Arndalia

I’ve barely left the house in the last few weeks, and I haven’t escaped Oxford since I returned on the day I went to Doncaster, well over a month ago now. For me, this is most unusual: I don’t know if I’ve ever spent a whole month in Oxford without leaving the city at all. So I’ve had to find other, more virtual, ways to escape. Welcome, then, to Arndalia.

Date of trip: Daily, since 28th March 2020
Journey time: About five minutes for the first visit, quicker thereafter
Fare: £49.99, plus 49,800 Bells (or 5000 Nook Miles)

Arndalia is my private island—though visitors are welcome—named in honour of one of my teddy bears (who is in turn named after the shopping centre in Manchester). I say “private”, but, of course, it’s not at all: I initially moved in alongside an elephant, a rabbit and three raccoons—one of them a Mr Tom Nook, who founded the community as a business venture—and a whole host of other animals have moved in since. It’s a pretty wild scene.

After an initial settling-in period of camping, island life became based around finding the perfect balance between rediscovering nature and having all mod cons available. So a typical day might include such activities as picking fruit, fishing, beach combing and even digging for fossils, with my choice of island being serendipitously rich in archaeological finds from across clade and era, despite its small size. There won’t be many thousands out there like it, let me tell you that!

But then there’s an urban aspect to life too, such as its shops. Of course, all the best shops require pairs of people behind them—Marks and Spencer, Holland and Barrett, Lakel and Plastics—and it’s no exception on Arndalia. There are two bricks-and-mortar shops: well, one of them is more wood-and-metal, that being Nook’s Cranny, the ramshackle convenience and furniture store run by the Nook brothers, Timmy and Tommy. The other is Able Sisters, run by Able and Sable, a pair of hedgehogs.

Travelling salespeople also visit the island too, like Label, the third Able Sister, and Kicks, an inexplicably-Cockney vendor of shoes. But most notable among the visitors is Daisy-Mae, who sells turnips. These are the financial instruments of the island’s economy—they come fresh from Sow Joan’s Stalk Market—and you can make a tidy profit on them. She visits every Sunday morning, and I may have just invested all of my Bells, the island’s currency, into a glorified vegetable patch.

Of course, as resident rep on the island, I feel my own duty to improve the landscape for the residents. My most recent installation was a Gothic maze—I had to clear an eyot on my island of all of its natural vegetation to build it, but I have no regrets when I now have a place to send my visitors when I want them to get lost. Other features I’ve added include a formal bamboo garden around a modernist water feature, a flower meadow around my house, and an area of kitsch decorations evoking the British seaside.  Try not to get too irritated by the music from the spinning teacups.

There’s a lively cultural programme here too.  The museum, run by Blathers the owl, takes residents’ donations, and has now built up quite a collection of bugs, fish and fossils that’s remarkably reminiscent of London’s Horniman Museum, except that, despite being on a remote island, the Arndalia Museum is currently much easier to visit.  Meanwhile, for music lovers, each Saturday the renowed singer-songwriter K.K. Slider makes a visit, to play his selection of folk rock while saying words like “daddio”.  He really is a cool cat, which is particularly remarkable given that he’s a dog.

Recently, the island celebrated Bunny Day, when a monomaniacal rabbit appeared and replaced half the island’s natural resources with candy eggs. Such fun, especially when they’re not eaten but used instead to craft souvenirs that can last a Bunny Lifetime. Now Nook is giving rewards for eco-friendly activities as part of Nature Day celebrations—though, as he still sells tickets for visitors to plunder hitherto-unspoilt islands for all their natural resources, leaving them barren wastelands, one can but question his commitment to the cause.

I mean, you could argue that this whole island has signs of being some sort of capitalist nightmare. The administration is run by a corporation—the ubiquitous Nook Inc.—who have a virtual monopoly on the island. There was an election to the position of resident rep, which has little real power; and, though that was democratic, it was mainly based on suggestions for the island’s name, and has given me a lifelong sinecure.

The museum has great art, sure, but it’s sold by a shady character who I can only assume is committing grand theft arto at the world’s great galleries. Nook only warns you to be on your guard around him, but makes no effort to regulate his activities. Meanwhile his assistant, Isabelle, keeps encouraging me to “decorate the island from stream to sea”, by which she means to urbanise the heck out of it, as much as I may like to preserve some areas of natural wilderness. Though I am intensively farming other portions of the land for fruit, in order to reap those sweet, sweet Bells.

But, you know, don’t think about all that. After all, if it is a nightmare, it’s certainly less of one than the world we live in right now. So why not escape with me to Arndalia—I know a pair of dodos who can fly you there in two shakes of a rabbit’s tail. Except: maybe don’t shake the rabbit’s tail when you get there. She probably wouldn’t like that.

In case it wasn’t clear, this post was about the video game Animal Crossing: New Horizons.  I was originally planning to post some screenshots of my island here, but Nintendo enforces their copyright quite vigorously—and while they have recently relaxed how you can use their content, so that things like Let’s Play videos are permitted, they restrict use under that licence to “appropriate video and image sharing sites”, and it’s not clear that a WordPress blog counts as one of those.  As such, if you want to see the delights of Arndalia, you’ll simply have to visit.