Dig For Victory

My Allotment Diary – August 2018

The first weekend

I decided that I would take on an allotment near to where I live, my own space to do with as I wish. I added myself to the waiting list back in May and was told that I would probably get something towards the end of summer. Well after a short wait I picked up the metaphorical keys to my new plot of land at the weekend. I wasn’t sure what to expect as I know people who have plots there already and I was hoping that I would be given a plot that had been looked after and weeded etc. What I got was a patch of wasteland.

Speaking with the chap who has the plot to the left of mine, he told me that the previous owner didn’t spend an awful lot of time there and had pretty much given up on it.

I fought my way through 6ft high nettles to the back, and hidden behind a tree was a shed! Trouble is the brambles have grown over the door so need to clear them before I can get in to have a look at what’s inside.

I have to admit I was a bit disheartened at the amount of work needed to get it to a usable state, but what I decided was to concentrate not on clearing everything in one go, but work on a smaller area and move on to the next and work it like that. Plus I’m going on holiday soon and that means the weeds will have a chance to come back with a vengeance.

Well that was the plan…

On the Saturday I went down armed with a pair of shears and some stout gloves and set to work:

Cleared enough to get in through the gate, and it seems a previous owner had laid down some weed blocking membrane which I’ve left down.

Back up on Sunday and did a bit more

And again on Monday after work for a couple of hours and cleared the nettles and brambles from the left hand side fence

Just got the back half to clear which I’m going to do this weekend coming, but it’s quite a jungle up there, more than the front was. Also going to clear out the shed, but will document that in another post.

Mid-life Crisis

Other than homebrewing beer, my other passion is old cars, specifically the British classic, the Jaguar. I fell in love with these when I was around 10 years old. I used to sneak and watch episodes of The Equalizer on the small black and white portable TV in my bedroom. In the show Edward Woodward, in his role as Robert McCall an ex British secret service agent, would take on jobs from people who were unfairly treated (Hence the name of the show). His chosen method of transport, a series 3 Jaguar XJ6.

Jaguar Series 3 XJ6
Jaguar Series 3 XJ6

A thing of beauty.

I decided that my quickly depreciating modern car would need to be sold before I lost any more money on it, and I had fretted about fuel economy and maintenance, the usual sensible things any self-respecting person would consider when looking for a daily mode of transport.

BUT…

What did I find for less than my car was sold for…

Jaguar X308 XJR Supercharged V8
Jaguar X308 XJR Supercharged V8

This.

A 4.0 litre Supercharged V8 XJR from the year 2000 (I dare you to not read “The year 2000” in some sort of movie trailer voice in your head)

This car has been referred to as a “Thug in a sharp suit”. I couldn’t put it better, having owned this for a month now I can’t begin to tell you how much power this car can offer.  Delivering 370 bhp, and a 0-60 time of 5.1 seconds. This car is scary quick, but with the styling of a well-dressed city gent.

Under the bonnet you find the last of the true British Jaguar designed engines (but built at the Ford plant), the AJ-V8 SC. Here it is in all its glory…

Jaguar AJ-V8
Jaguar AJ-V8

 

So far so good. Well like I say I have owned this for a month and have loved every minute of it. I have noticed the fuel consumption, I’ve only got to open the car door and it seems to have used a gallon of petrol. My average is about 20mpg, although I have taken it on a couple of long runs now and I am getting 31mpg. Around town it is awful and this drops to 16mpg. I’m not complaining however because SUPERCHARGED V8.

There’s a bit of rust, the rear driver’s side window goes down but not up, one of the dashboard bulbs has gone, the CD changer in the boot loads the discs but doesn’t play them and the rear windscreen de-mister only clears the top half. But that’s the joy of owning an old car. These are minor things that I can live with and will get round to sorting. One thing I did have was the car continually reporting that the coolant was low. The previous owner had the whole coolant system replaced as well as the head gaskets and water pump at the beginning of the year so I was dreading what it could be. Turns out it was two pipes that needed swapping.

