My Bury Life

[j4]

Maybe Bury St Edmunds isn't that far away after all. Decided last night that if I stayed in I'd just feel guilty about everything, and while it'd take me an hour and a half to get to London (and I'd be perpetually worrying about catching last trains back etc.) it'd only take me 30 minutes to drive to BSE and I could leave whenever I wanted. So now instead I feel doubly guilty about not making it to the uk.misc meet, made even more guilty by Huge being so cross about it. Probably best if I just don't go near misc for a while.

It was really nice to see J-P and Colin and everybody though. And the pub was great, it's a brewery as well & makes its own rather good beer. And the drive there was good driving practice. But I feel like I'm not supposed to have enjoyed anything because I was supposed to be somewhere else. :-(

Slept badly, and had weird dreams. I can only remember fragments: in one bit I was trying to skate on a frozen pond because cats were walking on it quite happily, but I knew as I did it that I was probably too heavy, so I sort of slid across the pond but then slid off towards the side so I wouldn't be over the deep bit if the ice broke, and the person I was with said "You're doing it all wrong, you're supposed to go towards the middle", but I couldn't be bothered to try to explain to them, I knew why I'd slid that way. In the other bit of the dream that I can remember, emperor had asked me if I could photocopy some of the cards from the game "Whot" [it's a real game, honest], only he called them the "danger cards", and I assumed he meant the wild cards, and I was going to photocopy them but then it turned out lnr had already done a really complicated database of hundreds of games, with spare pieces available to download, only the database was all on paper, all neatly coloured in to show the relations between things, and I felt really cross because it seemed as though somebody always came along and did everything better than me before I even had a chance to try. [Sometimes I wish my dreams were a bit more subtle.]

American Paul cheered me up enormously this morning by telling me that you can buy BADGERS at Asda. Apparently they're ornamental badgers designed to go in your garden, so they look like they're coming up out of the ground. They sound gloriously tacky and apparently they're very cheap so sion_a may come home some day soon to find that the garden is full of ornamental badgers.

Comments

[imc.livejournal.com]

We used to play Whot! quite a lot in the olden days. I seem to remember the symbols on it were dark blue, not the gaudy red and yellow illustrated here (http://www.iwantitcheaper.com/whot.htm). It wouldn't surprise me if the deck still existed somewhere in my parents' house - though I suspect the packaging (and instructions) are long gone.

[sparrowsion]

My (early '70s) deck was maroon on white (with, IIRC, green backs). I don't think I have it any longer, so it can't be added to the house collection....

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

Another maroon on white deck owning family here. No clue about card back colour.

I remember the existence of "Calling Cards" within the game, and calling the name of a suit (usually, for me, crosses and stars) at the highest volume my four-ish-year-old voice could muster, which was this: quite high.

One could play an entirely serviceable and somewhat chairmanly game with a Whot deck and a little imagination.

[boyofbadgers.livejournal.com]

Third maroon on white here. Back of the cards was Whot? printed both ways up in a semicurly font. I also remember a not dissimilar, but slightly more complex game called Uno.

[j4.livejournal.com]

The older version which I have is like this (http://www.kiddstoys.co.uk/whot.htm) only in dark blue -- does that look like what you remember?

[imc.livejournal.com]

That's pretty much it, yes - though I think the WHOT! card had a different design on the front.