Over the past few months, as many of you will already have noticed, I've been making an unusually determined effort not to suck at NetHack. I am delighted to report that at the weekend this effort finally produced its intended result, and I managed to ascend my first character. Since I've been sucking at NetHack for something approaching twenty years, this is really quite satisfying.

Aside from the various tactical problems within the game, my biggest problem with NetHack recently has been that I can't sleep when a game is going well. People laugh when I say that, but it's true: because NetHack doesn't let you replay from your last save point, the further you get the more there is at stake if you make a mistake, so I get more and more nervous and cautious and stressed and try to plan ahead, and when I take a break from playing and do something else I keep jumping up and thinking ‘ooh, I know what I need to do, better write that down before I forget’. This gives me rampaging insomnia (or ‘sleep resistance’ as I tend to call it), which (a) causes me to be useless at work if I'm at work the next day, so I feel guilty, and (b) to add insult to that injury, it also makes me play NetHack badly so that I do make the fatal errors I was trying so hard not to.

I've tried a couple of pharmaceutical solutions to this problem (Nytol and the like), but they didn't seem to help at all. This weekend I went for a completely different and rather simpler approach, which was to go to Mary's excellent flatwarming party on Saturday night and drink a large amount of very nice bubbly. That produced something resembling a normal night's sleep, and although I was a bit dopey the following morning I was together enough to finish the game without doing anything fatally stupid.

So that's a significant personal achievement, an excellent party and a lot of very nice bubbly. Altogether, I feel, a good weekend.