Nix on mornings

I woke up to snow.  In this part of the world it's the law that you have to shovel the pavement in front of your house, and our house is so shaped that we have rather a lot.  Fin had shovelled a bit of the way, but I said I'd take over.

The world is rather beautiful this early in the morning.  I put on my mittens and my waking-up music and got to work.  After a while, the man who sometimes appears at the door with the snow, asking for money to shovel it, appeared.  I don't know his name, but I think of him as Shovelling Matt.  I apologised for doing the work myself, and he said, "That's all right.  Do you know which streets might be good ones to shovel?"

After a few more plays of the music, Fin appeared with hot coffee for me.  Then I passed a neighbour I don't recognise, who looked a bit like John Linnell and was clearing the snow off his car.  He said, "You have quite a stretch.  Let me help you."  We started from opposite ends of the stretch, and worked towards one another until there was only one shovelful left.  He said, "Now this is your bit."

It was a good way to start the day.

Starlight cards

The Starlight cards are a set of sixty-four cards developed within my family, largely by me, in the late 1980s, when Mark, Mandy and I were teenagers and Andrew and Lucy were small children. The cards were designed before any of the games which are played with them. There are three such games known:

Starlight

a complicated board game which was never perfected;

Sunlight

a trick-taking game which was played very often for years; and

Candlelight

a game of patience ("solitaire").

The rules for Candlelight and Sunlight may be posted at some point.  (I may also make a JavaScript game of Candlelight.)

All the games share the feature of totem cards: that is, each player may choose a card to represent themselves within the game. Such a card cannot be used against the player it represents. A player is expected to stay with the same totem card indefinitely over as many games as they may play. For example, my totem card was Alchemist (shown right).

Three packs of these cards are currently known to exist. Please get in touch if you would like one of your own, especially if you would like to play any of the games or make up new games. We always welcome the invention of new games played with the cards.

( Read more (and see the cards) )