Now just imagine what an announcement like this one is going to do to me.

If I had children, I would already be finding a buyer for their internal organs. Broodmate, take note – this is not a joke. I am deadly serious. If we ever reproduce, the minute a video like this comes to my attention, I will be on the telephone to an emphesemic fixer in the London underworld. “I’ve got some Long Pork for you Harry.” I’d find a dogfood factory to deal with the unsaleable byproducts.

I can’t explain the sheer awe these toys generate in me. Some people collect vintage furniture. Others pursue rare stamps or exquisitely bound books. I idolise resin-cast miniaturised bipedal war engines.

I AM JUST A MAN.

It is so strange to meet up with someone one has not seen for years to discover that almost nothing has changed. I don’t mean in terms of the person you discover or the person you present as; these things change from beer to beer. I mean that it is a great delight to find that a relationship can be taken up again like a familiar coat – it slips on comfortably, with the same feeling, the same warmth, the same shape and idiosyncracies that you realise you have never quite forgotten, have perhaps not realised how dearly you missed. The terror of long-neglected friendships is that something will have fundamentally changed; that the coat will not fit.

The Mole and I grew up together. When I was an insufferable puffball of rage, terror and snot, inexplicably he decided to be my friend. We smashed each other’s lego, completed an entire folder of Star Wars tazos, and experimented with serious nerd crack. We played through Final Fantasy VII together, which is about as close to a marriage as two pre-adolescents ever get, (arranged marriages with dowries of livestock notwithstanding). Somehow we stayed friends through separate secondary schools.

And our latest meeting? We chatted, we swapped some nerdgeld, and we played three rounds of Carcassone and one round of Warhammer: Invasion. Four years apart and we came right back in to playing boardgames and talking about chameleons. I can’t tell you how afraid I was that the person I had become in the time of absence would utterly explode our dynamic and we would be left glowering at one another, spitting into our teacups and snarling across the corpse of our shared past. But no – it turns out that some things, particularly geeks, remain constant.

Driving home from The Mole’s house, I felt very, very sad. During the four years apart, even while he was on the other side of the globe, I felt like The Mole was fundamentally contactable. I suppose I didn’t realise how important our friendship was to me to have held it in such light regard. Seeing him reminded me that friendships don’t really exist without real effort; that while a friendship can always endure in potentia, unless you see and speak to the other person, really you’re just treading water. That’s not the hardest thing in the world, but the value of a friendship is so great that it is an investment that is always richly rewarded.

First the wings. There was a shivering permafrost of ice crystals depending from them, grown to a size I could not understand; forests, boulders, sheer geometrical protrusions mimicking the simple frost that creeps on the sleeping winter shape of moths. Beneath the sheeting ice were pinions as broad as galleon sails. The minute threads and barbs within a feather advanced to the size of picks and cables. The vast things had sheltered themselves beneath the casement of their spread wings, swanlike nesting, or monks hidden under their cowls. The creaking and cracking of the great ice-fields they wore, straining as the wings rose and fell with each sough and low of breath, was louder than the screaming wind.

The heads were indeterminate within the mass of ice and the cloak of feathers, but I saw an eye, or rather a black hemisphere, deep within the enfolding mass of bodies, that glinted in the way living eyes do, reflecting a light I could not detect the source of. It was cased too in a sheet of ice, a waterfall frozen in its flow. I suppose it was the size of a lake, but scale had little meaning for me just then. Around this still lens were thick barbs, mast-like, again hung with spears of ice. They might have been lashes: and I thought of the luscious, ludicrous eyes of a bull. Then there was the faintest twitch of the great mass; an incalculable volume of snow collapsed from some body part and avalanched downwards. Clouds of powdered ice shot skyward, billowed, gradually settled. I couldn’t make out the eye any longer.

“How many of them are there?”

“Five.”

“Five. Gods.”

“They are not.”