Here’s a spot the difference for you…

Picture depicting pipes in the wrong place
Spot the difference

(Hint: The one on the left is wrong)

What was happening was that in the wrong position it would suck all the coolant out of the expansion tank, and dump it out on to the road. Not Ideal.

Also there was a pipe that went from the air filter to the throttle body. This had split and was repaired with gaffer tape. Good if you’re the A-team, bad if you want reliability. Off to eBay I went and found a replacement for less than £40. Fitted and works perfectly.

I’m looking forward to sorting out all the niggles and keeping this for as long as it lasts (and is economically viable!)

All Grain Brewing Explained: Part One – The Mash

So in a previous post I gave a brief description of the all grain brewing process. This was amazingly simplified and suited me as all I wanted was to take a recipe, follow it blindly and end up with a finished product. Which is fine, but I have an insatiable curiosity and I wanted to know more about the process.

Cue much internet searching, forum visiting, book buying and note taking. What I’ve learned from this is that the art of homebrewing is more than follow the instructions and hope for the best. The amount of control I have is astounding and I truly didn’t realise that. So I wanted to share this info with you, maybe you’re like me and have been home brewing for a while. Maybe you’re just interested in the science behind it. Maybe you just want to read what I’ve written and then mock me for getting it all wrong. But in any case I would like to present to you Part One of a (hopefully) ongoing series on brewing your own beer starting with –

THE MASH (I wanted to add MONSTER between THE and MASH, but I think that it would be irrelevant and not make sense to anyone but me)

So what is it? What does it do?

Well it is the first step in creating the sweet sweet liquor that will become the beer.

Although what it actually is, is malted barley porridge. Yup, that’s it. Crushed malted barley, maybe a few other types of adjunct thrown in. But mostly malt barley. And hot water. mix it all up, leave to stand for an hour to an hour and a half, then drain and rinse. What you collect is a sticky sugary liquid, called the wort.

It’s a funny word, wort, it’s one of those words where you say it over and over again and think to yourself, “That’s not right”. It’s even pronounced differently – wert. If you’re interested have a look at the Wiktionary entry, I’ve copied the entry below if you don’t want to click the link:

Wort – Liquid extract from the ground malt and grain soaked in hot water, the mash, as one of the steps in making beer.

From Middle English wort, worte, from Old English wyrt, wyrte (“brewing wort, new beer, spice”), from Proto-Germanic *wurtijō (“spice”), from Proto-Indo-European *wr̥h₂d– (“sprout, root”). Cognate with Dutch wort (“wort”), German Würze (“wort, seasoning, spice”), Danish urt (“beer wort”), Swedish vört (“beer wort”).

Anyway back to it..

Why does the starchy grain transform, as if by magic, to sugary grain? To explain this I need to describe what the malting process is and what it does to the grain.

The Malting Process

The barley grains are delivered to the malt house, where the grains are submerged in water, they are then raised out in a drying phase, which is repeated several times. This process is to increase the moisture levels and prompt germination.

The grains are then cast out into beds to germinate. This germination process prompts the development of the required enzymes needed to convert the starchy grain into sugar. The beds are turned regularly to dissipate the heat generated from the germination process.

The grain is then kilned to dry it out and stop germination. It is then processed to remove the rootlets. This is called deculming.

Photo taken by Peter Schill – Self-photographed, CC BY-SA 2.0 de, Link

This whole ‘Malting’ process does the following –

  • Converts the hard insoluble starch into a soluble one. Malted barley is 80% soluble
  • Develops the enzymes needed for conversion
  • Develops Maltose and Dextrins in the grain
What the pH?

One factor that can affect the mash is the pH of the water. From school you may remember that pH is the scale used to define whether something is acid or alkaline. the neutral point is 7.0, which most of the water we use sits at, but it could be either side of that. If like me you went to school a long time ago and can’t remember the pH scale here is a handy info-graphic from the good old BBC –

The optimum for proteolytic enzyme activity is in the region of pH 4.2 – 5.3 and the optimum for diastatic enzyme activity is pH 5.2 – 5.8.  We as homebrewers would want to make the mash sit at pH 5.2 (at room temperature, the pH value slides 0.2 – 0.3 at the mash temperatures). This is the best of both worlds for the enzymes to work at. If you look at the above chart it becomes apparent that the water needs to be acidic (the numbers are less than pH 7). So we have to adjust the pH to suit. I can hear you all saying now, “How are we to do that? We’re not chemists, we just want to brew beer!”

