daddacool

Car door etiquette

2013-05-16T11:58:00.000+01:00

Don't worry, I'm not going to bang on about people parking in parent and baby spaces without kids or anything like that, oh no, I'm going to have a moan about kids and car doors. Ever since she opened the door on our hired Skoda Yeti while I was negotiating a round about in Northern Italy, Fifi has been obsessed with car doors. Until recently she's lacked the physical strength in her hands to open the doors from the outside and this has universally been declared a good thing.

Unfortunately now she has the strength in her hands to open the doors and frequently does. This is by no means always a bad thing, if it's raining and I'm carrying Danger, it is in fact a good thing as she and the boy can get into the car rather than standing around like lemons in the pouring rain. Of course there is always the fear that incessant door slamming will eventually see someone get their fingers caught in the door but the first proper door related accident wasn't one I was expecting at all and fortunately I wasn't present for it either.

On the way back from a play date yesterday, Fifi managed to fling the car door open with such vigorous enthusiasm, poor little Danger was sent flying by the force of the impact. Even several hours later, one side of his face was red from the impact. His vision was clear and he was himself though; the same little indestro-baby that we've come to know and love but my, he took a battering. That one incident at least wasn't malicious (although Fifi has been a bit spiteful recently, something I need to look into the root cause of), more a result of general heavy handedness on the part of our daughter. Nary a meal goes by without her watering the table by knocking over her drink at some point. She's just a bit cack handed.

Not that Danger would have considered this as he was clobbered and sent flying of course. Fifi's now on a permanent ban from opening or closing car door. Probably until she or Danger are 16.

It's all a bit of a mess...

2013-05-13T07:51:00.000+01:00

We've now entered week four of the kitchen refit. That means we've had 4 weeks where we've had no cooker, hob or kitchen sink and we've also had to store everything from the kitchen in other rooms. In other rooms that are regularly subject to a marauding one year old to boot.

This means there are a couple of rooms that are rammed floor to ceiling with stuff, one of which is our rather grandly named Library. You can tell it's grandly named because it's capitalised as a proper noun. We're pretentious like that.

Unfortunately the Library is also the computer room/video editing suite. I shoot my video reviews in 1080p50, which means my little netbook won't even play the clips, let alone edit the stuff. I know I'm really behind on the videos; our chickens need a video for the Actimel Family Wellbeing Index campaign and my review of the Orbit Baby G2 is also outstanding but when your computers buried like this:

Hint: back left of the room

it's all a bit tricky. This is the most accessible the Library has been in around 3 weeks as we've been able to put some of the stuff back in the kitchen wall cabinets. Until then, if you wanted to get anywhere, you had to pick the boxes up from in front of you and place them behind you as you made your way across the floor. Unfortunately most of it's been replaced by stuff from the sitting room, which is being painted later this week. Our fridge freezer is currently behind the open shelving unit you can see on your right, which means we have to be able to get to it.

I’m Not Sure, Parents know best…

2013-05-11T08:00:00.000+01:00

I still see my parents as the youthful couple I knew growing up, but over the past 12 months they have started to feel the effects that come with old age. In his youth my dad was a tremendous cricketer, he would tell you he played with the agility of a panther (this probably stems from my gramps, who once played football for England so sport was inherent in his blood). Nowadays he struggles around the house; reaching in cupboards, getting up the stairs and in or out the bath are all difficult.

That was until I managed to persuade him to buy a walk in bath. He can be a very stubborn man, and the persuasion took a little while to bring him round. He would argue the cost would be too much, that he likes the bath he has now as he can ‘lie properly in it’, and that it would mean he needed to redecorate the bathroom. These were poor excuses, in my eyes, so I made it my goal to make him agree to at least look into them.

After 3 months of nudging him in the direction of getting a bath, he finally agreed to visit a showroom. We visited Walk-In-Baths UK, based in west Yorkshire and, possibly due to the sales technique, probably to the fact he actually agreed with me, (although he wouldn’t tell you that!), dad bought a walk in bath.

10 days after the purchase, the builders installed the bath. They took the old one out and linked up the new bath. The bath dad went for was an ‘adagio Grande’. It is a compact bath tub that makes excellent use of limited space. It has a wide, inward-opening door that features no hazardous catches or operating devices, making getting in and out of the bath easy.

It’s been 4 months since dad had the bath installed now and I know he has seen the benefits. He no longer groans when getting in the bath, and he can still enjoy his customary hour-long soak. Mum is also happy… she’s had the bathroom redecorated!

Chocolate Soreen- you can still get it...

2013-05-10T17:12:00.001+01:00

... in Asda now, in Morrisons from 20th May for 3 weeks and Sainsbury's from 23rd May for 3 weeks. It's freezable, so I suggest you buy as much as you physically can and throw away all the food in your freezer because the thing about the limited edition nature of limited edition chocolate Soreen is once it's gone, it's gone. I'm already getting cold turkey fears (but then I'm on about half a loaf a day at the moment due to our extended kitchen refit and the general inaccessibility of other food stuffs), so the ice lollies have already gone, and are soon to be followed by the frozen peas and sweetcorn.

I took a box of it that I'd been sent into work to share out. It all went but alas, there are no pictures due to the enormous amount of confidential stuff we have in the office. Trust me, it was like pigs at the trough though...

Get lost! Or, The Car Hire Market Race! #chmrace2013

2013-05-10T11:59:00.001+01:00

I've driven a lot of cars in my time in a lot of different countries (and even on a couple of fairly famous race circuits like The Nurburgring and Ferrari's own Fiorano test track). I've even been bamboozled by the German language satnav on a VW Sirocco Yuri and I hired in Germany once but nothing strikes fear into me or anyone that knows me as the words "road atlas" do.

So when Car Hire Market contacted me and proposed I took part in a speed limit/sensible driving road race from our house to a secret location, against another blogger, with one of us using a road atlas and the other a satnav, it was almost a fait accompli that I would get the road atlas part of the challenge. Like I said, I have some demons to exorcise in this area...

Road atlas's and I started our tempestuous relationship in 1995 when I got my first car, a natty C reg Vauxhall Nova with 78,000 on the clock. It cost me a little over £1,000, which in turn worked out as the entire 12 weeks of the university summer holidays working in a bacon packing factory from 2pm until 10pm. I was at university up in Lancaster and, freely liberated by my wheels, embarked on a series of road trips with some chums. Back in the mid 90's, not a lot of students had cars. I knew about a dozen people with one, all of which were in various states of becoming clapped out.

