#1 - I keep buying onions

This might be revealing a little too much about my psyche, but I have a bag for onions (an onion bag if you will) that I store by the back door. A bit of backstory for you: we don’t use this back door as we have sliding doors in the same room, so the area by the back door has become the storage equivalent of those paths that people make across grass in order to shorten their route. When you have limited space, life finds a way, and my way turned a doormat into an open larder.

This floor shelf is where the onion bag is kept, alongside industrial-size boxes of Nature Valley bars, porridge sachets, coffee beans, and sometimes sweet potatoes. This is really all beside the main point of this newsletter, though: I keep buying onions.

Most weeks we go through a couple of onions; maybe in a pasta sauce that I pretend I created because I added diced onions and some peas to a shop-bought jar; maybe fried to top burgers; in a curry sauce if I have the energy. So I buy new onions every week. It’s easy when you do the online shopping to fire last week’s order into the basket and work from there. It worked before, so why change? It makes sense to keep buying onions.

No one has ever had too many onions, I think to myself as I ponder reducing my onion order to just one instead of the usual two. I don’t reduce my onion order. What if I need to knock something up off-menu that needs an onion? Maybe I’ll fancy some ‘fancy’ cheese on toast. No, I’ll just keep buying onions. Probably should buy a red onion or two as well, just to be safe.

Then one day, while taking an onion from the onion bag, I notice some onions are falling out. The bag is full.

There’s no onion bag ordering system, so new onions get thrown in among the old - I can’t keep the supermarket food delivery person waiting, can I? The onions, if they take a moment to stop being so entitled, are fortunate to have an easily reachable home, with most food scattered across the floor so I can get through the delivery process before I have to make conversation about if my kids like video games once the driver spots the PS5 sat next to the TV. Yeah, I too used to play them and had one of those PlayStations back in the day. I hate them now!

The onion I take out is slightly soft to touch, browning, and smells - it actually had some dust on it, which does for a moment make me question what I’m doing. That won’t do, so I go through the bag, throw the bad onions into the food waste, and pat myself on the back for a job well done. No more rancid onions in this house! I buy more onions that week as I binned about six.

I have too many onions on my onion shelf.

Xbox this week revealed more of its plans for the next Xbox console, currently codenamed Project Helix. As expected it will run Xbox games and PC games. I’ve honestly tried to force an eloquent, thought leader-like opinion out about this, but I simply can’t. I’m interested to a degree because I am interested in video games as a whole, and this does at least feel like something a bit different, but it’s clearly going to cost a lot of money and I’m not sure what it’ll really offer me over the PlayStation 6. While certain PC games likely won’t make their way to the PS6, will those be games I am desperate to play? I doubt it. Xbox games are all coming to PlayStation, single-player PlayStation experiences are only coming to PlayStation, and PlayStation will have plenty of third-party support. Oh, and PS6 is surely going to be a chunk cheaper than Helix too.

Ignore all I have to say about the next Xbox though, as I’ll likely buy one. It’s what I do. I can’t be stopped. It’s what I’ve always done. One more for the shelf.

This newsletter won’t always be entirely about onions and video games (I have other interests too), but the only other item of note in my mind right now as I tap away on my keyboard is the Until Dawn movie. Can anyone tell me why so many people exploded in that film? I’ll have a think about some other bits and pieces and round them up in the quick reviews below.

Things I can review:

• War Machine (Netflix): Terrible dialogue in the opening set-up scene, but an enjoyable romp. One for fans of giant alien robots, massive men, and exploding limbs. 3 wannabe Predators out of 5.
• Alien Earth (Disney Plus): Can a TV series be both exhilarating and dull? It seems so, at least in the first five episodes of Alien Earth. Looks great, top acting, but Eddie from Bottom being a mega-corp evil doer only keeps my interest for so long. 3 Davids out of 5 Bishops.
• Lotus Biscoff Smooth Spread (shops): Accidentally bought this instead of the crunchy variety. Too smooth. 2 blended digestives out of 5 chocolate Hobnobs.
• Tottenham Hotspur F.C. (The world): Rancid vibes. Wouldn’t recommend. 1 Teemu Tainio out of 5 Gareth Bales.