How are you choosing your destinations in the first place? There just be a reason you're traveling to these places, especially as you state it's specifically for tourism. Wouldn't it make sense to do/see the things that attracted you there in the first place?
Archived version: https://archive.ph/HSmIX
‘I wanted to be No 1. But a certain JK Rowling came along’: Jacqueline Wilson on rivalry, censorship – and love
Interview by Simon Hattenstone
Raised by a ‘scary’ father and a ‘terrible snob’ of a mother, the Tracy Beaker author has always understood the loneliness that marks so many young lives. But at 77, she’s never been happier.
Archived version: https://archive.ph/q7BZB
For five long years, the ZX Spectrum magazine Crash tried to get an interview with the people behind Ultimate Play the Game, which had become one of the UK’s premier games developers. They heard nothing until, one day early in 1988, Crash got a phone call. It was them. And they wanted to talk.
Ultimate Play the Game, a trading name of Ashby Computers and Graphics, began in 1982, owned by one family: the Stampers – brothers Chris and Tim, and Tim’s future wife Carole Ward, alongside programmer John Lathbury. Even at this stage, the Stampers were supremely confident in their own abilities, honed during the development of several arcade games. “We chose [this] company’s name because we felt it was representative of our products: the ultimate games,” Tim Stamper declared in an August issue of Home Computing Weekly. The brothers designed and created games while Carole juggled administrative roles and contributed art to several of its first hits. Those early titles included Jetpac, the home computer game that thrust the company into the big time, and turns 40 years old this year.
Initially, Ultimate focused on the UK’s predominant home computer, the ZX Spectrum, despite reservations about its technical constraints. “When the Spectrum came out, we thought ‘what a piece of garbage,’” proclaimed Tim Stamper in his 1988 interview for Crash. But the Sinclair computer grew on the brothers and its ubiquity (at least in the UK) led them to appreciate the commercial opportunities. Having begun their games-development careers creating arcade games in a minimal UK market, the brothers turned their talents towards this home computer.
For some of Ultimate’s longest-standing fans, their first game remains their best. Coded in under 16K, Jetpac was by necessity an uncomplicated game, but it perfectly replicated arcade-style thrills at home. Its hero – Jetman, who would become an unofficial Ultimate mascot – scoots from platform to platform, picking up pieces of his rocket before fuelling it up and heading upwards to the next alien-infested rock. “What puts it to No 1 in this review is the fantastic quality of the graphics,” noted ZX Computing magazine at the time. “But the thing that really caught my eye was the incredible smoothness of it all.”
Buoyed by the astonishing success of Jetpac, the Stampers created several more impressive hits for the Spectrum. Pssst, Cookie and the driving game Tranz Am all appeared in the summer of 1983, before Ultimate left the 16K Spectrum behind, moving to the heady heights of the 48K model. Lunar Jetman was released in the autumn of 1983 to massive praise throughout the dedicated Spectrum press. “Well, what can you say? Marvellous seems inadequate,” gushed one Crash reviewer.
Lunar Jetman was another smash, and the Stampers quickly followed it up with the brilliant adventure game Atic Atac. At the same time, with incredible foresight, the brothers were already investigating a new console emerging from Japan, “the Nintendo”. Ultimate’s contacts in the Japanese arcade industry had led them to this new, dedicated games machine. “It had colossal potential,” said Tim in the Crash interview. “We looked at this, and we looked at the Spectrum – and the Spectrum was hot stuff – but this was incredible.”
Tim and Chris spent several months learning all about what would soon become the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), while simultaneously working on a game that would redefine the ZX Spectrum and create a new genre. With six high quality games under its belt in less than a year, Ultimate had established itself as one of the UK’s finest games publishers. Incredibly, it was about to get even better.
In 1984 Ultimate released Sabre Wulf, the first adventure for a new hero, Sabreman – quickly followed by his second. Then there was Knight Lore. Presented in trademarked “Filmation”, the isometric graphics – a thing of cartoon beauty on such limited technology – predictably wowed reviewers, gamers and programmers alike. “I was handing over Match Day to Ocean when [Ocean boss] David Ward said I needed to look at this game they were distributing,” says Jon Ritman, the coder behind Spectrum isometric classics Batman and Head Over Heels. “I loaded it up and was just blown away. It was like a Disney film you could play … I didn’t even understand how they made the graphics overlay each other … cleanly as well, not in straight lines, but diagonals. It was just great.”
Like many of his peers, Ritman soon worked out and even improved upon the Knight Lore engine, so similar games proliferated, particularly on the Spectrum. The Stampers had an inkling this would happen: Knight Lore, and a considerable portion of its follow-up, Alien 8, were already completed when the company released Sabre Wulf. All these games received glowing reviews, and with its output now retailing at a pocket-money-busting £9.95 (compared to the average of £6-8 at the time), Ultimate was at its peak. So naturally, in 1985, the Stamper brothers decided it was time to bail out of the home computer market. Rival software publisher US Gold purchased the Ultimate brand, and the Stampers reinvented their company as the console-focused Rare.
It was the biggest switch in UK gaming history: the country’s most critically and commercially successful programmers (at least on the ZX Spectrum – things weren’t quite so rosy for Ultimate on the Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC) had suddenly left behind the computer that had made them. Ultimate’s entire home computer catalogue appeared to be merely a calling card for bigger things. “It was sort of an introduction process,” said Chris in 1988. “We had to show Nintendo that we had the capability before they could give us the rights to go ahead and produce for their system.” After the video game crash in the US, the Stampers saw that the market was returning, and predicted that the Nintendo Entertainment System would be at the forefront of this revival. “We knew a market was going to boom in Japan and America, and we set up Rare to handle that,” noted Tim in Crash.
By 1988, Rare had released several NES games including the downhill skiing simulation Slalom, and action platform game Wizards & Warriors. The company was rapidly approaching 20 employees, one of whom was Ritman, the creator of one of the most revered homages to Knight Lore, Head Over Heels.
“They were very mysterious, mainly because they were so busy and didn’t have the time,” says Ritman. “They had decided to start this new company [and] there was this huge interview in Crash. So I called the magazine, got a phone number and gave them a ring!” Supremely confident, it never occurred to Ritman that Rare might not be interested in his talents. “Fortunately, they’d played my games. Years later, Tim told me he’d never seen someone so certain they would be offered work!”
Rare established a foothold in Japan via the US and its sister company, Rare Coin-it. After it reverse-engineered the console, Nintendo, impressed by its technical prowess, made Rare its first western developer.
And once established, the Stampers continued with their prolific output, focusing once again on a single platform.
By the early 90s, Rare had published more than 30 games for the NES. And then the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle-inspired Battletoads became its conduit into Nintendo’s next-generation console, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES). By now, so confident was Nintendo in its premier western partner it even entrusted the developer with one of its own properties, Donkey Kong. “[Shigeru Miyamoto] was admirably hands-off, actually,” recalled Rare’s Gregg Mayles in Retro Gamer magazine. “I mean, he handed one of his characters over to us, and we changed the look of it completely.”
Arcade beat-’em-up Killer Instinct followed, together with two further Donkey Kong Country games. But it would be with Nintendo’s next console that Rare would achieve its highest fame. Renowned today as one of the best movie licence video games of all time, GoldenEye 007 energised FPS gaming on consoles and, along with the underrated Blast Corps and manic Banjo-Kazooie, cemented Rare’s position in the top tier of UK games developers.
Then the 00s brought a new era of consoles, and Rare struggled to hit the heights of the previous decade. Microsoft purchased the developer in 2002, and the Stampers departed in 2007. The family atmosphere of the 90s, when Chris and Tim sat in on interviews and left their talented developers to work unhindered, offering occasional golden nuggets of advice, was long gone. “Microsoft and Rare was a bad marriage from the beginning,” Rare’s Martin Hollis told Eurogamer in 2012. “The groom was rich. The bride was beautiful. But they wanted to make different games, and they wanted to make them in different ways.”