4 of us were on a trip to South Wales, to a hostel of some description. I merrily jaunted down the M6, noted a sign post for North Wales, and decided to continue on the basis that if they were that geographical specific, the sign post for South Wales would be a long shortly. It wasn't, and we ended up in Northampton for a cup of tea at Hope's mum and dad's place. If only I'd actually opened the road atlas.

My second navigational disaster wasn't entirely my fault. We were on a family holiday in Scotland (the last one I went on with my parents and brother actually), when I failed to find Glasgow. I was in the second car with my mum driving but there were mitigating circumstances- our 1975 hardback Shell Road Atlas was so old at the time it completely omitted the M8. Which is Scotland's busiest road. We got half way to Aberdeen before we managed to correct ourselves.

So you can imagine my joy at the prospect of navigating somewhere two hours away from our house with only my wits and a road altas for company. Oh, and wifey and the three children too of course. Needless to say the Haribo had been cracked open before we even left our estate.

I had a nice surprise when I strolled down to our local Enterprise rental place to pick up the car that Car Hire Market had sorted me out with. It was a large white Mondeo Estate, and the hire price on the invoice was really rather impressive- £128 for the bank holiday weekend- picking up Friday and returning Tuesday before midday. If that's the sort of deal that an aggregation site can find, I'm all for them. The car was pretty awesomely spec'd too- it even had heated/cooled driver and passenger seats, on top of keyless ignition and parking sensors.

So the morning of the challenge came and we loaded up the car, poured over the road atlas, took the kids out for ANOTHER wee, put the kids back in and then, finally, set off.

Our destination was a carpark on Victoria Street in Spalding. Spalding itself was relatively easy to find using the road atlas Even with the cries for sweets starting before we'd actually left the estate, we were able to concentrate enough to get most of the way to the town with only one pit stop. The fun and games started when we actually arrived in Spalding for our mystery event.

charity shop special

Road altas's have a section at the back with major town centre maps in at a higher level of detail than the general road maps. Spalding is by no stretch of the imagination a major town centre, so after a few minutes of fruitlessly driving around, we decided to park up and explore on foot.

So we parked up at the train station and, after getting distracted by some rather nice vinyl in a local charity shop, finally stumbled across the aforementioned road, only to find the car park had a funfair installed on it!

I checked my phone to find a message from the organisers saying we were being relocated due to the fun fair, and so it was we rendezvoused with the challenge masters from Car Hire Market (dot com) and eventually, Clare, who had got marooned in the traffic that was heading in for the flower parade.

So we'd won the challenge by dint of not getting stuck in a horrendeous traffic jam- we came into Spalding from the opposite direction! We had a great lunch in a local pub and then headed off to the flower parade:

Spalding: home of naked window gazers

The Flower Parade!!!

throws hands up in despair

2013-05-09T13:24:00.001+01:00

Danger was born in January 2012. Since then, I can count on the one finger the number of times wifey and I have been out together. And so it came to pass, on Sunday we had the inlaws booked for babysitting purposes and were going out for dinner to celebrate wifey's birthday. We were due to go out after bedtime, so I duly bathed and storied all three children and put them to bed. Fifi went down well, Danger went to sleep immediately because he's like that; he'll only make a fuss when night is properly upon us.

No sooner had the doorbell gone to announce the arrival of said inlaws that the boy was downstairs, brow furrowed and complaining of aches and pains that hadn't been apparent fifteen minutes earlier. We left him watching Country File with the inlaws on the sofa and more or less sprinted into town, scoffed a poorly organised meal at Wagamas and jogged back. The boy was still up, watching The Antiques Roadshow with the inlaws.

Our plans to have a quiet drink on the decking whilst enjoying i) each others company & ii) not having a small child hanging off of us were ruined by the boys continued refusal to go to bed. We ended up sitting in our bed with him in the middle and half a cider each watching re-runs of Grand Designs on E4.

No matter though, the follow day was wifey's actual birthday! After a nice day out (despite me forgetting to pack the picnic) we could look forward to an evening curled up on the sofa watching a film or something and recovering from a very busy weekend.

Ha!

About 10 minutes after lights out, Fifi started shrieking like a banshee. Over the next hour I was up and down the stairs about 15 times and she weeped, wailed, dropped cold bump patches down the side of her bed, woke Danger up and obviously got the boy feeling so left out he called me in to tell me he felt sick. Eventually we discerned that she had banged her ear bouncing down off her bed, which is something she knows she's not allowed to do and I'm taking her to the doctors this evening to get it looked at.

Things are a little fraught in our house as it is- we've entered week four of the kitchen renovation and it's hard work. The contents are spread across four removes and Danger, living up to his name, is often getting hold of things that he shouldn't and waving them around like a lunatic. What would be nice, especially for wifey who has no respite from the kids, is a little bit of peace and quiet once in a while. We know the kids are capable of it because other parents remark how incredibly well behaved our kids are on play dates and we even had an elderly woman compliment wifey on her "exquisite children" when we went out as a family to a restaurant on holiday. It seems they just can't bear to let us have a moment to ourselves in the evening...

Which cheap package deal suits you best?

2013-05-09T02:00:00.000+01:00

Which cheap package holidays we go for will ultimately depend on our personal circumstances. What a family with small kids might consider to be the ideal break will probably be a world away from that opted for by a single person or a young couple. It’s important when deciding that you take into account any specific requirements, such as a preference for peace and quiet, a crowded and convivial atmosphere, wheelchair provision, or anything else that will be an important factor in contributing to the success of your holiday.

Young couples

Romantic young couples, such as those on honeymoon, may only really have eyes for one another, but great food and drink coupled with breathtaking views will certainly serve to heighten the mood. Italy is always good for this sort of break, and in Umbria especially there are holiday deals that place an emphasis on rustic simplicity so that couples can do more things together in a semi-rustic environment rather than having too many hectic distractions as in a bustling resort. Quiet towns like Orvieto and the medieval villages in the countryside are great for exploring together in a relaxed and devastatingly romantic manner.

People with mobility issues
Many people who use wheelchairs will probably have heard so many horror stories that they’ll be reluctant to travel abroad at all and often end up staying put. But there are plenty of wheelchair-friendly destinations out there, and as long as you do the research properly you can have as good a time as anyone else. Some destinations are better than others, of course, and the agent will be able to identify them along with all the necessary support systems you’ll need when you arrive. They’ll also be able to handle the technicalities for easy flight transfers and facilities on the plane itself.

