Scenes of Devastation

So it's late October in the UK, and the storms have moved in. The winds were bad enough on Sunday night that most of the London Underground was out of action on Monday morning, and key lines still struggled into the afternoon. My local area wasn't too terribly hit - a load of leaves stripped from the trees and lots of litter blown around - but, with a tarpaulin on my roof weighed down by spare bricks and fragments of paving tiles, it was a loud night for me. So loud, in fact, that I woke up in the middle of the night with a splitting headache that stayed with me till morning. One of these days, I'll remember which parts of my brain can be fixed with paracetamol (front right, lower rear) and which requires the less friendly painkiller ibuprofen (front left), which I've all but sworn off and only use in real emergencies.

There were dire warnings of further adverse weather to come, but it's been strangely calm since Sunday night/Monday morning... and the Met Office (a body well known for predicting the weather by esoteric means that never include looking out of a fucking window) suggests things are going to remain fairly calm, at least until the weekend...

I learned yesterday I'd suffered some devastation of my own: my ancient Sega Saturn is working fine (no surprise, it's often said it was the most reliable console of its time, and mine will even run a game on a broken disc!) but my main memory card is buggered. It seemed to be OK initially, but after playing a couple of different games, the Saturn lost track of it. I pulled it out and put it back in (with the console off, obviously) and, after a few attempts, it picked up the memory card again... but it was suddenly blank. Bang goes all the saved games I had from when I was regularly using the machine - everything from Fighters Megamix to Panzer Dragoon Saga, from Castlevania X to Policenauts. It seems as though the battery in the memory card had finally died but, having switched it out for an equally old replacement memory card (which I thought had been bought new, but must have been second hand as it came with some saved files for games I never owned), things seem OK. Weird.

It's a bit of a blow, especially to lose completed games of Policenauts and Castlevania X (bar one painful boss battle that wasn't utterly necessary for the completion of the game), and a game of Panzer Dragoon Saga that was quite close to the end... but at least I can replay Panzer Saga. The other two, being imports, are rather more problematic. I have an emulator they both seem to work on, but it's not the same as using the console.