Like most enduring marriages, the couple found a way to manage the relationship. The Stampers may be gone but Rare continues today, tasting success again with a popular online pirate game, Sea of Thieves. Despite its travails, Rare is still a hotbed of talent. “With all the talent in the UK and with all those thousands of people writing games, I feel it should be UK companies producing the No 1 arcade games,” signed off Chris Stamper in that 1988 Crash magazine interview. “And then everyone in the world following that – because Britain’s got the best talent, without a doubt.”
Archived version: https://archive.ph/q7BZB
For five long years, the ZX Spectrum magazine Crash tried to get an interview with the people behind Ultimate Play the Game, which had become one of the UK’s premier games developers. They heard nothing until, one day early in 1988, Crash got a phone call. It was them. And they wanted to talk.
Ultimate Play the Game, a trading name of Ashby Computers and Graphics, began in 1982, owned by one family: the Stampers – brothers Chris and Tim, and Tim’s future wife Carole Ward, alongside programmer John Lathbury. Even at this stage, the Stampers were supremely confident in their own abilities, honed during the development of several arcade games. “We chose [this] company’s name because we felt it was representative of our products: the ultimate games,” Tim Stamper declared in an August issue of Home Computing Weekly. The brothers designed and created games while Carole juggled administrative roles and contributed art to several of its first hits. Those early titles included Jetpac, the home computer game that thrust the company into the big time, and turns 40 years old this year.
Initially, Ultimate focused on the UK’s predominant home computer, the ZX Spectrum, despite reservations about its technical constraints. “When the Spectrum came out, we thought ‘what a piece of garbage,’” proclaimed Tim Stamper in his 1988 interview for Crash. But the Sinclair computer grew on the brothers and its ubiquity (at least in the UK) led them to appreciate the commercial opportunities. Having begun their games-development careers creating arcade games in a minimal UK market, the brothers turned their talents towards this home computer.
For some of Ultimate’s longest-standing fans, their first game remains their best. Coded in under 16K, Jetpac was by necessity an uncomplicated game, but it perfectly replicated arcade-style thrills at home. Its hero – Jetman, who would become an unofficial Ultimate mascot – scoots from platform to platform, picking up pieces of his rocket before fuelling it up and heading upwards to the next alien-infested rock. “What puts it to No 1 in this review is the fantastic quality of the graphics,” noted ZX Computing magazine at the time. “But the thing that really caught my eye was the incredible smoothness of it all.”
Buoyed by the astonishing success of Jetpac, the Stampers created several more impressive hits for the Spectrum. Pssst, Cookie and the driving game Tranz Am all appeared in the summer of 1983, before Ultimate left the 16K Spectrum behind, moving to the heady heights of the 48K model. Lunar Jetman was released in the autumn of 1983 to massive praise throughout the dedicated Spectrum press. “Well, what can you say? Marvellous seems inadequate,” gushed one Crash reviewer.
Lunar Jetman was another smash, and the Stampers quickly followed it up with the brilliant adventure game Atic Atac. At the same time, with incredible foresight, the brothers were already investigating a new console emerging from Japan, “the Nintendo”. Ultimate’s contacts in the Japanese arcade industry had led them to this new, dedicated games machine. “It had colossal potential,” said Tim in the Crash interview. “We looked at this, and we looked at the Spectrum – and the Spectrum was hot stuff – but this was incredible.”
Tim and Chris spent several months learning all about what would soon become the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), while simultaneously working on a game that would redefine the ZX Spectrum and create a new genre. With six high quality games under its belt in less than a year, Ultimate had established itself as one of the UK’s finest games publishers. Incredibly, it was about to get even better.
In 1984 Ultimate released Sabre Wulf, the first adventure for a new hero, Sabreman – quickly followed by his second. Then there was Knight Lore. Presented in trademarked “Filmation”, the isometric graphics – a thing of cartoon beauty on such limited technology – predictably wowed reviewers, gamers and programmers alike. “I was handing over Match Day to Ocean when [Ocean boss] David Ward said I needed to look at this game they were distributing,” says Jon Ritman, the coder behind Spectrum isometric classics Batman and Head Over Heels. “I loaded it up and was just blown away. It was like a Disney film you could play … I didn’t even understand how they made the graphics overlay each other … cleanly as well, not in straight lines, but diagonals. It was just great.”
Like many of his peers, Ritman soon worked out and even improved upon the Knight Lore engine, so similar games proliferated, particularly on the Spectrum. The Stampers had an inkling this would happen: Knight Lore, and a considerable portion of its follow-up, Alien 8, were already completed when the company released Sabre Wulf. All these games received glowing reviews, and with its output now retailing at a pocket-money-busting £9.95 (compared to the average of £6-8 at the time), Ultimate was at its peak. So naturally, in 1985, the Stamper brothers decided it was time to bail out of the home computer market. Rival software publisher US Gold purchased the Ultimate brand, and the Stampers reinvented their company as the console-focused Rare.
It was the biggest switch in UK gaming history: the country’s most critically and commercially successful programmers (at least on the ZX Spectrum – things weren’t quite so rosy for Ultimate on the Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC) had suddenly left behind the computer that had made them. Ultimate’s entire home computer catalogue appeared to be merely a calling card for bigger things. “It was sort of an introduction process,” said Chris in 1988. “We had to show Nintendo that we had the capability before they could give us the rights to go ahead and produce for their system.” After the video game crash in the US, the Stampers saw that the market was returning, and predicted that the Nintendo Entertainment System would be at the forefront of this revival. “We knew a market was going to boom in Japan and America, and we set up Rare to handle that,” noted Tim in Crash.
By 1988, Rare had released several NES games including the downhill skiing simulation Slalom, and action platform game Wizards & Warriors. The company was rapidly approaching 20 employees, one of whom was Ritman, the creator of one of the most revered homages to Knight Lore, Head Over Heels.
“They were very mysterious, mainly because they were so busy and didn’t have the time,” says Ritman. “They had decided to start this new company [and] there was this huge interview in Crash. So I called the magazine, got a phone number and gave them a ring!” Supremely confident, it never occurred to Ritman that Rare might not be interested in his talents. “Fortunately, they’d played my games. Years later, Tim told me he’d never seen someone so certain they would be offered work!”
Rare established a foothold in Japan via the US and its sister company, Rare Coin-it. After it reverse-engineered the console, Nintendo, impressed by its technical prowess, made Rare its first western developer.
And once established, the Stampers continued with their prolific output, focusing once again on a single platform.
By the early 90s, Rare had published more than 30 games for the NES. And then the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle-inspired Battletoads became its conduit into Nintendo’s next-generation console, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES). By now, so confident was Nintendo in its premier western partner it even entrusted the developer with one of its own properties, Donkey Kong. “[Shigeru Miyamoto] was admirably hands-off, actually,” recalled Rare’s Gregg Mayles in Retro Gamer magazine. “I mean, he handed one of his characters over to us, and we changed the look of it completely.”
Arcade beat-’em-up Killer Instinct followed, together with two further Donkey Kong Country games. But it would be with Nintendo’s next console that Rare would achieve its highest fame. Renowned today as one of the best movie licence video games of all time, GoldenEye 007 energised FPS gaming on consoles and, along with the underrated Blast Corps and manic Banjo-Kazooie, cemented Rare’s position in the top tier of UK games developers.
Then the 00s brought a new era of consoles, and Rare struggled to hit the heights of the previous decade. Microsoft purchased the developer in 2002, and the Stampers departed in 2007. The family atmosphere of the 90s, when Chris and Tim sat in on interviews and left their talented developers to work unhindered, offering occasional golden nuggets of advice, was long gone. “Microsoft and Rare was a bad marriage from the beginning,” Rare’s Martin Hollis told Eurogamer in 2012. “The groom was rich. The bride was beautiful. But they wanted to make different games, and they wanted to make them in different ways.”