Singles
Singles usually require a package that’s a bit, or significantly, different from what’s on offer for families and couples. Meeting new people is usually a major factor here, and the last thing you want is to end up alone at dinner surrounded by families with screaming kids and couples conversing in romantic seclusion. Singles holidays are usually available in exotic locations and highlight adventure and fresh experiences, broadening horizons and taking chances. Singles holidays can cover everything from breaks for single parents to older travellers wanting to explore remote destinations with like-minded companions.

Families with young kids
Families travelling with young children are ideal customers for organised package breaks. Options like cruises and resorts where specialists are on hand to organise all the entertainment for various age groups are a godsend for harassed parents who want their kids to have a good time but who are also looking for a bit of relaxation for themselves. Cruises especially are ideal when it comes to kids’ clubs, arcades and nursery facilities, allowing parents to wander off knowing that their offspring are in safe hands.

Families with older kids

Beach-club holidays are often a good idea for families with older children because here they’ll find enough tailored activities to keep everyone happy. There’ll be access to sailing and windsurfing, children’s clubs, mountain-biking and a range of other activities, and the lodging is normally full-board with everything included in the package price.

This post was brought to you in conjunction with Travelzoo

Review: LEGO City Undercover: The Chase Begins

2013-05-07T13:24:00.000+01:00

It's usual for games to appear on a number of different formats to maximise the potential audience but the latest game in the LEGO franchise has taken a novel twist on this. The rather excellent Wii U game LEGO City Undercover, as reviewed by yours truly a month ago, has been complemented with a Nintendo 3DS prequel called LEGO City Undercover: The Chase Begins, which follows the rookie career of Chase McCain, a future MAVERICK cop, and star of the Wii U game. And fittingly, the first mission involves donuts. After that? It's gang related stuff, with Rex Fury making his eventual appearance. On a rooftop.

The first mission really answers the question of whether the developers have managed to shoe horn the same humour into the 3DS version that fills the Wii U version to the eyebrows. Yes, yes they have and it's still great fun! The 3DS has never had a game that's pushed it to the limits quite as much as Lego City Undercover: The Chase Begins- the 3D effects looks utterly compelling, and even if there is a bit of fogging/pop in caused by the amount of stuff the 3DS is throwing around, it really doesn't distract from the game in the slightest.

Whereas the Wii U version surprised me by having everything spoken, which is unusual for a LEGO game, the 3DS version returns much more to the norm by having subtitled conversations for the most part, with only the cut scenes voiced. If you've played any other LEGO games, you'll immediately be completely at home, with one fairly major difference: in keeping with the sandbox feel of the Wii U version, rather than partitioning the game off into different levels accessed via central hub, the whole city is open. Or at least it is once you unlock some parts of it via completing missions.

It is incredibly good fun and a real work of magic has been done to cram everything into the diminutive handheld without compromising the experience. I've bounced on trampolines, been down zip wires, rescued dogs, dressed up as a burglar and done a little bit of breaking and entering and practiced my safe-breaking, yet I feel I've hardly scratched the surface. It's full of neat little touches and I found myself impressed at small things, like all the vehicles handling differently or the Matrix style fights I got into with the baddies. Aside from the main missions, there are a myriad of smaller tasks to carry out, all of which help you towards the magical 100% complete target.

I get the impression that with it's shorter, more contained, missions LEGO City Undercover: The Chase Begins is an idea pick up and play for a few spare minutes sort of game. It's already comprehensively broken my addiction to Candy Crush, which can only be a good thing.

Competition: Can you make your garden centre stage?

2013-05-03T10:31:00.001+01:00

Win a private garden gig from Justin Moorhouse!

If you’ve ever dreamed of turning your garden into a stage fit for a comedy gig, now’s your chance.

Entries are now open for Ronseal’s new competition to win a private comedy gig for friends and family from top stand-up comedian, DJ and star of Phoenix Nights, Justin Moorhouse.

DIYers from across the country could have their garden transformed into a stage for a money-can’t-buy day of comedy.

To be in with a shot of welcoming Justin Moorhouse into your garden and hosting an unforgettable gig, you’ll need to prove to Ronseal that you’ve got a sense of humour. Simply head to the Ronseal Facebook page and share a joke or anecdote about your garden on the app.

The ultimate winner will receive products to update their decking under the watchful eye of Ronseal experts. They’ll also get £200 of food vouchers to cater for the guests during their garden gig by Justin Moorhouse.

20 runners up will receive £100 of garden products.

Justin Moorhouse said: “I’m really excited about working with Ronseal on this campaign. I’d never really thought that DIY and comedy could go together, but I guess they’re actually a great fit. Ronseal has a very honest and straightforward approach to everything they do, which is very similar to my style of stand-up comedy.

Kate Sitch, Marketing Manager for Ronseal, said: “DIY isn’t always the most fun topic of conversation so we wanted to run a competition with a touch of humour. Justin Moorhouse is the perfect choice for a garden gig prize. He is family friendly and extremely funny - a perfect fit for Ronseal.”

To enter, simply head over to Ronseal's Facebook page

The competition is open now and closes on Wednesday 12 June.

Baby led weaning

2013-05-02T09:23:00.001+01:00

photo courtesy of wifey :)

With all three of our kids, we've let them introduce themselves to solids to in their own time. It was a little more hesitant with the boy as he was our first and we didn't really know what we were doing. Additionally he didn't have a big brother (or sister) to copy, so he spent quite a while on baby jars and pouches. Fifi spent less time on them than the boy did and Danger hardly any time at all.

Locally caught rock in Beer, Dorset. With chips

I remember Danger eating a few jars at Butlins, which is incredibly baby friendly, in their restaurants at 8 months, but pretty much right after that he was waving sausages around and shoveling pasta down himself as fast as he could. Now, at 16 months, he's started using cutlery a bit.

It does mean that straight after dinner he has to go in the bath because he's often caked head to foot in pasta sauce/yogurt/ketchup but it's a mark of how his manual dexterity has progressed that he's getting it all over himself rather than the floor.

I think the other big benefit from baby led weaning has been an expansion in the kids pallet. They will try and eat pretty much anything, and all eat what we have for a family dinner rather than having "kids food". This extends from casseroles, to curries, moussaka to lasagna and well beyond. The only issue we have is the amount they want to eat- we had to take the boy off of school dinners because they simply weren't large enough. None of our kids are overweight but they do eat fairly large portions; probably to fuel the excessive amount of running about they do.

None of them are fans of the chicken nugget, which I take as a sign of success...

