Scrabble Philosophy

When I was about ten, Scrabble was definitely left behind in favour of Monopoly, Cluedo and Hungry Hippos: games that did not involve being able to spell.  It became a more interesting prospect later on when I realised that I quite liked words and the how the game offered a tactile relationship with them.  I could turn over tiles in my fingers, swap them around, hoping that something incredible would emerge.

At university, we played Scrabble with one purpose: to show off how many dirty or euphemistic words we knew.  I remember one such game played while imbibing copious amounts of wine in a holiday home in Aviemore (in the Highlands of Scotland).  We knew how to enjoy ourselves in the early afternoon in those days.  How my liver survived I don't know.  That's how you know who your real friends are: friends don't take winning too seriously.

Later, in proper adulthood, long after graduation and working life began, Scrabble became a staple on camping trips, something to enjoy sitting outside the tent on languid afternoons. between reading, sleeping, swimming, drinking cold beer and performing "Flight of the Conchord" sketches.  Yes, really.  I'll admit that I've dabbled in online games, but it's just not the same.  I'm old fashioned at heart.

The way I play Scrabble possibly says a great deal about the way in which I approach life.  It's a theory I have been mulling over the last few days, while changing nappies and driving to Supermarkets.  In Scrabble I feel conflicted: do I abide by instinct and play the longest, smartest word I can muster from my disparate tiles, or do I play the word which will gain me the most points? Do I play "quixotic"because I can, or "cox" over a triple word score?  In other words, am I a strategist or a wordsmith hedonist gratified by cleverness over high-scoring? 

If I applied this theory to life, it's interesting.  If I were a strategist, interested only in optimising gain I'd probably be significantly richer and successful.  Some people can say and do the right things, whilst not necessarily believing them, and while not necessarily being the smartest knight in La Mancha, can be promoted into high-powered positions leaving behind the perfectionists. 

What's lovely is that in our precious down time between 8.30pm and 10.00pm, after the children are asleep, the dishes are done and the explosion of toys extricated from under various pieces of furniture, my husband and I can play Scrabble any way we like, striking the balance between the cerebral and the down right filthy. 

Fifty word fiction!

Reborn

Her name was Marion:  patience of Ms Nightingale; sternness of a schoolteacher; the humanity of a friend.  She delivered our baby at 4.55am.

Shift over; she slipped on her leather trousers and jacket, a pair of biker boots and a bright red helmet.

So incongruous: perhaps her own midwife crisis? 

Juggle...juggle...juggle...

Ok, so I have to type this quietly.  The baby has been grizzly today and has slept for approximately twenty minutes every three hours, which meant that I had a shower at eleven, a cup of coffee at one o’clock and lunch at half two.

Why is it that before, I was a perfectly functioning working woman, who could get up at 6am and be at work by 8am, having got myself ready, done the dishes and put a wash on… but now, it takes until 4pm just to get done what I’d normally have done before going to work?

He’s so little, so cute, so demanding.  This is what people talk about: the perpetual guilt of motherhood.  We want to lavish our children with attention and love, but there’s also a yearning for them to have a nap, just a wee one so that we can have a moment of peace, a hiatus of tranquillity. I met a friend yesterday for coffee, not at a well-known establishment where one might sprinkle cinnamon on one’s latte, but at a soft play centre.  That’s where I go now at least once a week.
She’s a working mum who commutes from Scotland to London to work two days a week.  She told me that she’d been changing her little boy on his changing station, turned round to get his socks and he rolled off, knocking out his only two teeth.  She was distraught, as one would expect. But also frazzled, wearing odd socks and finished our conversation by telling me that she was finding it hard to live either life fully: not her working life, or her home life.  Life is just a hard juggle, and we can’t help but feel judged.  Her son did not show any outward sign of discomfort, but rather spent all his time chasing after a little girl who had cunningly acquired a pink police car to ride around in.  My friend had her son’s two perfect little teeth in her handbag, kept as a reminder of her momentary lapse of concentration. She’ll probably carry her guilt around for much longer.