Like most enduring marriages, the couple found a way to manage the relationship. The Stampers may be gone but Rare continues today, tasting success again with a popular online pirate game, Sea of Thieves. Despite its travails, Rare is still a hotbed of talent. “With all the talent in the UK and with all those thousands of people writing games, I feel it should be UK companies producing the No 1 arcade games,” signed off Chris Stamper in that 1988 Crash magazine interview. “And then everyone in the world following that – because Britain’s got the best talent, without a doubt.”
Archived version: https://archive.ph/q7BZB
For five long years, the ZX Spectrum magazine Crash tried to get an interview with the people behind Ultimate Play the Game, which had become one of the UK’s premier games developers. They heard nothing until, one day early in 1988, Crash got a phone call. It was them. And they wanted to talk.
Ultimate Play the Game, a trading name of Ashby Computers and Graphics, began in 1982, owned by one family: the Stampers – brothers Chris and Tim, and Tim’s future wife Carole Ward, alongside programmer John Lathbury. Even at this stage, the Stampers were supremely confident in their own abilities, honed during the development of several arcade games. “We chose [this] company’s name because we felt it was representative of our products: the ultimate games,” Tim Stamper declared in an August issue of Home Computing Weekly. The brothers designed and created games while Carole juggled administrative roles and contributed art to several of its first hits. Those early titles included Jetpac, the home computer game that thrust the company into the big time, and turns 40 years old this year.
Initially, Ultimate focused on the UK’s predominant home computer, the ZX Spectrum, despite reservations about its technical constraints. “When the Spectrum came out, we thought ‘what a piece of garbage,’” proclaimed Tim Stamper in his 1988 interview for Crash. But the Sinclair computer grew on the brothers and its ubiquity (at least in the UK) led them to appreciate the commercial opportunities. Having begun their games-development careers creating arcade games in a minimal UK market, the brothers turned their talents towards this home computer.
For some of Ultimate’s longest-standing fans, their first game remains their best. Coded in under 16K, Jetpac was by necessity an uncomplicated game, but it perfectly replicated arcade-style thrills at home. Its hero – Jetman, who would become an unofficial Ultimate mascot – scoots from platform to platform, picking up pieces of his rocket before fuelling it up and heading upwards to the next alien-infested rock. “What puts it to No 1 in this review is the fantastic quality of the graphics,” noted ZX Computing magazine at the time. “But the thing that really caught my eye was the incredible smoothness of it all.”
Buoyed by the astonishing success of Jetpac, the Stampers created several more impressive hits for the Spectrum. Pssst, Cookie and the driving game Tranz Am all appeared in the summer of 1983, before Ultimate left the 16K Spectrum behind, moving to the heady heights of the 48K model. Lunar Jetman was released in the autumn of 1983 to massive praise throughout the dedicated Spectrum press. “Well, what can you say? Marvellous seems inadequate,” gushed one Crash reviewer.
Lunar Jetman was another smash, and the Stampers quickly followed it up with the brilliant adventure game Atic Atac. At the same time, with incredible foresight, the brothers were already investigating a new console emerging from Japan, “the Nintendo”. Ultimate’s contacts in the Japanese arcade industry had led them to this new, dedicated games machine. “It had colossal potential,” said Tim in the Crash interview. “We looked at this, and we looked at the Spectrum – and the Spectrum was hot stuff – but this was incredible.”
Tim and Chris spent several months learning all about what would soon become the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), while simultaneously working on a game that would redefine the ZX Spectrum and create a new genre. With six high quality games under its belt in less than a year, Ultimate had established itself as one of the UK’s finest games publishers. Incredibly, it was about to get even better.
In 1984 Ultimate released Sabre Wulf, the first adventure for a new hero, Sabreman – quickly followed by his second. Then there was Knight Lore. Presented in trademarked “Filmation”, the isometric graphics – a thing of cartoon beauty on such limited technology – predictably wowed reviewers, gamers and programmers alike. “I was handing over Match Day to Ocean when [Ocean boss] David Ward said I needed to look at this game they were distributing,” says Jon Ritman, the coder behind Spectrum isometric classics Batman and Head Over Heels. “I loaded it up and was just blown away. It was like a Disney film you could play … I didn’t even understand how they made the graphics overlay each other … cleanly as well, not in straight lines, but diagonals. It was just great.”
Like many of his peers, Ritman soon worked out and even improved upon the Knight Lore engine, so similar games proliferated, particularly on the Spectrum. The Stampers had an inkling this would happen: Knight Lore, and a considerable portion of its follow-up, Alien 8, were already completed when the company released Sabre Wulf. All these games received glowing reviews, and with its output now retailing at a pocket-money-busting £9.95 (compared to the average of £6-8 at the time), Ultimate was at its peak. So naturally, in 1985, the Stamper brothers decided it was time to bail out of the home computer market. Rival software publisher US Gold purchased the Ultimate brand, and the Stampers reinvented their company as the console-focused Rare.
It was the biggest switch in UK gaming history: the country’s most critically and commercially successful programmers (at least on the ZX Spectrum – things weren’t quite so rosy for Ultimate on the Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC) had suddenly left behind the computer that had made them. Ultimate’s entire home computer catalogue appeared to be merely a calling card for bigger things. “It was sort of an introduction process,” said Chris in 1988. “We had to show Nintendo that we had the capability before they could give us the rights to go ahead and produce for their system.” After the video game crash in the US, the Stampers saw that the market was returning, and predicted that the Nintendo Entertainment System would be at the forefront of this revival. “We knew a market was going to boom in Japan and America, and we set up Rare to handle that,” noted Tim in Crash.
By 1988, Rare had released several NES games including the downhill skiing simulation Slalom, and action platform game Wizards & Warriors. The company was rapidly approaching 20 employees, one of whom was Ritman, the creator of one of the most revered homages to Knight Lore, Head Over Heels.
“They were very mysterious, mainly because they were so busy and didn’t have the time,” says Ritman. “They had decided to start this new company [and] there was this huge interview in Crash. So I called the magazine, got a phone number and gave them a ring!” Supremely confident, it never occurred to Ritman that Rare might not be interested in his talents. “Fortunately, they’d played my games. Years later, Tim told me he’d never seen someone so certain they would be offered work!”
Rare established a foothold in Japan via the US and its sister company, Rare Coin-it. After it reverse-engineered the console, Nintendo, impressed by its technical prowess, made Rare its first western developer.
And once established, the Stampers continued with their prolific output, focusing once again on a single platform.
By the early 90s, Rare had published more than 30 games for the NES. And then the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle-inspired Battletoads became its conduit into Nintendo’s next-generation console, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES). By now, so confident was Nintendo in its premier western partner it even entrusted the developer with one of its own properties, Donkey Kong. “[Shigeru Miyamoto] was admirably hands-off, actually,” recalled Rare’s Gregg Mayles in Retro Gamer magazine. “I mean, he handed one of his characters over to us, and we changed the look of it completely.”
Arcade beat-’em-up Killer Instinct followed, together with two further Donkey Kong Country games. But it would be with Nintendo’s next console that Rare would achieve its highest fame. Renowned today as one of the best movie licence video games of all time, GoldenEye 007 energised FPS gaming on consoles and, along with the underrated Blast Corps and manic Banjo-Kazooie, cemented Rare’s position in the top tier of UK games developers.
Then the 00s brought a new era of consoles, and Rare struggled to hit the heights of the previous decade. Microsoft purchased the developer in 2002, and the Stampers departed in 2007. The family atmosphere of the 90s, when Chris and Tim sat in on interviews and left their talented developers to work unhindered, offering occasional golden nuggets of advice, was long gone. “Microsoft and Rare was a bad marriage from the beginning,” Rare’s Martin Hollis told Eurogamer in 2012. “The groom was rich. The bride was beautiful. But they wanted to make different games, and they wanted to make them in different ways.”
