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Choose Your Own Adventure Retrospective: The Curse of Batterslea Hall by Richard Brightfield

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The Curse of Batterslea Hall  was always my favourite CYOA book – it was also, for reasons I'll get into, one of the more unusual ones. It sparked my later love of adventure games and inspired some of my sketchy early attempts at creative writing (including a thinly veiled recreation on 90s 'edutainment' program Storybook Weaver ). It also deepened my devastation when I returned home one fateful school night to discover my mum had donated my extensive CYOA collection – precious gems tremblingly unearthed from the dusty Mills and Boon-straining shelves of my local Scope – back to charity. Around twenty years later, and I took the obvious next step for a mildly lockdown-crazed 90s kid squinting down the barrel of their thirties: sourced a copy inflated by just four times the original cover price through eBay. But was it worth it, and does it still hold up? Dust off your bootcut jeans and fire up your Walkman – it's adventurin' time, 90s* style... The premise Battersl
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There's a First Time for Everything...

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...and I'd given up hoping that my first time driving a car would come any time before my 25th birthday, after which I might finally have the time and money to learn. However, I got my first taste of driving a couple of weeks ago.

first time driver
I watched from the safety of a picnic rug as my brother and two of his friends raced around a field in my brother's black Vauxhall Corsa SRi.  "That looks like so much fun," I thought. "Such a shame I don't know how to drive." I looked back down at my book and determined to content myself, but somehow the pages had lost a little of their charm.

As if he was reading my thoughts, my brother pulled up, hopped out of the car, and said to me, "Want a go?"

"Yesss...." I hesitated. "I'm a bit scared though!"

"Don't be scared. Watch closely; I'll show you everything you need to know." He then demonstrated at lightning speed the relationship between the clutch, the gear stick, and the other pedals. I got about 50% of it, just enough to make sure that I stalled half a dozen times when trying to start the car.

I also stalled the car numerous times while figuring out the brake.

And I realized that you really don't need to floor the gas pedal to make the car go.

I drifted. That was great fun, although not quite intentional.

The gear stick was the worst to get used to, though. Women might be supposed to be able to multitask, but I was a bit of a failure when it came to simultaneously dealing with the clutch and trying to remember which gear was which. "I want an automatic!" I half-laughed, half-wailed.

"Nonsense," said my brother. "My sister is going to learn how to drive in a proper car first!"

Other than that, I wasn't too bad for a first-timer.  I might give up teaching and go in for a career as a race car driver.

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