To grossly simplify things, because a lot can depend on water profiles, but when you mix the grain with the water it brings the pH to around 5.2. Sort of. Kinda. Well I did say it was an over simplification. I’ll cover off water chemistry in another post.

It’s all magic!

So why does adding hot water to the grain convert starch to sugar? Because of the enzymes created during the malting process. Well two types in particular –

  • Proteolytic enzymes (these degrade proteins)
  • Diastatic enzymes (these degrade starches)
So we know that putting the grain in hot water activates these enzymes, but how hot does the water need to be?
The protein rest

For the proteolytic enzymes to start breaking down the nitrogen based proteins into good wholesome nutrients for the yeast to munch on during fermentation, the water needs to be at between 45 – 50 °C. These nutrients are important in establishing how well the yeast attenuates (attenuation – the process of fermentation performed by the yeast to produce alcohol and CO2). Between 50 – 60 °C different proteolytic enzymes become activated and start breaking down the proteins to enable a frothy head when the beer is poured, and also helps the beer to clear down.

This temperature step is called the protein rest. If using a modern well modified malt this step isn’t necessary.

Diastatic disco.

The real workhorse enzymes are the diastatic ones. These change the starch into fermentable sugars and un-fermentable dextrins.

There are two diastatic enzymes that do all the hard work

  • Alpha-amylase
  • Beta-amylase

The fermentable sugars are all glucose molecules. Imagine them as a length of chain, all the links joined together in a large unwieldy jumble. Have you ever had to carry a load of chain? It’s heavy and difficult to manipulate. So the alpha-amylase takes its cutting torch and starts to cut the chain into smaller and smaller chunks. Then its buddy, beta-amylase starts to work breaking these small chunks down even further, down into smaller pieces of one, two and three links in length. I like to think of these two enzymes as junk yard workers, turning the large pieces of scrap into nice useful smaller pieces. These smaller pieces consist of:

  • one link = glucose
  • two links = maltose
  • three links = maltriose

Then there is a four link chain, this is a dextrin. This is still a sugar but the yeast can’t eat these, so they remain, adding body to the beer and gives it that nice smooth mouth feel.

Nature is amazing.

Heat it up!

The temperatures needed for our two friends, alpha and beta, to work at their best are different though:

  • Alpha-amylase works best at between 65 – 67°C, but stops working after 2 hours at 67°C.
  • Beta-amylase works best at between 52 – 62°C, but stops working within 40 – 60 minutes at 65°C.

BUT!

Both work very well together (usually) at 63 – 70°C.

What does this mean for the homebrewer? Well do you want a beer with lots of body but not as alcoholic? Mash at the higher range of 67 – 70°C. Want a beer that ferments dry and is strong at the expense of body? Mash in the lower range of 63 – 65°C. You will find the happy median at 66°C.

So we’ve established the best temperature, but for how long?

It depends…

There are lots of variables here:

  • Temperatures
  • Amount of enzymes activated
  • Amount of starch available to be converted

At higher temperatures, say 70°C, you could mash for a short time of 15 – 20 minutes. But there would be a lot of unfermentables in there, which wouldn’t give much sugar for the yeast to utilise.

At lower temperatures, around 63°C, the mash would be 90 minutes+. This would give a load of sugars, but would lead to a strong thin watery beer.

(This is all based on a standard mash with no more than a quarter of the grist being none malt adjuncts)

So if you mash at 66°C for 60 – 70 minutes, this gives a balanced wort. I use this temperature/time combo successfully, but your mileage may vary. At the end of the day these figures give you the base to design a beer that you want or the beer style you want to achieve.

Spargetastic!