Like most enduring marriages, the couple found a way to manage the relationship. The Stampers may be gone but Rare continues today, tasting success again with a popular online pirate game, Sea of Thieves. Despite its travails, Rare is still a hotbed of talent. “With all the talent in the UK and with all those thousands of people writing games, I feel it should be UK companies producing the No 1 arcade games,” signed off Chris Stamper in that 1988 Crash magazine interview. “And then everyone in the world following that – because Britain’s got the best talent, without a doubt.”
Archived version: https://archive.ph/q7BZB
For five long years, the ZX Spectrum magazine Crash tried to get an interview with the people behind Ultimate Play the Game, which had become one of the UK’s premier games developers. They heard nothing until, one day early in 1988, Crash got a phone call. It was them. And they wanted to talk.
Ultimate Play the Game, a trading name of Ashby Computers and Graphics, began in 1982, owned by one family: the Stampers – brothers Chris and Tim, and Tim’s future wife Carole Ward, alongside programmer John Lathbury. Even at this stage, the Stampers were supremely confident in their own abilities, honed during the development of several arcade games. “We chose [this] company’s name because we felt it was representative of our products: the ultimate games,” Tim Stamper declared in an August issue of Home Computing Weekly. The brothers designed and created games while Carole juggled administrative roles and contributed art to several of its first hits. Those early titles included Jetpac, the home computer game that thrust the company into the big time, and turns 40 years old this year.
Initially, Ultimate focused on the UK’s predominant home computer, the ZX Spectrum, despite reservations about its technical constraints. “When the Spectrum came out, we thought ‘what a piece of garbage,’” proclaimed Tim Stamper in his 1988 interview for Crash. But the Sinclair computer grew on the brothers and its ubiquity (at least in the UK) led them to appreciate the commercial opportunities. Having begun their games-development careers creating arcade games in a minimal UK market, the brothers turned their talents towards this home computer.
For some of Ultimate’s longest-standing fans, their first game remains their best. Coded in under 16K, Jetpac was by necessity an uncomplicated game, but it perfectly replicated arcade-style thrills at home. Its hero – Jetman, who would become an unofficial Ultimate mascot – scoots from platform to platform, picking up pieces of his rocket before fuelling it up and heading upwards to the next alien-infested rock. “What puts it to No 1 in this review is the fantastic quality of the graphics,” noted ZX Computing magazine at the time. “But the thing that really caught my eye was the incredible smoothness of it all.”
Buoyed by the astonishing success of Jetpac, the Stampers created several more impressive hits for the Spectrum. Pssst, Cookie and the driving game Tranz Am all appeared in the summer of 1983, before Ultimate left the 16K Spectrum behind, moving to the heady heights of the 48K model. Lunar Jetman was released in the autumn of 1983 to massive praise throughout the dedicated Spectrum press. “Well, what can you say? Marvellous seems inadequate,” gushed one Crash reviewer.
Lunar Jetman was another smash, and the Stampers quickly followed it up with the brilliant adventure game Atic Atac. At the same time, with incredible foresight, the brothers were already investigating a new console emerging from Japan, “the Nintendo”. Ultimate’s contacts in the Japanese arcade industry had led them to this new, dedicated games machine. “It had colossal potential,” said Tim in the Crash interview. “We looked at this, and we looked at the Spectrum – and the Spectrum was hot stuff – but this was incredible.”
Tim and Chris spent several months learning all about what would soon become the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), while simultaneously working on a game that would redefine the ZX Spectrum and create a new genre. With six high quality games under its belt in less than a year, Ultimate had established itself as one of the UK’s finest games publishers. Incredibly, it was about to get even better.
In 1984 Ultimate released Sabre Wulf, the first adventure for a new hero, Sabreman – quickly followed by his second. Then there was Knight Lore. Presented in trademarked “Filmation”, the isometric graphics – a thing of cartoon beauty on such limited technology – predictably wowed reviewers, gamers and programmers alike. “I was handing over Match Day to Ocean when [Ocean boss] David Ward said I needed to look at this game they were distributing,” says Jon Ritman, the coder behind Spectrum isometric classics Batman and Head Over Heels. “I loaded it up and was just blown away. It was like a Disney film you could play … I didn’t even understand how they made the graphics overlay each other … cleanly as well, not in straight lines, but diagonals. It was just great.”
Like many of his peers, Ritman soon worked out and even improved upon the Knight Lore engine, so similar games proliferated, particularly on the Spectrum. The Stampers had an inkling this would happen: Knight Lore, and a considerable portion of its follow-up, Alien 8, were already completed when the company released Sabre Wulf. All these games received glowing reviews, and with its output now retailing at a pocket-money-busting £9.95 (compared to the average of £6-8 at the time), Ultimate was at its peak. So naturally, in 1985, the Stamper brothers decided it was time to bail out of the home computer market. Rival software publisher US Gold purchased the Ultimate brand, and the Stampers reinvented their company as the console-focused Rare.
It was the biggest switch in UK gaming history: the country’s most critically and commercially successful programmers (at least on the ZX Spectrum – things weren’t quite so rosy for Ultimate on the Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC) had suddenly left behind the computer that had made them. Ultimate’s entire home computer catalogue appeared to be merely a calling card for bigger things. “It was sort of an introduction process,” said Chris in 1988. “We had to show Nintendo that we had the capability before they could give us the rights to go ahead and produce for their system.” After the video game crash in the US, the Stampers saw that the market was returning, and predicted that the Nintendo Entertainment System would be at the forefront of this revival. “We knew a market was going to boom in Japan and America, and we set up Rare to handle that,” noted Tim in Crash.
By 1988, Rare had released several NES games including the downhill skiing simulation Slalom, and action platform game Wizards & Warriors. The company was rapidly approaching 20 employees, one of whom was Ritman, the creator of one of the most revered homages to Knight Lore, Head Over Heels.
“They were very mysterious, mainly because they were so busy and didn’t have the time,” says Ritman. “They had decided to start this new company [and] there was this huge interview in Crash. So I called the magazine, got a phone number and gave them a ring!” Supremely confident, it never occurred to Ritman that Rare might not be interested in his talents. “Fortunately, they’d played my games. Years later, Tim told me he’d never seen someone so certain they would be offered work!”
Rare established a foothold in Japan via the US and its sister company, Rare Coin-it. After it reverse-engineered the console, Nintendo, impressed by its technical prowess, made Rare its first western developer.
And once established, the Stampers continued with their prolific output, focusing once again on a single platform.
By the early 90s, Rare had published more than 30 games for the NES. And then the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle-inspired Battletoads became its conduit into Nintendo’s next-generation console, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES). By now, so confident was Nintendo in its premier western partner it even entrusted the developer with one of its own properties, Donkey Kong. “[Shigeru Miyamoto] was admirably hands-off, actually,” recalled Rare’s Gregg Mayles in Retro Gamer magazine. “I mean, he handed one of his characters over to us, and we changed the look of it completely.”
Arcade beat-’em-up Killer Instinct followed, together with two further Donkey Kong Country games. But it would be with Nintendo’s next console that Rare would achieve its highest fame. Renowned today as one of the best movie licence video games of all time, GoldenEye 007 energised FPS gaming on consoles and, along with the underrated Blast Corps and manic Banjo-Kazooie, cemented Rare’s position in the top tier of UK games developers.
Then the 00s brought a new era of consoles, and Rare struggled to hit the heights of the previous decade. Microsoft purchased the developer in 2002, and the Stampers departed in 2007. The family atmosphere of the 90s, when Chris and Tim sat in on interviews and left their talented developers to work unhindered, offering occasional golden nuggets of advice, was long gone. “Microsoft and Rare was a bad marriage from the beginning,” Rare’s Martin Hollis told Eurogamer in 2012. “The groom was rich. The bride was beautiful. But they wanted to make different games, and they wanted to make them in different ways.”
