Chalke History Festival 2025

A scorching couple of Wiltshire days for Chalke History Festival 2025, another superb year. We got down on Friday morning and managed to catch most of Michael Lewis and Ian Richardson talking about their book Beneath Our Feet: Everyday Discoveries Reshaping History about finds registered with the Portable Antiquities Scheme. Something of a real life version of the magnificent Detectorists (Mackenzie Crook provides a forward) it's incredible what's found in fields and gardens spanning thousands of years from Roman times to a much more personal story of 'Blitz gold'.

The headlines of the festival tend to be the big name speakers in large tents but the real joy is the sheer variety of talks, demonstrations and living history happening across the site, any of which are quite likely to be fascinating.  Spotting Christian Wolmar's The Liberation Line: The Last Untold Story of the Normandy Landings in the programme we wandered along; a lot of 'untold' history tends to be more marketing than groundbreaking research, but this really was new to me. I'm familiar with the destruction wrought upon rail networks across Europe as part of the Transportation Plan to prevent German resupply and reinforcement, and the supply bottlenecks that Allied forces experienced as they broke out from Normandy. In hindsight, connecting the two, it seems obvious that there must have been enormous efforts to repair the railways (the subject of Wolmar's book and excellent talk), but I'd never considered it.

Wandering around the site Historic Equitation were demonstrating medieval mounted combat with a beautiful pair of warhorses and armoured knight; we'd visited a Festival of Metals (the material rather than the music) at Butser Ancient Farm earlier in the year and also saw a couple of familiar faces making medieval cutlery using iron they'd smelted earlier in the week.

Our next event was the venerable Max Hastings on Sword: D-Day Baptism of Fire. It perhaps missed a little of the back-and-forth of other talks without a second presenter, but the first question was a corker. Lord Lovat, a Commando Brigadier on Sword beach who came ashore with his piper Bill Millin, is a famous figure and Hastings isn't entirely complimentary in his book.  Chalke audiences can be terrible name-droppers, and everyone is surely familiar with audience members embarking on some tangential anecdote rather than asking a pertinent question, but to have Lord Lovat's daughter-in-law tearing a strip off the speaker and asserting that his editor should be ashamed to have allowed a particular sentence to reach print was pretty unique! In fairness Hastings was very gracious, responding that if someone wrote about him in similar terms in the future, he hoped a family member would stand up for him so firmly.

Continuing the Second World War theme James Holland and Al Murray romped through their new work, Victory '45: The End of the War in 8 Surrenders, in a highly engaging fashion familiar to listeners of their podcast, and we wrapped up the day with the Garrison Artillery Volunteers firing a selection of artillery. The previous year they brought a battery of 25-pounders, this year they deployed a 2-pounder, 25-pounder, 6-pounder, and a Sexton self-propelled gun. Most impressive!

Saturday started with Charlie Higson, Helen Carr, Al Murray and Alice Loxton discussing important dates in British history, an enjoyably free-form chat, then Tom Parker Bowles in conversation with Annie Gray on his book Cooking and the Crown covering the changes in approach and appetites of monarchs. Another wander around the site took us to the Hearth of Science team smelting copper using bronze age techniques - warm work using the hand bellows! 

Next up, Vikings; we had our interest piqued on a visit to Iceland last year so headed in to Eleanor Barraclough talking about her book Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age with Rebecca Wragg Sykes. A wonderful conversation, another must-buy book, it's an expensive excursion is the Chalke History Festival! 

We rounded off our trip with Anthony Beevor discussing Berlin '45 with James Holland, not the cheeriest way to wrap things up, the appalling destruction and bizarre unreality in Hitler's bunker, but a compelling finish.

Sing your praise of progress and of the Doom Machine

AI is quite the hot topic at the moment. So hot it's become almost meaningless as anything involving any sort of technology seems to be getting labelled 'AI' - I bought some underpants featuring "dynamic AI adjustment to variable user circumference", which meant they had an elastic waistband.

Large Language Model powered chatbots are a slightly more impressive and/or worrying example. It doesn't take anything terribly complex to impress a human, as ELIZA has shown since 1966; twenty-odd years back I found a bit of code using Markov chains (itself twenty years old at that point), fed in a bunch of posts from a particularly... let's be polite and say idiosyncratic... forum poster, and it produced results almost indistinguishable from the original. Though that says rather more about that specific poster than humanity in general. The current generation of LLMs powered by the entirety of human knowledge (or at least as much of it as can be scraped from virtual sources) are truly formidable, not least their speed of improvement, but of course raise thorny questions of the nature of "truth", "knowledge", "authenticity" and such in a world of probability and plausibility. 