So you’ve mashed and held your temperatures for the desired time. Our friends the enzymes have used their magic to convert the starch to sugar and the wort is ready to be collected. It’s time to sparge. There are a number of different ways to do this, and the forums are full of different views on how this should be done and the reasons why. I use a method called batch sparging. The other way of doing this is fly sparging. What are the differences? Well, you’ll have to wait until the next post, as part two is all about – The Sparge.

Oh!

Here’s an interesting thing, you can use potatoes as a source of starch. Potato beer! You want to go with the floury type of potato, such as King Edward or Maris Piper rather than the waxy types. The good thing is the starch is converted to flavourless sugars, which means that you wouldn’t get mashed potato flavour beer!

There is a bit of preparation, as the potatoes need to be peeled, chopped into 2.5cm cubes, then boiled for around 15 minutes and then mashed (not added to the mash, but crushed) once this is done add to the grist to be mashed. I think this would be handy if you were looking to do a batch of beer but didn’t have quite enough pale malt and the homebrew shop is closed or far away.

Want to try it? Here’s how to work out how many spuds you need –

Potatoes have 22% dry weight, of that 75% is starch. The potential extract is 7.6 points per 450 grams per 4.4 litres (in old money that’s 7.6 points per pound per gallon)

So 2.2 kg of potatoes with a dry weight of 0.5 kg = equivalent potential extract as 0.45 kg of 2-row pale malt.

Thanks for reading, please leave comments. and if you have questions feel free to ask and I will do my best to answer them.

I would like to thank the r/Homebrewing community for pointing out and helping to clarify a few things in this post. Thanks to – flappymcflappypants, Fapinthepark, dillsnick, seanbikes, carlgauss, osorojotx, moldiemom

 

Finding a use for things

If you’ve read my previous posts you’d know that I like to brew my own beer. I use a process called all-grain brewing which means I use malted barley grains which are soaked for a period of time and then discarded.

I’ve always felt that there must be some way of finding a use for these grains as it seems to be such a waste to throw them away. If I had a compost heap I could chuck them there, or if I had chickens I could use them for feed. But I don’t have either of those. So after a quick browse of the Internet I found this recipe for dog biscuits. I don’t have a dog, but my parents, brother and sister do, so now I have a way of being able to re-use my spent grain!

One thing you’ll notice is that the website with the recipe uses cups as a measurement and I always find that way of measuring a bit ambiguous. So I’ve converted them as best I could into metric.

Here’s my take on it –

Ingredients:
340g spent mash grain
136g whole wheat flour
340g natural peanut butter
2 eggs

Method:

  • Preheat your oven to 180 degrees Centigrade/356 degrees Fahrenheit/Gas Mark 4.
  • Add the ingredients into a bowl and  mix until a thick dough forms. If the mixture is too sticky add more flour until it is better.
  • Next liberally flour the worktop and roll the dough out. Use pastry cutters to cut out the biscuits, I may invest in some bone shaped ones for next time.
  • Now place them on a baking tray and place in the preheated oven.
  • Bake at 180C/356F/Gas 4 for 30 minutes, then reduce temperature to 110C/230F/Gas mark quarter(1/4) and continue baking for an hour. Cooking them the additional time at the lower temperature will help ensure they dry completely

I turned the oven off and let them sit in there until cold. I put them all in a ziploc bag and then in an airtight container. The recipe said they will keep for two weeks, or a bit longer if you put them in the freezer.

From the recipe above I made double the amount in the pic below. My oven burnt them a bit, but I’m sure the dogs won’t mind!

 

Beer!

 

Homebrewing.

For most it brings to mind a strong, bitter, barely drinkable beverage. I remember my dad doing some homebrew back in the 80’s and the barrel sitting on the sideboard like a dumpy sentinel on the landing outside our sitting room. It may have been because I was young and I hadn’t tried beer yet but I have recollections of sneaking a glass of this while my parents were out and being thoroughly disgusted.

Fast forward a number of years and I wanted to have a go myself. I started with ginger beer, because why not? I got all the ingredients together, boiled it all up on the stove, let it cool, dumped in the bakers yeast and let it do it’s thing. Now the ginger beer I had drunk up to this point was the carbonated soft drink from a can, no alcohol, sweet tasting and quite refreshing.

