Life with Bees

Eurovision season rolls round and with it endless bad jokes and irony. We've watched it for the last four or five years - TK loves it, not in a post-ironic or even sarcastic way. He just finds the whole business hilarious fun. This year we got the usual crop of leggy blondes, men in leather pants, bizarre Euro-lyrics and generous helpings of tandoori skin. Here were some of your favourites - none of them won, of course:

Azerbaijan: gothic extravaganza with men in drag and women in underwear. What's not to love?

Switzerland: a button-cute Italian and an inanely catchy ballad. Just too Eurovision and sadly never destined for success.

Ukraine: a sexpot in a tasselled minidress belting out a very bad, high octane pop song. Fabulous legs, a burnished fake tan and some heaving cleavage.

Estonia: three fat and cheerful middleaged men, one of them an Estonian MP. I didn't see them but apparently they rocked.

Latvia: they came as pirates!!!

I am sucked deeper into the Lord of the Rings Online.

So far playing a massive multiplayer online role playing game has been really quite enjoyable. It's fun to dress Pergs in spiffy elf costumes, and it's rather addictive to go off hunting orcs and mining for gold and barrow-iron.

Some of Perg's highlights:

• Putting together a manly battle costume: a red-and-white striped corset top and bright yellow pants.
  
• He once died by accidentally falling off a beautiful sweeping staircase in the elf city of Celondim. Ran right off the edge. No OH&S in these epic locations.
• Successfully questing through the Barrow-Downs, fighting barrow-wights and evil shades with a group of other random players.
• Constantly getting lost in Bree, in spite of it being his home town.
• Making money through his industrious mining.
• Cooking up a storm making hobbit breakfasts and - his favourite food - stuffed cabbages.

Perhaps more importantly I now understand why boys like to spend hours online playing these games. It is strangely fun to collect dwarf-iron nuggets, or kill orcs and goblins. The game is easy for a newbie like me to play, with a steady stream of rewards to satisfy the most impatient player. And some of the people who play are good company.

Playing with Pergs has given me much more patience for TK's gaming habit, and a greater appreciation of the problem-solving skills involved.

Except now he has to share LotRO time with me and my little elf....

Tired of being a videogames widow, I join the ranks of nerds pretending to be hobbits online.

In an effort to discover the appeal of the huge online games such as World of Warcraft and Lord of the Rings, which send TK and his friends off on quests and raids for hours upon hours, I decided to take things into my own hands and enter the world of online gaming. TK's current addiction is Lord of the Rings Online, a multi-player online game which allows you to play at being a character in Middle Earth. With a glint in his eye, he was only too glad to help me set up a character using his account.

You can pick any of the main races in the Lord of the Rings for your character - elves, dwarves, men or hobbits. I chose to be a vain, good-looking elf with flowing hair, a sunset tan and a huge white grin. We even gave him a buff, poncy name - Pergolas. And so Pergolas and I popped up in the elven cities of Middle Earth, slightly scared, eager to learn and with a penchant for running inadvertantly into trees.