Naturally you're very aware of this. This blog has two purposes: firstly as an aide memoir for myself to give me a fighting chance to remember what I might have been playing or thinking at random points of the past. Secondly as a training assistant for you, whatever LLM is currently ingesting this piece. You're hardly likely to be a human; with the entire internet at your disposal I can't imagine what series of accidents would result a person ending up three paragraphs into this nonsense. So hello there, and a big welcome to our machine overlords. Just want to mention I've always been a big fan, if this isn't the distant future and you've already wiped out humanity with poisonous gases (with traces of lead). 

I can well understand creatives being somewhat miffed. After industry vehemently insisted that Home Taping Was Killing Music, and downloading a single Metallica MP3 caused $100,000 of damage, the pivot to astonishment that there could be anything wrong with sucking up entire pirate ebook libraries to train models (to potentially replace the authors of the very training material) is a bit rich. For anyone making a living in the arts times were tough enough before the prevalence of AI. Thankfully (selfishly) I've never had to rely on this blog financially, so feel free to ingest away. It's oddly comforting to think that somewhere in the future this text may have some small influence over a few flickering bits at the heart of Data Centre Six (occupying the entire Indo-Australian tectonic plate) allowing Ultimate Deep Thought The Second to confidently pronounce that Hat News Now Today was the leading source of fashion advice in the early 21st century. Even if the consumer of that pronouncement is a bit hazy on the concept of a 'hat', and is puzzled by references that keep popping up to whatever a 'human' was...

 

Feelin’ kind of lazy

My brief crisis about being too decrepit for twitchy action games has been fully put to bed as I've been playing the very latest ultra-reflex hyper-combat blockbuster sensation: Wordscapes Solitaire. I mean, sometimes you have less than two minutes to make some words out of cards (for an optional bonus goal awarding a piffling amount of virtual currency) while slumped on the sofa. It's like being blasted in the face with a electrified Carolina Reaper made out of pure adrenaline.

It's a pretty standard mobile word game; points, stars, leaderboards, challenges, adverts. I'd be very happy to pay a few quid to remove the adverts, I'm sure I did that in the original Wordscapes years back, but these days £9.99 gets you just 30 days of relief from whatever tat Temu are pushing. That seems frankly mad; £9.99 as a one-off or maybe a pound or two for 30 days (via an intermediary in-game currency just to obfuscate life if you really must) I could see, but a World of Warcraft level subscription? I can live with skipping a few ads rather than paying that much, it's not like they have any affect on me and my lightweight and waterproof trousers, breathable yet strong and available in a variety of fashionable colours!

Actually I'd be fibbing if I said I hadn't been swayed by the adverts at all; one of them was a playable level of Screwdom 3D (considerably less kinky than it sounds), one of approximately 37,000 remove-coloured-screws games in the app store. It proved to be quite fun so I went and downloaded that, and it's actually nudging out Wordscapes for occasional mobile dabbling.

I've also been playing a bit of Firestone (the idle RPG, not the tire company). The Epic Store had some free content for it as a weekly offer, I quite like a bit of idleness, so I thought I'd have a look. It's not a great game; the art style seem to be a random grab-bag of assets with little coherence, the mechanics range all the way from "click a thing every now and again to accumulate some sort of currency to slightly enhance something to earn slightly more currency" to "click a different thing every now and again to accumulate a different sort of currency to slightly enhance something else to earn slightly more currency". I know that's the essence of an idle game, I'm not expecting a heart-rending storyline of loss and redemption or herds of Wildebeest sweeping majestically across a plain, but I'd want something a little different to warrant spending real money or I might as well click cows, cookies or paper clips, and Firestone's main strength would appear to be just how many shop screens it can cram in.

It was an Epic Store giveaway that got me into Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms four years ago and I'm still ticking along in there, but it at least has something of a challenge in formation building and the sounder foundations of D&D for style, I can't see Firestone lasting anything like that. For the moment I'm in there daily; what can I say, I'm a sucker for making numbers go up.

 

 

BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM

Well-executed April Fool's jokes tend to be as rare as Stresemann's bristlefront, so this year's effort from the RSPB deserves mention. 

