Board games for grownups

I’m going to lay my cards on the table straight out – as well as beginning the gaming metaphors – and confirm that I was a bad loser at board games as a child.  And so I stopped.

Unattracted as I was, equally, to other people being openly competitive, there wasn’t much reason to start again.  Except this year, for some reason I have wanted to play board games.

I still don’t know why it should be.  Perhaps it helps that some of the board games available now are more interesting than the ones I played as a child.

(I still hold a torch for Mine-A-Million, which allowed you to build up oil reserves, and ship them to the other side of the world.  But what with global warming, and pirates taking over oil tankers, I don’t think that one’s going to come back into fasion.)

I’m talking about games like Carcassonne and Settlers of Catan.  And I rather like Ticket to Ride, particularly the European version where I can distract others from my losing by being smug and saying “been there!” on some of the more obscure routes.

Games which are different every time, in terms of how you make up the board, keep me interested – and take the sting out of losing, or at least of not winning.

We have some friends who are good on the board game front, and introduced us to both Settlers and Mahjong, though we clearly need to build up more practice on games in between visits.  But the real shift was going on holiday with our regular group of friends from church, in June, and playing board games most nights.  And liking it.

When you are a child, winning and losing is a much bigger deal, and having siblings to taunt you, or parents to point out that you are a bad loser, tends to distract you from even trying to put a brave face on it.

A couple of decades down the line, and you’ve realised that there are many ways to win and lose in daily life, and so a brief stint at a board game is perhaps easier to take on.

In the case of our trip in June, it perhaps helped to be there with a very competitive friend, who you knew would win (almost) all the games anyway.

This took the actually trying to win part out of the equation, leaving you focus on banter, admiration of nice design of board game, an additional glass of wine, and so on. (Obviously, if wine had been in the equation as a child, who know how many people would have stopped being bad losers much earlier?)

But I think the real reason for it is a desire to be with people.  To do something together that you can remember, but that isn’t that big and important either, so you can focus on the people too.

Perhaps the addition of a nice fire, or bad weather, or large amounts of chocolate etc, add to the picture of it being a very positive thing to stay indoors and be with people you like.

And for that, I can even risk the possibility that some competition might come into the equation.

Pre-dressed salad and other social ills

Social ill is a bit harsh.  But it’s interesting going out for a meal in another country – particularly a European country, given the ongoing belief in the UK that we still eat worse than our European counterparts – and think you could have done better at home.

Targets on the list?  France is rather good at pre-dressed salad, as was Germany, back in the spring, and both were overly salty.  Top marks back to Italy, where you can generally dress your own salad at the table, although there’s still more of a tendency to add salt.

I still find salting a salad vegetable a bit strange, particularly when you could choose a tangier lettuce if you wanted more of a taste hit, but it still sits easier with me than adding cream to lettuce (my former flatmate in Poland.  It was just cream. I like a cream-y sauce on a salad from time to time, but not quite in this form).

Morning coffee in Italian hotels can be a bit of a disappointment – and this in a country which is really rather rated for its coffee.  Best trick is probably to forgo a hotel breakfast and get a quick breakfast in a nearby bar – which clearly works very well for the commuting population too, in many places.

We’re used to ‘serving suggestions’ on packaging, those kind of pictures that help you understand what to have on a plate with mayonnaise, for example.  France goes a step further, and suggests on its packets that you should actively have chocolate at breakfast time.

I know that many people need no encouragement in this area, but normally chocolate gets brought out later in the day…once something’s gone wrong…or you’re flagging at work?  Maybe we have completely the wrong attitude to chocolate – maybe our days would go much better if we had chocolate at breakfast time, and mustered the will to strike much earlier in the day.

I had an unexpected stop in a French hotel recently, and they offered the usual buffet breakfast option.  What was interesting was the paper serving mats on the table – like you get in fast food places here – only in France, it told you what elements you should be having to start the day.

There were 4 of them, and as far as I remember, you should have some protein, some carbohydrate, some fruit and something to drink to rehydrate you.  I’m sure chocolate was included in at least one of the categories as a serving suggestion…

Does this mean that the French are constantly thinking about how to balance their diets?  Is the placemat for visiting foreigners who need to shape up in this area – but need to be able to read French to do so?  Or is it a sign of a country also worried about its children going the way of the fast food chains?

Final food note: restaurants in Germany put rice in pots of table salt – I think this is to absorb any liquid which might get in, and cause the salt to dissolve, or clump, or something of that kind.  It makes lots of practical sense – but it doesn’t look quite as nice to look at.

Aesthetics eh?  You get them where you can.

Deja vu isn’t what it used to be

I grew up in the school of “if it’s a good joke, it’s worth repeating”.  I suspect that, separate from this, I am genetically predisposed to like puns, which are a form of repetition in a way, causing you to think about what you’re already familiar with. But the upshot is, I’m all too good at telling people something again…or yet again…because I think it’s worth a mention.

