a lot of weight. I have a Carers Card. An actual, official Carers Card. I am, technically, a registered carer. If you’d told me that ten years ago I’d have laughed. Now I carry it in my wallet and feel, if anything, quietly proud of it. We look after each other. That’s what it comes down to.

So. Did I do something very bad in a past life? Statistically, it’s starting to feel that way. Titanium ribs. Lymphoma. Knees that haven’t forgiven me for a pier jump in my twenties. A back staging a slow mutiny. Diabetes. ADHD. A wife I love deeply and care for practically, every day.

The thing is, I don’t say any of this from a place of despair. I say it from a place of — I don’t know, exhausted honesty? There’s a version of this post where I wrap it up neatly with something about resilience and perspective and silver linings. But that would be a bit dishonest, and I’m not really in the business of performing okayness at the moment.

What I am in the business of is getting through the day. Doing the work I love. Looking after Sadie. And spending time with Reggie — our three-legged cat, adopted at the end of April, who has brought more light into this house than I can properly explain. He gets around better on three legs than I currently do on two, which says something, though I’m not entirely sure what. He also likes to help me write. Daily. Usually by walking across the keyboard at a critical moment and contributing a paragraph of his own — ggggggggggggg, typically, or perhaps xxxxxcccc if he’s feeling creative. I’ve learned to save regularly. He has not learned to care.

And talking about it. Because I think a lot of people are carrying their own version of this list — the accumulation of things, the ways their body has let them down or surprised them or just refused to cooperate — and not saying much about it. So consider this me saying something.

What’s on your list? Drop it in the comments. I’d genuinely love to know I’m not the only one having a one-sided argument with my own spine every morning.

*Gary is a designer, developer, theatre FOH Manager, and occasional filmmaker songwriter based in Dover, Kent. He puts his socks on every day. It takes a while.*

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Am I seriously losing the plot?

So this happened today.

I was chatting with my Dad on the phone today, we don’t speak as often as I’d like but when we do we’re talking for hours, today’s call was around 90 mins. Yesterday’s was around 85 mins and the previous one (a month ago) was almost five hours. Anyway at the end of today’s call we were saying about how hungry and thirsty we were. We both agreed to make ourselves a cup of tea (of course, it’s always tea!) and a sandwich.

After we hung up I walked through to the kitchen to put the kettle on. I returned to the home office (also known as the dining room for normal people) to wait for the kettle to boil. Once the kettle had boiled I walked back through to the kitchen – without my cup!

“For f*ck’s sake.”

I return to the office/dining room. My phone beeped so I sat down to read, and reply to, a work email I’d received. I stood once more and returned to the kitchen to make my cuppa – without the cup again!

“Oh for f*ck’s sake!”

I stomp back to the office, grab my cup and return to the kitchen. I make the cuppa and return to the office – WITHOUT MY CUP OF TEA!

“For f*ck’s sake, what is wrong with you?”

Again I walk back to the kitchen, grab my cup of tea, and carry it back to the office. I set it down on my desk beside my PC keyboard and then head up the stairs to pee. I retrace my steps back down the stairs, pass the office and walk straight into the kitchen. Where’s my cup of tea? IT’S IN THE F*CKING OFFICE!

“Jesus, Gary, you are losing the plot!”

I take the walk of shame back to the office, plonk myself down on my chair and send my Dad a text message explaining this whole episode. He replies with “Welcome to my world” followed by…

“What about your sandwich?”

OH FOR F…..

In other news I forgot to breathe the other day. And some people don’t believe I have ADHD.

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Everybody needs a Sadie

G’day, bonjour, guten tag, now then, alreeeet.

An interesting thing happened today. I made a call to the Sky call centre as I’m very unhappy that they keep increasing their prices. Every few months they’d contact us trying to offer us these “amazing deals”, admittedly some of them were pretty good so we got Sky Cinema, Sky Sports, Sky F1. Little did we know when we upgraded to these “special offer packages” that they all had different end dates so every couple of months our bill would be hiked. When we first joined Sky back in October 2022 we were paying £48 per month. This month it hit £93 and next month it will be £134.90. Naturally I’m not happy with a 281% increase of my bill in just 18 months. So, I made that call to cancel my contract.

