the corner office

I got to see Hull this weekend. I had a great time. My first experience of 'up North.'

In particular:

• Hull town center has the highest concentration of pubs I have ever seen. And the majority are ancient and full of character. You could do a full-blown pub crawl without ever crossing a road.

• populace with the highest concentration of tattoos I have ever seen.

• I got to see (and experience) the kind of Victorian architecture I didn't think actually existed outside of old movies. Awesome.

• Hull does not have a happy economy. Sad, and I don't know how it ever gets better.

• rain. Real, heavy, rain, and real rain clouds that you can see coming and which stick around for long enough to make the point. That's something you don't get much in London. Hard to believe a few hundred miles could make such a difference.

So a couple of weeks back the old PS2 packed up. This is not the kind of thing that makes a 5 year old happy. We could've said 'y'know, son, there's a valuable lesson to be learned in this, why when we were your age etc etc, and we're going to make do without computer games for a while, let's see how Christmas goes if you eat EVERY DAMNED SPRIG OF BROCCOLI BETWEEN NOW AND THEN', or, 'maybe it's about time we introduced you to the Secret Seven, young man', but instead we decided to buy a PS3.

I'm pretty annoyed that our collection of PS2 games are now USELESS. USELESS. But the PS3 is pretty cool. Partly because the processing power is such that now the racing games all have 15 opponents and not 4 like 10 years ago, and partly because the controllers have motion sensors which is just like pure bloody magic right there in your hands, but mostly because the thing is connected to the Internet and you have demos and TV and movies and my golly, human ingenuity is just something else.

So this evening Ronwen and I are doing the usual 'so what are we watching' (cause she's not interested in watching The Day of the Jackal with me and I'm not interested in watching whatever foofy stuff she has on the shelf), and we talk in circles for a bit then maybe one of us pops out to hire a DVD that is agreeable to us both. But tonight we says 'hey you know, we have a LoveFilm account now (freebie 3 weeks don't forget to cancel if you change your mind!)', and in addition to the stuff that's just arrived in the post because, well, LoveFilm just sends you stuff that gets there a day later, but it turns out we can also watch streaming movies online.

Now, I'm a South African who spent a decade putting up with Telkom. I don't trust download speeds and I still feel like I need to be worrying about that 3GB cap before the whole thing gets shut down till month-end. Sure, after 5 years of UK interwebs I'm getting over it, but watch full-blown movies on the Internet, not just a low-res Youtube clip?

Well, one The Dark Knight later and I am just blown away. Not only because we watched two and a half hours of movie without so much as one pausey-loading thing, but also because after that was done, I went digging around on LoveFilm to see what else they had. What obscure movie that I remember fondly from a long time ago could I think of? How about How to Murder Your Wife? Hey ho, there it was! I'm pretty disappointed that Benson's not available, but hey, you can't have everything. Still.

My poor long-suffering wife has no idea what she's in for. And I suspect we'll be renewing the LoveFilm subscription when the freebie period runs out.

So, that was the Olympics. Thoughts and recollections:

• contrary to our worst fears, it turned out that Olympic tourists had amazing commuter-repellant properties, and the train rides to and from work were a breeze each day. I miss them already. I wonder whether the Paralympics will see so many people choosing to stay away. Not likely, I don't think.

• I think the UK, and particularly London, did itself proud. People were friendly and the whole place just seemed happy.

• Bert le Clos made me feel proud to be a South African.

• we got to see an Olympic event: Taekwondo, and we got to see Jade Jones whup some poor aunty's ass in the early rounds. I now understand what home crowd advantage means. When you're in a room with a few thousand people all cheering for your opponent, it must trigger some deep psychological stuff centred around 'roll over and play nice doggie and maybe you get out alive.'

• I've enjoyed the extended trading hours on Sundays.

• I have a strange hankering for McDonalds.

• the Olympic spirit: you devote yourself to your sport. You train and work harder than most human beings can even conceive of doing. In your discipline, you prove yourself to be the fourth best person ON THE WHOLE PLANET, and the newspapers say you flopped.

• the trains weren't so bad today. Cannon Street was well-prepared, with cordons and a cohort of pink-vested people trying to look approachable and not bored. The rest of the City was rather quiet. This is apparently because many commuters stayed home, fearing the worst. So now the risk is that all the stay-at-homers will see on the news that things weren't so bad, and all try to cram onto the trains tomorrow.

Impressions:

• odd-ball but Elgar and pom-poms wasn't going to cut it.

• Danny Boyle doesn't vote Tory, I don't think.

• case in point: the NHS? For real? Jesus wept. I thought seeing two kids to a bed was a bit ironic.

• the Mr Bean part was pretty funny.

• The Grand Prix commentator chappie was a dumbass. Inane and a dumbass. It's OK for people at home to be saying "we've never heard of some of these countries", but you want your commentators to be a little less, well, proudly ignant, don't you?

I should mention it's the first week of school holidays and I'm home looking after Leo. I have a trove of awesome quotes. Today's best:

"Do zombies wee?"

"No, they don't wee or poo because... well they're dead and they don't drink or eat anything"

"Except brains"

If I wanted 30C summers I could have stayed in SA.

I crawl into bed at an ungodly hour.

"Good night dear"

"What time is it?"

"A bit late"

"How late?"

[Redacted]

"What were you doing? Fscking around on the computer?"

"I was YouTubing"

"Aaah haha, that's a vortex of time consumery"

"That's pretty eloquent for someone who's fast asleep"

zzzzzzzzzzzz.

Things remain quiet. I had occasion to go via London Bridge on Friday, and I was surprised at how quiet the trains were. London Bridge is rather touristy at the best of times, and on Friday I saw only two tour groups, one of which was led by a dude holding up a fishing pole with a purple Pokemon at the end. It's gonna get weirder still.

I sat on the train this morning wondering just how busy my morning train will become over the next few weeks. Number one topic of conversation at work is 'how bad can it get, really?'

This is a marker so I can look back in a while and say 'naaah', or 'omfg next time I'm moving for a month.'