The Big Smoke

Before Christmas we put out a call in the mag for readers who have their own London love stories. Did you meet your other half in a pod on the London Eye? In a dungeon at Torture Garden? On the night bus? While doing the Lambeth Walk?

If so, and if you want to appear in a future issue of Time Out, we would like to hear from you. Email your story and contact details to lovestories@timeout.com and we'll be in touch shortly.

One of the highlights of my Christmas came a few days after the big day, when I spent an evening playing 'The Beatles Rock Band' on a Nintendo Wii with my girlfriend, our three-year-old daughter Leila and Leila's Grandad – I say 'play', but in truth Leila could barely cling on to a drumstick, let alone keep time during our otherwise exquisite virtual rendition of 'Helter Skelter' and 'Eights Days A Week'. After hearing some sad news on Christmas Eve, I'd been pondering the importance of family over Christmas, and this seemed to be one of the greatest expressions of family vitality that I encountered over the entire festive break.

So a couple of days later, when I was reading Tom Chatfield's book about the video game industry, 'Fun Inc.', it was no surprise that the following line jumped out: 'Already, there are grandparents playing video games with their grandchildren, a scenario that sounds mildly outlandish, but that will inevitably become commonplace in years to come.'

For some people, this scenario is not so much 'mildly outlandish' as downright sacrilegious. For many, computer games remain anathema, a cultural black hole, devoid of any merit, artistic, societal or otherwise. Just this morning I read one of my favourite blogs, Onion Bag Blog, and winced at Jason Cobb's throwaway line that ' It’s actually very hard to present me with a Beatles related ‘product’ that I don’t like. Rock Band would probably be the exception.' And this in a review of 'Nowhere Boy', a film that I saw for free, which would be an adequate reflection of its worth if I could also invoice the director for the cost of the time it took me to see it.

As a Beatles product, as entertainment, as art, as anything at all but especially as a form for appreciating and revelling in glorious music, 'Rock Band' batters 'Nowhere Boy' all over the park. Try it Jason, I urge you, you might like it. I mean, it can't be any worse than immersing yourself in an outdoor swimming pool on one of the coldest days of the year, can it?

Chatfield would agree. He boldly claims that 'books and games are the two great active media of our time' before exploring the numerous reasons that video games should be taken seriously, both as a business and as an art. It is the latter aspect that particularly interests me, and Chatfield quotes my piece (hey, I'm in the index people) about Punchdrunk's Tunnel 228, a piece of interactive theatre that took place last year in tunnels underneath Waterloo station and which reminded me of games like 'Doom' and 'Tomb Raider', both for the atmosphere and also for the way the 'player/viewer' gets to make their own decisions about where to go and what to see.

A commentator at the time said: 'no matter how sophisticated gaming gets the virtual world will never come close to the real deal' but I didn't think I agreed with that then and after reading Chatfield's book I certainly don't now. I recently rediscovered 'Deus Ex', a PS2 game from 2000, and found the mixture of conspiracy theory, mutants, GK Chesterton and moral dilemma (you are faced with three different endings, each of which represent a different and wholly unsatisfying political ideology) to be far more compelling than 99 per cent of cinema and theatre I have seen in recent years. It also kept me busy for the best part of a month, which represents value for money that cinema and theatre can only dream of.

That's not to say video games are always the answer. Over Christmas, I also played Trivial Pursuit on the Wii with my girlfriend's family, which proved to be one of the most pointless experiences I have ever had with a console. The questions were lame, the interactive host was a pain in the neck, it was difficult to enjoy the banter of competition when you were staring at a screen and I lost.

On New Year's Eve I was back in London and playing Trivial Pursuit for real, and this proved to be incalculably more satisfying. We had the clatter of real dice, the challenge of decent questions and the chatter of face-to-face competition. Also, I won. Video games are great, but never, ever mess with the Triv.

Christmas is coming but Yule has passed. I don’t normally give much thought to Pagan rituals, but recent research for a feature has led me down this curious path. In the process, I’ve discovered that London boasts an astounding four esoteric or occultist bookshops all within a short walk of each other: Watkin’s on Cecil Court; Treadwell’s on Tavistock Street; Atlantis on Museum Street; and Mysteries on Monmouth Street.

Atlantis is the oldest of these, opened in the 1920s by an acquaintance of Aleister Crowley. It is now run by the founder’s daughter and grandaughter – the latter is probably London’s only third-generation occult bookseller.

As I looked around the well-stocked and eclectic shelves and listened to Geraldine, the owner, banter knowledgeably with her loyal clientele, I felt satisfaction that London can harbour not just one such eccentric bookshop, but four of the blighters. But I also felt a twinge of envy. London’s selection of specialist bookshops is dwindling. To take one example, ten years ago, there were two bookshops specialising in sport: the well-known Sportpages on Charing Cross Road and the delightful Extra Cover shop in NW8, which covered football and cricket and had a great blend of new releases and classics, both lost and revered.

Now both these shops are closed: London, one of the foremost cities in the world for sport, does not have a single specialist bookseller on the subject.

Of course, every big bookshop in London has a sports section and none have an occult section, which explains the curious situation where the city’s witches and warlocks are so well served by independents whereas sports fans have nowt. But there is no comparison between the bland sports sections of Waterstone's – a wall of glossy, unreadable, ghostwritten autobiographies – and the carefully selected variety and vibrant community provided by Atlantis or Treadwell’s. I am no hater of the chain store, but these are valuable qualities that large enterprises cannot replicate.

So it being Christmas, perhaps I should put ‘specialist sports bookshop’ on my Xmas wish-list alongside my other must haves –‘a version of Grand Theft Auto set in London’ and ‘a workable and profitable model for newspapers and magazines in the age of the internet.’

I don’t think that’s too much to ask, is it? Merry Christmas everybody.

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