Perhaps all mums feel the same lack: we cannot be all things to all little men.

Despite the mania of life, its difficulties, the exhaustion, there are moments when, like the first throes of love, my heart skips a beat.  The baby spills milk down his chin because he can’t help but smile broadly at me, his eyes twinkling.  My toddler, who’s two, scoops up bubbles from his bath, splashes them onto the tiles and shouts, “It’s a turtle” and I marvel at his imagination.  And I sit down, perhaps for the first time that day, hair tousled by the humid bathroom air (and the bubbles inevitably foisted upon me by aforementioned toddler), covered in spit up, and feel an incredible satisfaction that the children are clean, well fed and, finally, asleep.

Lucian Freud and Arthur Miller have something in common?

I just watched a great documentary about the life and work of Lucian Freud.  I've always admired his work, ever since leafing through large, expensive art books with a History of Art student when I was in my late teens. I remember feeling the contradictory emotions of both curiosity and revulsion.  The pasty, all-too-real depiction of the human form was attractive, interesting, inviting, but at the same time, a destroyer of the illusion.  Bodies like that were kept in the dark, under duvets, not sprawled out on beds with dirty sheets.  He showed what we don't want to acknowledge: the absurdity of concealment, social masks, and our basic animalism.  In his paintings there's nowhere to hide and it's unnerving.  Who has the temerity to be viewed under the skin?  The outside is the inside: everything bleeds out.

For me, great works of fiction, poetry, art, music, have an inherent subtext of the unsaid and it's what clings to your bones.  I re-read "Death of a Salesman" just recently and everytime I read it or see it, I feel closer to a greater truth, something I couldn't have seen when I was 16.  A few days later, I was re-ordering books on one of my shelves, muttering to myself how bad it is to have so many left unread.  I really should read these, and these, and this, too, when it occurred to me: at what stage in life will I have to come to the acceptance that I will not read them, that I just will not have the time to?  Willy can't accept or see, that he will not achieve the greatness he thought he was bound for and instead of being utterly crushed, he projects his hopes upon Biff, his son, making life that little bit more tolerable. He lives in denial, but it's the only way for him to live, and to die.

Willy represents a great truth about humanity: we lie to ourselves because the truth is so...concrete.  Optimism is better than banal acceptance.  Freud sees the acceptance of the truth in all its ugliness in much the same way as Miller: it's just the subjects who don't.

A bright poetic light has gone out:

My apologies to chance for calling it necessity.
My apologies to necessity in case I’m mistaken.
Don’t be angry, happiness, that I take you for my own.
May the dead forgive me that their memory’s but a flicker.
My apologies to time for the quantity of world overlooked per second.
My apologies to an old love for treating a new one as the first.
Forgive me, far-off wars, for carrying my flowers home.
Forgive me, open wounds, for pricking my finger.
My apologies for the minuet record, to those calling out from the abyss.
My apologies to those in train stations for sleeping soundly at five in the morning.
Pardon me, hounded hope, for laughing sometimes.
Pardon me, deserts, for not rushing in with a spoonful of water.
And you, O hawk, the same bird for years in the same cage,
staring, motionless, always at the same spot,
absolve me even if you happen to be stuffed.
My apologies to the tree felled for four table legs.
My apologies to large questions for small answers.
Truth, do not pay me too much attention.
Solemnity, be magnanimous toward me.
Bear with me, O mystery of being, for pulling threads from your veil.
Soul, don’t blame me that I’ve got you so seldom.
My apologies to everything that I can’t be everywhere.
My apologies to all for not knowing how to be every man and woman.
I know that as long as I live nothing can excuse me,
since I am my own obstacle.
Do not hold it against me, O speech, that I borrow weighty words,
and then labor to make them light."

Wislawa Szymborska, Under a Certain Little Star (via yesyes)
Wislawa Szymborska, Nobel-Winning Polish Poet, Dies at 88
(Source: poets.org, via yesyes)