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Scene: eight (nine?) of us in the outdoor hot tub on the last night of iCon, triskellian's game-playing holiday in Northumberland. Caveat: I have no idea who actually said what, except that it was secretrebel's idea.

"Shame we didn't run a game in the hot tub."
"We could, you know. It'd only take four minutes."
"Four minutes?"
"Really. Come on, everyone, tell me your characters."
"I'm a mage."
"I'm a level 36 immortal mage."
"Okay, then, I'm a god."
"I'm a multi-classed monk bard."
"I'm a chicken tied to a ten-foot pole."
"That's been one and a half minutes already."
"Right, first dungeon! John?"
"You're in a narrow passage. There's a monster."
"I kill the monster."
"Experience points!"
"A thousand for Adam because he killed the monster. None of the rest of you get any."
"Next dungeon!"
"Er, a big room with a dragon in it."
"Give the dragon the chicken on the stick."
"The chicken gets toasted. Sorry, Roo."
"I pull a leg off the chicken and eat it."
"The dragon's bored and goes away. Experience points!"
"None. No one killed anything. Except the chicken."
"Someone resurrect the chicken."
(and so on around the tub)
"Dee, your dungeon!"
"Uhhh, you're in a ten-by-ten room. An orc is guarding a chest."
"Kill the chest and steal the orc."
"The chicken gets five million experience points."
"That's been way more than four minutes."
(holding up wrinkled hands) "I'm turning into a prune."
"Hey, how many more people do you think we could fit in here?"


It was a lovely almost-week - though my head was still a bit cotton-woolly from the festival and I was only fully alert when I was being someone else (in order, a space colonist who thought she was Lara Croft; the president of Earth; and a psychonautical hippie who accidentally turned out to have all the right skills for the game, which was based on the Tarot). The rest of the time I mostly read and sat and thought, but slowly; hunted through the house for hidden flags; and went barefoot on the lawn while peacocks shouted around us (they sounded as if they were saying "Help! Help!")

The house, Ellingham Hall, was jaw-droppingly gorgeous. Cavernous wood-panelled spaces, broad stairways, a kitchen fit for cooking meals for nearly thirty in, with an old dresser full of tiny drawers with the names of household chemicals on enamelled labels. I had something of a revelation about it when looking around for the first time. Yes, I was amazed by how lovely and spacious it was, but one part of my brain was even more amazed: my flat- and bedsit-dwelling London self from a few years ago. I remembered how good it felt arriving at Mrs B's manor house in Norfolk with a lot of the same people, coming from my little patch of London space, and remembered there had been a time (while I lived in my Finsbury Park bedsit) when I used to daydream about putting on a dressing-gown and wandering from room to room with a mug of coffee in my hand. Because back then I only had one room, and my bed pretty much filled it.

It's great, this feeling I have in recent months, a feeling of having enough.