1. Spent the evening at a colleague’s birthday party in a private bikers club in a Reykjavik suburb, drinking (water, of course), eating tasty food and playing poker, a strange game which seems to consist mainly of the following:

    • Give people some cards
    • Put some cards on a table
    • Move some bits of plastic around a few times — the bits of plastic are different colours, and make nice sounds if you click them together
    • Arrange your plastic into piles and click them together whilst sipping a cocktail (or water, depending on whether or not you are a bodybuilder/Buddhist/bodybuilding Buddhist).
    • Do poker with your face (to do: what is this?)
    • Intermittently tap the table
    • Nonchalantly toss some plastic into the middle of the table, or, if you’re hungry, toss your cards towards the dealer and go get some food — this is called folding but DO NOT FOLD THE CARDS it is confusing and not literal
    • Repeat 2-5 a few times, then show people your cards. Say some numbers out loud (optional: confused pause), and then one of you has won. Sometimes this is because a card has a bigger number than another, or because of the shape, or because of the picture.
    • The winner gets all the plastic, unless they ran out of plastic half way through, in which case they get that much less — use little piles for this purpose.
    • Repeat from beginning

    Thanks for a great evening everyone :)

  2. Has a go at making a chicken mushroomey cheesey sauce thing (inspired by an amazing Italian place here). Surprisingly it wasn’t unsuccessful — needs a bit more cheese next time though.

  3. Robin Andrews: @BarnabyWalters Hi Barnaby. Thanks for liking my post. However, my handle is @robinmujician! How's the land of ice?

    Robin Andrews whoops, missed it that time! I need to get autocomplete working again, then I’ll never forget :)

    Iceland is great, the people are cool, the weather+scenery is amazing, the work is interesting, and my apartment has a huge DVD collection! I did a panorama from the office roof.

  4. Jovian Salak: @BarnabyWalters such nice weather! UK is predictably bad...

    Jovian Salak the weather here is predictably unpredictable :) It was gorgeous when I took that two days ago, since then it has been freezing, murky and (in the last few hours) snowing a lot. All good fun!

  5. Jovian Salak: @BarnabyWalters Well where is it?! Lets see it! (coincidentally @catwall95 showed me a great #panorama of Dartmoor today!)

    Jovian Salak I’ll see if I can get it up this evening. Got lots of emails, code and postcards to sort as well though!