I’ve been teaching Doug 500, which according to the site I was just reading, is Australia’s national card game. I was checking the site to see which cards were excluded from the deck, because I can never remember if it’s red 4s or black 4s. Apparently, Americans do play it, but it’s not common, and they have very different rules. Only one round of bidding and they call the kitty a widow! Poor kitty. Worse still, they apparently call a misère bid “Nullo” (the latter actually sounds more Australian, unfortunately).
Needless to say, I’m teaching him the Aussie rules.
And it’s been a trip down memory lane for me, back to a time when my great friend Justine, who’s hopefully still reading this from her new digs in Deutschland, lived down the laneway and she,
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and
and I used to play it all the time; back further still to when we played it so much at Manning Bar with
and others and in nightclubs that we developed hand signals for bidding and our own code for “My hand is pure shit and I can’t do anything with it” (see the subject line).
I miss those more simple days when all we had to worry about was making the rent and getting the next paper in on time. Of course, that’s looking back with rose-colored glasses: there were jealousies and misunderstandings and drama and all that. But those nights were pure fun, drinking and smoking and talking and just enjoying the company of friends. Thank you for being a part of my life, guys.
PS: Talking about uni, what a coincidence. The music I’m listening to is Kim Cunio, who studied Communications with me at UTS before he went on to become a genius ABC Classics-recorded baritone specializing in sacred medieval music.