No, this isn’t an attempt to help exorcise her earworms; if I thought it would help, I would have suggested The Tokens singing The Lion Sleeps Tonight, but I suspect that they’re weaker than the awesome combination of the Princess Di version of Candle in the Wind and T’Pau’s China in your Hand that she’s currently infected with. I would certainly never suggest that she tried singing some terrible anthrax-like (the bacillum, not the band) Disney dirge. But I digress…
Instead, this is one of those “My god! I’ve just glimpsed the True Nature of the universe…and it’s all joined up” posts. A couple of weeks ago, I went on a gaming weekend in the wilds of Derbyshire with Kenton WINOLJ, , and a motley assortment of others. Now, I’d met some of these folk before, but by no means all. For example, I knew Clive long before I met , back when I was living in Cambridge with Helen and Rob (WANOLJ, naturally) and Clive was running a Cthulhu game (in which also played). I had met several more at and ‘s wedding, although my memories of that are generally quite dim. I went through most of the gaming weekend with a bad sense of deja vu, made worse by my general lack of sleep. Had I met this person before, or not? If so, where – the wedding, or somewhere else?
One of the people I had a particularly bad sense of deja vu about was Seth. I’d put this down to lack of sleep and the rather specious theory that “all gaming geeks look alike”. That is, until last night when he sent me a mail which (in true ISIHAC style) stripped the melamine veneer of reassurance from the chipboard kitchen cabinet of eternity.
In short, Seth is Laurence’s cousin. This is the same Laurence who was an undergraduate at Bath, a long-standing stalwart of the film society and general good egg. I’ve lost track of the number of times he’s stayed at our house. He has helped us strip and varnish our bannisters, did his best to keep us sane in the run-up to the wedding, and has made film projection above and beyond the call of duty into an artform. and I both met Seth briefly at Anthea’s (Laurence’s mum’s) funeral last year, which was possibly why I hadn’t made the connection that Laurence’s-cousin-Seth = gaming-Seth. I mean, it’s not as if Seth is an unusual name, is it?
(Oh and ? The world’s actually even smaller than this, since Laurence is going out with Sue from the Warwick SF society. The horror, the horror!)