What I got from my efforts was a potent high alcohol thin tasting liquid without much of the ginger burn I was expecting. And it was flat. So I thought I know what will fix this, add sugar and fizz in the sodastream. Disaster followed. Gouts of sticky liquid shooting like Old Faithful out of the bottle when I took it off the sodastream. The whole batch at that point got tipped down the sink.

I wasn’t going to be put off though, off to the library I trotted (The internet wasn’t as helpful back then) and got a book on homebrewing. In it was a recipe for ginger beer. I knew where I had gone wrong, left it to ferment for too long, no bottle conditioning to generate fizz, and bakers yeast was a no no. I doubled the amount of root ginger, added cayenne pepper, used proper beer yeast and only fermented it for 4 days. This way was sure to give me a slightly alcoholic drink, but still have the sweetness, and enough yeast to eat the priming sugar. This one turned out not bad, so I bottled it and left it in my garage ready to drink.

Did I mention I bottled it in glass bottles and crown capped them?What could possibly go wrong?

Well I had some friends round for our regular Dungeons and Dragons game, and I got out a bottle to drink. Popped the cap and the drink fountained out and onto the ceiling, walls, floor and me. A few days later I was watching TV and heard a muffled thud from somewhere in the house. It sounded like someone had thrown a stone against our garage door. Going to investigate I opened the internal door to our garage and was immediately aware of the smell.

The smell of fermented beverage.

Looking around I noticed that on the shelf with the other bottles was the remains of a bottle. The rest of it was embedded in the solid breezeblock wall and in the garage door. I had made ginger beer time bombs! Gingerly (see what I did there) I removed the remaining bottles and opened them all and once again tipped them all away.

I gave up on ginger beer at that point.

But not homebrewing. Next on my hit list was real ale. but that was to come half a decade later.

I visited my local homebrew shop, which sadly is no longer trading, and bought a kit. In it was a packet of yeast and two large tins. Following the instructions I emptied the contents of the tins into a 5 gallon bucket, added a gallon of boiling water, stirred and topped up with cold water to 5 gallons. Added the yeast and once again let nature take its course. A week later the fermenting had died down and I was ready to bottle 40 pints of beer. I had no idea what it was going to taste like, but it smelled great! Primed the bottles, left them in my study to condition then out into the garage. Four weeks later I cracked open a bottle and enjoyed a lovely pint. But it wasn’t like those I would have purchased in the pub.

Several more kits later I was chatting to the owner of the homebrew shop and he said “Have you ever thought of all grain brewing? You get a better beer”. So I jumped in at the deep end. Bought all the equipment I needed and massively underestimated the amount of time I needed to brew a batch.

I got home from work and thought, yes time to brew. This was at 6pm. Well all grain brewing is a long process, one that I will never start at 6pm ever again. The steps for all grain are as follows –

  1. Sterilise everything
  2. Heat water to strike temperature for the mash
  3. Weigh out grains
  4. Transfer hot water to the mash tun
  5. Transfer grains to mash tun, making sure all grains are soaked and there are no dry clumps
  6. Hold mash temperature at 67C for 90 minutes
  7. Drain mash tun
  8. Sparge mash to rinse out all the sugars
  9. Boil wort for 90 minutes (it takes a long time for 5 gallons of liquid to come to the boil) adding hops at required time during this period
  10. 15 mins before end of the boil immerse wort chiller (a coil of copper tubing attached to cold water supply), add any aroma hops, add Irish Moss (not a moss, but seaweed)
  11. Once boil finishes, allow to sit for 10 minutes
  12. Run cold water through chiller to cool the wort to 20C
  13. Drain wort into fermenter allowing as much air as possible to get into the wort.
  14. Take gravity reading before pitching yeast
  15. Pitch yeast
  16. Clean up

It is amazing how much mess this generates and I learnt very quickly not to leave this until the end. The end on this particular day being 1am.