“No, I just meant…”

But I had come to the end of my meanings. The overall bulk, if I tried to interpret it as five distinct individuals, suggested they were not bipedal; if what I thought were limbs were indeed limbs. I saw what could be interpreted as a torso, maybe, a beautiful, sculptural, classical male torso; but there were also suggestions of unfolding pouches, packets of concealed things like smaller limbs or mandibles or cilia that occasionally projected forth and scrambled over themselves in a motion of frantic cleaning. Glacial growth obscured the lower portions partially; but there were accretions of ice around the parts I thought might be mouths that looked unlike ice, and mountains of the stuff here and there, glimmering, unhealthy sheen.

So, Lisbeth. Sharp as a chisel and possibly autistic, with a savage sense of vengeance and a taser. Rides a motorbike. Treats her sculptured, whippet-thin body as a gothic canvas for shrapnel and ink. Enjoys sex. Breaks the law. Does the right thing. Does violent things to the men who hate women. Has capital “I” issues. Can do things that you can’t.

Character’s don’t have lives, they have arcs: Lisbeth is raped by her legal guardian, early in hers. Rape is a common point on the arc for female characters. From there they often die, or lose their minds, or are rescued by men. In some of the vilest stories they are unaffected.

Lisbeth catches her attacker on film. She’s been expecting him to assault her as payment for releasing her money from the state. Once she recovers physically from his assault, she tasers him into unconsciousness, and ties him naked to the floor. When he regains himself, she rams a steel dildo up his anus and kicks it home a good few times. She reveals the video to him and lets him know that from now on, she has absolute power over him. Then she tattoos “I am a rapist pig” crudely across his chest.

By this point in the film the part of me that cared for due process was on a leave of absence, and the tyrannical, genital crushing ape had full control of my mind. I can’t imagine better theatrical catharsis than a rapist being violently beaten and then socially castrated.

Later, appropros of seemingly little, Lisbeth decides that she’s going to fuck Blomqvist (Daniel Craig), and he agrees. Later, she saves him from being tortured to death by a serial killer.

Lisbeth’s arc is a fantasy: few people ever receive even the barest trappings of justice when they are raped. I don’t know to what degree, and over what time scale, people recover. But filmic characters are built out of fantasties, and Lisbeth’s arc sings. How many times have you seen a female character beaten down throughout a film, shattered? Or almost as demeaning – left dangling and waiting for inevitable rescue by the inevitable male hero? Lisbeth’s arc seems to scream out – give us the chance, give us the technology, and you bastards who demean us, we will break you, we will unmake you, we will crack you down into your merest atoms and we will walk away and leave you in the filth. And then we will fuck a journalist-cum-detective , solve a multiple homicide, rescue that journalist from a serial killer, and finally incinerate the murderer in a car fire.

She is fantastically bigger than life and immensely intimidating. If humans choose to mate for the qualities they desire passed onto their offspring, then Lisbeth is the sex icon of the Millenium.

I was put off history studies by the school curriculum (after drudging through Anglo- and Euro-centric accounts of the two world wars, our school switched to a four year programme studying the Russian peasantry. That did little to entice my sugar- and hormone-addled pubescent brain) and I’ve only rediscovered an interest in nonfiction recently. I already have a vast stash of books from my last fleeting obsession (the financial crash), so for this investigation, I’ve decided I’m going to do everything digitally. And in respect of my crippling troll addiction, I’ve decided I’m going to do it all for free, as well.

My first stop is wikipedia, where I uncovered a good precis of the entire period. I also identified that the period running up to and including the first Anglo-Afghan war was a very interesting and busy time, with the deposed monarch Shuja Shah Durrani retaking the throne of Kabul as a British puppet, and the excellent tale of Arthur Connolly, a British agent and memoirist who met an untimely death in Bukhara (now in Uzbekistan.) Following up on Arthur Connolly and the Reverend Joseph Wolff, who documented Connolly’s disastrous mission and demise, I moved on to google books, where I came across both Connolly’s and Wolff’s accounts of their time in central Asia. I’ve yet to read them, but they’re sitting happily on my desktop at home.

