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Over the last few days, in the run up to Glasto, my life seems to have turned into one of those logic puzzles where you are trying to get a number of items over a river in a small boat, but you have to keep crossing the river with various combinations of the items because you can’t take them all at once or leave certain combinations alone together. If I remember rightly, it’s usually a fox, a chicken and some grain, and you can’t leave the fox with the chicken, or the chicken with the grain, as one item ends up getting eaten in each case. Of course, none of this explains why you don’t just buy a bigger boat. Presumably you have to cross this river on a regular basis, I mean what sort of farmer are you?

Anyway, instead of a bizarre cargo of singular animals (again, what kind of farmer is this?), the logic problem that is my life involves a selection of tents and changes of clothes located either at my house or Sal’s house, which I have to get to my office (ludicrously located on the opposite side of London) via the northern line rush hour commute, during which I can only transport a limited number of items in case I get eaten by some banker with an attitude problem.

Today I brought in a change of clothes so that I can leave for Bristol straight from work on Wednesday evening, without having to take my suit to the festival. Tomorrow I’m going to be bringing to work the 2 tents that I stupidly offered to put up when I get there on behalf of the Thursday night late arrivals (the fools who decided to drive to the festival and can’t get any more time off work).

On Wednesday I’ll just have a rucksack (and a third tent) with me, but then in the evening I’ll have to get it all to Paddington [shudders].

Still, it’ll be worth it. I can’t wait…

10 thoughts on “”

  1. The game you’re remembering is Oregon Trail. I think every kid has fond memories of it as we tried our own hand at early America’s Manifest Destiny.
    Luckily, you can download it and relive the happiness that was losing your chickens as you crossed the rivers at:
    http://www.emotionaljoystick.com

    Enjoy

  2. Actually, nothing so complex (although I do remember Oregon Trail, or something similar, wasn’t that one of those old text-based adventure games? I think we played that on the computers at school). Actually, the game I was referring to is much more simple, it’s this puzzle:

    “A farmer is returning to his farm after a long day of working in the fields. He has with him a fox, a chicken, and some grain. He must cross a small stream on his way back to the barn. At the stream, there is a canoe, in which he can transport at most one item across at a time. However, he cannot leave the fox alone with the chicken, or the fox will eat the chicken. Similarly, he cannot leave the chicken alone with the grain because the chicken will eat the grain. Devise a plan (sequence of actions) that the farmer can take to safely bring all of his possessions across the stream and continue on his way home.”

    There’s also a similar one with missionaries and cannibals:

    “Three missionaries and three cannibals come to a river and find a boat that holds two. If the cannibals ever outnumber the missionaries on either bank, the missionaries will be eaten. How shall they cross?”

    But both are solved using the same basic principle…

  3. That reminds me, I must sort out setting up a comments function on the weblog pages. Job for a rainy day, I think.

  4. I think I like Oregon Trail better than those two other games you mention. Reminds me of math word problems- Yuck.
    Still fun to download and play though.

    Oh, here’s riddle for your brain: what can you hold but you’d never want to be in?

  5. I for one give up. Even a trawl of Google couldn’t give me the answer. Please enlighten.

  6. The answer to the riddle is a pickle.
    You can “hold the pickles” and you’d never want to be “in a pickle.” Maybe not the most clever of riddles, but it does put a tiny chuckle in your belly.

  7. Your temper.
    Where is a place that everyone can sit but you?

  8. Temper works but I was thinking of conversation. Meeting also kind of works.
    Behind you?

  9. Depends what kind of meetings you go to, I suppose.

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