Dantes 9 circles of hell or buying a kitchen from IKEA

2013-05-01T08:48:00.003+01:00

I'd like to start this post by saying the staff are IKEA Wembley/Neasden/wherever the check-in app thinks it is, are universally lovely. They're polite, helpful and mostly know their stuff. They also smile a lot if you're nice to them because I suspect it doesn't happen very much.

The customers on the other hand are mostly the sort of people you could imagine frequenting Mos Eisely space port in Star Wars, which was described by a certain O. W. Kenobi as a "wretched hive of scum and villainy". People have tried queue jumping, interrupting me when I've been sat at a computer with a planner and I've even been run over by a trolley piloted by someone who probably shouldn't have a driving license (assuming they even did). I've experienced first hand how rude customers can be to the staff, one after another after another, and it depresses me. Lord knows what it does to the people that actually work there.

Even though the staff are lovely, the process of buying a kitchen and then collecting the stuff isn't brilliant. We decided to get an IKEA kitchen as it worked out roughly a third of the price of the equivalent from either Magnet or Howdens. Even after we sourced sinks and worktops elsewhere, it was still about £2,500 cheaper and we don't have a big kitchen by any stretch of the imagination.

In order to buy a kitchen, or even one individual kitchen unit door at IKEA, you need to:-

take a ticket in the kitchen area and wait for someone to be free to serve you; (5-70 minutes)
queue at the tills to pay for your kitchen related stuff; (10-40 minutes)
queue at the customer collection point to pick the stuff up; (20 minutes to 3 hours!!!)
queue at the customer returns point to arrange collection of oversold items* (30 minutes)

The last one is optional, depending on the size of your order but the built in microwave we ordered, paid for and thought we were collecting was actually out of stock.

When I ordered the bulk of the kitchen on my first visit, I had paid for the order by half 8. They actually closed the shutters and turned the external lights off between me getting my first trolley of products, loading them into the car and coming back for the next of the remaining three. I had to bang on the door before they wheeled them out.

Don't get me wrong, the fact that you can stroll into a store and not just buy a kitchen but drive away with it, after playing a bit of IKEA box Tetris with your car, is fantastic but I can't help think the process could be streamlined a little.

For example, you can sort of pay at the kitchen planning area. Except they don't take gift vouchers or discount coupons, so you'll need to go to the till if you have either. The wait for picking is shown on a screen in the collection area (if it's working, it broke on two of the occasions I was there) and by the Bistro but not the cafe, which is much more conducive for a long wait. A store specific smartphone app that gave the same information would be awesome, as I could have buggered off to the adjacent Tesco or McDonald's for an hour or two.

But I suppose it's the price you pay for paying a much lower price in the end isn't it?

*the system shows everything that hasn't been picked. If the 3 people in front of you have all ordered the same product and their orders get picked first, if there are only 3 items in stock to start with, by the time it gets to you, you're going to be disappointed.

A new name for a new product- Shell V Power Nitro+

2013-05-01T07:36:00.001+01:00

A couple of weeks ago I went to the press launch of Shell's reinvented premium fuel. Shell V Power is technically no more, it has been superceded by Shell V Power Nitro+. It all happened overnight on the evening of 17 April across Shell's network of petrol stations across the country.

Shell are of course always developing their fuels; it's not a stationary business if you'll pardon the pun but the latest developments have been substantial enough that they have felt the need for a rebranding to really show how much difference the latest changes have made.

Developed with Scuderia Ferrari, the innovation behind Shell V-Power Nitro+ Unleaded lies in what Shell refer to as Friction Modification Technology (FMT). FMT has been around for a few years, it's something Shell introduced to their F1 fuels that power Alonso and co to give the cars a bit of a legitimate boost.

A Shell scientist. Note the lab coat

The new formulation contains 25% more FMT which is designed to instantly reduce friction in critical engine areas that engine oil and conventional lubricants can't reach. This helps the engine to turn more freely, unlocking valuable energy which can help lead to improved acceleration and power delivery. It also reduces wear and tear, which is nice.

If you drive an oil burner (a diesel apparently, look at me with my trendy jargon), Shell V-Power Nitro+ Diesel has also had a reformulation in terms of the detergents. As I found out first hand a couple of years ago, getting your injector nozzle mucky is no laughing matter, however smutty it might sound, so any fuel that actively removes deposits and cleans them is a fairly good idea as far as I'm concerned. Clean injectors in a diesel mean more efficient combustion, which in turn increases efficiency and performance.

I have to admit, ever since being involved with the Shell Network of Champions, I've put V-Power in our cars; I'm happy to pay the premium over supermarket fuel which after all is always less than a fiver a tank, because I know all fuels are different and I'm actively enhancing the performance and life of our motors.

Happy 75th birthday Soreen!

2013-05-01T07:19:00.001+01:00

Soreen first began making their famous malt loaf back in 1938, to a recipe that is still used today. To celebrate this milestone, Soreen are celebrating with a special limited edition chocolate malt loaf. I've had a few of these in the post and can vouch for their moist chocolatey-ness. Personally my favourite Soreen loaves are the banana influenced ones, but the chocolate one gives it a run for it's money and reminds me of afternoon tea on a Sunday when I was little (malt loaf plus chocolate cakes, but all wrapped into one). The odd thing is, although 75 years is a long time, I've been eating Soreen malt loaf for over half of it's life (and all but 4 or 5 years of mine), so that probably makes me excessively old too...

To find out more you can follow @SoreenHQ on Twitter or like them on their Facebook page. You can also enter their competition to win one of 75 Chocolate Soreen Loaves.

Limited edition Soreen Chocolate Loaf is exactly that, it's limited! It is available from 25th April in most Asda stores for six weeks. It is available from 20th May in Morrisons for three weeks and from 23rd May in Sainsbury's for 3 weeks too.

Tonight's homework

2013-04-28T21:35:00.002+01:00

The 6 year old came home with the sort of homework that requires real ignorance to do easily. He was given music from the 50's to the 90's to swot up on. I mean come on, I could do NME chart number ones from '53 onwards and still only skim a few classics. As far as his teacher was concerned the 60's were the Beatles and the 70's were probably ABBA. I despair.

We played some early Springsteen, The Beach Boys Pet Sounds, some Rolling Stones and a bit of Elton John on the way over to visit my parents but they boy wasn't greatly impressed. Sloop John B was boring, The Stones were babies and only some Elton was okay.

shame I don't have a tape player

Once we got to my parents I decided to raid my Dad's tape collection for inspiration. Always one to embrace change, he didn't have a great vinyl collection because as soon as tape came out he switched. Smaller and more convenient apparently.

