by My Christmas (or non-Christmas as it almost was for me) was a white one. I drank most of a bottle of sweet white wine and spoke to my cousin and her family on Skype. Today my tennis partner invited me for dinner, cooked my his girlfriend Simona (I thought they were married, but no). Simona’s mother was also there. After playing my first-ever game of Words with Friends, and a tough game it was too, I struggled to find a bottle of something I could take to dinner that was neither too cheap nor too expensive. After all that faffing around I missed the tram by seconds, had to wait ages for the next one (it’s a public holiday), and turned up late.
The meal was fantastic. We had beef soup for starters, lamb with redcurrant sauce and vegetables for our main course, and cakes afterwards. We got chatting, well kind of (speaking Romanian hasn’t magically got easier – those verbs, dammit). I said that I cooked most nights, and they said that it’s extremely unusual for any man to cook in Romania. Gender roles are still, should I say, fairly well defined here. Every day I pass ten or more “position vacant” notices in the windows of cafés and restaurants, every one of them either explicitly asking for a woman, or using the feminine form of the job title which amounts to the same thing. I had all those “no foreigners” adverts to contend with when looking for an apartment. In a few days we’ll be celebrating the new year. That might be 2017 where you are, but here we’ll be ringing in 1974.
Words with Friends. Yes I played against my cousin who beat me, walloped me almost, 365 to 282. The day after George Michael died, I put down WHAM. That was just about my only memorable turn. I had terrible letters, sometimes seven vowels, and unfortunately we were playing in neither Maori nor Romanian. I never had any of the high-scoring letters, or letters that worked together. M and W are both fine, but you don’t really want them at the same time with no other consonants. Ditto B and H. The differences between Words with Friends (WWF) and Scrabble look almost trivial at first, but they’re actually pretty significant. The biggest deviation is the placement of the triple word squares. In Scrabble half of them are in the corners whereas in WWF all eight of them are get-at-able and it’s possible (unlike in Scrabble) to hit a triple word score and a triple letter score with the same word. This placement incentivises defensive play, because nobody wants set their opponent up with a monster score, and I can’t say I like that. There are other important differences too that I won’t go into now. But if you get crap and your opponent doesn’t and he or she is half-way decent, you’ll lose, just like in Scrabble.
What a crazy year 1973, um, 2016, has been. I’ll write about that next time.
