Is it meant to be like this?

“Is it meant to be like this?” It’s the only question going through my mind as I run across the dystopian, post-apocalyptic landscape in Fallout 4. Picking up my seventeenth carrot before having a super-mutant scythe me in two because I only have the weapon equivalent of a cap gun…surely there’s meant to be more to this game?

I’ve clocked up days playing Fallout on the PS4 and everyone I’ve met in the game (even the dog) doesn’t like me. Isn’t the point of computer games meant to be escapism? If I want reality I’ll go to the shop or ride a bus and let everyone take an aversion to me as usual.

That juice I’ve just bought, the one everyone is going on about – you know, that one getting rave reviews in videos? Is it just me or is it meant to taste like something cooked up by Heston Blumenthal? Surely it’s not meant to be like this? Quite how does someone manage to skilfully blend the flavour of sheet metal with a subtle nuance of bleach?

“Is it meant to be like this?” I was sitting trying to fix the positive and negative wires to the Evod head. And then I was poking either too much or too little cotton through the coil. It struck me that vaping wasn’t half as enjoyable as other people would have me believe. I spent weeks bouncing from dry hit to flood – it was like a self-made analogy for post-global warming British weather.

Of course it isn’t meant to be like that. “Get a genesis tank, that’s what you want,” they said. “Get a genisys tank and bathe in the rich flavours hitherto hidden from your palette.” Oh yes, just what a new vaper needs: hotspots. I’m not sure how long it took me to work out how to coil with mesh to avoid hot legs but I’m pretty sure I missed out on a couple of wedding anniversaries.

But then shouldn’t love be strong enough to overcome the lack of a bunch of flowers? Shouldn’t marriage be able to withstand the vagaries of a man obsessed with making little bits of wire coil in such a way that he smiles like he did at the birth of his children? Sure it is; love can overcome all. Love can make you forgive anything, even a lumbering oaf who cares more for pizza than he does for his in-laws. *This paragraph was definitely not inspired by the failure to book a table tonight at El Toro but should my wife read it she may wish to consider the words ‘love forgives all’.

Love can make you forgive the Kraken for the months of suffering because it looks lovely. It doesn’t get up to much these days and I’m thinking it probably never will – much like its owner, it sits here quietly contemplating life. But love isn’t at home for the Succubus (the dripper, not a pet name for my darling wife who would have loved a steak for tea). Love has packed its bag and slammed the door. I’m sitting writing this next to a mountain of used toilet roll. Dribbles and gushes from the low-slung holes have recreated Hurricane Barney’s devastation on my desktop. It’s not supposed to be like this, but then without the set-backs in life how sweet would the good things feel? Who needs steak anyway – there’s always Fallout.