I'd forgotten (or forced myself to forget more like) some of my Dad's musical tastes weren't exactly trendy, even at the time. There was plenty of Nana Mouskouri, a lot of the Seekers, the New Seekers, The Spinners, Peter Paul and Mary, and rather too much Frank Pourcel for much credibility. It dawned on me though when I saw Simon & Garfunkel's Bridge over Troubled Water (some say it's a song about heroin addiction you know, I just think it's ace) that we've been playing the boy 60's and 70's stuff since he was old enough to go to sleep in his own room. I bet there aren't many 6 year olds that have gone to sleep with Jefferson Airplane's Surrealistic Pillow playing gently in the room but we have just that boy. He can hold a tune but the day I catch him humming White Rabbit is the day I buy him an electric guitar and set him to busking for his pocket money.

Undeterred, when we got back home I fired up the Xbox and waited for the Youtube app to update. Once it had updated I proceeded to embiggen a lot of 60's,70's and 80's stuff with video clips. Highlights were Roger Daltry's tassled shirt at the Isle of Wight Festival where the Who played Pinball Wizard, Dire Straits at Knebworth with the Knoff in an orange suit, Manfred Man (possibly without his Earth Band) singing the Mighty Quinn on Top of the Pops, The Kinks doing Waterloo Sunset and the video to Waterloo. The boy opined that the blonde girl in ABBA was very nice thank you very much. He liked the medley of ZZ Top numbers but thought the band looked silly- two of them have huge beards, one doesn't. The one without the beard has the surname of beard. It's one of the most elaborate in jokes going. I then sucker punched him with most of Dark Side of the Moon, after which it was time for bed.

So tomorrow at school, he'll no doubt say he likes the Beatles and everyone else wore silly clothes.

Oh well.

Boys are different from girls. Part 186

2013-04-26T08:58:00.000+01:00

Bed time story time!

I was in the middle of reading the bed time story the other night when the phone interrupted our story time. However as I was reading a genuine 1985 copy of He-Man and the lost Dragon (it turned out to be a Stegosaurus), wifey answered the phone and I continued with the tale of deception and overly muscled people. Fifi complained that She-Ra (Princess of Power) didn't make an appearance but my reply was forestalled by the return of a beaming wifey.

The kids go to swimming lessons on a Sunday morning at some great classes (in a not so great pool) run by a lady called Brenda, a contemporary of Sharon Davies, who's swimming career was cut short by a bad back injury. She knows her onions and teaches technique first and foremost. Fifi and the boy have been in the same class for the last 3 or 4 months. Fifi started swimming a year earlier than the boy and has more or less caught him up- she is obviously not as strong or powerful in the water as he is, what with being 4 compared to his 6 but she's a lot happier getting her face wet and pretty fearless.

Brenda had phoned to say she had decided it was time to put both of them up a class. The boy was coasting slightly and could do with being pushed whilst Fifi was just a natural. The next class up is a mix of reception and year 1 kids but Fifi is the first nursery aged kid to progress to that level for a very long time.

So the reaction to this good news then...

Fifi had a smile so wide, it threatened to meet round the back of her head and make the top of her head fall off. She was enormously proud. The boy? He burst into tears and was inconsolable for about 15 minutes. When he calmed down enough to be coherent, he was full of comments about how it would be too scary, how they would make him put his face under water and the pool would be too deep. Brenda's not daft, and it was for this very reason she called ahead to give us the good news.

The boy is definitely a creature of habit- he likes watching the same films over and over and going to the same places time and time again. Fifi on the other hand embraces change and new experience with the same gusto she tackles rollercoasters.

Suarez, biting, outrage and social acceptability

2013-04-24T16:34:00.002+01:00

The Liverpool football player Luis Suarez has just received a 10 match ban for biting another footballer during a game at the weekend. The initial incident caused a lot of comment, not least of all jokes that the victim was in trouble now that Frank Lampard knew he was edible*.

I've already broken a taboo though, I've referred to Ivanovic as the victim, as though some crime has occurred. The general consensus among football pundits and newspaper sports writers is summed up nicely by Liverpool, the once great moral compass of British football, saying they're "shocked and disappointed" by the "severity" of the FA's decision. It has to be remembered that this is the very same club that defended the very same players racial abuse of another player to the hilt, even when he was given an 8 match ban for it.

Suarez himself got into trouble while an Ajax player for biting one of the opposition, so he has form, and also a questionable choice in diet- perhaps an iron deficiency?

Pundits and players are trotting out straw man arguments that the ban is longer than that awarded for a vicious tackle- Liverpool's own Jamie Carragher has said he would rather have been bitten than put out of the game for 6 months by a intentionally bad tackle that had a much less severe punishment.

They all miss the point that biting, as well as spitting (which in itself is a straight red card in football and carries a mandatory 3 match ban), are completely socially unacceptable in children, let alone adults, and let alone adults who earn millions and millions of pounds a year and are role models (whether they like it or not) to many impressionable kids.

What is a brilliant contrast is looking at the comments from parent bloggers and people who don't follow football on twitter compared to football fans/writers/correspondents. You wont find us running a poll over whether it's too harsh a ban, let me tell you!

You won't find any hand wringing bleating about the unfairness of it all, you'll see comments like:-

I have to give special mention to @leemcivor a Liverpool fan who I was chatting to on twitter who thought it was a just punishment and was horrified at it all. A sole sane voice in the wilderness from my own experience but perhaps I'm just unlucky in who I follow.

I was initially worried it was just me- two things are drilled into our kids from an early age: no biting and no spitting. It's one of the things I like to think makes us civilised. The last time any of our kids bit me was over a year ago. In a fit of anger and the confiscation of some toys that had been lying around, the boy tried to punch me in the balls and Fifi bit me on the arm. Once she realised what she had done in anger, she was mortified, went white as a sheet and started crying but I followed through, picking her up and putting her in her room, firmly telling her that we do not bite in this household.

If a three year old can understand this, I'm baffled by how a 26 year old footballer and the hierarchy of a football club can pay lip service to biting being wrong and be outraged at the punishment meted out.

Football it seems exists, and still wants to continue to exist, in some sort of moral vacuum that exonerates our heroes from culpability for their actions, however unsavoury. This can only be a bad thing for society and for our kids.

*there are plenty of Fat Frank jokes that still do the rounds about Frank Lampard's size. He's not fat.

Happy birthday ZX Spectrum!

2013-04-23T11:51:00.002+01:00

It's older than many people who will read this but today in 1982, Sinclair Research released the ZX Spectrum. It was the successor to the monochrome, 1k ZX81 and completely revolutionised home computing by being affordable, easy to use and having tons of software.

