We would awake. The crisp morning sun would beam through our thin curtains lighting the room with a welcoming glow.
We would roll over, pull the duvet over our head and try to fall back to sleep.
I've always preferred sunrise to sunset. I can see how sunsets have become more popular as you are usually awake to witness a sunset, and so appreciate it. But sunsets represent the end of something. Watching sunsets marks the end of a beautiful day or the end of a memorable year. Sunrise gets shunned. But to me, sunrise means more. You have to make an effort to witness a sunrise. You don't witness a sunrise by being drunk one night and just happening to be watching the sky when the sun goes down. To catch a sunrise needs a bit of effort. To me they mean more, they mark the beginning of something. They are the start, and sunset is the end. I'm all for fresh starts.
Apart from when you've had a bit too much to drink the night before. In that case, sack sunrise. Who cares a bit about its beauty or majesty, turn it off. Make the light go away, shut the blinds, get me a glass of water, and make it night again.
I didn't appreciate one morning at the cottage. The only happiness they brought me was thinking back to the night before and remembering the laughs that we had.
Laughs like playing board games.
First up was Pictionary. The lads (me and Chris) got fully owned by the gals (Katie and Jo). It was painful to watch us lose. Chris is a graphic designer and with my imagination I thought we would have this game sewn up.
Not so.
We even cheated and still lost.
Well, I say Cheated. That is a strong word. It brings with it connotations of deceitfulness and dishonesty. We didn't so much cheat as we did strongly imply what a word may be. . . through the use of pictures. . . and some letters. . . . letters which may or may not have spelt the word we were trying to guess. . . . repeatedly.
But it all came unstuck when after a seemingly superhuman effort I guessed Leisure Centre in all of nine seconds. (damn you alcohol for clouding my judgement of time!) The gals asked to see our picture, and well you know. . . we didn't have one.
Busted.
So the rest of the game was played with all decorum and we got our assess whipped.
But the night after when we played again. . . this was a different kettle of fish.
The word was Dragonfly. It was an Allplay, so we were against each other to see who could guess it first. Chris and Jo were drawing, me and Katie were on interpretation duty.
The timer was started. Chris started on his abstract construct of what he sees as a Dragonfly. I got as far as Moth before taking a large swig from my whisky and wondering where the hell he was going with this.
Sure doom was looking us in the face. Chris has started on a tangent which no doubt was meant to 'help' me. My guesses were becoming more erratic, time was nearly out, the page was starting to resemble an entomologists scrap book, when from out of nowhere our deliverance sounded.
Imagine, if you will. What a whisper would sound like if it were not so much a whisper, as a cough . . . and if the volume didn't so much resemble the volume of a whisper, so much as that of a cough. . . . and if the whisper didn't sound so much like " wsshs" so much as "Dragonfly".
Imagine if you will, girls trying to cheat at Pictionary.
Whisper-coughing the word, loudly, when the opposition are sat no more than a meter away is not recommended practice for increasing your chances of 'getting away with it'.
Needless to say that Chris and I went on to take the game with a commanding lead. A lead so commanding in fact that it has been rumoured that we cheated. This is a rumour that we shall neither confirm nor deny. Needless to say that if we were cheating, we got it down to a fine art and for the whole game nobody noticed.
That is of course, if we were cheating. Which we were not. Not at all. Not once. Never.
After picturing ourselves out we though a game of Scrabble would calm things down.
Oh ho ho . . .wrong.
Before I tell this story. You have to remember that I was drinking the finest single malt Scottish whisky. Laphroig aged 15 years. Sweet and surprisingly mellow to start, with a slow burning peat smoke flavour building up towards the finish. This stuff is gorgeous, not my favourite, but a fine fine whisky none the less. This was a high pressure environment I was in, we were playing board games for heavens sake. I had consumed maybe more of this whisky than my cognitive capacity would have liked.
I had a great word ready. It was Wessex (a place in England). There was one E on the board and I had another. The move before mine Chris put a word down and I no longer had room for my super word. My W would have joined our too words together. I was gutted, I could see nothing else on the board. I would have got a double word score for this, and now, nothing. After longer than was socially acceptable sat looking at the board I had to throw my problem over to the other players. I could see no alternative.
I told them of my problem and a silence descended. They sat there looking at each other, confused faces one and all. I could see pity in their eyes, 'I know' I thought, 'my letters suck'. I could feel their condolences reaching out for me across the table, an almost unified sigh of regret that my letters, did indeed, suck.
Katie turned to me, she looked me straight in the eye, I could tell that this was where my game ended. I would have to pull out, put my letters back in the bag and make coffee for everyone. She took a controlled breath. "Wow" I thought, "she's taking this a bit hard".
With all the pity in the world, she looked at me and said,
"Why don't you just have Essex. . . . . Numbnuts!"
Awwww, Damn.
It was looking me in the face the whole time. The worst part about it was that I didn't even twig straight away and had to check that I had all the letters.
Man alive, sometimes I embarrasses myself.
Needless to say, I lost at scrabble. . . twice.
More tomorrow.