Do it yourself board games

Here’s a good use of winter afternoons – board games.  We had lunch with friends today, and, aided by a good stew, a couple of kittens in the background and a nice fire, a little board gaming ensued.

I found myself observing us a couple of times in the afternoon.  This is part of what life is for, isn’t it?  Good food, good company, comfort, a little entertainment?

It may not be trendy, it may not be cool or even youthful.  This is of a piece with buying a shed, having discussions about lawnmowing and other delights of one’s thirties.  Some would say that actually we could have got going on the board games earlier in life, though, because clearly our friends are well trained in strategy, distracting each other, explaining instructions and other social and competitive behaviour…

Anyway, this here board game is called Settlers of Catan.  Part of the interest in the game is that you set out the map of the board in different ways each time; the commodities that make or break the game change each time.  It also shows you how you can get stumped, collecting lots of one thing you can’t use, failing to get anything of what you actually need.

A couple of Christmases ago, we researched board games for family in the States. It’s a big market.  I don’t know if you have to have grown up with lots of board game playing to get into it more, but there’s no shortage of people out there inventing more games to play.

Many are board game versions of the kind of thing now done by Sim City and other computer simulation games.  Obviously Monopoly has been there long before, but it’s interesting to see that there’s still a lot of interest in making things, selling them, conquering other people, that kind of thing, but happily limited to some pieces of card on a table.

What with Dan and I playing cards on holiday, learning new board games today, perhaps we’re going through a make your own entertainment renaissance.  Maybe I’ll even learn to lose gracefully?  Who knows?  Raise me a few sheep, some iron ore and some bricks, and I’ll let you know…

Jog my memory

Now if memory jogging counted as exercise, I’d be well away…Currently trying to house several years’ worth of photos.  There’s a certain amount of memory jogging taking place, as I try to remember what order things happened in, which year we visited whom, and so on.

Inevitably, you get drawn into the subject matter even as you file them away in albums.  Looking at ones from our two trips to the States, in 2002 and 2003, it’s easy to step back into that world a little.  Buildings, people, views, cafes, that kind of thing.  When the kettle boils, or the letter box goes, it’s odd popping back into the ‘real world’.

I certainly couldn’t have related to you what was in the photos until I looked at them again.  Some would see that as a reason to junk them – in the way that if you’ve not worn something for six months, it should go out.  (As global warming increases, and the seasons feel fairly similar in Scotland, I guess the argument holds even more.  It’s not like you’re keeping it for ‘the summer’, after all.)

But there again, some would say they are there all the time anyway.  It’s estimated that we do actually retain large amounts of what we see, even if we’re not consciously aware of it.  The regular comments of those who face near-death experiences is that images do seem to flash in front of your eyes – your life speeded up, a self-loading picture gallery, a lifetime’s worth of photo albums.

Oliver Sachs, in his book “The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat“, goes further – after some brain malfunctions, it can be as though we relive earlier episodes in real time.  One of his chapters deals with someone who, as her illness increases, spends longer and longer in earlier, and happier, parts of her childhood.  When she dies, the nurses suggest that she has finally “gone home”, to the country she grew up in.

Enticing though it would be to spend time on the same holidays again (and what a money saver eh? two for the price of one!), it’s also good to be reminded of time edging on in the present day.  Who knows – maybe prices would have gone up since you were away?  Maybe you would now question the relevance of the particular day trip you’d looked forward to?  And would we feel like we were having deja vu, returning to the same experiences?

The real world we blink back into has pots and pans, bills and budgets.  But it also has sunsets that occur in real time.  Plenty of new material for the memory to work on.

I am read…

It’s not quite “I am loved, I am loved…”  But a friend who I catch up with on Facebook, and who lives a long way away, told me that she’d been reading my blog.  And she liked it!

Hurrah for those little encouragements friends can bring.  I’d been tiring a bit of Facebook recently – not much new, too many car races to upgrade my virtual car etc.  (It’s much easier to own a car on Facebook.  You don’t need refresher lessons for one thing.)

Tonight, I go on, and there’s a lot more to read.  Maybe it’s been one of those weeks for others, and having reached the weekend, they’re letting off steam online.  Although another has been letting off steam with piles of baking (which is more realistically generating steam, I’m sure), so she’s entitled to a small sit down.

E M Forster was the one with the famous phrase “Only connect”.  It came in a fairly dystopian story, if I remember rightly.  Our English teacher duly underlined the quote.  All this when there were a few computers about the place, but the Internet was in the hands of geeks, and certainly the concept of connecting was much more about face to face, phone call to phone call.