I was 7 when my Dad brought home a Speccy for all of the reasons that the rather brilliant song below describes:

My dalliances with programming didn't last long though. I remember spending hours typing in a programme from Your Sinclair or Sinclair User only for it crash when I hit run, losing all my code. I'd obviously made an error somewhere but that was it, I was a consumer rather than a creator from thereon in.

What were my favourite games as a nipper? Well...

Manic Miner

A platform game that required pixel perfection on the jumps and almost always terminal death a lot. When you're 7 this is a hard game. In fact, given the limitations of 16k, most games were hard because there simply wasn't the storage for them to be long without being multiload. Loading additional data into your Spectrum was a bit different to what it's like today, everything was on tape. Imagine making it to the end of a level with 1 life left, spending 5 minutes faffing about to load the next level, only to die 3 seconds later. Game over, and you have to reload the first level...

Gauntlet

The best dungeon game ever, Gauntlet was the game in the arcades that I always stood by watching the bigger kids play. It had cool voice synthesis, and was really colourful. Needless to say the Spectrum version wasn't as colourful, but it was still fun.

The Hobbit

Back in the day, adventure games were text based and driven by a very primitive set of typed commands, "East", "Smack Thorin", "Open door", that sort of thing. The Hobbit had an incredible command set up which was years ahead of the field. Each time you moved from a screen to another one, it took a minute or two for the image to be drawn. It was time consuming but quite involving for a 7 year old. The bonus was, our copy came with the book.

I got fed up with dwarves singing about gold, and getting hopelessly lost in the mountains but that was me all over.

JetPac

JetPac saw you as a space-suited chap having to reassemble his rocket ship and escape each level that was infested with aliens. It was very colourful and pretty addictive, especially for such an early release. I spent far too much time playing this game. It was a little more forgiving than Manic Minor, is as much as you could make the odd mistake but recover enough to carry on.

It also introduced me nicely to the world of attribute clash- the issue the Spectrum had when two sprites of different colours passed each other.

Knight Lore

The Speccy was particularly good as isometric 3D games, and Knight Lore was my favourite. The games were often 3D exploration and puzzle solving games, not particularly suited for very small kids but it wasn't as if there was a lot else to do on a rainy day if you'd finished reading your library books and the Beano wasn't out for another day or so. The amount of graph paper that kids used up making maps for games like Knight Lore or graphic adventure games like the Hobbit was mind boggling!

So it's happy 31st birthday to the Spectrum today then!

Will and Kate's 2nd anniversary playlist

2013-04-20T23:08:00.000+01:00

I think it's always great when your kids are more than 9 months younger than your marriage as it shows a certain amount of tradition. With the Royal couple, that's a given as the baby is due in mid July and their second wedding anniversary is 29 April. Good old William, I wonder if his Dad lent him a servant to keep him occupied until the wedding night?*

So then, a play list encapsulating two years of wedded bliss and the fact Kate is undeniably up the duff, as suggested by those clever clogs at Panasonic to celebrate our royalty and their rather nifty NE Series Wireless Speakers (RRP £249). I know which I'd rather have in the sitting room but that's only because Will would probably hog the telly and insist on putting the episode of Country File his Dad guest edited on again and again.

The Mirror managed a whole front page on newly wed Kate shopping at Waitrose back in 2011. It stops short of showing her mock fellating a cucumber in the chilled vegetable isle but it only mentioned the best part of the story in passing- whilst she was carefully squeezing the produce to ascertain freshness, Will was rescuing by helicopter a 70 year old from Bangor. This leads me nicely on Fiddle's Dram with Day Trip to Bangor

You will never look at Bangor in the same light again. Just imagine the helicopters in Apocalypse Now playing this instead of Ride of the Valkyries.

Of course being in the military, Will can get away with the buck teeth and premature balding that generations of inbreeding can bring to the royalty if they're not careful by basically being a Sharp Dressed Man in his military dress uniforms. Did you see what I did there? I could work on radio. The segue was worthy of Mike Reed at his best. Or maybe Dave Lee Travis. Who knows but it's over to ZZ Top for Sharp Dressed Man.

Mind you Will has done more than brush his teeth and look dashing. Oh yes. And Kate's not stranger to his wily charms either. Hence the imminent arrival of the next in line but several to the throne of this fair isle. And what better way to celebrate that than Mike Reed and DLT (my God I am some sort of continuity genius) on TOTP introducing Squeeze and Up the Junction.

Naturally the royal sprog will have a bit more cash sloshing around than that, but the choice was Squeeze or Spinal Tap's unfinished romantic ballad, Lick my Love Pump and since it was unfinished, Squeeze won through.

I strongly believe in lycra on men with long hair. Let me contextualise that with my love of hard rock and heavy metal. If it was good enough for Eddie van Halen (who was lucky enough to join a band called Van Halen- talk about coincidences!), then it's good enough for me. And bringing all the best excesses of shouty rock and heavy metal back into the popular mainstream (with the exception possibly of the Satanism) a whole ten years ago now, were the Darkness and I Believe in a Thing Called Love

I'm not one of these sort of people who would cynically include something like Goldigger (and probably the Glee soundtrack version at that) in here on the presupposition that Kate was raised with the sole target of being unleashed on some posh toff at university. I don't think her sole aim in studying at St Andrews was to bag a prince and marry him. Heck they even broke up briefly for what must have been the WORST PERIOD OF HER LIFE EVER.

Finally then, I'm going to get excessively lovey dovey and include a track I've mentioned on the blog before, it's Two Step by the Dave Matthews Band. Some say it's secretly a song about Noah, his drinking habit and his subsequent hobbies of boat building and animal collecting/breeding but I like to think of it as a rhapsody to being in love with someone.

If you enjoyed my post you can join in because Panasonic UK are running a little blogging competition where if you publish your top 5 Royal Wedding themed songs and tweet them to @PanasonicUKPR with #PanasonicNESeries by midnight on Sunday 21 st April 2013 you stand a chance of winning a Panasonic NE Series. This is my entry, although none of the songs were written by me however I might wish it.

*You know, games of Scrabble, brisk walks, long evenings in the smoking room whilst the women folk were in the Ladies Parlour.

Fossil hunting

2013-04-17T10:21:00.001+01:00

When we go on holiday to Lyme Regis we often spend hours searching the beach at Charmouth for fossils- mostly ammonites, belamites and crinoids but this year on a long weekend in Norfolk, we decided to try our luck at Hunstanton. Cue the boy and his rock hammer attempting to bring the cliff down...

