Sunday

Sitting here after traditional roast Sunday lunch.  Kids on PS3.  Wife on PC in dining room.  Washing up done/in dishwasher.  Me on blog.

Maybe I should watch the Wimbledon final if I was interested.

Oldest son went out for a picnic with his girlfriend twenty minutes ago.  They've just come back because the roads are near gridlocked - they going to walk to the park instead.

Next week will be very different.  I'll be out in Kent woodland helping on a bushcraft course.  No traffic, no electronic stuff, no crowds.  Just a small bunch of people living in home built shelters, cooking on a camp fire, and following the bears' lead for other necessities.  Physically much harder than my normal sedentary life, and everything takes much longer, it's all so more meaningful.  If I win that crazy £154,000,000 I can buy a nice piece of woodland and just live there.  Probably end up not spending anything!

The more entertainment and leisure opportunities I have, the less inclination I seem to have to actually do anything.  Reduce life to the basics and I'm eager to be up at first light, seeing and hearing the animal activity, tuned in to the natural world.  Being over-fed, under exercised and over stimulated with drivel is not a satisfying way to live.  Big problem is the need for space:  Living a natural existence requires acres of land for each person to provide their needs.  Uncontaminated water, fuel for heat, animals to hunt, plants to forage from, space to dispose of waste.

Glancing up at the PS3, there's a game set in derelict urban/industrial scenery with various monsters to be killed.  Yup, that sounds like most of the games there are - replace monsters with enemy forces and add cars occasionally.

Be quite nice to come up with a pre-industrial type SIMs game.  I wonder if the knowledge base still exists to create a realistic set of rules as to how to live in a natural environment.  Could be very educational with good and bad plants to eat, divvying up your effort into the necessary functions in order to thrive.  Be very interesting if it was an on-line, thousands of players, multi player game with restricted resources.  Would individuals cooperate or compete, and could the rules be set to enable either strategy to be viable.

I'm not even going to think about a default starting scenario...

Sunday afternoon - now for me followed by every day holding the option of leisure or working.  Semi retirement provides the options, but it's up to me to provide the decisions and actions.