As is usual with all these “service providers” they always try to get you to stay by offering you a new “special deal” that’s valid “today only”. Sky is no different.

“Before we cancel your contract, sir, I’d like to check to see what special deal I can offer you so you can continue to enjoy the service you love.”

I wouldn’t say I “love” the service but I’ve not had reason to complain – until today with their £41.90 price hike.

“I can offer you everything you’re currently enjoying for the great low price of £118.”

“£118 you say?”

“Yes sir, you’d be saving £800 a year by agreeing to this new contract.”

“Maths isn’t your strong point is it‽ I think you’ll find that there is no saving whatsoever because March’s bill is £93 and you’re offering me April’s bill for £118, an increase of £25 per month. No thank you, please cancel my account.”

“OK sir, let me just see what else I can offer you.”

“No, please just cancel my account.”

“Bear with me sir…OK I can offer you everything you’re currently enjoying for the great low price of £116. How does that sound?”

“No you’re still not getting it are you? That’s still £23 more than I’m currently paying. Please cancel my account.”

“Hold on sir… I can offer you everything you’re currently enjoying for the amazingly low price of £115. Is this agreeable to you?”

“What part of ‘please cancel my account’ do you not understand?”

After another few minutes of disagreements I managed to get it down to just £20 more than my current contract at which point Sadie intervened and practically screamed at the woman. We have now cancelled our contract and we have also been discounted, in full, the early termination fees which amounts to a saving of £1079.20.

The moral of the story is: get yourself a Sadie.

If anybody needs to hire Sadie to save yourself some money let me know.

The conversation ended with the adviser calling me Julie and telling me to enjoy my weekend. Bearing in mind it is Sunday night and the last time I checked I’m not called Julie.

So how’s your day been?

Originally published on my Colonel Cuppa’s Cuppa Club website

Photo credit: guvo59

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I’m sorry, but I have a good reason!

I want to start this blog post by saying I’m sorry. It’s 4th May (May the Fourth be with you!) 2023 and my last post was on 14th July 2021, almost two full years since I last wrote anything here. I’m sorry that I’m a shit blogger. So what’s happened in these past two years. Quite a lot actually which means I hope you can forgive me for not having the time to blog.

Jobs Galore

In my last post I told you I was between jobs after being furloughed from my old theatre job due to the Covid restrictions. Since the world reopened I’ve had three jobs with varying success. The first job I landed in August 2021 was at a kids soft play area as a manager, I managed three months.  My second job was as a Christmas temp at a discount clothing store (TK Maxx), I last three whole shifts! And finally a job I’ve now been in for seventeen months.

The soft play centre was awful, I hated every minute of it. One of the owners constantly micromanaged and wouldn’t let me do my job but I did make a new life bestie in Hollie.

TK Maxx was a disaster! The staff were great, the job itself wasn’t too bad but I had a major phobia. People. Still in the midst of a pandemic and in the lead up to Christmas (huge crowds!) meant I was fearful constantly. Within a week of starting I got ill and it put me out of action for three weeks. Not Covid, thankfully, but a bad case of the flu which I’ve no doubt I caught from a customer. This helped me make my mind up that I’m still not safe and I can’t be in crowded places yet.

In the week before Christmas 2021 I began volunteering and doing a few bar shifts at The Tower Theatre in Folkestone. With my previous experience in another Folkestone theatre I wanted to help out at this iconic community theatre that had not long reopened following the Covid-19 forced closure. A huge perspex screen separated me from the hordes at the bar, mask-wearing was still compulsory as was daily Covid tests and hand sanitiser stations were everywhere, so for the first time since before my cancer treatment I felt very safe. Fast forward a few months and in May 2022 I became officially employed there in a combined role of Front of House Manager and Bar Manager (official title ‘Duty Manager’). I’m now twelve months into this role (seventeen months at the venue in total) and I’m still loving every single day. My colleagues are amazing, as are all the volunteers, and wake up each morning eager to get to work. I can’t tell you how long it’s been since I last felt like this.