The next day (or later that morning) the beer had started fermenting quite vigorously to the point where I thought  it was going to escape into the kitchen and scare the dog. This died down to a reasonable foamy head and stayed that way for about a week.

fermenting

Once I had taken another gravity reading to make sure the ferment was over I then primed the keg with household sugar and carefully siphoned the beer into that, making sure not to introduce any air or disturb the beer too much. Once in the keg left for 4 weeks to mature.

keg

What I ended up with was a very nice easy drinking beer. It had a nice head and a reasonable amount of fizz.

finished

Of course this then led to lets see if I can make a better beer, and I have made many more batches since that first attempt and each one seems to get better and better.

I’ve just finished a new batch for Christmas, a dark porter style beer which I have christened Dark Tower, and it’s fairly strong at 6.6%.

img_0167          beer-label

I took a bottle of this round for one of my friends to try, and his comment made my day –

“This beer is really nice, I would buy this in a pub”

As far as I’m concerned, mission accomplished.

I’ve still given up on the ginger beer though.

Easy Chicken Curry

One of the things I enjoy doing is cooking. I don’t have a favourite style, I just enjoy cooking in general. I like eating too, so these go hand in hand quite nicely.

In any case I got in from work today and threw together a quick and easy chicken curry. You’ll notice that some of the ingredients don’t have any quantities, this is because I didn’t measure them and used whatever I had in the kitchen. This recipe will take around 45 minutes or so to prepare and cook.

Ingredients (Serves 2 or 3) medium spicy

  • 1 pack of chicken breast fillets cut into cubes
  • 1 onion chopped finely
  • 2 garlic cloves chopped finely or crushed
  • 1 chilli pepper finely chopped (can be left out)
  • 1 bell pepper finely chopped
  • mushrooms chopped
  • small piece of root ginger, peeled and grated
  • 2 tbsp curry powder (adjust to taste)
  • 400g tin of chopped tomatoes
  • half a chopped tomato tin of cold water
  • Spray oil or cooking oil (depends how healthy you want it)
  • Rice or cauliflower to accompany

Method

I use 1 cal spray oil as it is healthier than using glugs of oil, but whatever you want to use.

Fry the onions and garlic in a pan until browned. Add the chopped chilli pepper and grated ginger and fry for another 2 or 3 minutes.

Add 1 tbsp of the curry powder and stir in well, fry for a further 1 minute.

Add the cubed chicken and brown off, then add the chopped tomatoes, and the cold water.

Stir in the chopped bell pepper, mushrooms, and the rest of the curry powder. bring back to the boil and simmer for 30 minutes.

While the curry is simmering cook the rice or cauliflower. Adjust timings so everything is done at the same time.

Serve!

This is really easy to make and most people have these ingredients in the fridge/store cupboards.

 

Oh ITIL where has all the fun gone?

I am studying for my ITIL Foundation qualification. This first paragraph from the official study guide strikes fear into my very heart.

“Organisations operating in dynamic environments need to improve their performance and maintain competitive advantage. Adopting best practices in industry-wide use can help to improve capability.”

Straight in with the management speak, no pulling punches here. Ok so I wasn’t expecting it to be a gripping read and I struggle to learn by straight reading, but oh boy this material is so dry I have to keep it away from naked flames.

Though there are many resources on the internet that help to explain it in a way that encourages interest, it is still the dullest material I have ever come across. The ITIL framework is designed to support and integrate IT Service Management into the business environment, describing the key principles and practices as a set of resources and capabilities such as processes, people and technology.

See what I mean?

So how to make it more interesting to learn? I tried substituting the word process (it comes up a lot) with something else that is totally out of context. I chose kitten. Now here is a paragraph as it appears in the study book:

“The process owner role is accountable for ensuring that a process is fit for purpose, i.e. that it is capable of meeting its objectives; that it is performed according to the agreed and documented standard; and that it meets the aims of the process definition. This role may be assigned to the same person carrying out the process manager role.”