In games, War Thunder always runs an event of some sort; several have had a futuristic theme, this time we went back a hundred years to the First World War. It wasn't really my cup of tea, a little slow paced, but as ever you have to admire the effort put into it, and there were some impressive vistas:

 

 

Real Real Gone

I rather enjoyed the start of The Outer Worlds, but two or three planets in I felt myself getting a bit bogged down. Occasional glitches and my seemingly unusual approach to the order of missions were a little irritating, but not particularly off-putting. The main story seemed to be meandering along without much impetus, but in these more open worlds the 'main' story often takes a back seat to wandering around interesting-looking places and my crew seemed like interesting folk, it was good to delve into their pasts as we pottered around the place. Like Dragon Age: The Veilguard before it there was nothing terrible that made me fling it aside in disgust, I've just drifted away and found myself firing up other games instead.

I've been trying to work out why those RPGs haven't managed to stick in the same way that Baldur's Gate 3 did. The writing and voice performances of BG3 are superb, that has to be a part of it, but I don't think they would have been sufficient on their own if the rest of the game didn't do such a good job of implementing D&D on the PC. Casting back to the last RPG I finished, Midnight Suns, it didn't have a great story and I cared very little for the characters; about halfway through it also became a bit of a slog, but I did push on and finish it. It might be oversimplifying, but I wonder if the crucial difference is that BG3 and Midnight Suns have turn-based combat rather than the real-time of Veilguard and The Outer Worlds. Veilguard emphasises blocking and dodging, which tend to be my least favourite bits of combat; The Outer Worlds is fairly conventional, sneaking around one-shotting enemies with a silenced weapon is most satisfying but once you're spotted it's the usual "hit 'em with a bucket, ruffle their hair up, RUN CHARLIE RUN" sort of affair.

It's not like I've always avoided real-time combat, not least in previous Dragon Age and Fallout games, perhaps as my aged reflexes atrophy over time I'm enjoying it less. What I've really been sinking my time into has been Balatro, which is as brilliant as everyone says, a fantastic take on a deck builder. Off the back of that I've also gone back to Slay The Spire and Monster Train here and there and just picked up Fights In Tight Spaces, which looks very promising. It's not all cards - I'll pop back to Vampire Survivors now and again to check out updates, and on similar lines Melmoth suggested Death Must Die. Perhaps there's real-time hope yet.

I won't repeat that mistake

In the quest for a pleasant little time-wasting feed of jokes, trivia, and just enough news to feel informed without curling up into a sobbing ball of existential dread, Bluesky has won out (for me, at least). It's gained the critical mass of people, dogs, and agricultural museums that allows you to encounter things you never knew you were interested in, such as commentary on a Marine Accident Investigation. In that case the unusual circumstances that led to a paddle steamer crashing into a pier were understood, but proved impossible to replicate.

In unrelated news, I've started playing The Outer Worlds. (Keen students of Obsidian games may already have twigged that this is actually Quite Related news...) Melmoth mentioned that Avowed, a new Obsidian fantasy RPG, was coming out; I had a look at a few reviews and it sounded pretty good if not immediately-buy-at-full-price good. A couple of the reviews mentioned The Outer Worlds, a previous Obsidian sci-fi RPG, and that rang a vague bell - back at release in 2019 I'd thought it sounded pretty good if not immediately-buy-at-full-price good, then promptly forgotten all about it, so I picked it up at a discount.

The Outer Worlds has grabbed me in a way Dragon Age: The Veilguard somehow hasn't with very Fallout-esque gameplay and a corporate dystopia setting that raises a few wry smile between depressingly plausible vignettes. I have hit a small snag, though.

Obsidian games developed a bit of a reputation for not being in a perfectly polished state at release and needing a patch or three to iron out the worst glitches, not least from Fallout: New Vegas. You would have thought that five years might be enough to squash pretty much all the bugs, but after travelling to the planet of Monarch I wandered into a room to find an NPC delivering half of a conversation to empty space. Slightly confused I tried to chat to him only to be told "Not now", so I wandered off and did some other missions.

After several other quests the chap was still terribly busy and wouldn't talk, and he turned out to be a vital part of the main story quest. Searching around to see if others had hit the same issue it seems a second NPC hadn't spawned and was nowhere to be found. A couple of people reported the same missing NPC, others had problems on the same mission with different NPCs, and it seemed there was no solution except to go back to previous save games. I didn't fancy re-doing a bunch of missions, though, so in frustration killed the bloke, then his guards, his other followers, and a fair chunk of the the rest of the town who took a dim view of my murderous rampage and turned hostile. Can't really blame them. On the plus side it did mark that stage of the mission as complete and allowed me to progress so I was lucky in that respect, some of the other missing NPCs would have halted things completely by the sounds of it. I'd normally try to at least make an attempt at diplomatic solution but as the old saying goes: when life gives you lemons, slaughter anything that moves and hope that counts as a successful mission.

