Virtual amusements

Team quizzes

There have been quite a few of these, organized by public-spirited people; I’ve attended a few though until recently hadn't done very well at any of them. The first one I attended had an inventive ‘Name the yoga pose’ round, which I certainly couldn’t do. At another one, there was a question about which chemical element was denoted with the symbol B, and I was amazed to have ‘Boron’ pop into my head – must have been a faint memory from long ago school chemistry classes, as I’m sure I’ve never heard or thought much about boron since then. As it turned out, though most of us on the Teams call had heard the letter as ‘B’, the questioner had actually been saying ‘V’. There was of course a smart-arse who piped up knowingly with ‘Vanadium’.

However, this all changed at the most recent Friday quiz, when I actually managed to win, albeit narrowly. I credit this to a) luck; b) the amount of time Ruth and I have spent playing Scrabble during the lockdowns, as prior to this I would not have known that K is the only Scrabble letter to carry the value 5; c) on the ‘countries and their capitals’ round, the time Dave and I spent poring over Dad’s atlas as kids (though as it was before the fall of the Iron Curtain, don’t ask me the capital of e.g. Croatia, Slovenia or Georgia, as I won’t know). I also, thanks to a recent Sunday supplement article, did recognize Lady Gaga’s real name. And I got all five questions in the sports round right, amazingly, mainly through lucky guesses (thought processes along the lines of: Australia are quite good at cricket, aren't they, and let's try Pelé for that South American-sounding footballer's name).

Susan and I tied for top place and had to be asked tie-break questions – I lucked out with ‘What was the name of Han Solo’s ship in Star Wars?’ while Susan was landed with ‘What was Harry Potter’s birthday?’, which we both thought was a lot more difficult (though it’s possible someone under 25 might have thought the opposite). A prize of some beer is supposedly wending its way to me.

I didn’t, incidentally, know the answer to this. It’s apparently what Elon Musk and partner named their child born last year.

Musk’s partner evidently later tweeted an explanation for the name, though I can’t say it helps much. Also, there’s no guide to how it’s pronounced.

Scrabble

I’ve contrived to remain almost entirely ignorant of online gaming, but was dimly aware that people do play more traditional ‘board’ games like Scrabble and chess online, so thought it might be fun to have a go. After some brief online research I picked the Scrabble GO app. Ruth and I have subsequently had a number of enjoyable Zoom sessions on weekends when I’ve stayed at my MK flat. You can see each other’s moves via the app though if you want to talk to each other you need to be additionally logged in to a video call of some sort.

Advantages of the app: it does the adding up for you, and it’s all nicely neat and tidy – being of an anally retentive bent, much of my time during Scrabble games is spent tidying up the letters so that they’re neatly placed on their squares after some reckless pervert has jogged the board and/or placed their letters sloppily and JUST LEFT THEM.

Disadvantages of the app: we might be showing our ages here, but it’s obscenely over-busy and colourful. It’s nice to get a bit of tootling fanfare when you make a high-scoring word, but it goes too far and keeps exploding in coloured stars and inviting you to e.g. collect 500 awesomeness points – much of our time is spent furiously jabbing at our phones’ screens trying to get away from animated treasure chests and back to the damn board. It also keeps inviting you to play complete strangers – I’m sure I’ve inadvertently started games with several, which I’ve then had to work out how to withdraw from.

We are pretty evenly matched and have been enjoying our games so much we actually bought an actual Scrabble set in WHSmith, which we’ve been using on weekends we’re both at the house.

Virtual wine-tasting

Our head of unit, who is Spanish, has run a couple of virtual wine-tasting evenings during the lockdown. I missed the first one, which apparently involved blindfolds, but thought I’d turn up to the second as it was on the Friday evening of a weekend I was alone at my flat.

The blindfolds had been abandoned at the session I tuned in for – indeed, I’m not quite sure how blind tasting works when it’s wine you’ve bought yourself. We were asked to bring one bottle of red and one of white – in deference to a) being by myself and b) not much enjoying mixing the two, I only brought a little 187ml bottle of white wine, plus most of a bottle of red that I’d opened the previous evening. This meant that I couldn’t take part in what according to Begoña is an important part of the ritual, the uncorking of the bottle, but thankfully one of the others present had two bottles she had to uncork.

We spent an amusing hour and a half or so, with much listening to hand-picked tracks to build up atmosphere, while only being allowed to take minuscule sips of wine at intervals (much pleading of “Can we drink some more wine yet?”). At around 9pm I bowed out to go and put a pizza in the oven for my dinner.

I don't seem to have attended as much in the way of mind-enhancing virtual events over this last year as I could have done. However, here are a few I have attended:

Times session on boosting your financial wellbeing

As part of my current Times subscription, I signed up for this, thinking it might be useful. It was OK though I can’t say I gleaned much from it. Remarkably uninspired advice from the Yorkshire Building Society woman to ‘Google it’ when asked by an attendee for advice on finding a suitable financial adviser.

I have, though, been thinking I might consult a financial adviser about the viability of such longer-term financial aims as I have. As well as other useful tasks that I keep putting off, such as properly understanding my pension as well as just paying in to the thing every month (though I suppose the latter is a start). I do manage to buy a weekly ticket for the National Lottery. Well, somebody has to win it.

Talk by ‘Footprints of London’

This was a talk by a chap from Footprints of London titled ‘Going down the tube: the abandoned bits of the Underground’. I had hoped it might involve actually taking us (virtually) below ground into some interesting tunnels, but it proved to be just a chap giving a presentation on closed London Underground stations. Quite interesting though. He did play us a YouTube video at one point showing some bits underground, and mentioned the London Transport Museum’s ‘Hidden London’ programme, which I’m aware of but have never properly checked out.

The stations referenced included all those Ray and I visited on our tour in July 2019, plus quite a number of others. Among those mentioned that weren't among our earlier visit were King William Street, which was apparently the northern terminus of the City and South London Railway; City Road, now the site of the Bunhill 2 Energy Centre which draws waste heat from the Northern Line tunnels (Ruth and I visited Bunhill phase 1 as part of the London Open House in 2015); South Kentish Town, which looked pretty tatty and was housing a Cash Converters in the picture he showed us; St John’s Wood Road, which had three different names before its closure in the late 1930s, and the Swiss Cottage station on the Metropolitan line (as opposed to the extant one on the Jubilee Line). It did make me want to have another day exploring these sites at some point.

Talk as part of C20 Society Spring Lecture Series

This was part of the Society’s ‘C20 Cities’ lecture series. This one focused on Milton Keynes. The speaker was a Professor Guy Ortolano, an American who works at New York University but is a historian of modern Britain. He explained that he’s a fan of post-war architecture, particularly British. He’s written a book called ‘Thatcher’s Progress’ which apparently gives a bit of an insight into Britain in the 70s. Mrs T apparently visited MK in 1979 to formally open the shopping centre – Ortolano showed us the route of her tour.

After an interesting start, the bulk of the talk was then taken up with addressing the question of flat vs. pitched roofs, which was a little dry. I think Ortolano was arguing that the decline of flat roofs in MK was not due to the popular perceptions of their deficiencies (“flat roofs leak”) but to other factors, including the traditionalist intransigence of building societies.