In which I get really into Empire building and smoked salmon.
In this week I enjoyed my time off work by purchasing a car and then retreating into a state of lethargy where I struggled with the levers of power in medieval Europe. Here’s how that went…
Monday:
In this, the first day of December, I was spirited away to the garden centre with my mother, grandfather and middle sisters. On holiday from work, I wished for a break but found myself doubly exhausted because of the festive flavour of the entire enterprise.
I committed to the purchase of Christmas lights and argued vociferously for a duo-tone familial-significant colour scheme for outdoor Christmas baubles, but was unable to achieve the scale of my ambition due to a lack of cerise and silver Christmas baubles in any of the local shops.
Irritated and full of that unique Christmas-tide scorn and distaste, I retired home to slip into a state of infelicitous altered consciousness.
Tuesday
On the second day of December, in a giddying moment of spontaneous self-determination, I bought a car.
This was not the result of long deliberation or comparative spreadsheets, but rather an emotional purchase, executed cleanly and without apology. The car is an orange Vauxhall Mokka, automatic, because that is what I can drive and I refuse unnecessary hardship. I do not yet drive legally, but I require practice, and I require it on my own terms.
I ate smoked salmon for dinner and reflected positively on this great step towards autonomy over my future travels by road.
Wednesday
On Wednesday, December the third, I was profoundly, irreversibly tired.
To cope, I returned to the PlayStation 5 and Crusader Kings, a strategy game in which one plays a medieval ruler and attempts, through marriage, war, diplomacy, faith, and administrative cunning, to build and maintain a dynasty across centuries. I was not playing it for excitement but rather playing it because it gave me one clear problem to concentrate on.
I ate smoked salmon again, laid out in the drawing room, barely present in my own body.
Thursday
The fourth day of December passed in a narrow, carefully managed lane of attention.
I continued playing Crusader Kings, constructing a world within the game that felt more just and comprehensible than the real one.
Beginning by painstakingly creating a hybrid Norse-Gaelic culture centred around Galloway and the Isles, I had adopted and reformed the Norse Asatru religion to enshrine equality and to treat same-sex relationships as virtuous rather than sinful. This brought me great satisfaction and, crucially, emotional whimsy.
Each time my plans in the game approached stability, they faltered; not through villainy or chaos, but through succession laws that I was unable, due to tedious snarls of medieval bureaucracy, to bend far enough to preserve what I had built. I found this dispiriting, and also depressingly familiar.
Dinner was smoked salmon, eaten without reflection or vigour.
Friday
Friday, December the fifth, arrived with the weight of a week lived without agenda or thought, so I doubled down.
I played more Crusader Kings, knowing full well how it would likely end. Around the same point in the game’s timeline, just past the early medieval period, my carefully balanced empire would begin to fracture, heirs multiplying, power dispersing, cohesion dissolving by inches rather than explosions. My disappointing squatter of children would, by consequence of confederate partition laws, inherit discretely all of my kingdoms, fracturing the seamless coat of my government and falling victim to the predations of their own unruly vassals.
I ate smoked salmon again, by now a ritual.
Saturday
On Saturday, December the sixth, the inevitable occurred.
While playing Crusader Kings, I once again reached the point where everything I had constructed was almost secure. Almost enlightened. Almost permanent. And once again, I fell just short of the legal reforms required to hold it together. The empire unravelled for the fourth time, and so too did my joi-de-vivre.
I stared at the screen with the particular exhaustion of someone who keeps proving the same point to themselves. Supper was smoked salmon, and I felt no shame.
Sunday
The seventh day of December was spent in deliberate withdrawal.
I acknowledged the real world only minimally, noting the passage of time and the scurrying of the townspeople from behind the heavy drapes of the drawing room. I spent the rest of the day playing Crusader Kings again, beginning the cycle anew from a different starting point, with the same broad intentions and the same quiet hope that this time it might work.
When evening came, I stopped not because I felt restored, but because I felt steadier. The week had been narrow by necessity. I had focused on one thing to keep everything else at bay.
I closed the game, knowing I would return to it and accepted that sometimes endurance and survival looks like relinquishing the responsibility to eat anything other than smoked fish and instead focussing on the political machinations of a fictional high Kingdom stretching, during its heyday, from Iceland to Barcelona.