So here’s today’s moment: managed to leave work early, and include a quick visit to RealFoods.  I’m about to go in, and smell the familiar health food shop smell…and think, ah that reminds me of the health food shop I briefly worked in…and then remember that I’ve already written about it…

Now admittedly, I’m not visiting the shop all the time, having that scent-memory, boring you with the recollection etc, on a regular basis.  But I do forget what I’ve said to whom, or what I’ve written.  And the more I think it’s worth passing on, probably all the more likely I am to keep telling the story.

Catching myself at it again tonight, I felt a bit like the goldfish with the limited memory.  I don’t want to write a string of blog posts that add up to “Nice bowl! Nice bowl! Nice…”  And I also know that I get to see plenty of new things, because my brain takes in the fact that they’re new.

Every year I deal with applications from people who have hobbies I’ve never heard of before, health conditions I’ve never come across.  And they go off abroad and email with situations I’ve never had to come up with a solution to before.

That’s all before I spot things on buses, or open the paper to find out about the latest whatnot we’re all supposed to be interested in.

Blogs are partly about novelty, I guess.  You don’t expect to see the same story cut and pasted in, day after day.  Perhaps what I’m aspiring to is columnist status, where you can actively get away with repeating yourself, or mentioning particular people, because your readership has got to know them too, through you, and wants the latest installment.

Probably one of the main reasons I write a blog is because I love ideas, I love the variety in the world, I love seeing whether someone else has come across the same, and what they think about it.  And some of you even tell me, too…

Some of the nicest thoughts are like the first strawberry of the year.  (Yes, I have a conscious awareness of the first strawberry of the year, and a first mince pie too, bracketing the year.) You’d never claim that it was the first ever.  But the ‘first for a while…and good!’ is worth a shout about, don’t you think?

Which planet do you like best?

It’s a serious question when you’re eight, going on nine.  Things are not just out there.  You need to know whether you like them or not.

R and D’s eldest is keen on space.  She and Dan had fun setting up her telescope while we were there, and while you or I may be struggling to think what to wear tomorrow, she is looking ahead to 2020 and the next manned mission to the Moon.

At one point, she mentioned that she liked Neptune best as a planet.  “Why?”  “Just do.”  (This is also important when you’re eight.  And twenty eight or more.  Sometimes we just do.)  I think it helped that it was also blue.

What was interesting was that then the adults started saying which planet they like.  I liked Jupiter, because it was the biggest.  Her dad liked Saturn, because of the rings.  Dan liked Pluto, because it was also the name of a dog.

It was a great reminder that we too had our preferences, even though we might have long forgotten some of them.  Life gets a lot more complicated when we have to justify why we like something (or more often as an adult, why we are still doing something when in fact we don’t want to).

Perhaps it’s a good incentive to have a more immediate response to things.  Meanwhile, I’m off to practise a learned response – a cup of tea.

Six of the best

Friends that is.  Big and small.  We’re just back from visiting our great friends in Italy, and their four wee ones (some not so wee now).  As well as restocking the supplies of risotto rice, grana, and a certain small pasta that goes well in sausage casserole.

It’s now nearly 8 years since R and D decided to head to Italy, and interesting to see how friendships develop when you see people less often.  For a while, we managed to see each other nearly every 6 months.  Rising numbers of children on their side, and work commitments on ours, now stretch it to a yearly catch up.  But it’s still well worth it.

One of the features of going over less often is that we end up with a snapshot of life there that may only last a week.  Especially with the youngest at a year and a bit, change is a very rapid thing among children.

We pick up their catch phrases, identify their favourite books at that time, and see other ‘big’ changes that in fact came in over time: both older girls now reading independently in both English and Italian, for example.

Even being around for just a week, it’s terribly gratifying for you to hear one of the children saying “I want my Alison”, or for another to call you auntie by mistake.

Even the littlest went from hiding from us earlier in the week to accepting being fed by us, as well as a few games together, such as repeated shaking your head while holding a naughty grin at the same time.  (She started it, not me.)

Time also shows what has lasted since a previous visit – the eldest remembering how to play “Sausages and chips”, where you try to make the other person laugh by asking them silly questions.  She will also set up photo opportunities for their Flat Eric, as we tend to do with ours, having seen our pictures in the past.

Other elements that we completely forgot – interim books that went into a parcel at some time, colouring in stencils on windows – are still part of life there.  I remember hearing R’s grandmother saying to me one time, with some pride, an estimate of how many English books she had sent over to Italy while R and her siblings were growing up there, and I started to feel that we might be continuing a little of that trend.

Apart from the food products, there’s always things we bring back.  A growing interest in the Veggie Tales’ “Silly Songs with Larry“, which was principal CD in the car while we were there.  Photos of another year.  An even greater appreciation of R and D’s skills as parents.  A couple more pictures to go on our fridge.

Some people go on holiday for a change.  I do that too, but it’s sometimes even better to go on holiday for more of the same.