Alternative Reality

To offset the misery caused by my cat running away and my ex-landlady fleecing me out of £2,113.20 *and* a rather nice French cast iron bed in the same week as I locked myself out of the flat and sank to the bottom of the Spanish class, I've decided to retreat into an alternative reality.

The blogosphere isn't alternative enough (apparently, some of you are real people), and developing schizophrenia would probably be taking things a bit too far, so I've gone the Third Way and bought a new computer game.

I like computer games; my brother and I were brought up in the middle of nowhere in the north of Scotland (the flat bit, not the picturesque bit) with just a ZX Spectrum for entertainment, so I was hooked early on. But I've never managed to get to grips with all those silly, violent ones. I had a go of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City once, and became convinced that the protagonist had only turned to a life of crime because he was suffering from soul-crushing depression, possibly due to a traumatic incident in his early teens (I don't know what; the booklet didn't shed any light on the matter).

I thought the best way to make him see the error of his ways was to have him stand motionless for five days in the middle of a busy intersection, in the pouring rain. Disappointingly, instead of undergoing an epiphany of self-realisation and vowing to renounce his car-jacking and prostitute-murdering ways and become an earnest welfare worker, his only reaction was to shove two fingers up occasionally at cars that got too close to him. So GTA and I went our separate ways very quickly.

No, adventure games are more my thing. I was therefore very upset to find that the new, improved Tomb Raider isn't out till February. I adore Tomb Raider - though the last one was rubbish - and not just because Lara and I apparently share an alma mater. I just love the way a girl whose principal skills are running into walls, drowning and wearing inappropriate clothing can nevertheless overcome baddies and monsters and recover all manner of precious artefacts. It's made me realise that even though I'm always clumsily tripping over the heater at work, I could still become a posh, buxom action heroine if it all goes wrong in the world of high-tech copywriting.

Anyway, in lieu of Lara, I've ordered a mopy, gothic adventure game called Black Mirror, in which apparently "if it's raining, it sounds like it's raining." Which was enough to sell it to me. If you don't hear from me for a few weeks, you'll know where I am.