I read a deeply worrying article today which suggested the life expectancy of British people has actually flatlined and is predicted to fall. The article suggests it climbed and climbed throughout the 20th Century in the UK but then suddenly reached a plateau during the 2010 coalition government. Things have not improved since May took over. Far from it! There are thought to be two main reasons for the problem:
The first is air pollution. The government seems to have no interest in doing anything about the shocking levels of pollution, particularly in our major cities.
The second problem is the austerity cuts which have affected people really dramatically. It is thought that the cuts are directly responsible for the deaths of 120,000 people between 2010 and 2017. And the government is trying to bury these results.
The great tragedy is that most of the other “First World” nations (apart from the US) are faring a great deal better than us. Life expectancy is still rising in EU countries, so we can’t even blame the UK’s drop on global factors beyond our control. Most of the EU is now way ahead of us; a fact I find greatly worrying as we sever ties and stop asking for their advice! Life expectancy for women in the UK is now lower than in Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malta, The Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden. It’s often much lower according to the report. They are predicting a million extra deaths in this country by the mid century. And people in their 40s and 50s at the moment will be most effected. Great!
On a vaguely related issue, I don’t know if anyone reading this blog has been watching the fascinating Christmas vignettes from Fanny Craddock on BBC iPlayer. They’re only fifteen minutes long, and they are absolutely wonderful. She’s terribly endearing in an old-school, stern sort of way, but I was really surprised to note how obsessed she is with the cost of everything. The inclusion of almost every ingredient needed to be be justified. There’s a real sense that she doesn’t want to be seen to be wasting anything. At one point she lines a tin with old butter wrappers and on another makes sure to clear every last drop of cake mixture out of the bowl, saying that if she doesn’t, she’s bound to get scores of letters of complaint and that, in the past, she’s left mixture in the bowl only because she has a director waving his arms, telling her to get on with it!
The astounding thing is that these films weren’t shot in the waste-not-want-not 1950s. The vignettes were actually made in the early 1970s. We forget what a terrible mess Britain had got itself into at this stage... just before we entered the EU as it happens. So when these ghastly Brexiteers talk about returning to the time when Britain was great, they’re actually talking about the shocking pre-1973 mess we’d made of things! How quickly we forget.
I urge you all to read this report.
https://theconversation.com/life-expectancy-in-britain-has-fallen-so-much-that-a-million-years-of-life-could-disappear-by-2058-why-88063
Sunday, 31 December 2017
Saturday, 30 December 2017
Wogan House
My life can be incredibly surreal. This evening, Nathan and I found ourselves at the BBC’s Wogan House, talking about the computer musical, live, on a radio breakfast show in New Zealand! “Computer Says Show” is being broadcast on telly over there and they wanted us to talk about the experience. It struck me, as we walked from Oxford Street tube to the BBC, that I’d largely either forgotten about it or blocked out the experience. At one point, the interviewer mentioned the show’s finale and I genuinely couldn’t think how that particular song went. It’s so funny: I never think of Beyond the Fence as being part of my canon of work, which is probably a bit of a shame. There were some lovely songs in the show. In a couple months, I’ve been asked to do a sort of retrospective of my work at the BEAM festival of musical theatre, and I was planning to do a montage of songs from Brass and Em, but maybe I should sling in a little ode to Greenham?
It was rather surreal to exit Wogan House (which, I’m proud to report, is named after the late, great Sir Terry) at 9.30pm, to find many of the shops on Oxford Street still open. I would dearly love London to become more of a 24-hour city. The sight of shoppers still shopping at that hour instead of the usual drunk, edgy, half-wits stumbling about looking for a fight, warmed my heart and instantly reminded me of New York.
It was rather surreal to exit Wogan House (which, I’m proud to report, is named after the late, great Sir Terry) at 9.30pm, to find many of the shops on Oxford Street still open. I would dearly love London to become more of a 24-hour city. The sight of shoppers still shopping at that hour instead of the usual drunk, edgy, half-wits stumbling about looking for a fight, warmed my heart and instantly reminded me of New York.
Thursday, 28 December 2017
Lunch with an old friend
Transport for London was running what amounted to a Sunday service today, which essentially meant there were pitifully few tube trains available to take scores of families into Central London to shop in the sales. I went into town today and ended up with my nose pressed up against a tube train door with the woman behind me unwittingly (I hope) yet relentlessly pushing her bag into my bum.