5 family-friendly Spanish festivals

2013-04-16T16:56:00.001+01:00

Spain has always been famous for its deep passions, glorious cities and of course its wonderful ‘fiestas’ - you could, in fact spend a whole year travelling throughout the country, marking your progress with these colourful local celebrations.

Jerez – Flamenco Festival
You could start your journey through Spain in Jerez, where you can hire a car and travel the short journey from the airport to this fabled Andalucian city. Those who want to start their year with a bang should visit the city’s Flamenco Festival. The hauntingly beautiful music accompanied by the syncopated foot tapping of the dancers is awe-inspiring, and easily beats a night of ‘Strictly Come Dancing’. The two week long celebrations last from late February to early March - children (usually) love all the drama of the dancing, and Mum and Dad may well enjoy a schooner of sherry to wash down their ‘tapas.’

Valencia – Las Fallas
People of all ages flock to this very busy festival that celebrates the patron saint of carpentry, St Joseph. For five days in March the city makes way for noise, bonfires and fireworks. Watch out for the enormous figurines that are constructed in the neighbourhoods of the city, only to be ceremonially burned on the 19th of March in the ‘Nit de Foc.’

Children are encouraged to join in the fun and special tableaux are constructed for these younger members of the crowd. The noise of the fireworks and bonfires on the final day is ear-shattering, but at least you’ll feel that you’ve put winter to rest in fiery style.

Madrid – San Isidro

If you want to see the Spaniards dressed up in their regional costumes then you should head to Madrid on the 15th May and join in with the festivities celebrating the capital’s patron saint. This day also marks the start of the bullfighting season, though if that’s not your thing you can attend the festival and just become absorbed in the local music, the organ grinders, the beautiful folk costumes - and introduce your kids to the wonders of the ‘Cocido Madrileno’, a wonderfully tasty stew.

Bunol – La Tomatina

During the last Wednesday of August you will be encouraged to positively wallow in an orgy of tomato throwing at this festival. Your kids will think you’ve gone completely mad, but who cares? This little town is situated close to Valencia, though if you’re intending to stay overnight in Bunol you should try and book in advance because hotels fill up fast. The exciting highlight of the ‘fiesta’ - getting up close and personal with the tomatoes - only lasts from 12.00 to 13.00, and you should take some clean clothes to change into afterwards.

Barcelona – Festes de la Merce

This Catalonian city never seems to need an excuse for a party; it revels in its constantly vibrant atmosphere, and the 22nd September Festival or the ‘Festes de la Merce’ is the city’s major annual celebration. In common with many Spanish public events there is a lot of noise, but you can also go and watch the Parade of the Giants or even take a look at an extraordinary a human pyramid.

It's Charlie Chaplin's birthday!

2013-04-16T07:38:00.000+01:00

tribute to Chaplin

As well as being a film star in his own right, Chaplin was one of the four founders of United Artists. Bet you never knew that. My personal favourite film of his was 1925's Gold Rush.

The one that go away

2013-04-15T09:00:00.001+01:00

It was a birthday last week. Scrub that, it was THE Birthday (capitalised because it's become a proper noun in our house), the boy's 6th in fact. We were in no danger of missing it because we've had a daily countdown since Fifi's in mid January. Along the way, I've managed to reduce him to tears a few times by pretending the TARDIS & action figures we've bought him were for someone else. In his heart of hearts he knew I was joking but the fear that I wasn't was enough to completely throw him.

As I've mentioned before, the boy is a huge (new) Doctor Who fan, up to the point he has actually made a shrine with all his DW stuff in it. He's not a great player with toys generally but with something like Doctor Who that's story driven, he's had great fun with his plastic TARDIS, Amy, Doctor, Daleks and Cybermen. All of which were on the sale shelf in Forbidden Planet, which happened to have a life size TARDIS model too.

We picked him up another couple of bits and bobs too because it's always nice to have some variety, although his current obsession with Doctor Who brooked no other playthings. Unfortunately, one of the things I ordered on the spur of the moment didn't arrive in time- it's now at my desk at work, delivered during our short break to Norfolk.

So the question is, is it the toy that got away and can I justify keeping it for myself....?

Soundtrack to my life- the ones that didn't make it...

2013-04-09T15:25:00.001+01:00

I filled in Typecast's Soundtrack to my Life feature form back at the start of November but it turns out it's very popular (and I'm not. Either that or I made such an obscure selection of tunes, it's proving difficult to source them), since here we are in mid April and it's not featured yet. But the problem is five isn't enough, it can never be enough. I like more genres of music than that, let alone favourite songs. I've had this in draft for over a third of a year, so it's high time to publish the accompanying post with some alternatives, despite the original not seeing the light of day. So here are a few more for you...

Solsbury Hill- Peter Gabriel

I'm not a huge Gabriel fan, despite being into prog, but I do like Solsbury Hill. It doesn't remind me of anything in particular; perhaps looking at long barrows around stone henge in the days before we had kids (even though that's an entirely different hill).

Gin Soaked Boy- Divine Comedy

Wifey is a huge Divine Comedy fan, and they've grown on me in the last ten years. Each song tells a story, which is nice and the lyrics are so clever that they always make me chuckle. Gin Soaked Boy is one of the least story-like songs you'll find on a Divine Comedy album but it's so cleverly hung together.

Street Spirit/Fade Out- Radiohead

Another miserable song. I do like my audio misery don't I? There are only two Radiohead albums I like: the Bends &; Kid A. Since I can't really have the entirety of Kid A as a choice, I'll have this. I'll always associate this song with walking home in the pissing rain. It's that kind of song.

Mother- Pink Floyd

There are so so many Pink Floyd tracks I could pick- I'm a sucker for Dave Gilmour's guitar playing. Mother is off the 100m+ selling double album The Wall. Another depressing track. I got the album for Christmas when I was in to pop and didn't listen to it for a very long time. Big mistake though. Also fits perfectly on a C90 tape, one CD on each side, which I found useful when I wanted to wander around with my Walkman, wallowing in teenage misery and introspection.

Sea of Heartbreak- Don Gibson

Bit of a leftfield choice but it was either this or Chicory Tips Son of my Father. The ASH bar on campus at Lancaster university in the early 90's had a pool table, an old fashioned vinyl jukebox and hardly any punters. It was primarily meant for the post grads who were teaching undergrads but the all hung out in the other bars, trying to pull 1st years. The jukebox did random play but always seemed to come up with this country classic.

