Seasonal ritual

Christmas cards: we think we've broken the back of the job.  This is a rare instance of productivity, since I usually find that I'm still at it in mid-December, usually running out of ink in the printer at a critically late stage.  I think I only have a few more to print, and although the printer has started grizzling about ink levels, the quality hasn't started to drop just yet.  I thought I'd ring the changes by getting a variety of coloured envelopes, and ordered accordingly - or so I thought.  We'll, everyone's card will arrive this year in a startling lemon yellow envelope.  Memo to self: re-read before confirming order.

I love my word games.  On my last day at primary school (and our much-loved Miss Archer's), we had no lessons before we left for the Regal cinema for the prizegiving.  I spent a couple of hours happily playing Scrabble with friends, one of whom had brought in a Travel Scrabble set.  My twelfth birthday fell few weeks later, and we were staying at the time with relatives in East London.  Mum took me up to Gamages to find a present, and bridled a bit at paying 19/11d for a Travel Scrabble set.  She and our distant relative Phyllis wore that set out in short order - the little pegs on the corners of the tiles break off easily, and we had to send off for a new set of tiles.  When in due course I moved away, I bought another set, which has travelled round the world with me.  At the Rio UPU Congress, translation work was very slow to arrive during the early weeks, so with my set and Claire Smith's, we had something of a Scrabble tournament: it came to the point at which we resented the arrival of work, since it disrupted the important stuff.  (I think Barbara and I were playing Scrabble on the plane from Rio to Dakar when an Air France Concorde overtook us, its sonic booms scaring the wits out of us.)

Well, I still love word games, and have a couple of dozen on the go on-line with friends at any given moment.  These days I tend to prefer a variant, Words with Friends, and play it via Facebook.  It is rather trickier than Scrabble, since it is so arranged that you can't easily take advantage of a triple letter or word score without offering another to your opponent.  It is not without its irritations, though: it is financed by advertising, and the content, to be charitable, is uninspiring.  The current lot advertises laxatives and electric contraptions for planing calloused skin off feet.  Others try to attract you to one or other of the UK's cynical and incompetent banks.  There are also come-on competition sites including one that rather disgustingly suggests you click on a sandal-shod foot to squash a scuttling cockroach.  I've seen plenty of those in real life without their appearing on my computer screen, thanks v. much, so am quick to minimise the window to the exact size of the board.  The company attracts fewer advertisers in Francophone countries, so when I'm playing there, games are interrupted by blank black windows for the length of time an advertisement would be playing if they'd managed to sell the slot.  The game is, of course, American, so the built-in dictionary offers a few interesting orthographic variations - and blind spots, but it also allows a surprising number of Scots dialect words  Not to mention some two-letter words the value of which lies only in allowing you to get rid of those pesky Qs, Xs, Us and Ks that you invariably draw in your last hand.

With the Christmas cards ready to go, I'm looking forward to another seasonal ritual in a month or so: the marmalade.  I'm on to my last but one jar now, so may be reduced to Fortnum's best by the time the Seville oranges arrive.