And, of course, because the majority of people traveling today were out-of-towners, I had to endure several Northerners holding court about how grumpy Londoners are. Believe me: it doesn’t take many rides on the tube to realise that the only way to stay sane is to knuckle down and pretend you don’t exist. Small talk on public transport in London is actually traumatic rather than nice. One bloke got off the tube and shouted “love and joy” back into the carriage in a highly sarcastic manner. The man next to me mouthed a word back which sounded like banker.
Every time I get off the tube at Tottenham Court Road, I notice that they’ve pulled another building down. Today’s discovery was the demolition of the old Foyles building, no doubt to create luxury flats which will be bought-to-let by Russian oligarchs instead of the theatre performers who would probably benefit most from living in them. To compound the issue, the area around the tube has, yet again, become a Mecca for the homeless. Heaps of sleeping bags and cardboard boxes now surround the exit from the tube. The piles are so high that it’s impossible to know if there are people sleeping underneath. The network of underpasses around the Centre Point building were once so well known as a hang out for the homeless that they spawned a homeless charity. The designers of the tube were probably rubbing their hands together with glee at the prospect of getting rid of the problem by losing the underpasses, but homelessness is an issue we simply cannot paper over. It will just keep getting worse unless we learn to take responsibility for our own society. The sad truth is that we’re now all so entirely disconnected from one another that no one actually cares... As long as we’re not the ones in trouble.
I had lunch in Wagamama with my old mate, Matt today. It was lovely to see him but I can’t imagine how he deals with the attention he gets from his fans. We were given free puddings by someone who saw us in the restaurant and the groups sitting either side of us both asked to have their pictures taken with him. It felt a little intrusive, but it was actually a relief when they plucked up the courage to ask for a photo because they’d spent much of the meal trying to surreptitiously take pictures of him. There was a particularly tragic attempt at one point to take a “selfie” with Matt clearly in the background. At that point Matt leaned over and said, “would you like me to take a picture of the three of you?” Taking the picture gave us a temporary reprieve and them an anecdote to tweet. It was a good twenty minutes before we were hit with the “excuse me, can my friend have a picture with you?”
I tell you, if I’d have sat taking pictures of those girls as blatantly as they were taking pictures of Matt, a complaint would have been made and I’d have been thrown out of the restaurant. People get so protective of their own privacy, but forget all of their own boundaries when a famous person walks into a space.
And, of course, because the majority of people traveling today were out-of-towners, I had to endure several Northerners holding court about how grumpy Londoners are. Believe me: it doesn’t take many rides on the tube to realise that the only way to stay sane is to knuckle down and pretend you don’t exist. Small talk on public transport in London is actually traumatic rather than nice. One bloke got off the tube and shouted “love and joy” back into the carriage in a highly sarcastic manner. The man next to me mouthed a word back which sounded like banker.
Every time I get off the tube at Tottenham Court Road, I notice that they’ve pulled another building down. Today’s discovery was the demolition of the old Foyles building, no doubt to create luxury flats which will be bought-to-let by Russian oligarchs instead of the theatre performers who would probably benefit most from living in them. To compound the issue, the area around the tube has, yet again, become a Mecca for the homeless. Heaps of sleeping bags and cardboard boxes now surround the exit from the tube. The piles are so high that it’s impossible to know if there are people sleeping underneath. The network of underpasses around the Centre Point building were once so well known as a hang out for the homeless that they spawned a homeless charity. The designers of the tube were probably rubbing their hands together with glee at the prospect of getting rid of the problem by losing the underpasses, but homelessness is an issue we simply cannot paper over. It will just keep getting worse unless we learn to take responsibility for our own society. The sad truth is that we’re now all so entirely disconnected from one another that no one actually cares... As long as we’re not the ones in trouble.
I had lunch in Wagamama with my old mate, Matt today. It was lovely to see him but I can’t imagine how he deals with the attention he gets from his fans. We were given free puddings by someone who saw us in the restaurant and the groups sitting either side of us both asked to have their pictures taken with him. It felt a little intrusive, but it was actually a relief when they plucked up the courage to ask for a photo because they’d spent much of the meal trying to surreptitiously take pictures of him. There was a particularly tragic attempt at one point to take a “selfie” with Matt clearly in the background. At that point Matt leaned over and said, “would you like me to take a picture of the three of you?” Taking the picture gave us a temporary reprieve and them an anecdote to tweet. It was a good twenty minutes before we were hit with the “excuse me, can my friend have a picture with you?”