Although Connolly coined the term The Great Game, it was Rudyard Kipling that brought it to popular consciousness in his novel Kim, available from Project Gutenberg. The very first Flashman book by George MacDonald Fraser features the disastrous British folly in the first Anglo-Afghan war, and happily, Broodmate has a copy already lined up on the shelf. (For those of you not lucky enough to have psychic partners, there will certainly be a copy in  your local library).

Once I’ve thoroughly exhausted wikipedia and made as much progress as I can with Connolly and Wolff, I’ll be investigating local libraries (there are a few titles that look promising) and also university websites: I’ve found that most departments keep a few bits of useful information out in the open for public consumption, and I’m sure SOAS will have some essays I can scrump.

It’s easy to be blasé about the internet: just one more tributary to the raging river of trivial or commercial information we encounter everyday. Twenty years ago I would need to visit the library regularly to get this kind of information. Forty years ago I would be visiting universities. A hundred years ago, the British or Bodlean library. A hundred and fifty years ago (notwithstanding that these would be almost current events) I would need to be part of the class wealthy enough to attend Oxford or Cambridge to have such ready access to information.

We’ve got it good.

So this year I found myself absolutely unsurprisingly the proud owner of A Game of Thrones: The Board Game, Second Edition. For a brief precis, A Game of Thrones is a popular and comparatively recent fantasy property, derived from a series of books by George RR Martin called A Song of Ice and Fire. A Game of Thrones is the title of the first book which has been wisely picked up by other parties for adaptation into boardgames, cardgames, roleplaying games, and an HBO TV series starring Sean Bean.

The story of Game of Thrones is one of political intrigue and familial conniving, assassination, murder, incest, war, politics – in fact everything that makes the history of planet earth interesting, but in the context of a fantastical medieval world. There are magical overtones (dragons were real, once – strange things live in the far north that are not just wolves or Glaswegians) but the real freedom that this gives to Martin is the ability to weave an original tale of deceipt and betrayal without rehashing a historical narrative. In effect, he’s saving us from spoilers.

The TV series is a gem. The books are a cross-over hit: much beloved as they have been by the geek community (though far too long and swollen to interest me much,) I now find that Broodmate’s mother (The Hive Queen) has polished off the entire 5 million page series in the space of a few months. Broodmate has been reading them for years.

Anyway. Fantasy Flight Games, makers of shiny and expensive boardgames, have issued a revised second edition of A Game of Thrones: The Boardgame, in time for Christmas 2011. I found a copy in my local Waterstones, sitting alongside luxury-boxed versions of Monopoly and Cluedo, and tasteful German games like Carcassone and Settlers of Catan. I shan’t tell you the price point. I’m a little ashamed. Let us say that it was somewhere between a packet of crisps and a Prius.

There’s a lovely audio summary of how the game works available from the How to Play podcast. Broadly speaking, you take on the roll of a noble household from the fantasy continent of Westeros, vying for control of the throne through force of arms, making alliances and then breaking them at strategic moments. For the time being I will just write a few things about the game specifically to bamboozle those in my audience who do not play the same time of boardgame that I do.

• The game features four decks of cards, three of which you do not use on the first turn of the game, and one of which it is possible (although unlikely) never to use.
• One random possibility hidden within one deck of cards is a round of bidding, the results of which change turn order, who wins draws in fights, and how many special (rather than normal) actions players each player can take.
• Whoever has the cardboard badge of a throne made out of melted swords in front of them gets to decide draws outside combat.

And so on. I could go on being purposefully obtuse. Once you get playing it though the game is easy enough to understand. It’s not hard to learn how you take and resolve actions in the game, but I think it will take a few plays to work out their exact significance.

I managed to get two games in over the holidays, with a full six players at each. These were fabulous affairs spanning five hours a pop. By the end of each game all the new players were in agreement that they now knew the rules, and would give everyone else a sound hiding the next time around. I will count that as a definite win.

In sum: if you enjoy tactical and very social boardgames, or you’re a big fan of the Game of Thrones world, and have a sizeable chunk of time and money lying around, think about Game of Thrones.

