"Another fine mess..."

Woah, a tale of woe
Well, it was kind of a close run thing this time but here I am, back at the keyboard. There are several reasons why I almost succumbed to the urge just to disappear from the pages of RD/KA!. I'm just going to let them lie. I will however briefly explain why this particular bloglag was so long (at 9 months it's been the longest ever).

Sometimes people just won't own up...

It'll come as no surprise to my regular readers that a serious depression was to blame. Why so serious? Long story short: a home support worker who'd been visiting me for some 4 years took the huff with me one day and indulged in some unprofessional behaviour. The next time we met he manipulated me into withdrawing from the support service against my will. With hindsight I realised that saving his job was surely his primary motivation for being such a shit. We'd talked often of the difficult funding situation in his workplace and of how staff were worried about their jobs. So I think he feared a black mark if I was to ask for him to be replaced, which would've led to questions being asked about why I no longer wished to work with him (which I didn't, naturally enough).

At the time (just after RD/KA!'s 5th anniversary), I decided just to put the incident behind me. After all I reasoned, all the guy did was visit me for a couple of hours twice a week, when we'd mostly just talk, so what could happen? I was wrong. My mood was already wavering and within a couple of weeks it had taken a severe nosedive. Eventually I twigged that I'd been more psychologically dependent on the home support than I'd imagined, a supposition borne out by the subsequent length of the downswing.

And that's about that. I wish I hadn't let the guy off the hook, but it would've been an unpleasant experience to make a complaint which'd've been a matter of my word against his. And y'know, I believe that, deep down, he knows he was wrong. It won't get me back the last 9 months, but it's something I guess.

On a lighter note

It's not been all gloom and doom thank goodness. Sure, I missed this year's Conpulsion and UK Games Expo, so neither my Conflict of Heroes demo nor the Combat Commander tournament were repeated this year. Ah well, fingers crossed, they'll be back.

"A little bit of politics..."

These lowlights aside, the Sunday sessions- which stopped in February, were another significant casualty of my downswing. They too will be back sometime. There was a shedload of gaming nonetheless: I got through hundreds of games in those months; a playing record of which I'm strangely proud (I'm a gaming geek, go figure). I'll talk more about all that another day.

BoardGameGeek was another source of succour during those unhappy days. BGG community culture is not without its irritants (but then, I imagine that's true of any online community which otherwise serves your interests), but I like it for its game-specific forums, which allow me to focus my attention on subjects which particularly interest me; ie. my favourite games. I've also become a denizen of the Wargames forum. In fact, my increasing activity in these forums in recent weeks helped me recover my writing mojo to the point where only a couple of weeks ago I knew that my return to RD/KA! was just a matter of time.

Unfinished business
And so to the embarrassing matter of all those goodies about which I made such a hoo-hah before disappearing from view for so long. I will be sorting this out ASAP. More on that in due course. ;)