I tell you, if I’d have sat taking pictures of those girls as blatantly as they were taking pictures of Matt, a complaint would have been made and I’d have been thrown out of the restaurant. People get so protective of their own privacy, but forget all of their own boundaries when a famous person walks into a space.
Magpie
I dreamed last night that I was invited to a dinner party at Theresa May’s house. She went off into the kitchen to prepare the food but no one wanted to follow her because we all loathed her with intensity. In the end I took pity on her and asked if there was anything I could help her with. “You can fillet these magpies,” she said. She was cooking magpies for tea. She proceeded to rip one, limb from limb, using a blunt knife, without showing any form of emotion. It was a fairly grotesque sight.
It was Boxing Day yesterday, and tradition dictates that we head down to the South coast for a shindig with my extended family. I think there were twenty six of us, all the offspring, or partners of the offspring of just two people, my Grannie and Grampa Garner. A fact I find quite moving.
We all stayed in a hotel in a town on the edge of the New Forest called Ringwood. The hotel was doing a really good deal on rooms booked between Christmas and New Year, a period of time they were laughably calling Twixtmas. We had a sit-down meal and a Secret Santa where I “won” nail polish and a little pink suitcase just big enough to store my nail scissors in. In the end I swapped it with my Mum for a couple of bath bombs but the nail varnish did a circuit of the table and all of us decided to paint a nail. That’s solidarity!
Today was my Mum’s birthday and she decided to take us all to a mysterious ruined village on the Dorset coast called Tyneham. It’s presently situated in land belonging to the Ministry of Defence, in fact, the village was forcefully seized by the MoD during the Second World War. I’m not altogether sure why they were so desperate for the land, but they only gave villagers fifteen days’ notice to leave. I can’t really imagine anything worse than being brought up in an intensely rural community, and suddenly having everything you know taken away from you. I’m sure they were rehoused, but equally sure they wouldn’t have ended up anywhere near their former neighbours.
After the people moved out, of course, the houses slowly went to rack and ruin. Roofs collapsed, woodwork rotted, but the stonework remained and has now been preserved as an eerie memory of what once was.
There’s a school house and a church, both of which have been renovated so that visitors can get a feel for how the place must have been. There’s also a rather charming barn where they’ve placed a little stage. The barn was apparently the place where villagers would stage little shows including a performance of Alice in Wonderland. Photographs of some of the productions lined the walls of the barn.
We left Tyneham and headed for Corfe Castle, which towers over the landscape in these parts like a majestic ship rising from the mist. The village surrounding Corfe Castle is actually also called Corfe Castle, so one assumes the correct name for the Castle itself is actually Corfe Castle Castle!
The village is stunningly beautiful and full of ancient sandstone houses which seemed to almost glow in the wintry sunlight.
Lunch was in a pub on a hillside overlooking the village. My Auntie Glen had organised a surprise second family gathering for my Mum, involving my cousins Matt and Simon, Matt’s son, Harry and my Uncle John along with Nathan, me, Brother Edward and my Dad. We were very heavy on the men! In fact, my Aunt and my Mum were the only two women sitting around the table. I looked around the pub and it suddenly struck me how most family units are fairly equal when it comes to the ratio of men and women. I have often sat and watched groups sitting at tables wondering who fits with whom and why they’re all there. Anyone looking at us today would have been very confused!
Auntie Glen arranged a cake and Uncle John paid for everyone’s food, which was hugely generous.
The journey back to London was less thwarted by traffic jams as a similar journey had been this time last year. We listened to Rumours by Fleetwood Mac. It’s quite good driving music!
It was Boxing Day yesterday, and tradition dictates that we head down to the South coast for a shindig with my extended family. I think there were twenty six of us, all the offspring, or partners of the offspring of just two people, my Grannie and Grampa Garner. A fact I find quite moving.
We all stayed in a hotel in a town on the edge of the New Forest called Ringwood. The hotel was doing a really good deal on rooms booked between Christmas and New Year, a period of time they were laughably calling Twixtmas. We had a sit-down meal and a Secret Santa where I “won” nail polish and a little pink suitcase just big enough to store my nail scissors in. In the end I swapped it with my Mum for a couple of bath bombs but the nail varnish did a circuit of the table and all of us decided to paint a nail. That’s solidarity!
