No pumpkin pie
Oct 17, 2020
For the first time in six years, I didn’t have the time and energy to make a pumpkin pie for Canadian Thanksgiving.
Melbourne has been in stage 3 lockdown since July 8 (101 days and counting).
For us, the restrictions have primarily been inconvenient rather than truly disruptive or harmful.
We have few friends within the 5km travel limit, and I’m unable to go to the gym and do rehab exercises, or to let off steam by playing ice hockey.
There are many people in this city for whom the lockdown has been much more serious and damaging.
With daily case numbers remaining low (and possibly decreasing) hopefully we’ll hear tomorrow that some restrictions will be eased.
In the meantime, there’s still no pumpkin pie …
The scarcity of letters
Jun 28, 2017
I’m terrible at staying in touch with friends and family.
Recent events rarely, if ever, seem to merit firing off an email.
And the more time that passes between each communiqué, the greater the
pressure to write something substantial.
Online messages have a cheap and nasty feel, the electronic equivalent of a
late-night souvlaki, so writing something substantial feels like an uphill
battle.
No wonder my motivation withers to nothing (or so I tell myself).
But a handwritten letter is truly something else, from another time, an other
world.
Fledgling board game collection
Feb 25, 2017
—
Board games
As a child, Scrabble was our family’s board game of choice.
We were all well-read and had a sufficiently diverse vocabulary that games
could go down to the wire despite substantial differences in age.
Monopoly was a painful and frustrating experience, replayed so infrequently
that the memories were dulled by time and the agony was rediscovered all over
again (I’ve since learnt that this may have been due to an all-too-common
relaxation of the official rules, but that is scant comfort for the hours
lost).
Snakes and Ladders, stripped of its karmic lessons, was unbearably nihilistic.
In my adolescence I became (loosely) aware to tabletop wargames and Dungeons &
Dragons, but primarily through video games that borrowed from these genres.
Through my own failings, it took a relocation to Paris in my late twenties to
become exposed to the much richer variety of board games that are available,
populating entire bookshelves in friends’ apartments and forming the primary
focus of entire afternoons and evenings.
They even made frequent appearances during working hours, thanks to the
seriousness with which the French treat the lunch break.
Julien, Thibault, and colleagues, you know who you are!