Like most enduring marriages, the couple found a way to manage the relationship. The Stampers may be gone but Rare continues today, tasting success again with a popular online pirate game, Sea of Thieves. Despite its travails, Rare is still a hotbed of talent. “With all the talent in the UK and with all those thousands of people writing games, I feel it should be UK companies producing the No 1 arcade games,” signed off Chris Stamper in that 1988 Crash magazine interview. “And then everyone in the world following that – because Britain’s got the best talent, without a doubt.”
Iraq’s prime minister has ordered an investigation into how a bear escaped from its crate in the cargo hold of an Iraqi aircraft as it was due to depart from Dubai airport, leaving passengers disgruntled over the delay and causing a stir on social media.
Iraqi Airways said it wasn’t to blame for the bear’s escape and that the aircraft’s crew had worked with authorities in the United Arab Emirates, which dispatched specialists to sedate the animal and remove it from the plane.
A video clip circulating on social media showed the plane’s captain apologising to passengers for Friday’s takeoff delay because of the bear’s escape from its crate in the cargo hold.
Iraqi Airways said on Saturday that procedures to transport the bear were carried out in accordance with the law and with procedures and standards approved by the International Air Transport Association (IATA).
The airline said the bear was being flown from Baghdad to Dubai. But a person speaking on the video clip making the social media rounds suggested otherwise, saying the aircraft was an hour late for its trip to Baghdad and that passengers were being asked to disembark until the issue was resolved.
Dubai international airport, the world’s busiest for international travel, declined to comment.
An Iraqi Airways official confirmed to the Associated Press on Sunday that the bear was, in fact, being transported to the Iraqi capital. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to speak about the matter publicly, declined to name the animal’s owner.
Keeping predatory animals as pets in Iraq – especially in Baghdad – has become popular among wealthy residents.
Authorities have struggled to enforce legal provisions to protect wild animals. Baghdad’s police have previously called on citizens to assist authorities in preventing such animals from being let loose on the city’s streets or ending up as meals in restaurant by reporting such cases
Iraq’s prime minister has ordered an investigation into how a bear escaped from its crate in the cargo hold of an Iraqi aircraft as it was due to depart from Dubai airport, leaving passengers disgruntled over the delay and causing a stir on social media.
Iraqi Airways said it wasn’t to blame for the bear’s escape and that the aircraft’s crew had worked with authorities in the United Arab Emirates, which dispatched specialists to sedate the animal and remove it from the plane.
A video clip circulating on social media showed the plane’s captain apologising to passengers for Friday’s takeoff delay because of the bear’s escape from its crate in the cargo hold.
Iraqi Airways said on Saturday that procedures to transport the bear were carried out in accordance with the law and with procedures and standards approved by the International Air Transport Association (IATA).
The airline said the bear was being flown from Baghdad to Dubai. But a person speaking on the video clip making the social media rounds suggested otherwise, saying the aircraft was an hour late for its trip to Baghdad and that passengers were being asked to disembark until the issue was resolved.
Dubai international airport, the world’s busiest for international travel, declined to comment.
An Iraqi Airways official confirmed to the Associated Press on Sunday that the bear was, in fact, being transported to the Iraqi capital. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to speak about the matter publicly, declined to name the animal’s owner.
Keeping predatory animals as pets in Iraq – especially in Baghdad – has become popular among wealthy residents.
Authorities have struggled to enforce legal provisions to protect wild animals. Baghdad’s police have previously called on citizens to assist authorities in preventing such animals from being let loose on the city’s streets or ending up as meals in restaurant by reporting such cases.
Archived version: https://archive.ph/Nfsx0
Ryan and I met working behind the tills in HMV Cork in the winter of 2009. We bonded instantly, and as we are both natural romantics, began the process of myth-making in our friendship while it was still slippery from birth. We moved in together quickly. We began writing a sitcom based on our lives, then got stoned and paranoid about being sued by former co-workers when we became famous. We left long Facebook posts on each other’s walls, quoting the things we said to one another, terrified that our specialness and our closeness would not be noticed or rewarded by the wider world. We wanted them to say: you two really have something here.
We were 19, and we were insufferable. But there was a lot of that kind of thing around. Bright young women and their even brighter gay friends were burning up our screens. There was Will & Grace, of course, and there was Stanford Blatch from Sex and The City. There was Stanley Tucci’s Nigel in The Devil Wears Prada, and Damian in Mean Girls, and Rupert Everett’s George in My Best Friend’s Wedding. We opened Word documents, centre-aligned the text and transcribed ourselves.
Insufferable as we were, it wasn’t incorrect of us to think of our dynamic, the facts of it anyway, as TV-ready. You had to be quick and young and pop-culture obsessed. We were those things. You had to be adventure-ready, slightly fucked-up, and we were that, too. We had no life experiences and no responsibilities and so filled that chasm with plot. Like Friends episodes, we thought of each day of our life together as The One With. The One With The Failed Oscars Party. The One Where We Played Hide and Seek On The Roof. The One Where Each Jilted Our One Night Stands In Order To Eat A Lasagne In An Italian Restaurant at Eleven In The Morning.
Inevitably, the sitcom idea tailed off, and so did the living together. Ryan did a masters degree in Wales, and I moved to London in 2011. I became a writer and while the friendship maintained itself at various distances, it didn’t occur to me to write about Ryan or our relationship again. It wasn’t as if we had no adventures, no plot. If anything, the major movements of our lives still seemed to draw us back together. Ryan moved to London in March 2014; I broke up with my live-in boyfriend in April. Ryan came and filled a black cab with my things – I still didn’t have very many things – and he took me to his house.
“Thank you for coming to get me,” I said, an Anglepoise lamp teetering on my lap in the back of the cab.
“I’ll always come to get you,” he replied and, since then, it’s become a strange mantra of our friendship. He said it to me last Sunday, when he picked me up for brunch. A call and response, a song lyric that I always start and he always finishes.
That day has been a chicken-or-egg question in my head ever since. I know that the boyfriend and I broke up for good reasons. But did I time the break up to go with Ryan’s arrival? Was it just a coincidence? I had no family in the country before Ryan emigrated, no one who would look after me if I needed it. So I put off needing anything until he showed up, and then I needed everything.
The years passed and a cultural resistance grew up around “the gay best friend”. A sense of disgust around Will & Grace, around Stanford Blatch. As much as these characters provided energy and verve to otherwise by-the-book movies, the limitations of the gay best friend became a subject of cultural critique. Who were these homophobic caricatures, and why were they so everywhere?
They provided the heroine with empathy and access to a highly connected underworld of culture, media and whatever else she might need. But their sexuality, their private lives, their wants and desires are unimportant. They dissolve as soon as the heroine leaves the room, or puts the phone down.
As Elliot Page writes in his new memoir, Pageboy, “Hollywood is built on leveraging queerness. Tucking it away when needed, pulling it out when beneficial, while patting themselves on the back.”
The gay best friend was fairly criticised for being an example of both the tuck and pull of queer culture in mainstream media. He could not win: to conservative viewers, he was too much, and to liberal ones, not enough.
While much was written in the intervening years about what this stock character couldn’t give us, there was almost nothing written about what he could. He remained a standby of the sitcom and the romcom, often providing the com in each. But he was virtually invisible in literary fiction, where I was trying to make a name for myself.
Friendship, we’ve decided, is a reliable subject for literary exploration. Female friendship more than anything. From Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels to Zadie Smith’s Swing Time, and The Joy Luck Club to Fried Green Tomatoes, there have always been a great deal of words set aside for women agonising about their relationships with other women. Women are the ones reading the vast majority of novels in the world, after all, and it makes sense that they would want to read about their relationships with one another.