You'll have to wait to see what the top 5 I actually chose are. I certainly can't remember as I didn't keep a list of them!

RIP Maggie, the high horse is crowded today

2013-04-08T21:54:00.003+01:00

Ethnic liveries? No thank you

Being a social media whore, I found out about Thatcher's death in a slightly unconventional manner: basically a lot of people were tweeting that they were off for a twitter break because they found all the comments and jokes about Thatcher's death distasteful and that she was someone's Mum and someone's daughter. I have to admit, I read perhaps ten comments from people being offended to each comment that was actually offensive. Perhaps if we spent less time getting offended on other peoples behalf and more time pro-actively seeking to right societies wrongs, the world would be a better place.

In fact, as Rob Manuel put on Twitter:

My condolences to Thatcher's relatives, Mark the arms dealer and Carol who seems quite jolly but there was that gollywog incident.

To be fair, Rob also said:

We'll all remember where we were the day Thatcher died: sitting on Twitter trying to make nasty comments just amusing enough to get a RT.

And to my mind this sums it up rather nicely. Whilst I agree with RichTWarms when he says,

...Of course you can analyse someone's record later, but on the day of someone's death it is just nasty.

I do think there is a form of basic honesty in holding the opinion of Thatcher that you had before her death in the aftermath of it but perhaps how vigorously you expound it will depend on either how much she personally affected you and your ideology or how much of a troll you are. It's certainly a lot more honest than getting het up and morally outraged on behalf of her family; they'll be all too aware of the variety of public opinion and I doubt they'll give two figs over it. I don't think there is a figure in post war politics who has polarised opinion as much as Maggie did. There is an interesting piece on the Guardian Comment is Free section about this very subject:

There's something distinctively creepy - in a Roman sort of way - about this mandated ritual that our political leaders must be heralded and consecrated as saints upon death. This is accomplished by this baseless moral precept that it is gauche or worse to balance the gushing praise for them upon death with valid criticisms. There is absolutely nothing wrong with loathing Margaret Thatcher or any other person with political influence and power based upon perceived bad acts, and that doesn't change simply because they die.

Whilst I lived through the 80's, I was rather young to form an opinion on the policies Thatcher enacted at the time. Subsequently though I did meet a retired Northern railway worker (a good friends' father) who bitterly opposed her policies and my Dad, who spent 40 years working in local government and opposed what she did to local government tooth and nail. He wasn't particularly enamoured with interest rates hitting 17% in the early 80's or VAT almost doubling from 8% to 15% either.

Then there are the questions surrounding her support for some rather unsavoury dictators like Saddam Hussein, Pinochet and Suharto, who's occupation of East Timor saw at least 100,000 people die. And that's before you get into the concepts of flawed privatisation, the treatment of trade unions, the miners, the Hillsborough victims and the North of England particularly that no doubt will be swept under the carpet for the next week or so.

But for me, there are two incidents that will forever remind me of Thatcher. Firstly the time she covered the tailfins for BA's ethnic liveried plane models with a hankie because the Union Jack had been replaced and secondly, this rather splendid quote I've paraphrased somewhat: "Call me LADY Thatcher. Baroness is a German title."

Review: LEGO City Undercover Nintendo Wii U

2013-04-07T20:54:00.000+01:00

If you've ever played a proper blockbuster videogame, you've probably heard of the Grand Theft Auto series. They're an open world series of games, where you can roam around a whole city, interacting with other characters, stealing cars and stuff.

It's about to go in...

LEGO City Undercover is a sort of kid friendly LEGO version of Grand Theft Auto and it's completely ace. It's an open world adventure, with main mission stories and many many side missions and distractions to boot. You can actually hijack other cars (in your official role as a maverick cop of course) and in an example of the sort of comic genius that riddles the game, we hijacked a tram and failed to get where we wanted to go because the tracks went the other way! Even when you hijack a normal car, you can knock it about until bits of LEGO fall off. You can even see the engine pistons working when the bonnet gets knocked off.

Focused on the hilarious cut scenes

LEGO City Undercover is a Wii U exclusive. If you've not come across the Nintendo Wii U, it's a bit of a revelation. It's not enormously bigger than the Wii but it is a lot more powerful, it can easily match the Xbox 360 and PS3 in terms of graphics and comes with a very innovative controller (well Nintendo are the masters of innovative new controllers after all), that has a full sized interactive touchscreen built in. It's use varies from game to game but in Lego City Undercover, it works as a map when you're outside (and inside) as well as allowing you to do all sorts of other neat tricks. It has some other fab features built in, like a TV remote control and something called "remote play", whereby you can take your game with you from the telly on to the controller- ideal of some parent centric television show is on but the kids still want to play (and consoles shouldn't be relegated to the bedroom because you need to monitor what kids are up to).

The story follows Chase McCain, a MAVERICK cop who's called back to LEGO City to track down his nemesis, Rex Fury, who's escaped from prison and gone on a crime spree. The main thrust of the story is tracking down Rex and his cronies but there is so so much to do besides this. Collecting Super Bricks, for example, allows you to build stuff like helicopter landing pads or funfair rides, which become integral (believe it or not!) to the main story.

The Boy quickly got an audience

The game, unlike a lot of the other LEGO franchise games, is single player only, mainly because of the heavily integrated use of the gamepad. The Wii U can only have one gamepad per console, so it stands to reason if the controller is so integrated into the experience, that the game is going to be single player only.

There are so many things to love about LEGO City Undercover. From the constant chitter chatter from non player characters, which is often hilarious (how many more arrests does the cop by the station need to make to win waffle iron?), to the neat touches with the destructible cars and buildings, all these little things add to what is already a pretty fun game. It's easy enough for the boy to pick up and play (and since there are no guns involved in the game, we're happy to to let him play it) but has the depth for grown ups to enjoy. There are so many film references to pick up on, you'll soon lose track- I spotted Goodfella's, Die Hard and The Matrix for starters. There is plenty to keep your interest for a long time and you will end up playing it for a long time without really noticing how long you've spent playing it, which is always the marker of a good game.

There are loads of big games in the pipeline and quite a few good titles out already but LEGO City Undercover is a Wii U exclusive, as I've mentioned and shows of the console to it's best. If you've ever played any of the other LEGO games- Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings or the many excellent Star Wars games, you'll know the graphical style already but what LEGO City Undercover adds is the open world element that lets you do missions and explore an interactive world that wasn't part of the remit of the earlier games. If you have a Wii U, this is the MUST HAVE game on the system.

Game and console were provided by Nintendo for review purposes. Hours and hours of time were provided by me and the boy.