Today was my Mum’s birthday and she decided to take us all to a mysterious ruined village on the Dorset coast called Tyneham. It’s presently situated in land belonging to the Ministry of Defence, in fact, the village was forcefully seized by the MoD during the Second World War. I’m not altogether sure why they were so desperate for the land, but they only gave villagers fifteen days’ notice to leave. I can’t really imagine anything worse than being brought up in an intensely rural community, and suddenly having everything you know taken away from you. I’m sure they were rehoused, but equally sure they wouldn’t have ended up anywhere near their former neighbours.
After the people moved out, of course, the houses slowly went to rack and ruin. Roofs collapsed, woodwork rotted, but the stonework remained and has now been preserved as an eerie memory of what once was.
There’s a school house and a church, both of which have been renovated so that visitors can get a feel for how the place must have been. There’s also a rather charming barn where they’ve placed a little stage. The barn was apparently the place where villagers would stage little shows including a performance of Alice in Wonderland. Photographs of some of the productions lined the walls of the barn.
We left Tyneham and headed for Corfe Castle, which towers over the landscape in these parts like a majestic ship rising from the mist. The village surrounding Corfe Castle is actually also called Corfe Castle, so one assumes the correct name for the Castle itself is actually Corfe Castle Castle!
The village is stunningly beautiful and full of ancient sandstone houses which seemed to almost glow in the wintry sunlight.
Lunch was in a pub on a hillside overlooking the village. My Auntie Glen had organised a surprise second family gathering for my Mum, involving my cousins Matt and Simon, Matt’s son, Harry and my Uncle John along with Nathan, me, Brother Edward and my Dad. We were very heavy on the men! In fact, my Aunt and my Mum were the only two women sitting around the table. I looked around the pub and it suddenly struck me how most family units are fairly equal when it comes to the ratio of men and women. I have often sat and watched groups sitting at tables wondering who fits with whom and why they’re all there. Anyone looking at us today would have been very confused!
Auntie Glen arranged a cake and Uncle John paid for everyone’s food, which was hugely generous.
The journey back to London was less thwarted by traffic jams as a similar journey had been this time last year. We listened to Rumours by Fleetwood Mac. It’s quite good driving music!
Monday, 25 December 2017
Over sharing
One of my brother’s friends has just won the award for the most pathetic Christmas Day online post. In my mind what he’s written is indicative of the fact that we’ve entered an era where everyone over-shares. I do think there’s a lot to be said for holding one’s tongue and not using Facebook as a platform for endless vitriolic “pity me” venting. It invariably comes back to bite you on the arse. I think those who know you are as likely to judge you as they are ever to feel sorry for you. They might write “hugs babes” but deep inside they’re screaming “come off it mate!”
I am quoting the post in full here. As it’s effectively published on Facebook, I have no issues about doing so...
“Happy Christmas everyone! Sadly not having the best one myself, as Emily's mum has decided to go back on our agreement that she should visit me last weekend. So I'm posting a photo of an empty chair and an unwrapped present, together with our partially-opened Advent calendar. Emily has decorated it with some of her drawings, including a broken heart for her mum and me.”
I mean... come on.
Next time, how about leaving it at “Happy Christmas everyone!”? My suggestion: have a private word with Emily’s Mum to tell her how you feel!
I am quoting the post in full here. As it’s effectively published on Facebook, I have no issues about doing so...
“Happy Christmas everyone! Sadly not having the best one myself, as Emily's mum has decided to go back on our agreement that she should visit me last weekend. So I'm posting a photo of an empty chair and an unwrapped present, together with our partially-opened Advent calendar. Emily has decorated it with some of her drawings, including a broken heart for her mum and me.”
I mean... come on.
Next time, how about leaving it at “Happy Christmas everyone!”? My suggestion: have a private word with Emily’s Mum to tell her how you feel!
Gluten free Jesus
Happy Christmas to all of my Christian friends. And to the pagans amongst us, Happy Winter Solstice for three days ago. For atheists reading this, “Christmas” is an anagram of “Mr Shit Sac.” Joy to the world.
