It's Always More Complicated

Dr Johnson on card-playing.

Thoughts and reminiscences evoked by liv's post on board-games, which are not so much about that specific issue of 'games all the family can play' across generations, although some of these we must have done.

Not sure there was always generation of kindness, because there was a certain degree of e.g. sibling competitiveness in play with certain recreations.

These would be played within family and sometimes also with family friends.

Various pencil and paper games - my maternal grandfather was very into these and as I recall even had duplicated blanks made up.

Board games such as Sorry, Monopoly, Scrabble, Scoop, which I have never come across anyone who has played - there was also a very old Snakes and Ladders board, where you went up a ladder for doing a good deed, and down a snake for committing A Sin, but I'm not sure we ever played on it. And later on, Trivial Pursuit, well, we would, wouldn't we. (Original classic edition, I guess? it had only recently come out.)

Mainline, a card game which is now a rare vintage item, apparently, in which you had cards with bits of railway line and had to fit these together within certain rules, and honestly I can't remember what the ultimate outcome was meant to be.... the description there says to get rid of all the cards in one's hand.

On a less cerebral level, Pit - as I daresay is common, the Bear got very tatty and had to be very carefully concealed when trying to pass.

Apropos of the Dance to the Music of Time reading group, and the recent sort-out of my desk drawers, I disinterred a CD on which I had a whole lot of saved emails from the late 90s-early 00s, including at least partial records of the listserv on which I was participating in discussion of DMT, back then.

Okay, from skimming through these generally, this seems to have traversed the period when I was having ISP issues and missing emails for the later volumes (though I think would also have been when I was travelling in NZ and Oz with rather intermittent internet access anyway). But still, interesting.

Also interesting, and a bit scary, honestly, that this was a fairly hectic period of my life work- and academic-wise, and yet I seem to have been heavily participating in a range of listservs in discussions which sometimes grew quite heated, strops thrown, etc. Also setting up my personal website.

But further on Powell-related matters, have just started A Buyer's Market and very early on we encounter the artist Deacon, who was 'a student of Esperanto (or, possibly, one of the lesser-known artificial languages)' - points there for knowing that there were a whole lot, well, several, competing artificial language systems at the period - and 'intermittently vegetarian'. Also into advocating decimal coinage, which hasn't featured so much among the concerns of my fubsy progressives, but is later found selling an anti-war tract. Though opposed to spelling reform (take that, GB Shaw!...). And wears sandals. (Also heavily gay-coded.)

This made me think of a thought I had had about the overlaps between various of these concerns of interwar progressives/eccentrics/life reformers, and I did actually look up Esperantist vegetarians and it was in fact A Thing from the early days.

So far at least no indication whether he is into anything like eurythmics/morris-dancing/yoga/etc.

Being spammed by eBay:

sell past loves for extra cash (subject line of email) - which probably does strike rather differently if one has ever read any shock-horroring about what in the early C20th was known as White Slavery and we would now phrase as human trafficking, I guess. Anyway, one scenario in these morality tales was the dodgy guy who romanced naive young women until such time as they found themselves sold into sex-work, probably abroad in some place notorious, at least in repute, as a haunt of vice and iniquity.

In the body of the email it says Turn past loves into cash, which also conjures up rather creepy images, especially after reading that thing about bone-trafficking on the internet.

But this also has a faint resonance for me with, just possibly, some fantasy I read, like, ages and ages ago, selling one's memories - of love/lovers or maybe other things - in return for, actually I forget what, probably not cash? but some other benefit. Does this ring any bells with anyone?

(I'm also having vague recollection of sf in which unwanted memories could be taken away, but I don't think the memories themselves had any value to the persons removing them, whereas in this fantasy set-up there presumably was.)

Seeing all the tweets going about about 'A LEVEL RESULTS DAY!!!!' and how to cope, if you're either a person affected or their parent or other nearest/dearest, I was thinking about how I got my results -

- and I was, in fact, working my summer holiday job in Woolworths (that dates me, I suppose, for Woolies is no more, at least on these shores) -

- my recollection is that I was working on the quite immensely boring drapery counter, I don't really think that was what people went to Woolies for particularly -

And, anyway, my mother came in with my results, but also to say, the school had rung up to say, not to get in a panic because I had not got the exact 2 Bs (I think it was 2 Bs) which had been my offer for a place: in fact I'd got an A and 2 Cs, plus a distinction in the S level paper I took. They were pretty confident that this was Not Going To Be A Problem.

It Was Not A Problem.

I don't remember anything about the actual letter from the uni confirming. And not a lot about what I suspect must have been a fair amount of form-filling and bureaucracy before setting off Into The Unknown.

But I remember that.