And yet in all the countless literary friendship stories, the relationship between gay men and straight women feels barely touched. It is an entertaining subject enough for comedy, but not for exploration within drama. In our resistance to the gay best friend as a trope, we have skipped over analysing the nuances of the dynamic to begin with. We have decided that this particular kind of relationship is low-rent, and sort of tacky. There will not be a trio of Elena Ferrante novels about it.
I’ve been writing novels for six years, and reading them for far longer. I have learned by now that when there is an absence of stories about a given subject, it is either because it lacks stakes or it lacks an audience. The audience question is a no brainer. Every woman and gay man I know has a relationship in their lives that is a bit like this. Thank you for coming to get me/I will always come to get you.
So let’s talk about stakes. Stories about platonic friendship are always wary on this subject, simply because romantic relationships have the stakes built in. Will they say, “I love you”? Will he propose? Will they both show up to the wedding and, inevitably, will they both stay faithful? Friendship stories have to be more creative. There are no flashy ceremonies built into friendship and you can have as many friends as you like, so fidelity is never a struggle.
And yet when I examine my and Ryan’s relationship, I can see that from its very beginnings, the stakes were enormous. Officially speaking, Ryan was straight. He existed, in 2009, in what I think of as a very Schrödinger’s Cat problem of queerness. It was too dangerous for him to come out and so we existed in a suspended realm of both knowing and not knowing – defending his right to be straight right now if he needed to be straight right now, but also leaving room for the inevitable coming out, later. And while it was understood that we would maintain a mutual delusion of his straightness, we spent all of our spare time having the gayest conversations imaginable.
Perhaps it was this foundational dishonesty that led to the inner world of private jokes and fantasy that quickly grew around us. We were not dowdy students in retail, but darling chat show hosts, Southern belles, old movie stars. We watched Thelma & Louise, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, Hairspray, Grease, and argued about which one of us was the Geena Davis, which was the Dolly Parton, which the Bad Sandy.
There’s something, I think, in the specifics of the gay man/straight woman dynamic that lends itself to this kind of playtime. Maybe the fact that straight women and gay men, for different reasons, have to present such a variety of masks to the world. She, if she wants a boyfriend, has to tap into the deep feminine well of being both effortlessly beautiful and cheerfully lowkey. If she wants to be beloved by other women, she must approach them with humility and a low profile. “If there are three little girls,” a friend with daughters tells me, “two of them are talking shit about the third.”
For him, the stakes are higher. Particularly in 2009. The pressure of passing is more intense, and if you can’t pass, then to be the kind of gay person who is funny and won’t try anything weird. It’s exhausting. It was designed to be.
What’s more alluring than someone who wants to drop the droopy, gauzy veil of everyday life with you, and instead don the heightened, insane costume of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
“But you ARRRR in that chair, Blanche!”
Our house was a nature reserve for state-protected campness, and it needed to be protected from everything that threatened it. Part of my 19-year-old self never wanted Ryan to come out so that I could carry on being the sole receiver of his outsized specialness.
“So you’re writing about your gay best friend?” It is February 2021 and, in the midst of late-pandemic depression, I have come back to the idea of writing about me and Ryan. This is my sixth novel and my first to commit the female writer’s sin of identifiably using my life to inform my fiction. It strikes me, again, that there are things that haven’t been said about how gay men and straight women relate. Suddenly, I can see them everywhere. The Sound of Music was on, again, at Christmas. For the first time I had no interest in Maria or Captain Von Trapp. I was looking at the Baroness and Max.
Baroness Elsa von Schraeder, you will remember, has been the long-time lover of Captain Von Trapp and spends the entire film walking the high-wire act that the widower sets out for her. She must be the graceful, beautiful aristocrat he fell in love with in Vienna, but must also morph on command into a warm, domestic mother figure to seven children. It’s an impossible task, especially when Julie Andrews is right there, but we see her try anyway. And only once does she let her mask slip.
And it’s with Max. Uncle Max, who is no one’s brother. Uncle Max who has a pencil moustache and works in showbiz in the 1930s. “Tell me everything,” he urges, when they’re alone. “Come on. Tell me every teensy-weensy, intimate, disgusting detail.”
“Well, let’s just say,” the Baroness eventually confesses. “I have a feeling I may be here on approval.”
“How can you miss?”
“Far too easily.”
He regards her. “If I know you, darling, and I do – you’ll find a way.”
There’s a tone here, something that feels fabulous and correct: the unknowable woman turning to someone who really wants to know her. And not just on a surface level, not just the nice parts. He wants, as he says, every teensy-weensy, intimate, disgusting detail. It all adds up to the same conclusion: you are safe. You are safe to be yourself with me.
So here it was: everything I was interested in, in a film that everyone has seen, that somehow held a dynamic no one had talked about.
“So you’re writing about your gay best friend? Does he know? Is he OK with it?”
We talk every day while I’m writing the book; I send him chapter by chapter. I keep asking if he is OK with it. He says he is. In fact, he is more than OK. Because this was the deal, wasn’t it? When we met almost 15 years ago it was implicit that our role in one another’s lives was to make life itself more special. We were two kids in a small Irish city and nobody else was going to make us feel famous, if not each other. That’s why we wrote failed TV shows; why we cast one another as Joan Crawford and Bette Davis; why we named our adventures, on top of living them.
Last April, we went to Denmark together, on a whim. Now that we both live with our partners, short trips abroad are our favourite way to re-access our original dynamic. Two stupid kids, confused and excited by everything. We found ourselves in a tattoo parlour and, in a giggling sweep of hungover hormones, got matching True Romance tattoos. You know the film. The Bonnie-and-Clyde story about the prostitute and the comic-book nerd who fall in love, steal a suitcase of cocaine, and drive to Mexico with the money.
The book, which is now a bestseller, turned out to be my suitcase full of cocaine. And here’s the kicker: they really do want to make a television show about it. The 19-year-olds in 2009 were right, after all. Those two really had something, there.
Archived version: https://archive.ph/Nfsx0
Ryan and I met working behind the tills in HMV Cork in the winter of 2009. We bonded instantly, and as we are both natural romantics, began the process of myth-making in our friendship while it was still slippery from birth. We moved in together quickly. We began writing a sitcom based on our lives, then got stoned and paranoid about being sued by former co-workers when we became famous. We left long Facebook posts on each other’s walls, quoting the things we said to one another, terrified that our specialness and our closeness would not be noticed or rewarded by the wider world. We wanted them to say: you two really have something here.
We were 19, and we were insufferable. But there was a lot of that kind of thing around. Bright young women and their even brighter gay friends were burning up our screens. There was Will & Grace, of course, and there was Stanford Blatch from Sex and The City. There was Stanley Tucci’s Nigel in The Devil Wears Prada, and Damian in Mean Girls, and Rupert Everett’s George in My Best Friend’s Wedding. We opened Word documents, centre-aligned the text and transcribed ourselves.
Insufferable as we were, it wasn’t incorrect of us to think of our dynamic, the facts of it anyway, as TV-ready. You had to be quick and young and pop-culture obsessed. We were those things. You had to be adventure-ready, slightly fucked-up, and we were that, too. We had no life experiences and no responsibilities and so filled that chasm with plot. Like Friends episodes, we thought of each day of our life together as The One With. The One With The Failed Oscars Party. The One Where We Played Hide and Seek On The Roof. The One Where Each Jilted Our One Night Stands In Order To Eat A Lasagne In An Italian Restaurant at Eleven In The Morning.
Inevitably, the sitcom idea tailed off, and so did the living together. Ryan did a masters degree in Wales, and I moved to London in 2011. I became a writer and while the friendship maintained itself at various distances, it didn’t occur to me to write about Ryan or our relationship again. It wasn’t as if we had no adventures, no plot. If anything, the major movements of our lives still seemed to draw us back together. Ryan moved to London in March 2014; I broke up with my live-in boyfriend in April. Ryan came and filled a black cab with my things – I still didn’t have very many things – and he took me to his house.