So, online connecting.  It’s good, don’t get me wrong.  I wouldn’t be on Facebook otherwise.  Or emailing people.  Sometimes, I guess, the virtual doesn’t quite satisfy.

But at other times…when would I find the time to email my friends about my little ideas, to encourage them in their own worlds?  Particularly when those worlds are further away from my own.  As people move away, lives overlap less, even this level of connecting is good.

There’s a verse that has been going around my head recently – coming from the time when I would write a daily diary, and add a quote at the start of each entry.  I hope I’ve remembered it correctly:

“Sometimes the writer says

To hell with words

And longs to dig ditches.  She writes of this longing,

and you, because you are her friend,

Write back.”  [Erica Jong]

Online communication.  It helps you know you’re not alone.  And sometimes, it helps us to respond to each other, out of very ordinary circumstances, and find a moment of connection.  Amen to that.

My bus runneth over

Most frequent text message? ‘Now on bus on way home’.  Or cup on way home.  Predictive text is all very well, but given the number of times I send the same message, you’d think it would predict the right word, eh?

Having now had a mobile for maybe a bit over a year, I am getting the hang of things a bit more, though I am definitely in the ‘laughable’ category as far as teens go.  I don’t upgrade my handset!  I don’t have a cheeky ring tone!  I don’t play songs loudly for my posse to sing along to on the bus! (All these are fairly common on my bus route.)

I resisted mobiles for ages.  Why be available all the time?  What’s wrong with ‘your word being your bond’ for when you’ll meet up with someone?  But they do come in handy on work trips abroad, where the cheap B&B you found online has no phone in the room, or it’s too late to call but you’re thinking of your beloved, that kind of thing.

Another reason to be laughable to teens – I top up my mobile once a year…or so far, anyway.  Given that I almost only use it for texts, that makes life easy. Consequently, when it actually rings, I get a bit panicked.  I can’t get it out of my bag in time.   Dear oh dear, they might say.

In my defence, I am a step beyond Mum and Dad having a mobile ‘for the car’ but only turning it on in cases of dire emergency (actually, I’m not sure when they turn it on at all, though it may be when Mum drives back from choir on her own.)

Predictive text can be fun though, in emails too.  I used to have a colleague, whose name would regularly default to ‘boffin’ when I started typing it in.  It was a reasonably good choice too…And I could change my name to frydab, or something equivalent, if I get fed up with being Frydman.  Though I doubt it would mean they’d spell it right then either.

Anyway, I am smug in the knowledge that I don’t commit the cardinal mobile sin: to shout loudly ‘hello? hello? yes…I’m on the bus…train…‘ and other forms of public transport.  Those mortals are destined for the circle of hell where the bus runneth over.  That’s my prediction, anyway.

Cutting and sticking

How to keep entertained on these long winter nights?  You could write long Norse sagas – and with “Beowulf” in the cinema, your time could have come here – or go for a little low-level entertainment with some cutting and sticking.

Now lots of options for what you cut and stick. I’m not advising that you have to go full scrapbook mode.  I got teased at home while growing up for constantly cutting things out of magazines – recipes in particular, but other things that were of interest.

Probably back to the journalism side of being keen on lots of different things.  This, coupled with a good old fashioned “this could come in useful” attitude, resulted in a lot of piles of newsprint, which finally made their way into scrapbooks.

So, card making, collage, papier mache…you name it.  Cutting and sticking allows you to re-read your magazines or newspapers, end up with a larger pile of paper to recycle (for high inner smugness values), stick a few of them in a scrapbook, or bung them in a useful folder, and hopefully look at them again.

Trouble with cutting and sticking: are you really going to re-read the things you keep?  This was the trouble before.  How many of those recipes did I use?  How many articles on nice white painted houses do you need for inspiration?

You can of course do the smaller version, which is editing what you’ve already got stashed away.  Less cutting, more freeing up existing scrapbook pages, or the equivalent.  But I probably shouldn’t be admitting to this degree of introversion.

Perhaps the really good side is the rediscovery.  Kate Muir’s ode to the food van at the top of the Rest and Be Thankful.  A particular recipe that you’ve done, loved, forgotten, and your heart leaps to see it again.

We are happy to reread a book.  To listen to a song, time and time again.  To put on a piece of clothing that makes you smile.  Why not reread an article?  Partly because there are so many of them, so many angles, so many tiny snippets to consider revisiting.

Anyway, come and retrieve me when you hear the scissors hit the floor.