I’m in Thaxted. It’s raining. We drove here from Shropshire last night and instantly took ourselves on a walk around the town to look at the glorious Christmas decorations. There’s a little estate on the outskirts where the residents compete for the most over-the-top Yuletide displays. There are dancing snowmen, epic projections, fit-inducing flashing lights, bows on doors, sleighs on roofs and illuminated icicles. Many would say it was tacky and ghastly but I believe that anything which brings excitement and happiness is well worth doing. I imagine there are children (of all ages) who would go to that estate and feel a sense of great joy. Something we all deserve.
More traditionally festive is the Main Street in Thaxted, which has been turned into a mega advent calendar with 24 houses displaying beautiful festive windows, each of which was unveiled on a different day in the run up to Christmas Day itself. Some windows are obviously better than others. I’m rather proud to say that the best (by far) belongs to our friends Sally and Stuart, who made a massive Christmas tree out of a wooden pallet which looks an absolute picture. It was really very lovely (and very festive) to rush from one side of the street to the other trying to find which houses had been chosen to make window displays.
The parents and Brother Edward went to Midnight Mass. Obviously as an atheist who now sings regularly in a synagogue, I would explode immediately on contact with a church, so Nathan and I stayed home, and I stuck photographs from the year into a giant album. I was very amused to find out that the vicar had made an announcement that gluten free wafers would be available for those who wanted to take communion. To my mind it makes an absolute mockery of the very concept of eating the flesh of Christ. As if it weren’t already creepy enough, we’ve now got people going “I’ll only eat Jesus if he’s gluten free!”
I’m in Thaxted. It’s raining. We drove here from Shropshire last night and instantly took ourselves on a walk around the town to look at the glorious Christmas decorations. There’s a little estate on the outskirts where the residents compete for the most over-the-top Yuletide displays. There are dancing snowmen, epic projections, fit-inducing flashing lights, bows on doors, sleighs on roofs and illuminated icicles. Many would say it was tacky and ghastly but I believe that anything which brings excitement and happiness is well worth doing. I imagine there are children (of all ages) who would go to that estate and feel a sense of great joy. Something we all deserve.
More traditionally festive is the Main Street in Thaxted, which has been turned into a mega advent calendar with 24 houses displaying beautiful festive windows, each of which was unveiled on a different day in the run up to Christmas Day itself. Some windows are obviously better than others. I’m rather proud to say that the best (by far) belongs to our friends Sally and Stuart, who made a massive Christmas tree out of a wooden pallet which looks an absolute picture. It was really very lovely (and very festive) to rush from one side of the street to the other trying to find which houses had been chosen to make window displays.
The parents and Brother Edward went to Midnight Mass. Obviously as an atheist who now sings regularly in a synagogue, I would explode immediately on contact with a church, so Nathan and I stayed home, and I stuck photographs from the year into a giant album. I was very amused to find out that the vicar had made an announcement that gluten free wafers would be available for those who wanted to take communion. To my mind it makes an absolute mockery of the very concept of eating the flesh of Christ. As if it weren’t already creepy enough, we’ve now got people going “I’ll only eat Jesus if he’s gluten free!”
Sunday, 24 December 2017
Fake-mas
I’m in Cheshire at Nathan’s sister’s house, which is in a little place called No Man’s Heath. As you enter the village, there are two sign posts on either side of the road. One displays the village name entirely in capitals, without an apostrophe. The other is in lower case letters and has one! It’s a charmingly eccentric anomaly.
I was in East Sussex all day yesterday running a quiz in a little seaside town near Hastings called Bexhill-on-Sea. I was lucky enough to be able to choose my own assistant, and asked Meriel because Lewes, where she lives, is only about half an hour’s drive away.
The quiz was happening in a charming seafront hotel, so, after setting up, we were able to take a wander along the windswept beach.
It was so lovey to see Meriel, and she was a brilliant assistant: terribly charming with everyone, and hugely assiduous and conscientious when it came to the scoring. She managed to sniff out two Brummies. I didn’t realise that people from Birmingham have a sixth sense for each other, but there was definitely some sort of psychic connection going on: Maybe it’s a smell thing!
The journey from Bexhill to No Man’s Heath was somewhat epic and took six hours. I had a little sleep in a service station somewhere near Banbury and made a disastrous wrong turn in Brighton which meant I ended up in Lancing by mistake. Other than that, it wasn’t the travel mayhem which had been predicted, or, indeed that I’d expected. I thought I was going to be sitting on stationary traffic on the M25 for hours.