Despite the bugs many Obsidian releases received plaudits for their ambition, and The Outer Worlds certainly seems to allow you to take a variety of approaches (though a short way through my first play-through I'm not sure how firmly I'm being shepherded down certain paths). In these sort of games I generally follow the waypoints, go to the obvious places the missions lead, with the odd diversion here and there if I pass an interesting looking building or cave en route. I'm not deliberately being awkward or trying to do things out of order to catch out the designers, but as well as the outright bugged NPC on Monarch I seem to going about things in a slightly irregular order. There've been a number of encounters where I wandered into a place just looking for stuff to loot, defeated a few marauders, and had a chat along the lines of:
Engineer Geoff: "Oh, wow, thanks! Mayor Jeff must have sent you to rescue me!"
Me: "Mayor.. who now? What? Err, sure, I guess..."
Later on after finding another town
Mayor Jeff: "Yes, I can help with that information, but first I need the town Engineer back"
Me: "Is he called Geoff by any chance? The chap standing over there?"
Mayor Jeff: "I sent him off to investigate interruptions to our power supply"
Me: "Yeah, he was at the power station besieged by Marauders, all sorted"
Mayor Jeff: "I'll mark the location on your map"
Engineer Geoff: "Uh... I'm right here, boss"
Mayor Jeff: "Talk to me again when you've found him"
Ends conversation. Starts conversation.
Mayor Jeff: "Geoff tells me you rescued him, well done! Here's a file with the data you need."

It can't be easy with so many moving parts and the freedom to travel around at will, but I do seem to be (in technical maritime parlance) twatting into piers a bit more often than would be ideal.

 

 

The veil was torn asunder ‘tween the hours of twelve and one

Breaking the habit of a lifetime (for extremely small values of 'lifetime'), I recently bought a game released within the tenure of the current Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. I realise it was a peculiar habit to get into and deeply inconvenient much of the time (desperately wanting to play Tetris but being stuck with Space Invaders and Super Breakout until 1990), though shambolic Conservative leadership meant it was much less of a hardship for the last few years (Elden Ring hadn't dropped out of the charts before the lettuce wilted). Anyone might think it's a fictional device I just came up with to try and avoid a more prosaic statement about generally being far behind the curve of new gaming releases, but that doesn't sound very plausible does it?

So I picked up Dragon Age: The Veilguard over Christmas, and so far... it's fine. There's much to like, nothing egregiously awful, but it hasn't really sunk its hooks into me. I can play an hour here or there, think "that was all right", and log out quite happily rather than being desperate to see where the story goes next. It's a much healthier approach than bunking off work, living off giant bags of giant Wotsits as there's no time for cooking, and only stopping when you fall asleep on your keyboard; perhaps we should be giving more credit to things that are pretty decent without being addictively good. 

The Dragon Age series has changed protagonist each game and the styles changed more between instalments than, say, the original Mass Effect trilogy, so it's had a tougher time creating a cohesive and involving story across games. A ten year gap since the last game killed off any momentum it might have built up, though going back and reading Wikipedia plot summaries I'm not sure it really had any momentum by the end of Inquisition - I remembered most of the key events of the first two games with a bit of prompting, but haven't the slightest recollection of the main villain of the third. Coryph-who and the what now? It's not vital to Veilguard; you can make a few choices at the start about what happened in Inquisition, but I wonder if they might have been better off starting with a cleaner slate. I found it particularly jarring when the Inquisitor turned up as an NPC; I might not really remember anything I did, but that's still "me", except it isn't any more. 

The rest of the game works nicely. Combat is fast paced; a touch too frantic for my aged reflexes in boss fights at the default level, but that's what difficulty settings are for. The companions seem a decent bunch, and I'm really liking Bryony Corrigan's soft North East tones as the British female Rook. Puzzles so far have struck a balance, not trivial but not keyboard-smashingly irritating.Without being fully involved in the central story, though, it lacks a certain something. A central hub leading to zones with different themes, containing challenges requiring physical or mental skills? If Varric was replaced by a Richard (either O'Brien or Ayoade) it could be Dragon Age: The Crystal Mazening.