“Thank you for coming to get me,” I said, an Anglepoise lamp teetering on my lap in the back of the cab.
“I’ll always come to get you,” he replied and, since then, it’s become a strange mantra of our friendship. He said it to me last Sunday, when he picked me up for brunch. A call and response, a song lyric that I always start and he always finishes.
That day has been a chicken-or-egg question in my head ever since. I know that the boyfriend and I broke up for good reasons. But did I time the break up to go with Ryan’s arrival? Was it just a coincidence? I had no family in the country before Ryan emigrated, no one who would look after me if I needed it. So I put off needing anything until he showed up, and then I needed everything.
The years passed and a cultural resistance grew up around “the gay best friend”. A sense of disgust around Will & Grace, around Stanford Blatch. As much as these characters provided energy and verve to otherwise by-the-book movies, the limitations of the gay best friend became a subject of cultural critique. Who were these homophobic caricatures, and why were they so everywhere?
They provided the heroine with empathy and access to a highly connected underworld of culture, media and whatever else she might need. But their sexuality, their private lives, their wants and desires are unimportant. They dissolve as soon as the heroine leaves the room, or puts the phone down.
As Elliot Page writes in his new memoir, Pageboy, “Hollywood is built on leveraging queerness. Tucking it away when needed, pulling it out when beneficial, while patting themselves on the back.”
The gay best friend was fairly criticised for being an example of both the tuck and pull of queer culture in mainstream media. He could not win: to conservative viewers, he was too much, and to liberal ones, not enough.
While much was written in the intervening years about what this stock character couldn’t give us, there was almost nothing written about what he could. He remained a standby of the sitcom and the romcom, often providing the com in each. But he was virtually invisible in literary fiction, where I was trying to make a name for myself.
Friendship, we’ve decided, is a reliable subject for literary exploration. Female friendship more than anything. From Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels to Zadie Smith’s Swing Time, and The Joy Luck Club to Fried Green Tomatoes, there have always been a great deal of words set aside for women agonising about their relationships with other women. Women are the ones reading the vast majority of novels in the world, after all, and it makes sense that they would want to read about their relationships with one another.
And yet in all the countless literary friendship stories, the relationship between gay men and straight women feels barely touched. It is an entertaining subject enough for comedy, but not for exploration within drama. In our resistance to the gay best friend as a trope, we have skipped over analysing the nuances of the dynamic to begin with. We have decided that this particular kind of relationship is low-rent, and sort of tacky. There will not be a trio of Elena Ferrante novels about it.
I’ve been writing novels for six years, and reading them for far longer. I have learned by now that when there is an absence of stories about a given subject, it is either because it lacks stakes or it lacks an audience. The audience question is a no brainer. Every woman and gay man I know has a relationship in their lives that is a bit like this. Thank you for coming to get me/I will always come to get you.
So let’s talk about stakes. Stories about platonic friendship are always wary on this subject, simply because romantic relationships have the stakes built in. Will they say, “I love you”? Will he propose? Will they both show up to the wedding and, inevitably, will they both stay faithful? Friendship stories have to be more creative. There are no flashy ceremonies built into friendship and you can have as many friends as you like, so fidelity is never a struggle.
And yet when I examine my and Ryan’s relationship, I can see that from its very beginnings, the stakes were enormous. Officially speaking, Ryan was straight. He existed, in 2009, in what I think of as a very Schrödinger’s Cat problem of queerness. It was too dangerous for him to come out and so we existed in a suspended realm of both knowing and not knowing – defending his right to be straight right now if he needed to be straight right now, but also leaving room for the inevitable coming out, later. And while it was understood that we would maintain a mutual delusion of his straightness, we spent all of our spare time having the gayest conversations imaginable.
Perhaps it was this foundational dishonesty that led to the inner world of private jokes and fantasy that quickly grew around us. We were not dowdy students in retail, but darling chat show hosts, Southern belles, old movie stars. We watched Thelma & Louise, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, Hairspray, Grease, and argued about which one of us was the Geena Davis, which was the Dolly Parton, which the Bad Sandy.
There’s something, I think, in the specifics of the gay man/straight woman dynamic that lends itself to this kind of playtime. Maybe the fact that straight women and gay men, for different reasons, have to present such a variety of masks to the world. She, if she wants a boyfriend, has to tap into the deep feminine well of being both effortlessly beautiful and cheerfully lowkey. If she wants to be beloved by other women, she must approach them with humility and a low profile. “If there are three little girls,” a friend with daughters tells me, “two of them are talking shit about the third.”
For him, the stakes are higher. Particularly in 2009. The pressure of passing is more intense, and if you can’t pass, then to be the kind of gay person who is funny and won’t try anything weird. It’s exhausting. It was designed to be.
What’s more alluring than someone who wants to drop the droopy, gauzy veil of everyday life with you, and instead don the heightened, insane costume of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
“But you ARRRR in that chair, Blanche!”
Our house was a nature reserve for state-protected campness, and it needed to be protected from everything that threatened it. Part of my 19-year-old self never wanted Ryan to come out so that I could carry on being the sole receiver of his outsized specialness.
“So you’re writing about your gay best friend?” It is February 2021 and, in the midst of late-pandemic depression, I have come back to the idea of writing about me and Ryan. This is my sixth novel and my first to commit the female writer’s sin of identifiably using my life to inform my fiction. It strikes me, again, that there are things that haven’t been said about how gay men and straight women relate. Suddenly, I can see them everywhere. The Sound of Music was on, again, at Christmas. For the first time I had no interest in Maria or Captain Von Trapp. I was looking at the Baroness and Max.
Baroness Elsa von Schraeder, you will remember, has been the long-time lover of Captain Von Trapp and spends the entire film walking the high-wire act that the widower sets out for her. She must be the graceful, beautiful aristocrat he fell in love with in Vienna, but must also morph on command into a warm, domestic mother figure to seven children. It’s an impossible task, especially when Julie Andrews is right there, but we see her try anyway. And only once does she let her mask slip.
And it’s with Max. Uncle Max, who is no one’s brother. Uncle Max who has a pencil moustache and works in showbiz in the 1930s. “Tell me everything,” he urges, when they’re alone. “Come on. Tell me every teensy-weensy, intimate, disgusting detail.”
“Well, let’s just say,” the Baroness eventually confesses. “I have a feeling I may be here on approval.”
“How can you miss?”
“Far too easily.”
He regards her. “If I know you, darling, and I do – you’ll find a way.”
There’s a tone here, something that feels fabulous and correct: the unknowable woman turning to someone who really wants to know her. And not just on a surface level, not just the nice parts. He wants, as he says, every teensy-weensy, intimate, disgusting detail. It all adds up to the same conclusion: you are safe. You are safe to be yourself with me.
So here it was: everything I was interested in, in a film that everyone has seen, that somehow held a dynamic no one had talked about.
“So you’re writing about your gay best friend? Does he know? Is he OK with it?”
We talk every day while I’m writing the book; I send him chapter by chapter. I keep asking if he is OK with it. He says he is. In fact, he is more than OK. Because this was the deal, wasn’t it? When we met almost 15 years ago it was implicit that our role in one another’s lives was to make life itself more special. We were two kids in a small Irish city and nobody else was going to make us feel famous, if not each other. That’s why we wrote failed TV shows; why we cast one another as Joan Crawford and Bette Davis; why we named our adventures, on top of living them.
Last April, we went to Denmark together, on a whim. Now that we both live with our partners, short trips abroad are our favourite way to re-access our original dynamic. Two stupid kids, confused and excited by everything. We found ourselves in a tattoo parlour and, in a giggling sweep of hungover hormones, got matching True Romance tattoos. You know the film. The Bonnie-and-Clyde story about the prostitute and the comic-book nerd who fall in love, steal a suitcase of cocaine, and drive to Mexico with the money.