I’d recommend you scan the book beneath your eyes. It’s rich and frothy and alcoholic, like something Nigella Lawson would bake; also nigh-pornographic in parts. Like something Nigella etc. etc. etc. Also it is a decidedly sexy volume of feminist lore; feminism with a kick and a grin. Watch out for the first description of childbirth, mind.

Babies. Who on earth thought of hiding them inside adults? The mind boggles.

“Do you want… no, I suppose you don’t want anything.” Tobi asked.

“I’d like to taste it, actually.”

“It’s gone downhill mate.”

It was a tiny table packed between two old oak beams, under a stuffed deer head without eyes. Tobi watched the crowds for a minute, shaking his head, before he turned and said:

“Maggitch is dead.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. They hung him. For sodomy.”

“Okay.”

“We all know what it really was. Sodomite though he was. When Curacell was ousted, Maggitch wouldn’t sign on with the Gurelas. I wouldn’t expect them going after the University, but we’re not safe. Anyway they got him in a honey pot.”

The names were strange. Curacell was an outsider family I associated with granaries, and the Gurelas were landowners tied up with offshore vineyards. That same feeling again caught me up – as though I wasn’t disjointed in time, but in place.

“Do you lecture now?” I asked.

He nodded, stroking his beard. “I’ve got… it’s not Maggitch’s post. Well, more or less it would be Maggitch’s post. Nothing much changed. I imagine everything I tell them is a bloody lie, though?”

“I don’t know any better than you.” I took a little sip of the ale; ashy and sweet. “San Jorgo, that’s bad.”

He nodded. A grim little smile settled onto his face. “It’s all bad, old boy.”

“Hey, if you’ve got Maggitch’s post, does that mean you’ve got his luck with women?”

“Hah! Twice married, friend. And some of us have been aging all these years. After a while the urge, upon seeing a young girl, to jenny her senseless, fades quite sadly, replaced with the desire to fix her up with a nice young man with a solid line in milinery or some such. Or maybe to get her a good governess and teach her the harpsichord.”

I let the veil drop, and spoke.

“Excuse me.”

She started, suddenly seeing me beside the door, and pressed herself into the nook. “Bloody hell. I didn’t see you.”

“I’m very quiet. I’m sorry. Miss.”

“Missus.”

“I didn’t mean to presume. My family used to live in this building.”

“Servants?”

“We made good.”

“I see.” She pulled herself out of the alcove and flattened her pinafore. Her profile was my mother’s, but she had father’s hair, curled into a black mop, and familiar thick black slugs of her eyebrows. “I don’t remember you. What do you do?”

“I’m a salesman.”

“Oh yes. Well you can clear off.”

“I’m not at work. I really wanted to see the old place.”

“No.” She said. “No, thank you.”

That was that. What did I want from her? Nothing. And there was nothing that I could provide for her. So we parted. That was the last time I saw my family.

“Did you train as a dancer?”

She nodded. “I was at the Black Light Theatre. On the corner of the Bundestrasse and Regelscourt.”

“My mother enjoyed the Black Light.”

She stuck a finger in her mouth and faked gagging. “God it was horrible. No offence to your mother. I thought I was always going to get a part in pantomime or a comedy or something, but no, not a chance.” She paused on one foot for a moment and looked at me directly. “Is your mother alive?”

I nodded.

“I don’t know what it’s like to be dead. I’m so curious. That’s not offensive is it?”

I laughed. “I could help you find out.”

She looked at me ascant. Perhaps she’d heard the joke before. I didn’t really know how many times she or the players had visited Draugrburg. I was still only just becoming comfortable in myself; and often I had the strong sense that other people knew my state better by description than I did by acquaintance.

“I think it’s quite peaceful here.”

We sat in the lee of a stretch of battlement, perched on the crumbled head of an ancient stone king, watching the unlife of the city carrying on as the short day ended. The sleepless dead lit torches, congregated around the fire fountains, put away playing dice and picked up musical instruments. Builders and renovators put away their implements and collected carts so they could bring the infirm out of their seclusion. Ella put her hand over mine.

“I don’t ever warm up.” I said.

“Prove it.”