Warming Up

I wasn’t sleeping well and woke up at 2am feeling a bit out of sorts and wired, so went on my phone to calm down. Even though my head was all over the place I thought I’d have a crack at the day’s Wordle. I like to choose a different word every day where possible (though occasionally use one from before) favouring words with only one vowel and lots of connecting consonants, as this seems to be the way to avoid the terrible Hard Mode fate of having too many choices for one letter and not enough goes. I haven’t lost since I’ve done this -sadly I don’t know how many days of success that is as my stats reset (twice), but I would say it’s over 300 days now. As you know I am hoping to get it in 3, but 4 is acceptable - anything else is either luck or poor play. A nicely deduced 3 is the greatest thrill known to man. At least to a 55 year old man.

I wanted to play “shriek" this morning, before realising that that had too many letters - that’s how out of it I was - so I pivoted to shirk, a great opening word that I’ve never thought of before, using up both the sh combo and rk too (obviously it’s the other combos that that takes out that is helpful). I usually like to have a k in there. Others might have played “shirt” to start. The fucking idiots.

Anyway I was suprised and somewhat discombobulated to see all 5 letters turn green. I had, apparently, got a wordle in one, which would have been strange at any time, but in the middle of the night, in the middle of a mind crisis, just felt like I was being toyed with by the master of the simulation that is life. I’ve always secretly thought that most people claiming to get the word in one are either lying or have picked up some clue consciously or subconsciously from social media or friends (what am I talking about? Anyone who plays wordle, especially at this late stage, has no friends). But I had been restlessly asleep until I did this and not checked twitter. I had a hole in one and it was mildly unsettling and disappointing. But at least I’d proven (to myself - the rest of you might still believe that I cheated) that it is possible for this to happen. Though anyone who does it with a word with a repeated letter is a fucking idiot.

It wasn’t an anticlimax because I had always known that this piece of luck would be underwhelming. But it did make me wonder if I am somehow in touch with an essential truth at the heart of the universe - but one for very mundane things. I think I know what’s going to happen in a few seconds more than should be possible by chance. But it’s always super unimportant things that I have presage of. 

And if I was that good then this wouldn’t be my first ever Wordle in one. And Wordle would be pointless to play if you had that kind of access. Unlike it is in reality, very pointful.

When you’re a parent date nights are few and far between and we are trying to plan them ahead to make sure they happen. Today we were going to London to see the matinee of the Unfriend, but as we stood waiting for the train at Welwyn Garden City we got a text saying the performance had been cancelled. Which was a shame as we’d been looking forward to it.

But we didn’t bail on the trip. We had lunch booked and we figured that there might be something else to do in London. Eventually we settled on a visit to the National Portrait Gallery which was in walking distance, but life thwarted us again as it turned out to be under scaffolding and not open. So we tried the National Gallery instead. That still had loads of portraits in it, just of old time people and not Lenny Henry, so one-nil to us. Take that National Portrait Gallery. You’re not the only place that has portraits. Get over yourself. 

I recognised quite a few paintings, not because I am an art connoisseur, but because as a kid I played a game called “Masterpiece”, which I don’t remember much about, except that you had to clip pictures of famous works of art on to monetary values and somehow try and get the million pound painting and avoid the forgeries. There must have been some buying and selling involved, but even though I played it quite a lot,  I don’t recall the gameplay.

What’s weird though, especially given my aphantasia, is that 40 plus years on, I pretty vividly remember which paintings were in the game. I can’t pull many to mind (even with my non-typical version of recall) but when I saw them on the wall I would pretty much instantly remember them from the game. I suspect that it might have been some National Galley tie-in as I saw loads of them today. You might say that that was a very educational board game, but I didn’t know who had painted any of them. And the ones that had really stuck in my mind were ones with pretty women showing a little bit of flesh. But in pre internet days we had to get our jollies where we could.

Now the paintings didn’t titillate, they just made me want to play Masterpiece again. But it wasn’t available in the shop.