The book, which is now a bestseller, turned out to be my suitcase full of cocaine. And here’s the kicker: they really do want to make a television show about it. The 19-year-olds in 2009 were right, after all. Those two really had something, there.
Archived version: https://archive.ph/ZfHr3
I am back on the job hunt. My recent role working with young people who are at risk of becoming involved with county-lines activities has come to an end.
I’m used to it. I’ve always worked short contracts. What I’m not used to is how hard it is to get a proper contract now with a decent number of hours. No one knows what the future holds so employers have become tentative. Any contracts that are given out are small – 18 hours a week, for instance.
I have enjoyed this latest job. What it’s really made me realise is that county lines and exploitation can be traced back to poverty and destitution. Young people are being exploited because their mums work on low-income wages and they don’t have any money. These mums can’t afford to buy them £100 Nikes or whatever it is they’ve seen on Instagram. One young person – a nice kid – I was working with was a phone thief. I asked them why they did it. Their answer: “I can earn £200 to £300 per phone. I’m at home with my mum, my dad’s in prison and there are mouths to feed.”
Rishi Sunak is on a different planet. He’s not seeing the poverty, the destitution, the high cost of living that normal people are experiencing. The cost of living is still affecting me and everybody else but there is also clearly greedflation. There are things I simply refuse to buy now. I saw Bisto gravy granules in Asda for £4. Are you mad? They used to be £2.50. The company that owns Bisto has just announced a 21% rise in sales. The Nescafé cappuccino sachets I used to like for £2.50 are now £3 in Sainsbury’s. Domestos bleach was always £1. Now it’s £1.50. I refuse. I just buy the rubbish stuff instead. I feel like I’m being mugged off. The only power you have is to say no.
We are being squeezed. To me there is something really evil about doing this to consumers; money is being made off our backs. I might be working but I feel like I’m not reaping the whole benefits of my salary.
I don’t even know who I am going to vote for. Keir Starmer has said he is not going to change the policy on the two-child benefit cap. What is the point of voting for a progressive party if they are not going to make change? That policy is what has driven so many children into poverty. Then there’s the way Rishi Sunak has spoken about immigration. He has used the term migrants when we should be talking about helping refugees. He talks about them like they are some new species that is overtaking us.
I went to the theatre the other day with my niece. It was a folk play. I’m part of a literary group so I get free tickets. Our seats were in the corner. There was a couple seated there before us. I said: “Excuse me, these are our seats.” She kept staring at me, not watching the play. In the second half she swapped seats with her partner. When the show finished, I said to her: “I’m sorry that my black skin made you uncomfortable.” What else could it have been?
Racism has been tolerated by the government, especially with the way they talk about refugees like there’s an invasion. I’m going to start calling it out. I’m tired of being judged as soon as people see the colour of my skin.
On a positive note, I’ve got a role in a play called Bread and Roses, part of the Untold Stories series in Enfield. It covers suffragettes and going to war, but also deals with homelessness, eviction and the cost of living. I rehearse every Sunday. I feel like I’m getting to do what I want. Even though I’m not acting full-time, I’m still engaged in it, still performing.
Sharron Spice is in her 30s and lives in London
Archived version: https://archive.ph/ZfHr3
I am back on the job hunt. My recent role working with young people who are at risk of becoming involved with county-lines activities has come to an end.
I’m used to it. I’ve always worked short contracts. What I’m not used to is how hard it is to get a proper contract now with a decent number of hours. No one knows what the future holds so employers have become tentative. Any contracts that are given out are small – 18 hours a week, for instance.
I have enjoyed this latest job. What it’s really made me realise is that county lines and exploitation can be traced back to poverty and destitution. Young people are being exploited because their mums work on low-income wages and they don’t have any money. These mums can’t afford to buy them £100 Nikes or whatever it is they’ve seen on Instagram. One young person – a nice kid – I was working with was a phone thief. I asked them why they did it. Their answer: “I can earn £200 to £300 per phone. I’m at home with my mum, my dad’s in prison and there are mouths to feed.”
Rishi Sunak is on a different planet. He’s not seeing the poverty, the destitution, the high cost of living that normal people are experiencing. The cost of living is still affecting me and everybody else but there is also clearly greedflation. There are things I simply refuse to buy now. I saw Bisto gravy granules in Asda for £4. Are you mad? They used to be £2.50. The company that owns Bisto has just announced a 21% rise in sales. The Nescafé cappuccino sachets I used to like for £2.50 are now £3 in Sainsbury’s. Domestos bleach was always £1. Now it’s £1.50. I refuse. I just buy the rubbish stuff instead. I feel like I’m being mugged off. The only power you have is to say no.
We are being squeezed. To me there is something really evil about doing this to consumers; money is being made off our backs. I might be working but I feel like I’m not reaping the whole benefits of my salary.
I don’t even know who I am going to vote for. Keir Starmer has said he is not going to change the policy on the two-child benefit cap. What is the point of voting for a progressive party if they are not going to make change? That policy is what has driven so many children into poverty. Then there’s the way Rishi Sunak has spoken about immigration. He has used the term migrants when we should be talking about helping refugees. He talks about them like they are some new species that is overtaking us.
I went to the theatre the other day with my niece. It was a folk play. I’m part of a literary group so I get free tickets. Our seats were in the corner. There was a couple seated there before us. I said: “Excuse me, these are our seats.” She kept staring at me, not watching the play. In the second half she swapped seats with her partner. When the show finished, I said to her: “I’m sorry that my black skin made you uncomfortable.” What else could it have been?
Racism has been tolerated by the government, especially with the way they talk about refugees like there’s an invasion. I’m going to start calling it out. I’m tired of being judged as soon as people see the colour of my skin.
On a positive note, I’ve got a role in a play called Bread and Roses, part of the Untold Stories series in Enfield. It covers suffragettes and going to war, but also deals with homelessness, eviction and the cost of living. I rehearse every Sunday. I feel like I’m getting to do what I want. Even though I’m not acting full-time, I’m still engaged in it, still performing.
Sharron Spice is in her 30s and lives in London
Regarding Rule 6, this seems to say that the same story with a different source is okay. I don't think this should be the case. The same story regardless of source should not be reposted unless it adds new information.
No, anyone on Telegram can block incoming calls. Voice messages are different.
Thank you for the explanation. Good to know single line breaks are possible. However, other web services allow the user to use a single line break and it's displayed in the same way. While you give a good technical reason why it is this way, I'm not convinced it's the most user friendly approach.
It could be added in the community info, just under the name of the community.
For example:
Jerboa
Created two years ago
Whoops, my math was off there. You're right.
Funny you should mention teachers but a very recent report says that a quarter of teachers have had allegations made against them, and 10% have been subjected to a formal disciplinary process during their career. Source: https://www.tes.com/magazine/news/general/teacher-allegations-parents-pupils
There's no uproar because the majority of allegations are just that. Allegations. While I have no doubt there are bad people in all walks of life, I do not believe most allegations hold weight. In both policing and teaching there is a power balance that works to and against each party's advantage. Making allegations against a person in a position of power is a strong weapon (though, yes, on the flip side, taking advantage of being in a position of power is also something people can do).
I wonder what the exact terms of the deal are. For example, if Tunisia takes the money and does very little with it to stem the flow of migrants to the EU, will there be any consequences? How could it be monitored?
Can you repost the whole article? I'm not able to view it. "This content is not available in your country/region."
Hello :) I think the phrase you are looking for is "notification anxiety". If you Google that you'll find a lot of information, experiences, and advice.
As you've been very diligent reporting errors and suggesting changes to map data, have you ever considered contributing to OpenStreetMap? You might like helping by using the app Every Door on iOS, for example.