We woke up this morning to the sound of Nathan’s great niece, Renée, excitedly rushing about the house. The one thing which always strikes me when I’m around families is how active children seem to be in the morning!
Today has been dubbed “Fake-mas” by Nathan’s family. Choosing this particular date meant that all of them could get together before disappearing off to other corners of the country for actual Christmas Day. It’s was a bit surreal because it felt 100% like Christmas, but emails were periodically buzzing in from people who were still working.
We had a big Christmas dinner, which was delicious. We got very silly and giggly, particularly when little Renée donned a pair of inflatable antlers and, with absolutely no sense of spatial awareness, managed to sweep everything off the side board onto the floor, seemingly without realising that she was the cause of the mayhem!
We went for a much-needed, all-too-brief walk as the sun set, before returning to Sam’s house to play games and laugh a great deal more. Ratfink, which seems to be having quite the renaissance in my life, went down particularly well. I found myself having the most vivid flash-back to a Christmas in the early 1980s where my entire family was sitting on a very long table in my Gran’s house in Warwickshire playing the game. Ratfink involves passing cards around the table. There’s a heap of spoons in the middle of everyone and when you’ve collected four cards of the same number, you take a spoon. This triggers a manic free-for-all where everyone grabs one of the other spoons. There’s one spoon too few on the table, so the loser is the one who doesn’t get a spoon. This particular memory from the 80s featured both my grandmothers sitting on a trestle table extension of the long table the rest of us were sitting on. One of them had got four cards and picked up a spoon. The other followed suit, but no one else noticed, so the game simply carried on with the two of them laughing like naughty school girls, waiting for everyone to cotton on! Happy times...
I was in East Sussex all day yesterday running a quiz in a little seaside town near Hastings called Bexhill-on-Sea. I was lucky enough to be able to choose my own assistant, and asked Meriel because Lewes, where she lives, is only about half an hour’s drive away.
The quiz was happening in a charming seafront hotel, so, after setting up, we were able to take a wander along the windswept beach.
It was so lovey to see Meriel, and she was a brilliant assistant: terribly charming with everyone, and hugely assiduous and conscientious when it came to the scoring. She managed to sniff out two Brummies. I didn’t realise that people from Birmingham have a sixth sense for each other, but there was definitely some sort of psychic connection going on: Maybe it’s a smell thing!
The journey from Bexhill to No Man’s Heath was somewhat epic and took six hours. I had a little sleep in a service station somewhere near Banbury and made a disastrous wrong turn in Brighton which meant I ended up in Lancing by mistake. Other than that, it wasn’t the travel mayhem which had been predicted, or, indeed that I’d expected. I thought I was going to be sitting on stationary traffic on the M25 for hours.
We woke up this morning to the sound of Nathan’s great niece, Renée, excitedly rushing about the house. The one thing which always strikes me when I’m around families is how active children seem to be in the morning!
Today has been dubbed “Fake-mas” by Nathan’s family. Choosing this particular date meant that all of them could get together before disappearing off to other corners of the country for actual Christmas Day. It’s was a bit surreal because it felt 100% like Christmas, but emails were periodically buzzing in from people who were still working.
We had a big Christmas dinner, which was delicious. We got very silly and giggly, particularly when little Renée donned a pair of inflatable antlers and, with absolutely no sense of spatial awareness, managed to sweep everything off the side board onto the floor, seemingly without realising that she was the cause of the mayhem!
We went for a much-needed, all-too-brief walk as the sun set, before returning to Sam’s house to play games and laugh a great deal more. Ratfink, which seems to be having quite the renaissance in my life, went down particularly well. I found myself having the most vivid flash-back to a Christmas in the early 1980s where my entire family was sitting on a very long table in my Gran’s house in Warwickshire playing the game. Ratfink involves passing cards around the table. There’s a heap of spoons in the middle of everyone and when you’ve collected four cards of the same number, you take a spoon. This triggers a manic free-for-all where everyone grabs one of the other spoons. There’s one spoon too few on the table, so the loser is the one who doesn’t get a spoon. This particular memory from the 80s featured both my grandmothers sitting on a trestle table extension of the long table the rest of us were sitting on. One of them had got four cards and picked up a spoon. The other followed suit, but no one else noticed, so the game simply carried on with the two of them laughing like naughty school girls, waiting for everyone to cotton on! Happy times...
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