Wow, heavy going I hear you say. Now here is the fun version:

“The kitten owner role is accountable for ensuring that a kitten is fit for purpose, i.e. that it is capable of meeting its objectives; that it is performed according to the agreed and documented standard; and that it meets the aims of the kitten definition. This role may be assigned to the same person carrying out the kitten manager role.”

Who wouldn’t want to be a kitten manager? You need to make sure that the kitten is fit for purpose, does it chase a laser pointer dot when presented? Is it a cute ball of fluff that can climb the curtains? Makes writing the kitten definition fun, making sure all the objectives are met. And as a kitten owner, you can be a kitten manager too! It’s just too good to be true.

But alas I cannot procrastinate any longer, I still have dull studying to do, I just wanted to share the tediousness of the material I am trying to learn.

Oh and if for some reason you are wondering what the word ITIL means, it is an acronym – Information Technology Infrastructure Library.

Carly

She’s not a kitten, but couldn’t help posting a photo of my study partner.

Rediscovered Treasures

If you’re anything like me then you have boxes of ‘stuff’ in the attic. Boxes filled with things that may come in useful one day. You have to understand I am a borderline obsessive hoarder. I don’t like to get rid of anything, everything will have a use or could be mended.

I needed to find something from one of these boxes. I knew it was up there, but not in which box. I had been putting this off for a while, mainly for two reasons;

  1. I don’t like spiders. There are many up there, hanging like macabre eight legged Christmas baubles. Staring at me with their eight beady eyes, just waiting to drop on my head, or down the collar of my shirt. This causes me to scream uncontrollably.
  2. The boxes are stacked in a way which is massively inconvenient to get to anything. And it’s hot up there. And dusty. And full of spiders (see number 1)

So after half an hour of Tetris stacking to avoid the boxes falling off the boarded area and falling through the ceiling of the bedroom below, I found a box which was heavy. Really heavy. I’m thinking to myself how on earth did I get this up here? Anyway with growing excitement I took the packing tape off to look inside to see what was contained in this corrugated cardboard sarcophagus. What I found caused waves of joy and memories wash across me. Think of the scene in Indiana Jones and The Raiders of The Lost Ark where the ark of the covenant was opened and all the whooshing spirits came out. It was pretty much like that, just with no Nazis or face melting.

I know what you’re thinking, come on James just tell us what was in the box, what could have caused such unbridled joy and happiness? Is it Gold? Diamonds? The last Panini sticker to complete your album?

I’ll stop your wildly inaccurate guesses right there, what I had in the really heavy box were all of my RPG books, everything I had collected over the course of my life. Boxed up and forgotten, sent to live with the spiders. These books were some of the best friends I had during my teenage years, there abandoned in the dark, dusty confines of my spider infested attic. (I may have mentioned I don’t like spiders)

I manhandled the box down the ladder, nearly slipping and snapping my spine like a twig. Got it down the stairs and into the sitting room. My eldest son (he’s 12) looked up from whatever it was he was reading, and seeing the big heavy box immediately focussed on its contents.

What followed was an hour of rediscovering lost treasures, made even better by having number one son help me to sift through all the bits of paper, books, and box sets. Most of my collection consisted of 2nd Edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons material, although amongst all the books, there is a mix of original , 1st edition, and 3rd edition Dungeons and Dragons, I might catalogue it in a future post, but there is a lot!

After we had sorted into editions, the first thing we did in a father/son bonding time was roll up ridiculously high level characters. His character was a 12th level Firbolg (a giant kin), and mine was a human 15th level armoured wizard/9th level cleric. Now before anyone points out that wizards can’t wear armour, or a Firbolg isn’t a playable race in AD&D, these were created using the skills and powers player’s option rules add-on. This enables a kind of assignable point system that is simple yet complex at the same time. But worth it to have an ARMOURED wizard.

I was filled with pride as I passed the torch (well all my books) to my son who now has all this gaming material on the bookshelves in his bedroom. It brings back fond memories from when I was the same age, receiving my first D&D rule book from my parents for Christmas, and spending the rest of the day creating my own worlds and inhabitants.

My rediscovered treasures are his gateway into the greatest fantasy realm ever. The only limit? His imagination.

 

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