Aaand Action!

Since we last spoke I’ve been busy with the production of Steve Davis’ ‘SOMME16’ movie. We’ve spent around 6 days in a WW1 trench in south east Kent and with further shoots planned we hope to have this incredible story shot, edited and released before the end of the year.

Captain Valve

When I’m not working at the theatre or working on the movie I’m busy gaming using my alter-ego Captain Valve. Recently I’ve been concentrating on building my characters in a new GTAV roleplaying server. Notice I said characters – plural. I have Harry Windsor, Police Chief of Paleto Bay and EMS. I also have Bradley Hamster, the President of a Motorcycle Club. I am also Willie Stroker (yes, that’s his name!) who’s a rapper, and Arthur Sixpence, a Santa suit-wearing homeless guy. I occasionally also bring in other characters just for the day to liven up the RP. Names include Annie Rection, Major Wood, Hugh Jorgan, Mike Oxlong (he was a vicar!), Artie Tack, Tess Tickles and Buck S. Fizz.

The plan, if my PC can handle it, is to start streaming on Twitch very soon. I’ll do a couple of test runs in the next few weeks and put the PC through its paces. I will also stream other games such as Transport Fever 2, Cities:Skylines and 9Dragons. You can follow my progress via my new website www.captainvalve.net or by joining my Discord The Valve Club.

Hopefully my next blog post won’t be another two years away…

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The “new normal” but what was the old normal?

I have been fortunate in my life since moving to Folkestone with my wife in 2013. In between the filming work I have supplemented my income with a few day jobs. These range from being a barista, waiter and more recently duty manager in a theatre. But the past two years have been difficult for a number of reasons.

While working in the theatre I had to take an extended period of time off due to my cancer diagnosis and subsequent chemotherapy treatment. I returned after six months yet just three months later I found myself back on my sofa thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic. I was furloughed and had to go into shielding as the NHS said I was in the “clinically extremely vulnerable” group. I was then made redundant in August 2020 when it became apparent that theatres would not be reopening in the near future. Fast forward to July 2021 and in the past two years I have worked for a whole three months.

These past two years have been very testing and my mental health has taken a real beating. Filming ground to a total halt. The safety net of the steady income at the theatre was pulled from under me. The constant worry about when (when, not if) the “incurable” cancer will return. My wife’s own health issues. The worry about my parents who are not getting any younger and who live 250 miles away. The worry about catching Covid which is likely to be very severe due to being immunocompromised by the blood cancer. It’s a lot to handle. I haven’t suffered a mental breakdown but I have been damn near close on numerous occasions since June 2019. There have been times when I’ve considered packing everything in and moving back home to Grimsby but thankfully I’ve remained resilient and remembered why I moved to Folkestone in the first place.

As things begin to reopen and the filming work is set to resume next month, albeit with additional precautions, I feel that society is beginning to return to normal with the relaxation of the rules. Yet I still worry every time I leave the house making sure I have a mask and hand sanitiser in my pocket. I hold my breath when strangers pass me too closely and I look around anxiously when someone coughs nearby. I get stressed when people deny the existence of the virus (I know people who died from it!) and come up with outrageous conspiracy theories about the “untested” vaccine yet will happily inhale, sniff, swallow or inject something given by a stranger on a street corner.

I used to be a very outward person, thriving in group situations, but now I know I have become a lot more introverted. I know I’m not alone, there are thousands of people in exactly the same situation as me, clinically vulnerable, scared of catching Covid-19, a virus that is still likely to be deadly for many. The Government will end all restrictions on 19th July yet many people with blood cancer have not developed antibodies despite having both doses of the vaccine and the number of infections is still rising (42,302 cases reported today alone!). But the Government say it’s safe for us. I shielded since March last year when we had 7,000 cases a day but now at 42,000 cases Boris Johnson says I’ll be fine going out if I just wear my mask. How?

Will I ever return to normal? What was normal? What is this “new normal”? I don’t have the answers to these questions, I doubt I ever will.

 

Photo credit: Gerd Altmann

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